THE BIBLICAL

ILLUSTRATOR
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OR
ANECDOTES, SIMILES, EMBLEMS, ILLUSTRATIONS;
EXPOSITORY, SCIENTIFIC, GEOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL,
AND HOMILETIC, GATHERED FROM A WIDE RANGE OF
HOME AND FOREIGN LITERATURE, ON THE VERSES OF
THE BIBLE
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BY
REV. JOSEPH S. EXELL, M.A.
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Jeremiah and Lamentations
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Based on work done by Josh Bond and the people at BibleSupport.com

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 JEREMIAH

INTRODUCTION TO JEREMIAH

THE PROPHETS NAME AND DESCENT

The name Jeremiah was not uncommon (1Ch 12:13; 2Ki 23:31; cf. Jer 35:3). Our
prophet is more precisely described as son of Hilkiah (Jer 1:1), by whom we are
not to understand the high priest of this name who held office in Josiahs days (2Ki
22:1-20; 2Ki 23:1-37), since, instead of the definite statement which we should then
expect, we have only a general account: of the priests at Anathoth in the land of
Benjamin; the high priest without doubt had his seat at Jerusalem; on the other
hand, the priests settled at Anathoth, the old Levitical town (Jos 21:18), the present
Anata (a good hour northeast of Jerusalem; according to Josephus, twenty stadia
from Jerusalem), probably belonged, according to 1Ki 2:26, to the line of Ithamar,
not to that of Zadok. (C. Von Orelli.)

The name of Jeremiah is significant. Some have supposed that it means that he
was exalted by the Lord. Others assert with more probability that it means set by the
Lord, as solid foundation; or sent forth by the Lord, as lightning from the cloud, or
as an arrow from a bow. Whichever etymology we adopt, the name Jeremiah
intimates that, whatever he did and suffered, all was from the Lord. He was set by
Gods hand as a solitary beacon on a lofty tower, in a dark night, in a stormy sea;
lashed by waves and winds, but never shaken from his foundations. (Bishop Chris.
Wordsworth)

POLITICAL STATE OF AFFAIRS

His call to the prophetic office came in the thirteenth year of Josiah. Danger was
once again gathering round Judah, and to Jeremiah was assigned a more directly
political position than to any other prophet. The destruction of Sennacheribs army
in the fourteenth year of Hezekiah (B.C. 693), though it had not freed the land from
predatory incursions, had nevertheless put an end to all serious designs on the part
of the Assyrians to reduce it to the same condition as that to which Shalmaneser had
reduced Samaria. The danger of Judea really rose from Egypt on the one hand and
Babylon on the other. In Egypt, Psammetichus put an end to the subdivision of the
country, and made himself sole master in B.C. 649. As he reigned for fifty-four years
he was--during the last eighteen or nineteen years of his life--contemporary with
Josiah, but it was his successor Necho who slew Josiah at Megiddo. Meanwhile, as
Egypt grew in strength, so Nineveh declined, partly from the effects of the Scythian
invasion, but still more from the growing power of the Medes, and from Babylon
having achieved its independence. Two years after the battle of Megiddo, Nineveh
fell before a combined attack of the Medes under Cyaxares and the Babylonians
under Nabopalassar. But Nabopalassar does not seem to have been otherwise a
warlike king, and Egypt remained the dominant power till the fourth year of
Jehoiakim. In that year (B.C. 586) Nebuchadnezzar defeated Necho at Carchemish.
Having peaceably succeeded his father, he returned to Judea, and Jehoiakim
became his vassal. After three years of servitude Jehoiakim rebelled (2Ki 24:1), and
died. Three months after his son Jehoiachin, the queen-mother, and a large number
of nobles and artificers were carried captive to Babylon. The growth of Egypt into a
first-rate power under Psammetichus (2:18, 36) raised the question of a close
alliance with him. The youthful Jeremiah gave his voice against it. Josiah recognised
that voice as inspired, and obeyed. His obedience cost him his life at Megiddo; but
four years later Necho was defeated by Nebuchadnezzar at Carchemish. On that day
the fate of the Jewish nation was decided, and the primary object of Jeremiahs
mission then ceased. The ministry of Jeremiah really belonged to the last eighteen
years of Josiahs reign. Judahs probation was then going on, her salvation still
possible; though each year Judahs guilt became heavier, her condemnation more
certain. But to the eye of man her punishment seemed more remote than ever.
Jehoiakim was the willing vassal of Egypt, the supreme power. No wonder that,
being an irreligious man, he scorned all Jeremiahs predictions of utter and early
ruin; no wonder that he destroyed Jeremiahs roll, as the record of the outpourings
of mere fanaticism. It was his last chance, his last offer of mercy; and as he threw the
torn fragments of the roll on the fire he threw there in symbol his royal house, his
doomed city, the temple, and all the people of the land. It was in this fourth year of
Jehoiakim that Jeremiah boldly foretold the greatness of Nebuchadnezzars empire,
and the wide limits over which it would extend. This prophecy (chap. 25) placed his
life in danger, so that the Lord hid him and Baruch (Jer 36:26). When Jeremiah
appears again, Nebuchadnezzar was advancing upon Jerusalem to execute the
prophecy contained in Jer 36:30-31. And with the death of Jehoiakim the first
period of Judahs history was brought to a close. Though Jeremiah remained with
Zedekiah, and tried to influence him for good, yet his mission was over. He testifies
himself that the Jewish Church had gone with Jehoiachin to Babylon. Zedekiah and
those who remained in Jerusalem were but the refuse of a fruit basket from which
everything good had been culled (chap. 24), and their destruction was a matter of
course. Jeremiah held no distinctive office towards them. (Dean Payne Smith.)

JEREMIAHS PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

The personality of Jeremiah looks out on us from his book in more individual
distinctness than that of any other prophet. He reveals himself as a soul of gentle
nature, yielding, tender-hearted, affectionate, with almost a womans thirst for love,
with which certainly the iron, unbending firmness and immovable power of
resistance belonging to him in his prophetic sphere are in strange contrast. There
were in turn two different, widely diverging potencies,--the human flesh in its
weakness, yet with all its lawful generous impulses; and the Divine Spirit, with its
boundless strength. Thou h the former was thoroughly subject to the latter, it
suffered, sighed, bled under the heavy, almost intolerable, burden laid upon it by
Gods Spirit and Word. No doubt the youth received the Divine revelations with
delighted eagerness (Jer 15:16); but it went hard with him to be obliged to renounce
every joy of youth on account of the hand of the Lord that came upon him, and to be
obliged to experience and proclaim to his people nothing but wrath, ruin, woe. How
utterly all this cut across his natural inclination (Jer 15:17 f.). Moreover, the office of
this witness of Jehovah was in itself highly tragical; he had to preach repentance to a
people unfaithful to its God, while knowing that this final call to salvation would
pass away unheeded! He had to picture to the nation and its God-forgetting leaders
the terrible danger accruing to it from its guilt, and he was not understood, because
no one wished to understand him! Thus he himself suffered most under the
disobedience of the nation which he loved, without being able to save it. And at the
same time he, the warmest, noblest friend of his country, was forced to let himself
be counted among traitors, as though in league with the enemy! And yet it was Gods
inspiration that compelled him again and again to beat down without mercy every
deceitful hope to which sinking courage strove to cling; not cowardice, but courage,
made him dissuade those eager for war; not treachery, but love for people and city,
made him enjoin submission to the conqueror chosen of God. If such a position in
some respects like the one forced on Hosea in the last days of the northern kingdom-
-would have been terribly hard for any one, for the deeply sensitive Jeremiah, who
felt the wounds of his nation as his own, it was almost crushing! That he who
interceded with priestly heart for Judah saw himself rejected in his constant
intercession before Gods throne (Jer 7:16; Jer 11:14; Jer 14:11; Jer 18:20); that he
who consumed himself for the salvation of his country, and strove only to avert the
ruin threatened by God, had to listen to the bitterest suspicions and revilings (Jer
9:1 ff; Jer 12:5 f., 15:10, 17:14-18, 18:23, etc.), often brought him to despair; nor does
he restrain his feelings. Nothing can again cheer him and heal his inner wounds (Jer
8:18; Jer 8:21); he wishes he could dissolve in tears for his poor people (Jer 9:1; Jer
13:17); he would fain dwell alone in the wilderness to escape the wickedness of his
surroundings (Jer 9:2); he wishes God had never persuaded him to enter His
service, since Gods words make him reel like wine (Jer 23:9), and burn in him like
fire, when he would suppress them (Jer 20:7 ff.). Yea, in this conflict between his
heart of human feeling and Gods inexorable word he wishes he had never been born
(Jer 15:10; Jer 20:14-18), like Job (Job 3:1 ff.). But just because what the Lord
announces to him is so painful and contrary to his natural feelings and wishes, he is
so certain that a stronger one has come upon him; and he opposes with invincible
certainty of triumph the false prophets, who publish the flattering dreams of their
own heart as revelations from above. Over against all outward attacks he stands as
an iron pillar and brazen wall (Jer 1:18; Jer 15:20), whilst inwardly mourning the
ruin of Judah and Jerusalem as none else does. (C. Von Orelli.)

Jeremiah has been likened to several characters in profane history--to Cassandra,

the Trojan prophetess, whose fate it was never to be believed, though prophesying
nothing but the truth; to Phocion, the rival of Demosthenes in the last generation of
Athenian greatness, who maintained the unpopular but sound doctrine that, if
Athens were to escape worse evils, she must submit peaceably to the growing power
of Macedon; to Dante, whose native state, Florence, was in relation to France and
the empire as Palestine was to Egypt and Babylon, while the poet, like the prophet,
could only protest without effect against the thickening ills. (A. W. Streane, D. D.)

Jeremiah faithful as a prophet

In the midst of his own sorrow, and even in the deepest despondency, Jeremiah is
faithful to his task as a prophet, and bold in declaring the Word of the Lord. Though
his message was largely directed to immediate affairs, it pointed forward to a better
dispensation, and his words have a meaning for all time.
1. We see fidelity to his calling triumphing over natural timidity throughout his
life. See his own words (Jer 20:8-9). He seems ever to have been conscious
of the assurance given to him at his call (Jer 1:8; Jer 15:20). And his faith in
Gods promise is illustrated in his purchase of a field when the ruin of the
country was imminent (32).
2. The truths mainly insisted on by Jeremiah are
(a)--That mere attention to worship or veneration for its forms is
worthless (Jer 3:16; Jer 7:8-11; Jer 7:21-23). The law must be written
on the heart (Jer 4:4; Jer 4:14; Jer 17:9; Jer 31:33).
(b) Consequently the individual rather than the state is the object of
Divine regard (Jer 5:1; Jer 9:1-6; Jer 9:18).
(c) In thus condemning the old, Jeremiah anticipates a new order of
things. Though he says little of a personal Messiah, he prepares His
way (see Jer 23:5-8; Jer 30:4-11; Jer 33:14-26). (James Robertson, D.
D.)

THE TEACHING OF JEREMIAH

The distinctive advance of Jeremiahs teaching on that of his predecessors is due
to his clear recognition of the fact that the Divine purpose could not be realised
under the forms of the Hebrew state, that the continuity and victory of the true faith
could not be dependent on the continuity of the nation. Israel must be wholly
dispersed, and can only be gathered again by a Divine call addressed to individuals,
and bringing them one by one into a new covenant with their God, written on their
hearts. Here for the first time in history the ultimate problem of faith is based on the
relation of God to the individual soul; and it is to Jeremiahs idea of the new
covenant that the New Testament teaching directly attaches itself. (Chamberss
Encyclopaedia.)

JEREMIAHS LITERARY STYLE

So far as style can be spoken of in Jeremiah, his style perfectly reflects all the
articulations of thought and all the hues of emotion of his mind. His was a nature
characterised by simplicity, reality, pathos, tenderness, and a strange piety, but
subject to his emotions, which were liable to rise into passions. His mind was set on
a minor key, and his temper elegiac. And to all this his language is true. (A. B.
Davidson, D. D.)

ARRANGEMENT OF THE PROPHECIES OF JEREMIAH

The prophecies of Jeremiah are not arranged m chronological order. The earlier
portion (chaps. 1-20) has a general character, and is a prelude to the rest. Some of
these earlier chapters belong to the days of Josiah (Jer 3:6); others to the time of
Jeremiah (Jer 13:18). But at the beginning of chap. 21, which is introductory to the
second great portion of the book, we are carried forward to the days of Zedekiah, the
last king of Judah. The prophet hastens, as it were, to the end, and sets before us the
fate of that king of Judah, to be delivered into the hands of the Babylonian monarch,
Nebuchadnezzar; and the fate of Jerusalem, to be destroyed by fire; and of the whole
land, to be spoiled by Nebuchadnezzar and by the armies of the Chaldeans (Jer 21:1-
14). The next chapter (22) contains prophecies delivered in earlier times concerning
the predecessors of Zedekiah, namely, Shallum or Joash, the son and successor of
the good king Josiah (Jer 22:10-12); and Jehoiakim the elder brother and successor
of Shallum (Jer 22:13-19); and concerning Jehoiakims son and successor--
Jehoiachin, Jeconiah, or Coniah, the immediate predecessor of Zedekiah (Jer 22:24;
Jer 22:30). What is the reason of such an arrangement? It was intended to show that
Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, had ample notice from God, by the ministry of
Jeremiah, with regard to the fatal consequences of his own acts, both to his country
and to himself. If he persisted in his rebellion against God, speaking to him by the
voice of the prophet. The fulfilment, which Zedekiah himself had seen, of Jeremiahs
prophecies concerning his three predecessors on the throne, was a solemn warning
to him that unless he himself repented, the predictions of the same prophet
concerning himself would be fulfilled also; and it contained also a merciful
assurance that if he listened to the prophets voice, and turned to God with a true
penitent heart from his evil ways, he would thus escape the punishments hanging
over his head. This is a specimen of the principle on which the prophecies of
Jeremiah are arranged; and if we bear this principle in mind, and apply it to the rest,
we shall see that these prophecies are not thrown together without method and
system, but that they have been disposed in such a manner as to exhibit in a clear
light the wisdom, justice, and mercy of God in dealing with His own people, and to
justify His dispensations in executing His sentence upon them; which, after His
other methods of correction had been exhausted, led at length, by the severe but
salutary discipline of their captivity of seventy years, to their conversion from
idolatry, and to their restoration to Gods favour and to their own land. (Bishop
Chris. Wordsworth.)

The unchronological arrangement of Jeremiahs prophecies is not without its

teachings.
1. As showing that during the length of tune over which the prophets work was
spread but little care was taken by him to provide for their transmission in
any definite order. Like the sibyl of classical antiquity, he gave his writings,
as it were, to the winds, careless of their fate, and left it to others, through his
long career, to collect, copy, and arrange them as they could.
2. As suggesting the probability that what happened in his case may have
befallen the writings of other prophets also, such as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea,
Amos, whose labours were spread over a considerable period of time; and
consequently, as leaving it open to us to deal freely with the order in which
we find them, so as to convert them, as we best can, with the successive
stages of the prophets life. (Dean Plumptre.)

The very lack of order which is displayed here serves a valuable end, in showing
that we possess the words of Jeremiah put together in those same troublous times in
the course of which they were spoken, not arranged with the care and method which
would have been afterwards employed to remodel and fit them to mens notions of
propriety. It is not the Book of Jeremiah, edited by a future generation, but, his
words, as they fell from the inspired lips themselves, that are thus in Gods
providence preserved to us. (A. W. Streane, D. D.)

Contents of the book.--

1. Jer 1:1-19; Jer 2:1-37; Jer 3:1-25; Jer 4:1-31; Jer 5:1-31; Jer 6:1-30; Jer 7:1-34;
Jer 8:1-22; Jer 9:1-26; Jer 10:1-25; Jer 11:1-23; Jer 12:1-17; Jer 13:1-27; Jer
14:1-22; Jer 15:1-21; Jer 16:1-21; Jer 17:1-27; Jer 18:1-23; Jer 19:1-15; Jer
20:1-18; Jer 21:1-14. Containing probably the substance of the book of Jer
36:32, and including prophecies from the thirteenth year of Josiah (with a
long interval of silence) to the fourth year of Jehoiakim. Jer 1:3, however,
indicates a later revision, and the whole of chap. 1 may have been added as
the prophets retrospect of his whole work from this its first beginning. Jer
21:1-14 belongs to a later period, but may have been placed here, as
connected by the recurrence of the name of Pashur with Jer 20:2. Jer 22:1-
30; Jer 23:1-40; Jer 24:1-10; Jer 25:1-38. Short prophecies against the kings
of Judah and the false prophets. Jer 25:13-14, evidently marks the conclusion
of a series, and that which follows (Jer 25:15-38), the germ of the fuller
predictions of Jer 46:1-28; Jer 47:1-7; Jer 48:1-47; Jer 49:1-39, has
apparently been placed here as a completion to that of the seventy years of
exile.
3. Jer 26:1-24; Jer 27:1-22; Jer 28:1-17. The two great prophecies of the fall of
Jerusalem. Jer 26:1-24 belongs to the earlier, Jer 27:1-22; Jer 28:1-17, to the
later portion of the prophets work.
4. Jer 29:1-32; Jer 30:1-24; Jer 31:1-40. The message of comfort to exiles in
Babylon.
5. Jer 32:1-44; Jer 33:1-26; Jer 34:1-22; Jer 35:1-19; Jer 36:1-32; Jer 37:1-21; Jer
38:1-28; Jer 39:1-18; Jer 40:1-16; Jer 41:1-18; Jer 42:1-22; Jer 43:1-13; Jer
44:1-30. The history of Jeremiahs work immediately before and after the
capture of Jerusalem. Jer 35:1-19; Jer 36:1-32 are remarkable as interrupting
the chronological order, which would otherwise have been followed here
more closely than elsewhere. The position of chap. 14 as an isolated fragment
suggests that it may have been added by Baruch at the close of his narrative
of his masters life.
6. Jer 46:1-28; Jer 47:1-7; Jer 48:1-47; Jer 49:1-39; Jer 50:1-46; Jer 51:1-64. The
prophecies against foreign nations, ending with the great utterance against
Babylon.
7. Jer 52:1-34. Historical appendix. (Dean Plumptre.) .

JEREMIAH 1

JER 1:9
To whom the Word of the Lord came.
The Word of God
Words are often used in two ways--one specific, definite; the other general,
figurative. Thus, when we use the word heart, we mean specifically that organ
which pumps the blood throughout our being; on the other hand, we use it broadly
as the seat of the affections and centre of highest being. So it is with the term
word, Primarily, it stands for a written or spoken term composed of letters; then
we enlarge its content and use it in the sense of a message, What word did our
friend send? Then as the Psalmist used it, where the heavens have a word for us, a
message. Then we go on until we come to find that any expression of God is called a
Word of God. This is the use of word in the Bible. The Word of God is always an
expression of Gods being.

I. There is a Word of God for us IN NATURE. The very heavens have a Word of God
for us. They tell us that an attribute of His is glory, majesty, far-reaching grandeur.
Days and nights all speak of His glory and infinite resource. How many words of
God come to us through Nature! How the writers of the Psalms saw it! How Jesus
saw in Nature the Word of Gods care and watchfulness!
1. Thus honesty is a Word of God, written on all the face of Nature as an
attribute. Nature tells us God is honest, true to Himself, to the laws He has
made, to man. The foundation Principle of the physical universe is honesty.
The stars swing true to their courses. Suns rise and set and do not deceive us.
If we did not know this universe was run honestly, we would not dare enter a
new day.
2. As we are reading, in these days, more and more deeply into Nature, we are
hearing another great Word of God, namely, that God is a God of purpose.
This is a great message. Many people think He is not a God of purpose, but
that the universe is being run with no end in view. Nature is full of prophecy,
life everywhere throbs with expectancy of greater being; God begins with the
simplest and works towards the greatest, He starts with a cell of living
matter, and ends with the wonderful human frame, He starts with a spark of
life and ends with a spirit in His own image. The best lies before us, the
golden age is yet to be. God has great destinies in view for the human soul.

II. There has been a distinctive Word of God spoken THROUGH PROPHETS AND
STATESMEN who have been wrapped up in the progress of nations. We might see this
in the history of any nation, of old or of today, but I will take Israel, because we are
more familiar with its history and its prophets. One Word of God that came through
Israel was justice. God was a just God. He was not like the gods of the Babylonians,
fickle, full of whims, acting by impulse, but He was a God who weighed and
considered; who looked at motives as well as deeds; who meted out rewards and
punishments by desert. Another Word of God that came to Israel was that He was a
shield and reward, a defender of His people. The Word of the Lord came unto
Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram, I am thy shield and thy exceeding great
reward. Ah, how well Israel learned that word in all her devious history! And how
deeply impressed upon her was the word that God was a jealous God--jealous for the
welfare of His people, a present help, a refuge, and a strength. Another word that
came through Israel was that God was a patient, long-suffering God. The prophets
Isaiah and Jeremiah were continually giving this Word of God. And every other
nation through its people and prophets has some great Word of God to give to the
world. For God is not dumb, and His prophets today are not deaf.

III. It is THROUGH LIFE that God must speak His largest word, make the fullest
revelation of His Being. It is life that speaks to life, heart that comforts heart. All the
prophets of Israel saying that God is long-suffering will not move a man to see it so
much as one soul here exhibiting the forbearance of God. Preachers may preach
forever that God is love, and it will not have the force of one God-filled deed of love.
So it is with all the attributes of God. They cannot be revealed in their great, Divine
reality except as they are manifest in human life. So when the fulness of time had
come God spoke to men through a human soul. Then was His true glory revealed,
then His nature made manifest. It was when the word, the expression, the character
of God became flesh and dwelt among us that we beheld His glory. Jesus is the living
manifestation of the Word of God. Now I have seen Jesus I know God identifies
Himself with men. For He has come into our humanity. I ask God what word He has
for me in my sorrows and loneliness, and the answer comes to me in the life of Jesus
that God is love. I see God living as love before me. I see His love going out to
wretched men and women. I see Him serving as only love can serve. I see Him
gathering to Himself outcasts and sinners, and recreating them in a new atmosphere
of love. I see Him taking little children upon His knee and blessing them. I see Him
suffering because He loved the world. What is the nature of God? In Jesus see how
He is a Father. See how Jesus whole life was a living word speaking the Fatherhood
of God. How does God treat sinful beings? Look how Jesus treated sinful women
who came to Him, and see how God treats sinners. How does God feel over the sins
of the world? See Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. Will God suffer to save men? See
Jesus giving His rest, and strength, and life, that men may see to what ends God will
go to save His children. Let us remember that it was because Jesus was one with the
Father that He could be the medium of the Word of God. But when He said, I and
the Father are one, He referred to a spiritual oneness. So wherever there is a soul
today who is one with the Father, there you will find a living Word of God. There is a
very striking scene in George Macdonalds Robert Falconer which shows how
today a Word of God may come through life. Eric Ericson, a poor Scotch student,
tramping on to Edinburgh, stops footsore and weary at the Boars Head, the inn
kept by Letty Napier. After resting awhile, he starts to go on, although so footsore he
can hardly walk. But Miss Letty makes him go up to a room and take off his shoes,
and let her bathe his feet. He expostulates, for he has not a shilling in the world. But
Miss Letty makes him stay three days and rest, while she ministers to him, and then
starts him off to Edinburgh, a new man, and a couple of pieces in his pocket. Eric
had been a sceptic, but as he walks with Robert he says, with the tears welling up in
his eyes, If I only knew that God was as good as that woman, I should die content.
Robert answers, But surely ye dinna think Gods nae as guid as she is? Surely Hes
as guid as He can be. He is good, ye know. Eric answers, Oh, yes, they say so. And
then they tell you something about Him that isnt good, and go on calling Him good
all the same. But calling anybody good doesnt make him good, you know. Yes, poor
Eric was right--calling Him good does not make Him good. But when Eric felt love
in this godly woman it set him to thinking about the goodness in God. It was a living
word from God straight to his heart. So, every time you do a deed of love, you are
speaking a word of God. (F. Lynch.)
The call of Jeremiah
It is not to be expected that a superficial gaze will discern the special qualifications
that attracted the Divine choice to Jeremiah. But that is no wonder. The instruments
of the Divine purpose in all ages have not been such as man would have selected.
There were several reasons why Jeremiah might have been passed over.
1. He was young. How young we do not know; but young enough for him to start
back at the Divine proposal with the cry, Ah! Lord God! behold, I cannot
speak; for I am a child. Without doubt, as a boy he had enjoyed peculiar
advantages. God has often selected the young for posts of eminent service:
Samuel and Timothy; Joseph and David; Daniel and John the Baptist.
2. He was naturally timid and sensitive. By nature he seemed cast in too delicate
a mould to be able to combat the dangers and difficulties of his time. He
reminds us of a denizen of the sea, accustomed to live within its shell, but
suddenly deprived of its strong encasement, and thrown without covering on
the sharp edges of the rocks. The bitter complaint of his afterlife was that his
mother had brought him into a world of strife and contention. Many are
moulded upon this type. They have the sensitiveness of a girl, and the
nervous organism of a gazelle. They love the shallows, with their carpet of
silver sand, rather than the strong billows that test a mans endurance. For
them it is enough to run with footmen; they have no desire to contend with
horses. Yet such, like Jeremiah, may play an heroic part on the worlds stage,
if only they will let God lay down the iron of His might along the lines of their
natural weakness. His strength is only made perfect in weakness. It is to
those who have no might that He increaseth strength.
3. He specially shrank from the burden he was summoned to bear. His chosen
theme would have been Gods mercy--the boundlessness of His compassion,
the tenderness of His pity. But to be charged with a message of judgment; to
announce the woeful day; to oppose every suggestion of heroic resistance; to
charge home on the prophetic and the priestly orders, to each of which he
belonged, and the anger of each of which he incurred, the crimes by which
they were disgraced--this was the commission that was furthest from his
choice (Jer 17:16).
4. He was conscious of his deficiency in speech. Like Moses, he could say, O my
Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since Thou hast spoken unto
Thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. The best
speakers for God are frequently they who are least gifted with human
eloquence; for if that be richly present--the mighty power of moving men--
there is an imminent peril of relying on it, and attributing the results to its
magnetic spell. God cannot give His glory to another. He may not share His
praise with man. He dare not expose His servants to the temptation of
sacrificing to their own net or trusting their own ability. Do not, then,
despair because of these apparent disqualifications. Notwithstanding all, the
Word of the Lord shall come to thee; not for thy sake alone, but for those to
whom thou shalt be sent. The one thing that God demands of thee is absolute
consecration to His purpose, and willingness to go on any errand on which
He may send thee. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)
 In the days of Josiah . . . also in the days of Jehoiakim.

Mutations of life
When one sea floweth, another ebbeth. When one star riseth, another setteth.
When light is in Goshen, darkness is in Egypt. When Mordecai groweth into favour,
Haman groweth out of favour. When Benjamin beginneth, Rachel endeth. Thus we
are rising or setting, getting or spending, winning or losing, growing or fading, until
we arrive at heaven or hell. (Henry Smith.)

JER 1:4-10
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.

Seven points in Jeremiahs life and call:--

1. God knowing him. I knew thee.
2. God sanctifying him. I sanctified thee.
3. God ordaining him. I ordained thee.
4. God sending him. I shall send.
5. God commanding him. I command.
6. God encouraging him. Be not afraid.
7. God speaking through him. I have put My words in thy mouth. (C. Inglis.)

Childhood prophetic
Of Charles Kingsley it is written: His poems and sermons date from four years
old. His delight was to make a little pulpit in his nursery from which, after putting
on a pinafore as a surplice, he would preach to an imaginary congregation. His
mother unknown to him took down his sermons at the time, and showed them to the
Bishop of Peterborough, who predicted that the boy would grow up to be no
ordinary man.
I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Election and mediation

The two great blessings of election and mediation are here distinctly taught. God
did not speak to the nations directly, but mediatorially He created a minister who
should be His mouthpiece. Observation itself teaches us that men are called and
chosen of God to do special work in all departments of life. The difficult lesson for
some of us to learn is that we are called to obscurity, and yet this is as clearly a
Divine appointment as is the choice of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah. If you look at life,
you will see that the most of men are called to quietness, to honest industry, and to
what is mistakenly called common place existence. What of it? Shall the plain
murmur because it is not a mountain? Shall the green fields complain that Mont
Blanc is higher than they? If they have not his majesty, neither have they his
barrenness. To see our calling, to accept it, to honour it, that is the truly godly and
noble life! Every man is born to realise some purpose. Find that purpose out, and
fulfil it if you would lovingly serve God. We find no difficulty in persuading a man
that he is a Jeremiah or a Daniel, at any rate that, under certain circumstances, he
might easily have turned out a Hannibal or a Wellington. The difficulty, on the
contrary, is to persuade a man that the lowliest lot, as well as the highest, is the
appointment of God; that door keeping is a promotion in the Divine gift; and that to
light a lamp may be as surely a call of God as to found an empire or to rule a world.
(J. Parker, D. D.)

The prophets call and consecration

I. THE CALL OF JEHOVAH. Not the product of a reflective musing, nor the result of
an inward impulse, but a supernatural Divine revelation, an inspiration, a voice
from without.

II. HIS DIVINE CONSECRATION. He felt the hand of the Lord touch him: a palpable
pledge of His support. Touching his mouth meant endowment. Equipment and
qualification for Gods work must be from God.

III. SIGNS WHICH UNVEIL HIS MISSION. These he saw in spirit, God interpreted
them to him as confirmatory tokens of his Divine commission.

IV. SUPERNATURAL ASSURANCES OF HELP. God will furnish strength, will make him
valiant and impregnable. (C. F. Keil.)

Calling to service
Like as a sword being committed into the hands of a soldier, by the captain
general, he is not to smite before he be commanded to fight, and before the trumpet
be sounded to battle: even so, though a man have excellences given him, yet he is
not to execute any function, especially publicly, before he receive a particular
warrant and calling from God (Rev 16:1). As the ostrich hath wings and flieth not; so
some men have a calling, but they answer it not; they have knowledge, but they
practise it not; they have words, but they work not. (J. Spencer.)

The ways in which men are called to service

It is very remarkable that the ancient prophets always kept steadily before them
the exact way by which they were led up to their office, and were always ready to
vindicate themselves by a plain statement of facts. It is remarkable, too, that they
could trace their heavenly election, as clearly as their earthly parentage; so much so,
that, as a rule, they put on record both pedigrees, so to speak, side by side; first, that
which was natural; afterwards, that which was spiritual; and the one was as much a
living and indisputable fact as the other. Thus Jeremiah said, Hilkiah was my
father, and the Word of the Lord came unto me, two things separated by an infinite
distance, yet both matters of positive and unquestionable certainty. Jeremiah would
have treated with equal indifference or contempt the suggestion that Hilkiah was
not his father and that the Lord had never spoken to him. (J. Parker, D. D.)

I formed thee
 Ask what thy work in the world is. That for which thou wast born, to which thou
wast appointed, on account of which thou wast conceived in the creative thought of
God. That there is a Divine purpose in thy being is indubitable. Seek that thou
mayest be permitted to realise it. And never doubt that thou hast been endowed with
all the special aptitudes which that purpose may demand. God has formed thee for
it, storing thy mind with all that He knew to be requisite for thy life work.

I. THE DIVINE PURPOSE. I knew thee . . . I sanctified thee . . . I have appointed

thee a prophet. In that degenerate age the great Lover of souls needed a
spokesman; and the Divine decree determined the conditions of Jeremiahs birth
and character and life. How this could be consistent with the exercise of personal
volition and choice on the part of the youthful prophet we cannot say. We can only
see the two piers of the mighty arch, but not the arch itself, since the mists of time
veil it, and we are dim of sight. It is wise to ascertain, if possible, while life is yet
young, the direction of the Divine purpose. There are four considerations that will
help us. First, the indication of our natural aptitudes; for these, when touched by the
Divine Spirit, become talents or gifts. Secondly, the inward impulse or energy of the
Divine Spirit, working in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Thirdly, the
teaching of the Word of God. Fourthly, the evidence of the circumstances and
demands of life. When these concur, and focus in one point, there need be no doubt
as to the Divine purpose and plan. But in cases where the Divine purpose is not so
clearly disclosed, in which life is necessarily lived piecemeal, and the bits of marble
for the tesselated floor are heaped together with no apparent plan, we must dare to
believe that God has an intention for each of us; and that if we are true to our
noblest ideals we shall certainly work out the Divine pattern, and be permitted some
day to see it in its unveiled symmetry and beauty. To run errands for God! To be like
the angels that excel in strength, and do His commandment, hearkening to the voice
of His Word! To resemble the boy messengers in some of our large cities, that wait
in readiness to discharge any commission that may be entrusted to them!

II. FORMATIVE INFLUENCES. It is very interesting to study the formative influences

that were brought to bear on the character of Jeremiah. There were the character
and disposition of his mother, and the priestly office of his father. There was the
picturesque beauty of his birthplace, the village of Anathoth, lying on the high road
three miles north of Jerusalem, encircled by the famous hills of Benjamin; and
looking down the ravine on the blue waters of the Dead Sea, gleaming at the foot of
the purple hills of Moab. There was the near proximity of the holy city, rendering it
possible for the boy to be present at all the holy festivals, and to receive such
instruction as the best seminaries could provide. There was the companionship and
association of godly families, like those of Shaphan and Maaseiah, who themselves
had passed away, but whose children preserved the religion of their forefathers, and
treasured as sacred relies the literature, psalms, and history of purer and better
days. His uncle, Shallum, was the husband of the illustrious and devoted prophetess,
Huldah; and their son Hanameel shared with Baruch, the grandson of Maaseiah, the
close friendship of the prophet, probably from the days that they were boys together.
There were also the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah, who were burning as bright
constellations in that dark sky, to be soon joined by himself. His mind was evidently
very sensitive to all the influences of his early life. His speech is saturated with
references to natural emblems and national customs, to the life of men, and the
older literature of the Bible. Take, for instance, his earliest sermon in which he
refers to the story of the Exodus, and the pleadings of Deuteronomy; to the roar of
the young lion, and the habits of the wild ass; to the young camel traversing her
ways, and the Arabian of the wilderness; to the murmur of the brook, and the
hewing of the cistern. His quick and sensitive soul eagerly incorporated the
influences of the varied life around him, and reproduced them. It is thus that God is
ever at work, forming and moulding us. The purpose of God gives meaning to many
of its strange experiences. Be brave, strong, and trustful!

III. THERE WAS ALSO A SPECIAL PREPARATION FOR HIS LIFE WORK--The Lord put
forth His hand and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have
put My words in thy mouth. In a similar manner had the seraph touched the lips of
Isaiah years before. And we are reminded that the Lord Jesus promised that the
Spirit of the Father should put appropriate words into the lips of His disciples when
summoned before the tribunals of their foes. Words are the special gift of God. God
never asks us to go on His errands (Jer 1:7) without telling us what to say. If we are
living in fellowship with Him, He will impress His messages on our minds and
enrich our life with the appropriate utterances by which those messages shall be
conveyed to our fellows. Two other assurances were also given. First, Thou shalt go
to whomsoever I shall send thee. This gave a definiteness and directness to the
prophets speech. Secondly, Be not afraid because of them; for I am with thee to
deliver thee, saith the Lord.

IV. GOD VOUCHSAFED A TWO-FOLD VISION TO HIS CHILD. On the one hand, the
swift-blossoming almond tree assured him that God would watch over him, and see
to the swift performance of his predictions; on the other, the seething cauldron,
turned towards the north, indicated the breaking out of evil. So the pendulum of life
swings to and fro; now to light, and then to dark. But happy is the man whose heart
is fixed, trusting in the Lord. There was a period in Jeremiahs life when he seems to
have swerved from the pathway of complete obedience (Jer 15:19), and to have gone
back from following the God-given plan. Surrounded by contention and strife;
cursed as though he were a usurer; reproached and threatened with death--he lost
heart, and fainted in the precipitous path. Immediately he had good reason to fear
that the Divine protection had been withdrawn. We are only safe when we are on
Gods plan. But as he returned again to his allegiance, these precious promises were
renewed, and again sounded in his ears: I will make thee unto this people a fenced
brazen wall; and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee;
for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the Lord. And I will deliver
thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the
terrible. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

A call to service
It was no vision that called me to the foreign field, said a missionary at Clifton
Springs, last summer. I read with intense interest All power is given unto Me, go
ye, therefore. This was the foundation stone of my call to be a missionary. Later,
while I was in the seminary, a letter was read from Dr. Butler, asking for five new
men for India, a chance to put your life to the best use for the Master. Though I had
no outward vision, the illumination of the heart is the best vision one can have, and
from that day I have never been sorry, and I have never doubted that God called me
to this work. (Christian Age.)

I cannot speak: for I am a child.--

Fears and comforts in prospect of labour for God:--

I. The fear of Gods servant in prospect of labour.

1. He feels his weakness.
(1) Having no influence.
(2) Having no experience.
(3) Being unstable.
2. He feels his ignorance.
3. He feels his unworthiness.
4. He dreads the enmity of man.

II. The comforts of Gods servants in prospect of labour.

1. The assurance they are called to the work.
2. The knowledge of the purpose of God.
3. The promise of the presence of God.
4. The fact that the message was from God. (R. A. Griffin.)

A young preachers oppressive sense of responsibility

When I first became a pastor in London my success appalled me; and the thought
of the career which it seemed to open up, so far from elating me, cast me into the
lowest depths outer which I uttered my miserere, and found no room for a gloria
in excelsis. Who was I that I should continue to lead so great a multitude? I would
betake me to my village obscurity, or emigrate to America and find a solitary nest in
the backwoods, where I might be sufficient for the things that would be demanded
of me. It was just then that the curtain was rising upon my life work, and I dreaded
what it might reveal. I hope I was not faithless, but I was timorous and filled with a
sense of my own unworthiness. I dreaded the work which a gracious providence had
prepared for me. I felt myself a mere child, and trembled as I heard the voice which
said, Arise and thresh the mountains and make them as chaff. (C. H. Spurgeons
Autobiography.)

A sense of helplessness as a preparation for ministry

How many of the greatest men have been broken under a sense of their
insufficiency! That passage in the life of John Livingstone comes back to me as I
write. He had spoken at the yearly communion at Kirk o Shotts on the Sabbath with
marvellous power, and had been requested to preach on the following morning,
which he promised to do on condition that his friends should spend the night in
prayer. But, as he awoke in the morning, he was so overwhelmed with the sense of
his incompetence, that he went three and a half miles out of the town, to be brought
back, however, and to preach so marvellously that five hundred souls were
converted. The writer, years ago, when in great anxiety to learn whether his was a
true vocation to the Christian ministry, the Bible opened to this page, and he can
bear witness that God has been faithful. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

God achieves His work by seemingly inadequate workmen that the

glory may be His
In using such ill-adapted tools for the accomplishment of His designs, God shows
His own transparent power. That famous well cover at Antwerp, just opposite the
cathedral--one of the finest pieces of wrought-iron that was ever known--is said to
have been made by Quintyn Matsys with nothing but a hammer and a file, his fellow
workman having taken away his tools. If it be so, the more praise to him for his
consummate skill. All Gods works redound to His glory; but when the tools He uses
appear to be totally inadequate to the results He achieves our reverence is excited,
while our reason is abashed, and we marvel at a power we cannot understand. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Reluctance overcome
Farel, alike humble and courageous, had often asked if another would not succeed
better than he, and a sort of presentiment had bidden him wait in hope for such a
man. Calvin was unwilling to undertake the work, he was not made, he said, for such
an office Farel is urgent Calvin educes fresh reasons, and it seemed as though he
wanted to deter Farel by exhibiting to him the defects of his future colleague. Once
more he asked that he might be left in obscurity to busy himself in studies. Then
Farel broke out, Thy studies are a pretext. I tell thee that if thou refuse to associate
thyself with my works God will curse thee for having sought thyself and not Christ.
Calvin was henceforth prompt and sincere in the work of the Lord. Say not, I am a
child.--Jeremiahs mission:--

I. His objection not unreasonable.

1. Inexperience.
2. Insufficient knowledge.
3. Modest diffidence.
4. Yet his ago and defects time would remedy.

II. How God overrules His objection.

1. He refers to His preordination.
2. He refers to His commission.
3. He was to speak Gods words.
4. Divine presence pledged.
5. Supernatural communication.
Lessons:
1. God, not man, arranges the affairs of His moral kingdom.
2. God qualifies His instruments.
3. God often selects His agents, not as men would do.
4. God gives His own message to His messengers.
5. The ministry of Gods servants is mighty for good or evil.
 (1) Listen when God speaks.
(2) Obey when He commands
(3) Trust when He promises. (Y. Burns, D. D.)

God teaching His prophet

I. WHAT IT IS, IN SPIRITUAL LANGUAGE, TO BE A CHILD. This is one of the most

comforting of Gospel names, when it unites us with God as our Father, and thus
implies that there is the holy principle of a new birth unto righteousness within us.
1. A child in this sense, is one who has been translated out of his own
unrighteous nature into the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ; and this
translation takes him at once from under the dominion of the law, and brings
him into the glorious liberty of the Gospel.
2. A child, in scriptural acceptation, because he feels himself to be a sinning
child, will bear submissively, every trying dispensation that shall be laid
upon him, and in a child-like spirit.
3. Every child of Gods adoption will study the will of God, and strive to make it
his own.

II. What influences were operating upon the prophets, when he said, I cannot
speak, for I am a child.
1. There was the influence of a fallen and diseased nature. It is a great blessing to
be able to look into the drowning sea of our own evil hearts, and to know the
things we ought to pray for, and the rocks and quicksands it is our interest to
avoid. But it is perilous to linger too long in an enemys country, and to roll
our meditations overmuch through the defiled places; because the very sight
and knowledge of what we are, in our natural weakness and deformity, if
they are steeped for too long a time in the bitterness of soul humiliation, will
be apt to produce a feeling of darkness akin to despair.
2. There was a distrust of Gods providence. This is a common sin in very many,
who are without a question, children of the covenant. They have a faith, but
it is not equal to their emergencies; there is a light in it, but it does not warm
them; it staggers and hesitates, when it ought to be going forwards and
realising.

III. What it was that God intended His prophet to understand, when he replied,
say not, I am a child, etc.
1. First He taught him that His simple word is the best rock for dependence:
Thou shalt go and thou shalt speak. This is the way in which God most
loves to teach His children, because it is the simplest, I do not say the easiest
lesson, for their faith to embrace. It is a trial for their confidence to improve.
2. But Gods word to the prophet, Say not I am a child, implies more. Jeremiah
was to work for God; but God was to work in Jeremiah, and to supply him
with a strength fully equal to what he had to do. Here is another link that
binds God in His omnipotence to a covenant child in his weakness. (F. G.
Crossman.)
The Divine mission of children
If we judge by inference and analogy from these words, rather than from the
circumstances and person to whom they belong, we reach a truth like this: that by a
messenger, incompetent because of his weakness, some messages from God come
more forcefully to the ears and heart of men. What the prophet was comparatively
many are actually, and the same truth holds good throughout, and so we reach a
point which may well occupy our thought: the Divine mission and office of children,
what they have to say, what they have to do. Is it not wrong to think of children as
incomplete growth, of youth as nothing more than incomplete maturity? Such
treatment injures them, for it fosters the idea into strength that today is nothing,
and tomorrow everything, that the present is valueless, and the future holds all
hope. Such treatment injures us, for we only exist impatiently till this time shall
have passed, and miss all the instruction we might gather from the earliest impulses
of life. In the home, and in the Church which is the larger home, there is a place for
them to occupy, a mission to fulfil. Take two or three points as hints.
1. First the meaning and the power of simple faith. It is a word that some of us
perhaps for years have been trying to learn the meaning of. Faith, trust. Have
you children of your own, or have you seen such, nestling fearless and
trustful at their parents knee! Your child believes in you, in something more
than the fact of your existence. It lives in your love. It trusts your care. Faith
is a belief that leads to the committal of the whole being to the hands of One
who is our Father, our Helper, our Saviour; and as we grow up into strength,
the highest of all motive impulse, at first it may be fear or expectation of
good that induces obedience, but no long time can pass, if the relation be
truly sustained, before love is the impulse of every action; and because your
child loves you it delights to do your will. As such is the truth which appears
in the earliest years of children, can it be a mistake to suppose that God
intended the truth to be learned from such illustration of His word?
2. Does there not come to us in this self-same way, too, a hint of the folly and
wrong of distractive anxiety? What good could the child do by puzzling its
little brain with such questions as belong necessarily to the chiefs of the
family? What slight would be cast upon the parents love if the child should
becloud its life and be sad because no way out of supposed difficulties
presented itself! Would you not say or think, my child, I stand higher and see
farther; what is an inscrutable problem to you is none to me; my strength
removes the hindrance, my wisdom solves the riddle?
3. And this leads us to another thought: that those things which seem to us all-
important, upon which our whole interest is often apt to centre, to which,
indeed, we look as to the source of our happiness in life, may be the merest
trifles after all. What a small matter changes the childs light to darkness! In
what an instant, by what a trivial cause, is laughing changed to crying, or the
reverse! You say the child will grow, that now it speaks, thinks, acts as a
child, but when it becomes a man it will put away childish things. God
expects the same thing of us, and we well may ask ourselves, Am I growing
into a higher life, and is it manifest by my interest in things of superior
moment? Spiritually, have we come to see what is the noblest aim that may
be set before us? Having learned the principles of the Gospel of Christ, are
we going on to perfection, coming closer up to our Father in likeness,
reflecting proof of our sonship, ready to follow everywhere He leads, and to
 be quite sure that as we would give our child all that is good, and not
willingly or needlessly cause one pang of pain, so in much intenser and
tenderer love does our Heavenly Father deal with us?
4. The last thought is the influence of kindliness and refreshing which is shed
from the life of children. Their presence in the home makes the life less
artificial, more true; and such may be their influence in the Church. We hold
out the hand of encouragement for them to confess the name of the Saviour
whom they may love. Let first impulses toward Christ, instinctive they will
be, be nurtured. See to it that none be repressed, none discouraged. (D. J.
Hamer.)

Childlike, not childish

Jeremiah learnt to bear testimony without flinching before kings, ay, and, in the
name of the Lord, against kings; to be willing to undergo stripes and imprisonment;
and to be sawn asunder for his grand defence of the Faith of God. But it was terribly
difficult to him, in the beginning of his prophetic ministry, to take even the first
steps on that narrow and painful way. The Word of the Lord comes to him, and tells
him that from his birth he has been divinely ordained a prophet unto the nations.
Then said I (it is an autobiography), Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I
am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child, etc. Then the fear of
men passed away from the prophet; and he girded up his loins, and arose, and spake
unto them all that God commanded him. Now, what strikes us in this is, first, its
thorough naturalness; and next, its awakening, encouraging call to each of us. It was
so natural in Jeremiah to shrink from the awful ordeal of facing nations and kings. It
came to him as such an absolutely new call. Well might he say, I am a mere child: I
cannot attempt this. Poor human nature could scarcely have said otherwise. Only
the grace of God would empower for such a duty: and that the grace of God was
ready for him was proved, alike by the original call and by the rebuke and the
encouragement which followed, by the zeal which he was enabled to show, in the
face of the greatest possible difficulties, and by the accomplishment, both for good
and for evil, of the predictions which God spake by him. And the call and the reproof
and the reassuring words, are applicable also, in great measure, to each of us. Each
one among us is bound to speak the truth among the brethren, boldly to rebuke vice,
and, if necessary, patiently to stiffer for the truths sake. And yet, when we come to
real, everyday life, how constantly we fail herein! How often the strong man excuses
himself for being weak! how often the soldier, bravo to the death in meeting the
enemy, has not courage enough to reprove or admonish a friend! how often the
minister of Christ, holds his hand, instead of standing up for his Master! Surely, this
backwardness in the Lords work, this miserable fear of men, this distrust of the
Divine power committed to us, is found more or less in every class among us. And
what is the real name for this? It is our childishness. How different is this from the
child-like temper! The greatest and bravest and wisest of men have something of the
child in them--the childs simplicity, and truthfulness, and implicit obedience, and
regard for authority. Wellington had all this eminently; but he was never childish, he
had no false fears, he never sold the truth to serve the hour. All who are really
great share this character, this holy boldness this valour for the truth upon the earth,
this which is described in the picture of the Christians armour as the preparedness
of the Gospel--the readiness to go at once on the blessed messages of God.
1. Realise the needs of men around you. They are very great. They demand all
 your energies, all your courageous charity, all possible firmness and decision.
2. Think of the danger of delay, the immense value of present opportunities.
Have you never noticed, that the occasion for speaking to a soul to which we
feel peculiarly impelled is at times the very last? How bitter must be our
regret, if we let such an occasion slip, and allow one for whom Christ died
actually to perish!
3. If you hesitate, if the childishness of your nature still wrestles with the mighty
angel of Gods grace, remember that which should constrain us the most to
the fearless deeds of Christian faith--the contemplation of Christ crucified,
and of the exceeding great love wherewith He loved us, enduring the
contradiction of sinners and the shame and agony of death. Take the first
step, the first brave, loving step along that way, and He will hold you by the
hand, and go with you into the very midst of the battle, into the heat of the
day; and you shall thank Him, ere the sun goes down, for enabling you,
though you seemed to yourself but a child, to speak and to fight for Him. (G.
E. Jeli, M. A.)

Thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee.--

A portrait of the true servant of God

I. HE IS CALLED TO A GREAT WORK. He is a Divine messenger.

1. To go forth on an errand from God.
2. To go only where God sends him.
3. To speak only what God communicates. Not to speak his own speculations, on
the theology of others, but the Word of God.

II. He is conscious of self-insufficiency.

1. The characteristic of all true servants. Moses, Isaiah, Paul.
2. A qualification of all true servants. When I am weak, then am I strong.

III. HE IS STRENGTHENED BY THE DIVINE (verse 8). A man who has God within
need never be afraid. (Homilist.)

Jeremiah a servant

I. Divine commission.

II. Divine authority.

III. Divine presence.

IV. Divine deliverance.

V. Divine power.
 VI. Divine message.

VII. DIVINE RESULT. (G. Inglis.)

The Gospel minister encouraged and instructed

1. An objection overruled.
2. Work and duty prescribed. To bear Gods message to men.
(1) To whom? To all to whom the Lord should send him. He was not to
choose for himself. Must obey the call of God, and do his duty, though
neglected, hated, and persecuted for his faithfulness.
(2) The matter of the message. Not to speak at random whatever came
uppermost, or what might be most easy to himself or agreeable to his
hearers but only what the Lord commanded.
3. How, or in what manner, Gods word was to be delivered.
(1) Faithfully and fully.
(2) Plainly and boldly.

I. The office of the ministry.

1. It is an ordinance of Divine appointment to be continued in all ages to the end
of time. Accordingly, they who slight and undervalue it, or despise those who
are employed in it, reject their message, and disregard their salutary
admonitions, reproofs, and instructions, greatly dishonour God, and pour
contempt upon His authority.
2. It hath pleased God to employ weak and sinful men to dispense His word, and
bear His message to sinners and saints.
3. None must intrude themselves into the office of the ministry, or presume to
exercise it without a lawful call. Those who run unsent, who take upon them
the office of the ministry when they are not called to that sacred function, in
such a manner as God hath prescribed in His word, have no reason to expect
assistance and success in their work.
4. Those whom God calls to the exercise of the ministerial office, He doth in
some measure qualify for discharging the several parts of it.
5. The work of the ministry is very important and difficult work. The honour of
God, and the salvation of souls, are nearly concerned in it.
6. Those whom God calls to exercise the office of the ministry have ordinarily a
humbling sense of their own weakness, and insufficiency for the work they
are called to.
7. Ministers of the Gospel, in performing the duties of their function, do not act
in their own name, but in the name, and by the authority of their Divine
master the Lord Jesus Christ.
8. Whatever opposition, or difficulties, the servants of Christ may meet with in
the exercise of their ministry, they have sufficient encouragement to
persevere in it.

II. Some of the difficulties and discouragements which they who are called to
exercise that sacred function may have to struggle with.
1. Their fears and discouragements are sometimes occasioned by a serious
consideration of the nature of the work they are called to engage in.
2. By a sense of their own weakness and insufficiency for discharging the duties
of the sacred function.
3. When they consider the opposition they are likely to meet with in the exercise
of their office.
(1) From the world.
(2) From lukewarm professors.
4. The cold reception that is usually given to the messages which the servants of
the Lord deliver in His name, is sometimes a cause of discouragement.
5. The low and afflicted state of the Church is apt to discourage those who are
about to enter upon public work in her.

III. Their duty and the work they are called to.
1. They must not choose their own let. Have they a call in providence to deliver
Gods message to those who are more likely to persecute them, than to
submit to their instructions or pay any due regard to what they declare in the
name of the Lord, they must not dispute, but readily obey the orders given
them. Nor have they reason to fear any dangers they may be exposed to,
through the power and malice of their enemies; for He in whose service they
are employed is able to defend them, and frustrate all the designs of their
enemies against them. His promise is their protection.
2. They must deliver nothing in His name but what He commands, or what is
agreeable to His revealed will. In order to this, the teaching and renewed
illumination of the Holy Spirit is necessary; but they need no additional,
objective revelation.
3. The instructions given to the prophet, and every other minister of the Word,
in the text imply, that those who are called to preach the Gospel should, as
there may be opportunity, teach all truths revealed in the Word of God, and
urge the performance of all duties required in it.
4. They should urge the diligent observance of all Divine ordinances, as a
necessary duty. They must not think it is enough, if persons have the low of
God in their hearts, and some experience of a work of grace in their souls,
though they neglect the administration of the word and sacraments, or other
outward ordinances, and treat with contempt any endeavours to maintain
their purity; because, as some are pleased to speak, they are only outward
things, and the observance of them hath not a necessary connection with
vital piety, and the exercise of grace in the heart.
5. They must urge obedience to all the precepts of the moral law.
6. They should endeavour to accommodate their doctrine to the various
conditions of their hearers.
Conclusion:
1. When those who are about to enter upon public work in the Church have a
humbling sense of their own insufficiency, it is a presage of future
usefulness.
 2. The work of the ministry is not to be engaged in rashly. Count the cost.
3. Such as bear the character of office bearers in the Church, who take upon
them to make laws for the members of the Church, contrary to those which
the glorious Head of the Church hath enacted, or different from them; or
who enjoin the observation of religious rites, devised by men without any
warrant from the Word of God, not only transgress the limits of their
commission, but are chargeable with great presumption. They teach what
God never commanded, and exercise a power which no creature can claim,
without invading the prerogative of the supreme Lawgiver.
4. Those who are called to bear Gods message to the children of men ought to
be well acquainted with His written word contained in the Scriptures of the
Old and New Testament.
5. Ministers of the word must have no partial respect to the persons of men.
6. In order to a suitable discharge of ministerial duties, much fortitude and
resolution is necessary.
7. Those ministers of the Gospel who, sensible of their own weakness, are
enabled humbly to depend upon the power and grace of God for protection,
and support in their work, are most likely to discharge the duties of their
office with acceptance and success.
8. They must take care that they do not run unsent, or thrust themselves into the
office of the ministry without a lawful call, the call of God and the call of the
Church.
9. They are to deliver their message authoritatively, as not acting in their own
name, but in the name of God. If ministers, in preaching the Word, act as the
messengers of the Lord of hosts, the people to whom they preach ought to
receive their message with reverence and submission. If they reject it, or
slight it, they put an affront upon Him who sent them. They despise not man
but God. (D. Wilson.)

Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the
Lord.--
A reason for bravery
Whenever fear comes in and makes us falter, we are in danger of falling into sin.
Conceit is to be dreaded, but so is cowardice. Our great Captain should be served by
brave soldiers. What a reason for bravery is here. God is with those who are with
Him. God will never be away when the hour of struggle comes. Do they threaten
you? Who are you that you should be afraid of a man that shall die? Can you not
trust Him? Do they pour ridicule upon you? Will this break your bones or your
heart? Bear it for Christs sake, and even rejoice because of it. God is with the true,
the just, the holy, to deliver them; and He will deliver you. Remember how Daniel
came out of the lions den, and the three holy children out of the furnace. Yours is
not so desperate a case as theirs; but if it were, the Lord would bear you through,
and make you more than a conqueror. Fear to fear. Be afraid to be afraid. Your worst
enemy is within your own bosom. Get to your knees and cry for help, and then rise
up saying, I will trust, and not be afraid. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Valiant manhood
 Just as much as a man drives out fear, marches boldly on, says his say, does his
act, by so much is he a valiant man. In the old Norse ballads it was indispensable to
be brave. Odin cast out of his heaven, the Valhalla, all who were tainted with
cowardice; and over a battlefield the priests taught, went the Valkyries, or choosers
of the slain, heavenly messengers who took care only to admit the valiant. The kings
when about to die, lay down in a ship with its sails set, drifted out into the ocean,
charged with fire too in the hold, so that the king might blaze in his tomb and be
delivered to the sky. The valiant is the really valuable man.
Courage is ministers
The truest way not to be afraid of the worst part of a man is to value and try to
serve his better part. The patriot who really appreciates the valuable principles of his
nations life is he who most intrepidly rebukes the nations faults. And Christ was all
the more independent of mens whims because of His profound love for them and
complete consecration to their needs. There come three stages in this matter: the
first, a flippant superiority which despises the people and thinks of them as only
made to take what the preacher chooses to give to them, and to minister to his
support; the second, a servile sycophancy which watches all their fancies, and tries
to blow whichever way their vane points; and the third, a deep respect which cares
too earnestly for what the people are capable of being to let them anywhere fall short
of it without a strong remonstrance. You have seen all three in the way in which
parents treat their children. I could show you each of the three today in the relation
of different preachers to their parishes. Believe me, the last is the only true
independence, the only one that it is worth while to seek, or indeed that a man has
any right to seek. An actor may encourage himself by despising or forgetting his
audience, but a preacher must go elsewhere for courage. The more you prize the
spiritual nature of your people, the more able you will be to oppose their whims.
These must be the fountain of your independence. (Bp. Phillips Brooks.)

Danger regarded from the high ground of faith

Fire broke out on a prairie not far from the dwelling of a settler. His son, seeing
flames advancing, cried out they would all be burned, but the father took his boy to
some high ground, and showed him that all round their dwelling was a wide
clearing, too broad for the flames to overleap, and so they were safe. How frequently
we worry ourselves because of some threatening danger, whereas, if we took higher
ground and looked with the eye of faith, we should see that God has arranged a
defence, that it may not hurt us. (The Signal.)

See, I have this day set thee over the nations.--

Prophets commission
1. He is made a (paqid), a prefect or superintendent of the nations of the world.
A Hebrew term corresponding to bishop of the Christian Church.
2. He has widest scope for the exercise of his powers: he is invested with
authority over the destinies of all peoples. If it be asked in what sense it
could be truly said that the ruin and renascence of nations was subject to the
supervision of the prophets, the answer is obvious. The Word they were
authorised to declare was the Word of God, that fulfils itself with all the
necessity of a law of nature (Isa 55:10-11).
 3. What strength, what staying power may the Christian preacher find in
dwelling upon this fact, that Gods Word is fulfilling itself, though that Word
may be disowned, and the efforts of the preacher may be thwarted. (C. J.
Ball, M. A.)

Charge to pastors: their work defined

I. Inquire what are the evils against which you must contend and the methods
you are to adopt in this opposition.
1. By your public ministry root out errors in doctrine.
2. By leading the Church, in the exercise of faithful discipline, root out evil-
doers.
3. By rendering your pastoral visits subservient to the purposes of conviction
and correction.

II. What is that good you are to encourage?

1. As a builder--
(1) Be sure you lay a right foundation.
(2) See that your materials be fitly framed together. Implying that--
(a) They be hewed and squared.
(b) They be formed by the same rule.
(c) Every one be put in the situation for which he is formed.
(3) So frame the whole as that it may be a fit habitation for God.
2. As a planter.
(1) Sow wholly a right seed.
(2) Give attention to the plants as you see them grow.
(3) Cultivate them by every means.
(4) Pray that they may be watered by the Holy Spirit. (Andrew Fuller.)

The work of Jeremiah, and that of St. Paul

I. CONTRAST. Jeremiah, the prophet of disaster and despondency, could look back
to a holy and happy past--the son of the faithful priest Hilkiah, the friend of the
godly king Josiah; he fell upon evil and apostate times. Saul had to turn his back
upon his old life--count all things but loss that had been gain to him--thus he was
ever looking forward, reaching onward--the apostle of faith and hope.

II. Parallel.
1. Each is elected by God, and therefore trained by his circumstances for his
work. The call of Jeremiah, the conversion of Saul, was to each a revelation
of a God that had formed him from the womb for his work (cp. Gal 1:15-16
with Jer 1:5).
2. The two-fold nature of that work--destructive and constructive. To root out,
pull down, destroy; yet to plant and to build. We may almost say this is the
 work of all whom God has called to labour for Him. This was the type of
Christs work. His coming laid an axe to the root of the tree (Mat 3:10, see
also 15:13). Yet was He the Sower. It may be the teacher, like Jeremiah, does
not live to see his work grow--yet who can doubt the effect of Jeremiah upon
those who returned purified and repentant from Babylon? The two must go
together. Root up error and plant truth. Pull down the strongholds of sin,
and build up the temple of Christian holiness. (John Ellerton, M. A.)

To throw down, to build, and plant.--

Destruction and construction conjoined
To root up, and to pull down. What a mercy of God to the Church was it that the
same day that Pelagius, that arch-heretic, was born in Britain, Augustine the Great,
confuter of that heretic, should be born in Africa--providence so disposing that the
poison and the antidote should come into the world together. (John Trapp.)

JER 1:11-16
I see a rod of an almond tree.

Tree emblems
The Hebrew word for almond signifies the waker, in allusion to its being the first
tree to wake to life in the winter. The word also contains the signification of
watching and hastening. The word for almond tree is shaked, and the word for I
will hasten (Jer 1:12) is shoked, from the same root. The almond was the emblem of
the Divine forwardness in bringing Gods promises to pass. A similar instance in the
name of another rosaceous tree is the apricot, which was named from praecocia
(early), on account of its blossoms appearing early in the spring, and its fruit
ripening earlier than its congener the peach. (Professor Post, F. L. S.)

The rod of the almond tree and the seething pot

This vision was parabolic, and contains one thought in different stages of
development. In looking at any object through a telescope the first look may give a
correct impression of the object, but an adjustment of the lens may reveal details not
seen before. So in the case of the double vision here. The almond is the first tree to
awake from the sleep of winter, and to put forth blossoms. God, in the vision of the
almond branch, indicated that the judgments pronounced upon the Hebrew nation
were nearing their fulfilment. I will hasten My Word to perform it. The second
vision gives more information than the first upon the same subject. In the first only
the fact of the speedy retribution is made known, the second reveals whence it is to
come. Out of the north. The seething pot also shows the terror and confusion that
would fill the city of Jerusalem when surrounded by her enemies.

I. Those who have to utter the truth of God to others must first see it clearly
themselves.

II. THOSE WHO CAN SEE THE MIND OF GOD MUST BE PREPARED TO UTTER THE
TRUTHS THEY SEE. Men of genius who see things in secret, and think they see what is
worth giving to the world, gird up their loins to put forth what they have seen in
word, or on canvas, or in the sculptured marble. Christ instructed His first scholars
to do this (Mat 10:27). So Jeremiah must give out that which he has seen.

III. GOD OFTEN MAKES USE OF THINGS FAR BENEATH US, TO MAKE KNOWN TO US
IMPORTANT TRUTHS. The boiling pot and the almond branch were common everyday
objects, yet God uses them as vehicles to convey to Jeremiah solemn truths
respecting His people. So in Christs parables.

IV. The times and instruments of national judgment are in the hands of God.

V. GODS CHASTISEMENTS INCREASE IN SEVERITY WITH THE INCREASE OF NATIONAL

SIN. God had again and again sent less severe chastisement upon the Jewish nation,
but all had failed to stop their moral decay; hence the necessity, if the nation were to
continue in existence, of the execution of the judgments foretold in the prophetic
vision.

VI. THE MOST CHILDLIKE AND HUMBLE IN SPIRIT SEE BEST INTO DIVINE MYSTERIES.
Just before receiving this revelation Jeremiah had confessed his ignorance and
inability (verse 6). (Mat 18:3-6; Isa 57:15; 1Co 2:1-16.) (Sermons by a London
Minister.)

The almond trees message

The almond tree was, as its name indicates, the watcher, the hastener; as if it
lay at the gates of spring, waiting, yearning for their opening; as if it would urge
forward the days of sunshine and gladness. It was apparently with some sense of the
allegory it taught that the shape of its blossom was adopted as the pattern of the
cup for the candles in the golden candlestick in the temple. So, as the candles
burnt from sunset to sunrise in the golden cups of the almond blossoms, the symbol
out of which they sprang was telling of the watcher and the hastener, and was
saying, The morning cometh And the almond branch says through all the dreary
winter, The spring cometh and also the summer. God watches over His Word to
perform it. Yes, as God watches over the almond blossoms to open their beautiful
leaves, and to gladden the eyes of men, so will He open the promises and prophecies
of His Word to fill mens hearts with joy and peace. Ah, we cannot watch over our
word to perform it, save in a very qualified sense indeed. But how calmly the Infinite
and Eternal One keeps watch over His from generation to generation till all are
fulfilled! Although the symbol of the almond branch was employed to show how
certainly Gods Word will be performed on the grand scale of its application to
national life, we may fairly take our crumb of personal comfort from it. There are
multitudes of promises, multitudes of assurances of love, multitudes of revelations
which are adopted and applied as personal words from God to His children, who
build upon them, hope in them, look for their fulfilment. They have associated Gods
love and honour with them as closely as our children bind us up with our words.
And they are abundantly encouraged to do so. The promises for man are promises to
men. God deals with humanity by dealing with individuals. The race is saved
through its units. The secret promise of spring in the branch of the almond tree,
which the prophet was taught to apply to the whole nation, has also a meaning for
every soul of man. It means that God watches and waits to perform His Word to
him. But we turn now to that national and human aspect of the text, which
undoubtedly it chiefly had for the prophet, and which it was intended to have for
men in all generations. When, then, God performs His Word, does He perform it
mediately by the instrumentality of agents, or immediately by an exercise of
volition? The almond branch answers our question. Not by the touch of His invisible
fingers does He make the flower burst from the stem and open its pale pink leaves to
the sun and wind. He does it by the majestic movement of the seasons. The courses
of the stars, the rush of the world through space, the heat from the far-off sun, the
blowing of the winds, the falling of the rain, the secret chemical action of the soil,
the mysterious operation of the laws of life in the tree itself, all combine as Gods
ministers to bring to pass Gods will and word in the making and unfolding of a
flower. And this increases the marvel of His work; this enlarges our conception of
His superintending care; this touches our souls with a consciousness of His
universal presence. If the Almighty will spend a year of unceasing work to make a
flower bloom, if He will lavish the wealth of earth and use the powers of the heavens
upon it, then we may fairly assume that He will exercise as great or greater vigilance
and effort to perform His Word touching the highest welfare of man. He will not fail
to establish His kingdom, and He will do it by using the most vailed forces operating
through centuries of time, if need be, through ages of ages. It is, perhaps, not easy
for us to remember that He is now operating through ourselves and through the
great masses of mankind, all the while watching over His Word to perform it, but so
it is. The Old Testament view of Gods use not only of Israel, but also of heathen
kings and nations, should aid us to see that He is still using men to fulfil His
purposes. Tyrants as well as patriots have served the cause of liberty by compelling
nations to safeguard it by constitutional laws and usages. Atheists have furthered a
reverent piety by revealing the coldness of their denials and their incompetence to
satisfy the deepest, the best, the most irrepressible of our thoughts and desires.
Grasping capitalists, as well as Socialists, are now urging forward the cause of a
sound and real equality, by causing men everywhere and of all degrees to think, to
inquire, to contrive, and to act in combination, each man subordinating the personal
to the general good, and so learning a lesson in unity, in self-control, and in care for
others. The very faith of the Gospel has been promoted by much that seemed to
threaten its extinction. The very principles and precepts of the kingdom of God have
been adopted and confirmed because of experience of the evil of their opposites. We
dare not, we would not, say that knowledge of evil has been the necessary
introduction to knowledge of good, but this we may affirm, that God works by
means of evil to perform His Word, to establish it among us as the admitted counsel
of perfect wisdom and perfect love; He uses even our faults and our sins to bring to
pass the fulfilment of His Word. (J. P. Gladstone.)

Spiritual vision
This power of spiritual vision is preeminently the gift of God. This power of
parables, making them or reading them, is a deep mystery of the unseen kingdom. Is
it not the gift of sight that distinguishes one man from another? The prophet may
truly say, I hear a voice they cannot hear; I see a hand they cannot see. How the
earth and sky are rich with images which the poets eye alone can see! What a
parable is spring, and what a vision from the Lord is summer, laden with all riches,
gentle and hospitable beyond all parallel! With the mountains girdling thee round,
as if to shut thee up in prison, and suddenly opening to let thee through into larger
liberties--what seest thou? I see beauty, order, strength, majesty, and infinite
munificence of grace and loveliness. Look at the moral world, and say what seest
thou. Think of its sinfulness, its misery untold, its tumult and darkness and
corruption, deep, manifold, and ever-increasing. Is there any cure for disease so
cruel, so deadly? What seest thou? I see a Cross, and one upon it like unto the Son of
Man, and in His weakness He is mighty, in His poverty He is rich, in His death is the
infinite virtue of atonement. I see a Cross, its head rises to heaven, and on it is
written, The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin, and from it there comes a
voice, saying, Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die? Believe in Me, and live forever.
And far away in the distance, what seest thou? Across the seething sea of time,
standing high above all earthly affairs, yet inseparably connected with them, what is
that glistening object? It is fairer than the sun when he shineth in the fulness of his
strength, and marvellous is its fascination alike for the evil and the good: the evil
look upon it until their knees tremble and their bones melt like wax, and the good
look unto it, and praise the Lord in a song of thankfulness and hope. What is it? It is
a great white throne whence the living Judge sends out His just and final decrees. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

Natural objects setting forth Divine dispensations

In his later days it was the habit of Wm. Wilberforce, before retiring to rest, to
seek in the natural objects about him, to be afresh assured of his Fathers love and
presence. I was walking with him, says a friend, in a verandah, watching for the
opening of a night-blowing Cereus. As we stood in eager expectation, it suddenly
burst wide open before us. It reminds me, said he, of the dispensations of Divine
providence first breaking on the glorified eye, when they shall fully unfold, and
appear as beautiful as they are complete.

JER 1:17
Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I
command thee.
Gods witness

I. Must be QUICK.
II. BUSY.
III. BOLD.

IV. Faithful. For--

1. He must speak all that he is charged with.
2. He must speak to all that he is charged against.
(1) Because he has reason to fear the wrath of God if he should be false.
(2) Because he has no reason to fear the wrath of man if he is faithful. (M.
Henry, D. D.)
Service requires concentration
The girdle is often yards in length, and is a significant part of a mans apparel
when in full dress; and the first sign that a man is in earnest about any work would
be that he would gather his skirts about him and tuck them into his girdle; so as to
be unhampered and free. The idea for us is that Christian service demands
concentration. It needs the fixing of a mans power upon one thing, and the
gathering together of all the strength of ones nature until its softest and loosest
particles are knit together and become strong. You may take a handful of cotton
down and squeeze it tight enough to make it hard and as heavy as a bullet, or you
may stretch it out into tissue paper. The reason why some men hit and make no dint
is because they are not gathered together, compacted--their loins are not girded. (A.
Maclaren, D. D.)

JER 1:18
I have made thee this day a defenced city, etc.

A sure stronghold is God

Though thou shalt be exposed to persecutions and various indignities, they shall
not prevail against thee. To their attacks thou shalt be as an impregnable city; as
unshaken as an iron pillar; and as imperishable as a wall of brass. None, therefore,
can have less cause to apprehend danger than thou hast. The issue, in Jeremiahs
case, proved the truth of this promise; he outlived all their insults; and saw
Jerusalem destroyed, and his enemies, and the enemies of the Lord, carried into
captivity. (Adam Clark.)

JER 1:19
And they shall fight against thee.

Opposition

I. The vehemence of our foes.

1. Formerly this virulence was manifested in revolting cruelties; lit fires of
martyrdom; crowded prisons with sufferers for conscience sake; drove
thousands into exile; even disturbed ashes of pious dead to emphasise the
execrations of the living.
2. Now opposition resorts to more secret, though not less deadly means. Seeks
to prison confidence and joys; impede progress, disturb peace, destroy
spirituality.

II. THE CERTAINTY OF OUR SECURITY. Saints may be weary, maimed, fearful, but
cannot be ultimately defeated. False professors will fall a prey: indeed they tempt
the tempter; but true men are sure of victory.

III. The source of our confidence.

1. The abiding presence of the Lord.
2. The constant manifestation of the power of the Lord. (R. A. Griffin.)

Persistence in spite of opposition

As the springs do not cease from giving forth their waters, or the rivers their
streams, albeit no man come to take up any, or to sail upon them: so must not the
minister cease from preaching, admonition, and reproving, albeit in manner, no
man make profit of his doctrine and admonition. (J. Spencer.) .

JEREMIAH 2

JER 2:1-3
I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth.

Youthful religion

I. The rich and glowing description of youthful piety here given.

1. Ardent affection.
2. Union of the soul to Christ.
3. A going after God.
4. Not discouraged by difficulties and troubles.
5. A religion of holiness.

II. The aspect which the Divine remembrance of youthful piety may have on
different circumstances of life.
1. A view of approbation.
(1) When you are successfully struggling with the temptations of the world.
(2) When you act under the influence of youthful impressions in promoting
the cause of truth and holiness.
(3) When sunk in deep affliction.
(4) When young people come to be old people.
2. A remembrance of regret and displeasure. (R. Winter, D. D.)

Thy first love

I. God remembers with grace the best things of His peoples early days.
1. I think that it is, first, because all these were His own work. If there was in
thee any light, or life, or love, it was the gift of the Spirit of God.
 2. God also remembers with pleasure those best things in His peoples early days
because they gave Him great delight at the time. Those first tears, which we
tried to brush away secretly, were so precious to the Lord that He stored
them away in His bottle.
3. It is very sweet to reflect that, when God says that He remembers the love of
our espousals, and the kindness of our youth, He does not mention the faults
connected with our early days. Our gracious God has a very generous
memory.
4. The Lord so remembers the best things of our early days that He recounts
them. He says, I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth. Let us try
whether we can recollect how we showed our kindness to our God in our
early days. Then the Lord adds, I remember thee the love of thine
espousals. Oh, some of us did love God very fervently in our early days!
Observe that the Lord speaks in our text of Israels going after Him into the
wilderness: I remember thee . . . when thou wentest after Me in the
wilderness. Perhaps some of you, when you became Christians, had to give
up a situation, or to quit some evil trade. Perhaps you had to run the gauntlet
of a workshop where everybody laughed you to scorn. Some of you had hard
times in those days; yet I will not call them hard, for you never had in all
your life such joy as you had then. When everybody gave you an ill word,
then Christ was most precious to you, and your love to Him burned with a
steady flame.

II. God remembers with a gracious purpose the best things of our early days.
1. He remembers them that He may make use of and honour us in our after
days. There is many a man, now honoured in the service of God, who would
not have been if he had not been faithful to God as a youth; and I believe that
there is many a man who has missed his opportunity of serving God through
not beginning well.
2. God remembers these early faithful ones, to instruct them, and to reveal
Himself to them.
3. The Lord also remembers what we do in our youthful love and kindness, that
He may sustain us in the time of trouble.
4. Especially do I think that this must be true in the time of old age. I remember
how you worked for Me when you could work for Me; and now that you are
getting grey and old, and can do but little in your last days, I will uphold you,
and bear you safely through.

III. GOD WOULD HAVE US REMEMBER THE BEST THINGS OF OUR EARLY DAYS FOR OUR
REBUKE. Ah, you are not what you used to be, not so decided, not so joyous, not so
faithful! What have you been at? Do you not owe more to God now than you did
then! You have come a good way on the road since then; ought you to love Him less?
He has blessed you; He has preserved you; He has forgiven you; He has manifested
Himself to you. You have had some grand times when your heart has burned within
you; you have sometimes had a taste of heaven upon earth. Should you not,
therefore, love Him much more than at the first? Oh, come back with tears of deep
regret, and give yourself again to God! Have you ever seen a water-logged ship
towed into harbour? She has encountered a storm; all her masts are gone, she has
sprung a leak, and is terribly disabled; but a tug has got hold of her, and is drawing
her in, a poor miserable wreck, just rescued from the rocks. I do not want to enter
heaven that way, scarcely saved. But now look at the other picture. There is a fair
wind, the sails are full, there is a man at the helm, every sailor is in his place, and the
ship comes in with a swing, she stops at her proper place in the harbour, and down
goes the anchor with cheery shouts of joy from the mariners who have reached their
desired haven. That is the way to go to heaven; in full sail, rejoicing in the blessed
Spirit of God, who has given us an abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom
of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Gods remembrance of our covenant with Him

I. A solemn dedication to God and entering into covenant with Him.

1. A contract founded in love. The soul is under the influence of a supreme love
to God, a high esteem of His infinite excellences, and a grateful sense of His
innumerable benefits.
2. This contract consists of mutual, unalterable engagements. The soul gives
itself to the Lord; enters into covenant to be wholly devoted to His service
and interest, and to admit no rival with Him. God avouches such a soul for
His; and promises to be its God, its father, portion, and happiness.
3. This covenant, like the marriage covenant, is never to be dissolved.

II. The pleasing remembrance which God has of an early dedication to Him. God
accepts it as double kindness.
1. Because in youth the affections are most warm and lively.
2. Because it is rare and uncommon. (Job Orton.)

Backsliding reproved

I. Remarks.
1. Behold in God a disposition to commend, rather than condemn. While we
admire this tenderness, let us learn also to resemble it. Let us approve as far
as we can; and, in examining characters, let us observe the good more largely
than the evil. Let us beware of indiscriminate reflection; of speaking severely
of persons in the gross; of branding a whole course of life with the reproach
of a particular action.
2. God remembers the past. Our memories soon fail us. Old impressions soon
give place to new ones, and we often find it difficult to recall, without
assistance, an occurrence that happened a few months ago. But a thousand
years are in His sight but as yesterday, etc.
3. It is well to be informed of what we once were, and to be led back to our
former experience. It is useful for a preacher sometimes to remind us of our
natural state; that we may look to the rock whence we are hewn, and to the
hole of the pit whence we were digged. We need everything that is
favourable to self-examination and self-knowledge.
 II. Application.
1. To Christians under declensions in religion. How dreadful is it that, when
everything requires our advancement, we should be stationary! that, when
means and ordinances, mercies and trials, unite to urge us forward; that,
when our obligations to God are daily increasing, and the day of account
every hour approaching so we should not only stand still--but even draw
back!
2. To those who promises fair in their youth, and are now become irreligious.
Perhaps you say, But we are not vicious and profligate. So far it is well. And
oh that this was true of all! but, alas! we have swearers now, who in their
youth feared an oath; we have Sabbath breakers now, who in their youth
revered the sacred hours; we have sceptics and scoffers now, who from a
child knew and admired the Scriptures, which are able to make us wise unto
salvation. You say, We are not like them. But they were not thus drawn
aside all at once; they became wicked by degrees. This is always the course of
sin. They proceed from evil to evil: they wax worse and worse.
3. To those who in their early days are truly devoted to the service and glory of
God. To such the words are applicable--not in a way of reproach, but honour-
-not in a way of rebuke, but encouragement. (W. Jay.)

Failures
Many a fine morning has been overspread with clouds, and followed by foul
weather. Many a tree in spring has been covered with blossoms, which have never
settled into fruit. King George had it in his mind to build a marble palace, and he
has left behind him nothing but a marble arch. All failures. (W. Jay.)

Changed moral conditions

It is difficult to think that the mighty rocks which are as hard as flint were once as
soft as the flesh of a little child, and that your finger dent would have left a mark
upon them as upon dough kneaded for the next batch of bread. Upon some rocks
there is the impression of leaves and ferns. In our great museums there are stone
slabs with the marks of raindrops that fell in gentle showers hundreds and hundreds
of years ago, while on other rocks may be seen the footprints made by wild birds
upon the soft beach by the side of some rushing stream in some remote age.
Gradually the clayey soil hardened into stone, and from the tracery and marks upon
the rocks it is possible to tell what kind of trees and birds grew and flourished in
those early times. As with the hard rock, so with the hard heart. It was once soft and
gentle. God said to the children of Israel, whose hearts had become like stone, I
remember thee, the kindness of thy youth (Jer 2:2). (A. Hampden Lee.)

JER 2:4-8
What iniquity have your fathers found in Me.

The evil nature of sin committed after conversion

 I. VIOLATION OF SOLEMN VOWS AND COVENANT ENGAGEMENTS. At that time we took
Christs cause for our cause, His people for ours, His will for our law, His glory for
our end, and Himself for our portion. Did we love Him too well then?

II. Without any provocation whatever on Gods part.

1. Was He wanting in forbearance when we were in rebellion?
2. Did He act unfeelingly when we were ruined, in that He gave His own Son to
die for us?
3. Has He been a hard master since we entered His service?
4. Has He ever been a churlish father to us?
5. When we have returned to Him with our whole heart, has He not always been
ready to receive us, and bury all in forgetfulness? (Dan 9:7.)

III. Peculiar and horrible ingratitude.

1. He has given, not Egypt or Ethiopia for our ransom, but His own blood.
2. He has redeemed us, not from Egyptian thraldom, but from the Power of
darkness, etc.
3. We never were supported by miracles in lonesome deserts of Arabia, but
having obtained help of God, we continue.
4. We did not possess Canaan, but God hath provided some better thing for us.

IV. Extreme and singular folly.

1. It is a foolish exchange--of liberty for drudgery, peace for remorse, joyfulness
for anguish, abundance for penury and misery.
2. It is singular folly. The people of the only true God alone prove untrue!
(Andrew Fuller.)

Heavens appeal to the sinner

1. THE SINNER IS DIVINELY DESCRIBED.
1. Sin is departure from God. Alienation of sympathy and soul.
2. Sin is a progress of vanity. A going from the real to the unreal.
(1) The pleasures he seeks are unsatisfactory; all empty, and outside him.
(2) The honours he aspires to are unreal; neither enrich nor ennoble the
soul.

II. The sinner is divinely challenged.

1. If iniquity were found in God, there would be some justification for apostasy.
2. The discovery of such iniquity is an absolute impossibility. (Homilist.)

Gods mercies should evoke gratitude

Selim, a poor Turk, had been brought up from his youth with care and kindness by
his master, Mustapha. When the latter lay at the point of death Selim was tempted
by his fellow servants to join them in stealing a part of Mustaphas treasures. No,
said he, Selim is no robber! I fear not to offend my master for the evil he can do me
now, but for the good he has done me all my life long. May not many Christians
learn a lesson from Selim?
Neither said they, Where is the Lord, that brought us up?--
Three shameful possibilities in human life

I. THE POSSIBILITY OF DISHONOURING THE GREAT MEMORIES OF LIFE. Neither said

they, Where is the Lord? etc. The dark night was forgotten, and Israel did not know
who had lifted upon it the brightness and hope of morning.
1. The great memories of life are dishonoured--
(1) When the vividness of their recollection fades.
(2) When their moral purpose is over looked or misunderstood.
(3) When their strengthening and stimulating function is suspended.
2. 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. There is, however, a possibility of
forgetting sacred scenes, and of cheating the soul of reminiscences which
ought be a perpetual inspiration. Let each man find the proofs in his own
history: Sickness, poverty, danger, etc.

II. The possibility of underestimating the interpositions of God.

1. Look at the case in the text,--through the wilderness, through a land of deserts
and pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a
land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt. Viewed
prospectively, men shrink from such difficulties; viewed retrospectively, a
good many of the terrors are forgotten. Granted that we have not the same
outward difficulties, will any man deny that his moral pilgrimage is beset by
many perils, and that the grave is constantly open at his feet? Not only was
the dark side of history forgotten, but the bright side was overlooked. I
brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness
thereof. What was the result? Did they erect the altar, and bow in long-
continued prayer, and unite in the loud, sweet psalm of thankfulness? Ye
defiled My land, and made Mine heritage an abomination.
2. If we try our own lives by these historical disclosures, shall we shame Israel by
our purity and love? Remember the Deliverer! Remember the Giver!

III. The possibility of the leading minds of the Church being darkened and
perverted (Jer 2:8). The priests, the pastors, and the prophets, all out of the way!
1. In all ages there have, of necessity, been foremost men; men whose capacity,
culture, and Divine election have entitled them to leadership; men whom
God Himself has acknowledged as the guides of the people. How easy it is for
such men to succumb in periods of general corruption is too evident from
universal history. What then?
(1) Such men should watch themselves with constant jealousy.
(2) Such men should never be forgotten by those who pray.
2. The most affecting of all subjects to contemplate is,--God grieved, God
complaining! Would He complain without reason? Would He startle the
 universe for some trifling cause? It is as the cry of one whose heart is
breaking; His great deliverances have been forgotten; His heritage has been
defiled; His power has been despised, and His mercy been treated as an
empty sentiment; what if the throb of His great sorrow should send a
shudder of distress through the heavens and the earth! Look at Calvary for
the full expression of all this Divine emotion. Seeing that such pain was
inflicted by sin, let us avoid it as the abominable thing which God hates. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

The priests said not, Where is the Lord?. . .the rulers also transgressed
. . . and the prophets, etc.

The three ruling classes accused

1. The priests, part of whose duty was to handle the law, i.e., explain the Torah,
to instruct the people in the requirements of Jehovah, by oral tradition and
out of the sacred law books, gave no sign of spiritual aspiration; like the
reprobate sons of Eli, they knew not Jehovah, that is to say, paid no heed to
Him and His will as revealed in the book of the law.
2. The secular authorities, the king and his counsellors, not only sinned thus
negatively, but positively revolted against the King of kings, and resisted His
will.
3. The prophets went further yet in the path of guilt, apostatising altogether
from the God of Israel, and seeking inspiration from the Phoenician Baal,
and following worthless idols that could give no help. (C. J. Ball, M. A.)

The corruption and ignorance of the priests and prophets

Two centuries ago the religious state of the English-speaking world was bad, and
was rapidly becoming worse. Infidelity was fast spreading among the people, and,
consequently, there was an open and professed disregard of religion and morals.
The secret of this sad state was simple. The clergy, though their lives in general
might not be scandalous, were, as a rule, ignorant of all spiritual truth, and in too
many cases even devoid of a sound intellectual apprehension of scriptural teaching.
As Cowper, referring to those clergy, tersely put it--
Except a few with Elis spirit blest,
Hophni and Phinehas may describe the rest.

JER 2:9-13
Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods?
Christian controversy
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 east to west,--and ask if any heathen land has given up its idols,
and you will find that no such thing has ever taken place; but whilst the heathen
have kept to their gods as if they bad 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. We all
know how much easier it is to keep up the form of religion than to be true to its
spirit. Say that religion is a number of things to be done, some at this hour and some
at that, and you bring it, so to speak, within range of the hand, and make it
manageable; but instead of doing this, show that religion means spiritual worship, a
sanctified conscience, and a daily, sacrifice of the will, and you at once invoke the
severest resistance to its supremacy. Or say that religion simply means a passive
acceptance of certain dogmas that can be fully expressed in words, which make no
demand upon inquiry or sympathy, and you will awaken the least possible
opposition; but make it a spiritual authority, a rigorous and incessant discipline
imposed upon the whole life, and you will send a sword upon the earth, and
enkindle a great fire. Earnest religious controversy seems to be but the higher aspect
of another controversy which has vexed man through all time. The study of God is
the higher side of the study of man. It is a singular thing that man has never been
able to make himself quite out, though he has been zealously mindful of the doctrine
that the proper study of mankind is man. He wants to know exactly whence he
came and what he is; but the voice which answers him is sometimes mocking, and
nearly always doubtful. Is it wonderful that man, who has had so much difficulty
with himself, should have had proportionately greater difficulty with such a God as
is revealed in the Bible? On the contrary, it will be found that the two studies--the
study of man and the study of God--always go together, and that the ardour of the
one determines the intensity of the other. In this view the text might read thus: Pass
over the isles of the Chittim, and see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently,
and see whether the inhabitants thereof have studied the physiology and chemistry
of their own bodies; but the philosophers of Christendom have built themselves
upon protoplasm. Kedar cared nothing about humanity, and therefore it cared
nothing about divinity. When man is not deeply interested in himself it is not likely
that he will be deeply interested in God. In the doctrine that the very greatness of
God is itself the occasion of religious controversy, and even of religious doubt and
defective constancy, we find the best answer to a difficulty created by the words of
the text. That difficulty may be put thus: If the people of Chittim and of Kedar are
faithful to their gods, does it not prove that those gods have power to inspire and
retain confidence? and if the people of Israel are always turning away from their
God, does it not show that their God is unable to keep His hold upon their
occasional love? Such a putting of the case would be valid if inquiry be limited to the
letter. But if we go below the surface we must instantly strip it of all worth as a plea
on behalf of idolatry. Clearly so; for, not to go further, if it proves anything it proves
too much; thus--the marble statue which you prize so highly has never given you a
moments pain; your child has occasioned you days and nights of anxiety; therefore
a marble statue has more moral power (power to retain your admiration) than has a
child. Your clock you understand thoroughly; you can unmake and make it again,
and explain its entire mechanism down to the finest point of its action; but that child
of yours is a mystery which seems to increase day by day: therefore you have more
satisfaction in the clock than in the child. So the argument in favour of Kedar proves
nothing, because it not only proves too much, but lands the reasoner in a practical
absurdity. The foundation of this argument is, that of all subjects that engage the
human mind, religion (whether true or false) is the most exciting; that in proportion
as it enlarges its claims, will it be likely to occasion controversy; and that, as the
religion of the Bible enlarges its claims beyond all other religions, assailing the
intellect, the conscience, the will, and bringing every thought and every imagination
of the heart into subjection, and demanding the corroboration of spiritual faith by
works that rise to the point of self-crucifixion, the probability is that there will not
only be a controversy between man and man as to its authority and beneficence, but
also a controversy between man and God as to its acceptance; and that out of this
latter controversy will come the very defection complained of in the text, and will
come also the vexatious human controversies which may really be but so many
excuses for resisting the moral discipline of the Gospel. This is the whole argument.
Specially is to be noted that the principal controversy is not between man and man,
but between man and God; our hearts are not loyal to our Maker; His
commandments are grievous to souls that love their ease. The God of grace, rich in
all comfort and promise, we do not cast off. We want such a God. But the God of law,
of purity, of judgment, terrible in wrath and not to be deceived by lies, our hearts
can only receive with broken loyalty, loving Him today, and grieving Him tomorrow.
It is in this sad fact that we find the only satisfactory explanation of the slowness of
the spread of the Christian kingdom. Evil hates goodness, hates light, hates God;
and as truth cannot fight with carnal weapons, or force, itself upon the world by
physical means, it can only stand at the door and knock, and mourn the slowness
which it cannot accelerate. It is Gods will that the rock grow slowly, and that the
forest hasten not its maturity; but it is surely not the will of the Lord that His
children should grieve Him long, and provoke Him to wrath through many
generations. We have been speaking of the controversy respecting the Unseen and
Invisible God. There is a distinct effort made in our day to turn the controversy out
of historical channels, and to fasten it upon abstract speculation. We must resist this
effort, for we, at all events, believe that the discussion concerning essential Deity
was started from a new centre when Jesus Christ came into the world. No name
given under heaven amongst men has occasioned, and is now occasioning, so much
controversy as the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Men do not know what to make
of Christ. You cannot get rid of Christ: you exclude Him from your schools by Act of
Parliament, but He, passing through the midst of you, says, Suffer Me and the
children to meet; let the flowers see the sun; you find Him in statute books, in
philanthropic institutions, in literature; you find Him now just as His disciples
found Him, in out-of-the-way places, doing out-of-the-way things;--they marvelled
that He spake with the woman,--the eternal marvel, the eternal hope! This leads us
to remark that how strong soever Christianity may be in force and dignity of pure
argument--and in that direction it has proved itself victorious on all fields--its
mightiest force for good is in its vital and inexhaustible sympathy. Christianity as a
sympathetic religion, tender, hopeful, patient, with morning light forever falling on
its uplifted eyes, leaning with all its trust upon the Cross of the atoning Son of God,
calling men from sin, ignorance, and death, is a figure the world will not willingly
spare in its day of anguish and sore distress. It will be interesting to observe how
God Himself meets the controversy which He deplores, for in doing so, we may learn
a method of reply. When God answers, His reply must be the best. Look at the
Divine challenge: What iniquity have your fathers found in Me, that they are gone
far from Me? This sublime challenge you cannot find in all the sayings of heathen
gods. And this is the invincible defence of the Christian religion in all ages and in all
lands,--you have purity at the centre, you have holiness on the throne! Those who
have read Augustines immortal work, The City of God, will remember with what
fierce eloquence he scourges the gods of pagan Rome. How biting his tone, how keen
his retorts, how broad his sarcasm! Why, he sternly demands, did the gods
publish no laws which might have guided their devotees to a virtuous life? And
again, Did ever the walls of any of their temples echo to any such warning voice? I
myself, he continues, when I was a young man, used sometimes to go to
sacrilegious entertainments and spectacles; I saw the priests raving in religious
excitement, and before the couch of the mother of the gods there were sung
productions so obscene and filthy for the ear that not even the mother of the foul-
mouthed players themselves could have formed one of the audience. History, as
you know, is full of such instances. Remembering these things, you may see the
force of the inquiry, What iniquity have your fathers found in Me? This is the
invincible defence of the Christian religion today. Observe how Jesus Christ repeats
the very challenge we find in the text,--Which of you convinceth Me of sin? And,
later on, If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil. They had accused Him
often, but had convicted Him never! We apply this doctrine with timidity, for who
would wilfully slay himself, or bring judgment upon a thousand men? Yet the
application is this: When the Church is holy, the Christian controversy is ended in
universal and immortal triumph! (J. Parker, D. D.)

Changing gods
The records of all ages exhibit the strange obstinacy with which the heathen
usually cling to their superstitions. If we except the triumphs obtained over
paganism by the Gospel of Christ from the apostolic age up to the present, some of
which even in our own day have been most signal, the idolatrous nations of the
world still perpetuate the absurd and unholy practices transmitted to them by their
fathers. Most urgent then is it upon all Christians to feel pity for their fellow
creatures sunk in the darkness and guilt of heathenism, and by Christian teachers to
rescue them from their fearful condition. But there is also another practical
consideration connected with a survey of the obstinate blindness and superstition of
the heathen, and their devotion to their idolatrous worship, namely, the contrast
which it affords to the conduct of too many who consider themselves worshippers of
the one true God, and of Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. May it not too truly be
said, Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but My people have
changed their glory for that which doth not profit.

I. We have set before us evil conduct of the people.

1. The first step in the career of evil is forsaking God. This is the fountain and
root of all other sins. While the prodigal son remained contented under his
parents roof he knew nothing of the want, the hunger, which he afterwards
experienced. His first sin, and that which led to all the evils which overtook
him, was his neglect towards his parent, his indifference to his approbation,
his wish to cast off the duties he owed to him. If then we would guard against
evil, we must watch over our hearts, and beware of forsaking God. The more
gross violations of His law are readily discovered, while perhaps we think
little or nothing of that great sin which is the foundation of all others.
2. But this sin leads to another; for we are not content when we forsake God,
that our hearts should continue a mere blank; we seek to fill up the void
which His absence has made, and to find our satisfaction in other objects,
 which can never afford us true repose. Having forsaken God, we choose to
ourselves idols. In the words of the Almighty in the chapter before us, they
are gone far from Me, and have walked after vanity, and become vain; they
even refuse His offers of peace and reconciliation.

II. Such is the universal offence of mankind against God: we proceed now to show
THE SINFULNESS, THE INGRATITUDE, AND THE FOLLY, WHICH ARE INVOLVED IN IT.
1. Its extreme sinfulness. Persons are apt to speak and to think of these subjects
with the most careless indifference. They do not consider themselves as
virtually addressed in such words as those in the chapter which precedes our
text, where Jehovah says by His prophet, I will utter My judgments against
them, touching all their wickedness, who have forsaken Me, and have burned
incense unto other gods. They do not open their eyes to the aggravation of
their crime, as pointed out even by our natural sense of obligation to our
Creator, of which the very heathen are examples; for, says the Almighty,
hath any nation changed their gods, which are yet no god? The light of
natural reason taught them that they ought to obey their Creator, their
preserver, and their benefactor. But the proof of our sinfulness in forsaking
God, and in placing our trust and happiness in the things of this present life,
does not depend upon the mere light of natural conscience; for we have in
our possession a revelation from Himself, in which He plainly declares to us
His own unerring decision upon the subject. Ye shall walk after the Lord
your God, and fear Him, and keep His commandments, and obey His voice;
and ye shall serve Him, and cleave unto Him.
2. But the sinfulness of forsaking God, and preferring other things to His
service, is greatly aggravated by the ingratitude involved in the offence. The
Almighty reminds His rebellious people of the miracles of mercy which He
had performed on their behalf; how He had brought them out of the land of
Egypt, etc. He gave them His law to guide them, and pastors to teach them;
and He challenges them, as it were, to point out any instance in which He
had acted unjustly or unkindly towards them: what iniquity have your
fathers found in Me?
3. But there is still another consideration dwelt upon by the prophet in reference
to this sinful and ungrateful course of conduct, namely, its unparalleled folly.
The very heathen would not give up their vain hope of benefit from the
supposed protection of their images of wood and stone; yet the professed
worshippers of the one living and true God are too often willing to sacrifice
the inestimable blessings of His favour for the most trifling gratifications of a
frail and sinful life. My people have changed their glory, for that which doth
not profit. No! it is the height of folly thus to choose the worldly mammon
before the true riches; to forsake God for the creature; and to prefer earth to
heaven, and time to eternity. Are we not conscious that we have seen guilty
of the sin of forsaking God? (Christian Observer.)

Hath a nation changed their gods?

Xenophon said it was an oracle of Apollo, that these gods are rightly worshipped
which were delivered them by their ancestors; and this he greatly applaudeth. Cicero
also saith, that no reason shall ever prevail with him to relinquish the religion of his
forefathers. The monarch of Morocco told an English ambassador that he had lately
read St. Paul, and that he disliked nothing in him but this, that he had changed his
religion, (John Trapp.)

Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this.

Seven wonders
Parents of olden time were wont to tell their eager children of seven wonders:
(1) The Pyramids.
(2) The Temple of the great Diana of the Ephesians.
(3) The Statue of Jupiter at Olympia.
(4) The Tomb of Mausolus. What a satire on immortality! Who was
Mausolus? We know not, but the mausoleum is with us. He gave his
name and glory to his tomb.
(5) The Colossus at Rhodes.
(6) The Pharos at Alexandria.
(7) The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
We have to do, however, at this moment with marvels in the province of the
spiritual life. There are some things here touching our relations with the spiritual
world whereat heaven must wonder. A thoughtful man will find it impossible to
explain them.

I. AN UNCLAIMED CROWN. God made man in His likeness, with a splendid

birthright and glorious possibilities before him. He was of the line royal, the blood of
the King of kings flowing in his veins. Where is the man to whom God extends this
crown? See him yonder chasing butterflies, pursuing thistle down. He calls this
pleasure. See him toiling with a muck rake, his eyes downcast, plucking coins out of
the garbage and loading himself with them. He calls this wealth. See him climbing
laboriously the rocky side of yonder cliff that he may carve his initials upon its face--
and fall. And this is fame! All the while the windows of heaven are open above him
and the glory of the celestial realms is unveiled before him. He gives no heed.

II. A SECRET SIN. Here we touch the lowest part of our nature. A dog with a bone
sneaks off to a corner of the garden and buries it, watching meanwhile out of the
corners of his eyes that none may know his secret. So we bury our darling sins; so we
flatter ourselves that none shall ever find us out. An Egyptian princess died four
thousand years ago, and her body was committed to a company of priests for
embalming. They said, Let us save ourselves the trouble; it will never be known. So
they dipped the body of a common Egyptian into bitumen and placed it in the
princess casket. It was a clever trick; but a few years ago, before a company of
scientists at Tremont Temple, gathered together to witness the unswathing of the
royal mummy, the bands of byssus were unwound, and the fraud perpetrated by
those priests, now forty centuries dead and turned to dust, was detected. There is,
indeed, nothing hidden that shall not be brought to light, and that which is done in a
corner shall be proclaimed on the housetop.
 III. A REPROBATES LAUGH. Not long ago I heard the merry laughter of a girl and
looked that way. A carriage was passing by. Through the open window I saw two
women, the one old, haggard, bedizened--it was easy to discern her vocation--the
other a sweet-faced girl late from some country home, going garlanded to death.
God help her! How dare they laugh who are hurrying on unprepared to the
judgment bar? Yet they are making merry everywhere. O men and women, let us De
safe and then be merry.

IV. A CHRISTIANS GROAN. We profess to believe that the past is forgiven, all gone
like a nightmare, and that heaven is open before us and that Christ walks with us, an
ever-present and helpful friend. If a man believes these things, how can he ever hang
his head like a bulrush? Surely something is wrong. One night in Newgate prison a
man sang cheerily and swung like a boy on the post of his bed. Fine shining shall we
have tomorrow! Who is this, and what shining shall there be? This is John
Bradford, and tomorrow he is to die at the stake. But what matter, if the day after
tomorrow he shall be in the midst of the merry making of heaven? Why, shall he not
with gladsome heart be praising God?

V. A TATTERED LIVERY. Our Lord tells of a marriage feast whereat a certain one
was found who had not on the wedding gown. His host remonstrated with him,
Friend, how earnest thou in hither in this garb? And the man was silent. We are
going to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Our heavenly Host has provided for us
fine linen, clean and white, which is the righteousness of the saints. To appear in
that heavenly presence clad in our own righteousness is to be found arrayed in rags
and tatters, for all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.

VI. AN AVERTED FACE. A few days ago, at a hanging in a neighbouring State, it is

said that twenty thousand people left town and tramped four miles along a country
road to see a poor wretch swung from the gallows tree. There is, indeed, something
brutal in our human nature. When our Lord was dying on the accursed tree it is
written, The people stood beholding. Is it strange that men should look on anguish
with a calm delight? Was it strange that men could look at Jesus dying and feel no
responsive thrill of sympathy? Ah! a thousand times stranger is it that some of us
should refuse to look upon Him! We hide, as it were, our faces from Him; He is
despised and we esteem Him not.

VII. A WAITING GOD. Behold, I stand at the door, etc. Wonderful patience! Love
that passeth knowledge! His arms are loaded with the dainties of the kingdom,
apples and pomegranates from the Kings gardens, and bread of life. Oh, let us draw
the bolts that He may come in and sup with us! (D. J. Burrell, D. D.)

Sin unnatural
There is something unaccountable and unnatural about sin, which, if we were not
the victims of its power every day, would startle and make us horribly afraid. If we
merely heard of it as existing in some other of Gods worlds, we should doubt
whether the report could be true. We should demand more than the usual amount of
testimony before believing so unnatural a story, and when it was proved, should not
cease to wonder, and to ask what cause beyond our experience had brought to pass a
thing so marvellous.

I. IT PREVENTS MEN FROM PURSUING WHAT THEY OWN TO BE THE HIGHEST GOOD.
There is a passage of Ovid where a person in a conflict between reason and desire is
made to say, Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor; and in a like strain we
hear Paul, or rather the man made aware of the bondage of sin saying through him,
That which I do, I allow not: for what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that I
do. So true to human nature such words are, that no one ever thought of them as
being misrepresentations of the real state of man. Everywhere we see examples of
this sacrifice of a higher good to a lower, of acknowledged greater happiness to less,
of the improvement of the mind to the enjoyments of the body, of future hopes to
present pleasure, of an object of desire felt to be praiseworthy and exalted to one
which is base and low and sure to be followed by remorse. We find this cleaving to
the best of men and to the wisest: the influences of the Gospel may weaken but
never remove this tendency. It belongs to mankind. Is there not, now, something
very strange in this fatal proclivity toward the low, in this constant, wide-spread,
unalterable folly of choosing wrong within the moral sphere of action. Suppose we
found the same obliquity of judgment and choice elsewhere--that, for instance, a
scholar, aware what was the right meaning of a passage according to the laws of
thought and language, deliberately chose a wrong meaning; or a merchant,
acquainted with the laws of trade, undertook an adventure with his eyes open, from
which only ruin was to be expected; or a general, patriotic and discerning, adopted a
plan of battle which all his experience had condemned as sure to end in his defeat:
should we not regard such a person as a kind of moral prodigy, as fit to be put away
in a museum of morbid psychology among the deranged men who have believed
themselves to he two persons, or that their souls had gone from their bodies?

II. IT IS NOT DEPENDENT ON A WEAK CAPACITY, BUT THE VERY HIGHEST INTELLECTS
ARE OFTEN EMPLOYED IN ITS SERVICE. It is indeed true, that sagacity and folly will
differ in their ways of sinning and of escaping detection. An absurd, or ill-contrived,
crime will be committed by a boy or a half-witted person, and not by a man of
shrewdness. Whence it may happen that the criminals in a penitentiary may be, in
the average, below the ordinary range of intellect. In other words, the vigour of mind
will show itself, either by abstaining from certain crimes, or by committing them in
such a way that they will not be brought to light. But we do not find that the highest
abilities keep men from sinning, from a life of pleasure, from deadly selfishness,
from feelings which carry with them their own sting. Great minds lie like wrecks all
along the course of life; either they disbelieve against evidence, or give themselves
up to monstrous pleasures, or destroy the welfare of society by their self-will, or
gnaw upon themselves with a deadly hatred of others.

III. ITS EXISTENCE INVOLVES THE CONTRADICTION OF THE FREEDOM AND THE
SLAVERY OF THE WILL. This is but another aspect of the truth which we have already
considered--that the soul steadily chooses in some strange way an inferior good
before a superior; but it is too important a view of our nature not to be noticed by
itself. Mankind, in choosing the evil, have been an enigma to themselves and to the
philosophers who have studied human nature. We see our nature exercise its
freedom in various ways,--choosing now a higher good in preference to a lower, and
now a lower before a higher,--doing this over and over within the sphere of earthly
things, yet when it looks the supreme good full in the face unable to choose Him,
unable to love Him, until, in some great crisis which we call conversion, and which is
as marvellous as sin is, we find the soul acting with recovered power, acting out
itself, and soaring in love to the fountain and life of its being. It is as if a balance
should tell every small weight with minutest accuracy, and when a large weight was
put on, should refuse to move at all. It is as if the planets should feel each others
attraction hut be insensible to the force of the central sun. Is not sin then as
unaccountable as it is deep seated and spreading in our nature?

IV. IT HAS A POWER OF RESISTING ALL KNOWN MOTIVES TO A BETTER LIFE. This,
again, is only another form of the remark, that we are kept by sin from pursuing our
highest good; but under this last head we view man as opposing Gods plan for his
salvation, while the other is more general. Here we see how causeless and
unreasonable are the movements of sin, even when its bitterness has been
experienced, and the way of recovery been made known. The way in which the
Gospel comes to us is the most inviting possible--through a person who lived a life
like ours on earth, and came into tender sympathy with us; through a concrete
exhibition of everything true and good, not through doctrine and abstract statement.
It has been the religion of our fathers, and of the holy in all time. It is venerable in
our eyes. It is Gods voice to us. Where else can so many motives, such power of
persuasion be found; and yet where else, in what other sphere where motives
operate, is there so little success? Even Christians who have given themselves to the
Gospel confess that all these weighty considerations often fail to move them; that
they stand still or turn backwards a great part of their lives rather than make
progress. So marvellous is the power of sin to deaden the force of motives to virtue,
even in the minds of the best persons the world contains.

V. IT CAN BLIND THE MIND TO TRUTH AND EVIDENCE. Of this we see numberless
examples in daily life. We see men who have been accustomed to judge of evidence
within the same sphere in which religion moves, that of moral and historical proof,
rejecting the Gospel and afterwards acknowledging that they were wilfully
prejudiced, that their objections ought to have had no weight with a candid mind.
We see prejudice against the Gospel lurking under some plausible but false plea,
which the man has never taken the pains to examine, although immense personal
interests are involved. We see men rejecting the Gospel unthinkingly, repeating
some stale argument scarcely worth refutation, as if a great matter like the welfare of
the soul might be trifled with, and made light of. It is strange, too, how quick the
change is, when for some reason the moral or religious sensibilities are awakened
after long slumber, how quick, I say, the change is from scepticism, or denial of the
Gospel, or even hostility, to a state of belief. Multitudes of intelligent men have
passed through such a conversion, and have felt ever afterwards that truth and
evidence were sufficient, but that their souls were in a dishonest state. Now, how is
this? Is this a new prejudice which has seized upon them, at their conversion, and
has their candid scepticism given way to dishonest faith; or did sin,--that which in a
thousand ways, through hope and fear, through indolence, through malignity,
through love of pleasure, blinds and stupefies, did sin destroy their power of being
candid before?

VI. THE INCONSISTENCY OF SIN IS MARVELLOUS IN THIS RESPECT THAT WE ALLOW

AND EXCUSE IN OURSELVES WHAT WE CONDEMN IN OTHERS. Men seem sometimes to
have no moral sense, so open are their violations of morality, and so false their
justifications of their conduct. And yet, when they come to pass censure upon
others, they show such a quickness to discern little faults, such an acquaintance with
the rule of duty, such an unwillingness to make allowances, that you would think a
new faculty had been imparted to their minds. These severe critics of others are all
the while laying up decisions and precedents against themselves, yet when their
cases come on, the judges reverse their own judgments. They condemn men
unsparingly for sins to which they are not tempted, although the radical principle in
their own and in others sins is confessedly the same. Marvellous inconsistency!
Strange that the same mind balances between two standards of conduct so long.
Why does not the man, whose own rules condemn himself, begin to sentence
himself, or to excuse and pardon others? Is not this an unnatural state of mind;
impossible, save on the supposition that it is effected by some strange perversion of
its judgments? (T. D. Woolsey.)

JER 2:13
My people have committed two evils.

Two astounding evils

I. THE FORCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM. Mightiest rivers cannot break from their
source, nor greatest planets from their centre, but man can from centre and fountain
of his being.
1. This freedom is a matter of personal consciousness.
2. It invests human existence with transcendent importance.

II. The enormity of human wickedness.

1. Ingratitude.
2. Injustice.
3. Impiety.

III. The egregiousness of human folly.

1. In withdrawing from the satisfying to toil for the unsatisfying.
2. In withdrawing from the abundant to tell for the scanty (Homilist.)

The two-fold sin of mankind

I. THE NATURE OF SIN. This will be seen by observing--

1. What men leave. God--a fountain of living waters to them. The sum of all
excellency, the source of all happiness.
2. What the follow. Broken cisterns.
(1) Worldly business.
 (2) Worldly pleasure.
(3) Earthly distinction.
(4) Worldly ease.

II. HOW WE SHOULD REGARD SIN. As God regards it--with loathing and
abhorrence. Learn--
1. The emptiness of mere outward profession.
2. Gods remedy for mans sin. (C. Clayton, M. A.)

They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters.

The fountain of living waters

In a land like this, perpetually green with Atlantic showers, which at once refresh
the thirsty soil and replenish the subterranean reservoirs, it is not easy to
understand the gratitude, reverence, almost affection, with which men who live
under a fiercer sky, and upon a parched earth, look upon a fountain of living
waters. Some remnant of the feeling, descending to us from an earlier and simpler
time, may be noticed in connection with such a strong outgush of pure waters as, at
Wells or at Holywell, springs into the upper air, at once a river: men have thought
that there must be some healing efficacy in so bountiful a manifestation of one of
natures most beneficent forces; and soon they have imagined a legend, and built a
shrine, and to the natural holiness have added a superstitious sanctity. But it is
almost the same in the thirstier lands of the East with any rill of water, so it be
perennial. A spring becomes a natural landmark of a kind to which expectation
points, round which memories are wont to gather. When all the long day the caravan
has toiled patiently through the pitiless brightness, and the path has lain for many a
weary mile over the sand slopes shimmering in the heated air, or by the mountain
pass where the sun-smitten rocks reflect the intolerable rays,--how grateful, as the
shadows are lengthening, to descry afar off the fringe of palm trees on the horizon,
and to quicken the march, till at last there is a bubbling in the cool grass, and shade
overhead, water for the thirsty lips, rest for the tired feet! And how terrible the
disappointment, if, when the journey has tended to some less fortunate spot, where
the care of man has provided--poor substitute for the bounty of God!--a cistern to
catch a precarious and failing supply, the travellers have found at nightfall only a
broken reservoir, and the trace of help and refreshment passed away! What
resource, but a night as comfortless as the day had been toilsome, and on the
morrow, a renewed effort, with diminished strength and a courage sustained by
despair, to reach some happier island in the desert, where the waters of God never
fail to flow! There is a depth of spiritual meaning in this passage, which, ignorant as
we may be of the precise occasion to which it applies, forbids us to interpret it in any
but a religious sense. It was, so to say, the nature, the destiny, of the Jewish people
to be always committing the two evils of which it speaks. Theirs was indeed a mixed
character, in which elements as opposite almost as light and darkness perpetually
struggled for the mastery. Their distinguishing mark as a nation was insight into
God: they had discerned Him as one; they had learned that He was holy; they had
fixed, for all coming time, the true point of contact between God and man in the
god-likeness of humanity; and yet in their history, as told by their own lips, they
show themselves false, fickle, sensual, cruel, as hardly any other people. In Judah of
old, a distracted State, the sport of fierce political passions within and beyond her
own borders, falling back now upon a hard Levitical religiousness, now madly
rushing upon alien idolatries, now again wakened to better life by the thunder of
prophetic rebuke;--in Judah of old it was possible for a man to climb, like Isaiah, to
such heights of rapt communion with the all-holy God as human feet have since but
rarely trodden, or to find a downward way to abysses of foul sensuality, masking
itself in a pretence of religion, such as it is not good even to speak of. It is enough
surely to forsake God; to pass through the dry and thirsty land of life as if no
fountain of living waters sprang up to cheer and to fertilise it; to choose the sun-
smitten sand, to toil up the parched torrent bed, when it is possible to rest beneath
the palm trees shade, and to drink of the brook that murmurs through the grass.
And yet this can hardly be: the thirst for the Divine cannot wholly die out of the
human heart: there must be some reaching forth to the unseen, some attempt to
find a stay in the Eternal. So the first evil has its natural issue in the second. Those
who have turned away from the living fountain bend their wandering steps towards
a cistern of their own making, a broken cistern which will hold no water; a cistern
which, as the traveller draws nigh, offers to his thirsty lips only the slime, where
water was long ago, baking in the sun. This it is to forsake the solemn worship of
Jehovah for the wild dance of the devotees of Baal. It may not be easy to expound
this passage; but, as it stands, it is impossible not to feel how deep and how vivid it
is. It contains all the secret of religion; the secret which it is the object of preaching
of every kind to reveal and to enforce; the one truth which prophets present in every
form of living and burning words,--that all life worthy of the name is life in, and
with, and for God; that life without God is a dream likest death, except that by Gods
mercy it is always possible to awake from it. So I take this particular metaphorical
representation of the central truth to indicate that an essential element of human
nature is a longing for the Divine, as heat and weariness thirst for cool water: a
sense of a higher law, a holier will, to which it would be peace and happiness to
conform: a desire to find, amid the perplexity of things, a hand of guidance, and in
their mutability and sorrowfulness a heart on which to rest: a yearning after
something fixed and changeless, to set against the daily experience of loss and decay
and death. The thirst is in us all: when sorrow strikes us down upon the sand; when
disappointment bars our way in the mountain pass; when the mirage of earthly
affections first allures and then deceives us, we feel it, and all the more keenly that
we hardly know where to seek the spring that will refresh us. Would that always we
had the courage to listen to the promptings of our nobler nature, and to enter upon
the impossible task of quenching the souls thirst for God! Would that always we
could recognise the demand of our true need, and bring our parched lips through
every desert and over every obstacle to the living spring whereof who drinks shall
never thirst again! (C. Beard, B. A.)

The fountain and the cistern

Jeremiah was the medium rather than the source of these words; and it is
noteworthy that he does not lay claim to them. We find lying between the two verses
a clause which invests them with Divine authority, namely, saith the Lord.

I. THE CHARACTER WHICH GOD GIVES HIMSELF. It is a fact, that all that God has
made and sustains speaks to us of God; and it is essential to morality and religion, as
well as to our happiness, that God should reveal Himself. Before we can know that
He is worthy of our supreme love, reverence, and trust, and that we should obey His
will, He must make Himself known. We cannot conceive of God giving Himself a
false character. God sets Himself forth as the fountain of living waters. His
estimate of Himself is high, but not too high. He does not speak of Himself as a
stream or reservoir of water. He is a fountain, and not merely a fountain among
other fountains, but the fountain. If there be other fountains, they spring from
Him; and He casts them completely into the shade. He is not content with
representing Himself as the fountain of waters. He applies the epithet living to the
waters that issue forth from Him. He is a fountain that is ever gushing. There is no
exhausting of Him. There is an immense difference between the water that is taken
from a reservoir and that which is drawn from a fountain. The water which is taken
from a fountain is peculiarly fresh, pure, sweet, and wholesome. For ages the angels
have been enjoying God. Has He become distasteful to them? The waters that flow
from Him never grow stale and fiat. They are living and life-giving. They undergo no
change for the worse. This language--the fountain of living waters--is, of course,
figurative, and on that account all the more beautiful and expressive. The grand idea
which they suggest is--that God alone can satisfy individuals and communities.
Creatures are good and useful. As things are, we cannot do without them. Earth is
not a superfluous gift. We require light and air; we require bread and human society,
and a multitude of other things; but creatures are not absolutely needed. If God
chose, He could dispense with them. Assuredly, it is not in creatures to satisfy us.
They yield us more or less pleasure; and it would ill become us to despise them; but
we have a mind above them. Deal with them as we may, they leave us unsatisfied.
We were made for God, and, till we find Him, there is a void within. He is the
fountain of living waters, and besides Him there is no fountain. Thirst has an
injurious effect upon the bodys life, beauty, health, and strength, and is a most
painful sensation. Well, what do the thirsty need? Lead them to a bubbling fountain,
and they are satisfied.

II. The two evils with which Judah is charged.

1. The first evil is desertion of God. They have forsaken Me, the fountain of
living waters. To forsake God in any physical sense, in the sense in which
birds sometimes forsake their nests, and children home, is impossible. We
can put local distance between us and our fellow creatures, but not between
us and God. The forsaking referred to is departure of a moral kind, or
departure in thought and affection. This species of departure from God was
possible to the inhabitants of Judah. Like ourselves, they were morally free.
They might either think about God or not, either love Him or not, either trust
in Him or not, either do His will or not, either seek their happiness in God or
not; and how did they act? It seems that the departure from God which we
have characterised as possible, became actual. God did not turn His back on
them; but they deserted Him, and in deserting Him they forsook the
fountain of living waters. They forsook Him as a people, and in forsaking
Him they committed an evil. They neither did God nor themselves justice,
Morally, they backslided from Him--dismissed Him from their minds and
hearts, and lapsed into A state of sin and idolatry. Instead of seeking their
happiness in God, they began to seek it in other objects. What God
pronounces an evil must be an evil. It is criminal to forsake God; and, as we
would expect, it is as injurious as it is criminal.
 2. The second evil is attempting to find a substitute for God. And hewed them
out cisterns, broken cisterns, etc. These two evils go together. The one
naturally leads to the other. The religious is perhaps mans strongest instinct.
There is something which men of the world ever supremely fear and love, to
which they look and pray in times of danger and distress, and on which they
lean for happiness. Accordingly, when we cease to worship God--the right
object of worship--there is not with us an end of all worship. There is merely
a change of worship. Wrong objects are put in the place of God. Man is not
competent to the supply of his own wants, and he knows it. He cannot rid
himself of the consciousness of limitation and dependence. Hence, when he
departs from God, he precipitates himself on a variety of objects, and devotes
himself to a variety of pursuits, with the view of indemnifying himself,
Nothing will do for those who renounce God, but trying their hand at cistern
making They are driven to exert themselves in order to the discovery of a
substitute for God; and are they successful? No. One cistern may be larger
than another, or differ from another in shape, or other respects; but the best
cisterns are leaky. Water may be poured into them, but, alas! they let it
through. Whatever may be thought of them by the maker, they fall infinitely
short of God, the fountain of living waters.

III. THE SUMMONS TO ASTONISHMENT ADDRESSED TO THE HEAVENS. Be

astonished, etc. Were a fountain of living waters and a leaky cistern put before a
person suffering from thirst, it would excite wonder were he to prefer the cistern to
the fountain. We would be strongly tempted to call in question his sanity. Were a
youth to leave a happy home--to forsake a father well able to provide for, protect,
school, guide him, advance his temporal and spiritual interests, how would we feel
on being introduced to him as a deserter from home? We would look on him with no
small measure of pity and surprise; and how can we help being affected with the
profoundest astonishment when with the minds eye we contemplate an intelligent
and free creature turning his back upon God? (G. Cron.)

The misery of forsaking God

I. What has man substituted in the place of the happiness which might have been
found in God?
1. Philosophy. They have sought enjoyment in calm contemplation on the
relation of things, and on the abstract questions of philosophic inquiry. They
have sought to raise themselves above suffering by rendering the mind
insensible to the common ills of life, and they attempt to separate themselves
from the common herd of mortals by their insensibility to the woes which
affect the mass of men.
2. A part, men of leisure and of taste, fly to the academic grove, and look for
happiness there. They go up the sides of Parnassus, and drink from the
Castalian fount, and court the society of the Muses. Their enjoyment and
their solace is in the pursuit of elegant literature. Their time is spent in
belles-lettres--in the records of historic truth, or in the world of poetry and of
fiction.
3. Another portion have substituted the pursuit of wealth in place of religion,
 and their happiness is there. This has become almost the universal passion
of civilised man. Yet is not happiness so much sought in the pursuit of wealth
itself as in that which wealth will procure. He looks on to the old age of
elegant retirement and leisure which is before him; he sees in vision the
comforts which he will be able to draw round him in the splendid mansion
and grounds, and in the abundance which his old age will enjoy.

II. Has the plan succeeded?

1. What is happiness?
(1) It must be adapted to the nature of man or fitted to his true rank or
dignity. There must be some permanency, some solid basis on which the
superstructure is to be reared.
(2) There must be a recognition of immortality. This must be, because man
is so made that he cannot wholly forget it.
(3) True happiness must be of such a nature that it will not be materially
disturbed by the prospect of sickness, the grave, and eternity. My
Athenian guest, says Croesus to Solon, the voice of fame speaks loudly
of your wisdom. I have heard much of your travels; you have been led by
a philosophic spirit to visit a considerable portion of the globe. I am here
induced to inquire of you what man, of all you have beheld, has seemed
to you most truly happy. After one or two unsatisfactory answers, and
being pressed still for a reply, Solon said, I shall not be able to give a
satisfactory answer to the question you propose till I know that your
scene of life shall have closed with tranquillity. The man of affluence is
not in fact more happy than the possessor of a bare competency, unless
in addition to his wealth his end be more fortunate. Call no man happy
till you know the nature of his death. It is the part of wisdom to look to
the event of things; for the Deity often overwhelms with misery those
who have formerly been placed at the summit of felicity (Herod. 1:24,
32). Our happiness must not be of such a nature as to be disturbed by the
recognition of death, and the anticipation of a future world.
2. Can happiness be found away from God? My appeal is mainly to experience;
and here the argument need not be long. The experience of the world on this
point may be divided into two great parts--the recorded and the unrecorded.
Of the recorded testimony of the world, I appeal to the records made on sick
beds, and in graves; to the disappointments, and cares, and anxieties,
evinced all over the world as the result of the revolt in Eden, and of
wandering away from God. Recall for one moment what the forsaking of God
has done. Whence is sorrow, disappointment, pain, death? The misery of our
world all began at that sad hour when man ate the fruit of the forbidden tree.
What might not this world have been if man had never forsaken the fountain
of living waters! Alexander wept on the throne of the world. Charles V and
Diocletian descended from the throne to seek that happiness in the vale of
private life, which could never be found in the robes of royalty. Goethe, the
celebrated German author, said of himself, in advanced age, They have
called me a child of fortune, nor have I any wish to complain of the course of
my life. Yet it has been nothing but labour and sorrow, and I may truly say
that in seventy-five years I have not had four weeks of true comfort. It was
 the constant rolling of a stone that was always to be lifted anew. Who shall
record the disappointment of those who seek wealth as their portion? The
most instructive part of the history of our world is unwritten--at least is not
written among mortals. It is recorded in the book that preserves the memory
of human deeds with reference to the judgment, and will be developed only
on the final trial It is the record of numberless individual failures and
disappointments; the total history of that which makes up the vast
experiment in our world to find enjoyment without the friendship of the
Most High. (A. Barnes D. D.)

Broken cisterns that can hold no water.--

Broken cisterns

I. A SINNERS LIFE IS LABORIOUS. Have your dreams of ease in sin been fulfilled?
Have you not found the life of sin to be a toilsome, thankless drudgery? Be honest to
your own heart if you cannot confess it to man. Has not sin been an universal
deceiver, a cruel, remorseless taskmaster? Have not all the fairy visions of our fancy
been converted into bushes of thorns and barren rocks of desolation? God has made
the broad road thus to prevent His children walking therein.

II. A SINNERS WORK IS WORTHLESS. Our grandfathers could tell us what a great
noise sounded through Europe in the days of their early youth at the strokes of a
great cistern hewer. By a series of marvellous steps the mightiest military genres of
modern days reached the cold and tottering summit of imperial power. He had
devoted almost superhuman energies of body and mind to the task of hewing out a
cistern, he had compelled millions of slaves to assist in this gigantic construction.
Strong and glorious as the fabric was, God could not be outwitted; His decree went
forth against the cistern, by His iron rod it was broken into a thousand shivers, and
the exile of St. Helena sat himself down for weary months and years in the chill
shadow of his own broken cistern which could hold no water, till his own heart
broke, and he passed away, to render his account unto God. Power, glory, fame, are
but a broken cistern to the soul of man. You may get it by becoming a vestryman, an
alderman, a popular novelist, a member of Parliament, a Cabinet minister, or a
hundred other ways, but the end will be the same dissatisfaction and unrest which
overwhelmed the great Napoleon. Ah, when will saints give as much diligence to
their high and holy calling as the servants of pleasure give to theirs?

III. A SINNERS STATE IS APPALLING. Shall we witness the blindness, madness of

our own friends and neighbours, of our fellow citizens, and have no bowels of
compassion for them? Let us fervently, kindly, personally appeal to them; lot us
watch for their souls, invent wise contrivances, and lovingly use them till the scales
fall from their eyes, and we bring them to the Fountain of living waters.

IV. A SINNERS CONDITION IS NOT HOPELESS. God is still the Fountain of living
waters. In Him abides the fulness which alone can supply all the lawful and infinite
longings which rise up within the mysterious nature of man. Do we want knowledge,
wisdom, love, life, peace, rest, immortality? They are all in God. From Him is ever
issuing a stream bearing upon its bosom the richest spiritual blessings His mercy
can provide. The grace of God is wider, deeper, richer, than in the era when the
prophet of lamentation poured forth his sorrowful strains over the folly of sinners.
(W. A. Esscry.)

Broken cisterns
Think over these cisterns which have been built, and have been offered to us in
our time, and ask whether, after all, they are not broken, obviously broken before
our eyes.
1. I thought of the immense part that, a few years ago, secularism seemed to play
in the thought of London. A cistern offered to us of this kind, that man
should confine his attention to the world in which he lives; that we should
seek to make the most of our material and intellectual opportunities here;
that we should use our time honestly and well, we should instruct one
another in the affairs of the world and of life, but we should remit the
consideration of religion and thoughts of God to another world if it ever
comes, and not trouble ourselves with them here. That cistern of secularism,
at which the men of England have been requested to drink, must always be
an unsatisfying cistern--a broken cistern indeed. For what reason? Because
you never can silence the deep craving of the human soul; you never can
bring man within the limits of time and space, and get him quietly to remain
there. If secularism could give us, as we wish, a more equal distribution of
opportunities, and if every man had all that the world could offer, every man
would still remain unsatisfied. Count Leo Tolstoi has told us himself how in
his youth he was a nobleman with every advantage of wealth and education
and social position, and, moreover, he was a man in perfect health, and there
seemed to be not a cloud to cross his sky. And yet he has told how at that
time his deep dissatisfaction and misery were such that he was constantly
contemplating suicide.
2. And then I thought of that cistern which has been offered to us under the
name of socialism. That cistern is so well constructed, and is so attractive,
that I would be the last to deny that waters of a satisfying kind might for a
time be stored within it. It proposes to make a framework of society in some
future day complete and satisfying, but meanwhile it has no message to the
millions of human souls that are passing, as it were, in a dull, dead flood,
week by week, day by day, into the silent grave.
3. Then it occurred to me how much we had heard in our time of natural science
and physical science as cisterns at which human beings were to quench their
thirst. And I remembered how, in my earlier ministry, we were constantly
told that the discoveries of science would take the place of religion, and that
man would learn to live his life in the world, subject to its many limitations,
in the clear light that science sheds upon the development of human life and
its possible goal. Then I took up the utterance of a great scientific man today,
Sir Henry Thompson, who has published his little pamphlet called The
Unknown God, in order to show us what the creed of science really is. I turn
over the pages of Sir Henry Thompsons book and see what a great and
candid and earnest scientific man makes of this universe, and of this life in
the light of science. When I read his broken and halting conclusions, and see
what he offers me as the cup of cold water to quench the ardent thirst of my
 soul, I cannot hesitate to say, with all reverence to so good, so honest, and
sincere a thinker: My friend, you have brought me to a broken cistern,
which can give no water for the thirsty soul of man.
4. And then I thought of that which is much commoner than secularism,
socialism, and science, as the solution of human life--I mean the widespread
and absolute indifference to all higher things into which so many of our
unhappy people fall. The men who seem agreed to live as if they were merely
animals upon the earth, like the beasts with lower pleasures, like the beasts
with lower pains. The men who put aside altogether ideals and dreams. The
men who do not ask for either God or life or eternity. The men who do not
concern themselves about moral improvement or the benefit of their fellow
creatures, but drift along the path of life an aimless crowd, careless of the
world, careless of themselves, indifferent to all that makes life truly worth
living and significant. And it seemed to me that this was not so much a
cistern which is offered, or even a broken cistern, but a dull, flat pool, a mere
stagnant pond where men can never quench their thirst, but where they can
be and must be poisoned by the malaria that rises from the stagnant waters.
What is to happen to these men if the soul thirst should ever awaken within
them? And when I thought of all these broken cisterns that can hold no
water, I remembered from my text that meanwhile there is a fountain; it
rises there in the far-off Galilean hills, and the stream flows through the
thirsty centuries, and where it flows the margin of the stream is green and
fertile. And today it seems as if it were in a sense easier to get to the spring
than in any other day that has ever been. If any man thirst let him come
unto Me and drink. (R. F. Herren, D. D.)

True happiness to be found not in the world, but in God

I. The soul of man naturally thirsts after happiness.

1. This affords a strong argument for the dignity of the soul, and the certainty of
a future state.
2. These inward and insatiable cravings, amidst the high enjoyments of sense
and the world, should lead us to God, who alone can felicitate the soul He
hath made; should deaden our desires towards the delights of life, and
quicken them after those of religion.

II. Notwithstanding this native thirst in the souls of men after happiness, yet they
are generally mistaken in their choice of it.
1. There are many who quite mistake the object of their happiness, and place it
in those things which are not only foreign from but opposite to it. Wealth,
ambition, pleasure.
2. Some are right in their notions of happiness, but seek it the wrong way.
Instead of seeking Gods favour in the way of righteousness, through the
mediation of Christ, by the assistance of His Spirit, they build their hopes of
it either on a zeal for speculative opinions, party notions, formal services,
modes of worship, voluntary mortifications, impulses of fancy, deep
knowledge, rigid faith, or unscriptural austerities.
3. How many are they who have not only right notions of happiness but of the
 way to it, who yet fall short of it through neglect and indolence; and the fatal
influence which the world and the things of it have upon their hearts!
whereby they are rendered quite cold, lukewarm, and indifferent, in the
things which concern their eternal salvation.

III. Mankind are naturally disposed to seek their happiness from this world,
where it is not to be found.
1. The pleasures of this life are very scanty and confined. They are but cisterns of
water--which can hold no very large quantity--not sufficient to answer all the
occasions we may have for it, at least not for any considerable time.
2. They are also insipid and unsatisfying; like water in a cistern, stagnated and
exposed to the sun; whereby it not only loses its quick taste and freshness,
but contracts scum and dirt and foulness.
3. They are at the same time uncertain, and continually wasting away. The vessel
that holds them is leaky.
4. They are not to be had without much pains. Even these broken cisterns we are
obliged to hew out to ourselves, and be at great labour to procure.

IV. MEN ARE NATURALLY BACKWARD AND AVERSE TO SEEK THEIR HAPPINESS FROM
GOD WHERE ALONE IT IS TO BE FOUND. The folly of this will appear by considering that
the pleasures of piety have properties just the reverse of those belonging to worldly
pleasures.
1. They are most full and capacious. Not contracted and limited, not diminished
by successive draughts, as water in a cistern is--but free, and full, and ever
flowing, as water at the fountain head.
2. They are the most exquisite and satisfying delights.
3. They are most durable and imperishable.
4. They are easy to be had. Freely offered. (J. Mason, M. A.)

The sin of peoples forsaking God and betaking themselves to the

creature in His stead

I. Forsaking of God in Christ, and betaking oneself to the creature in His stead,
are two signally ill things.
1. The forsaking of God in Christ.
(1) The object forsaken by the hearers of the Gospel must be considered as--
God in our nature, for communion with guilty men (Mat 1:23). God in
our nature, ready to communicate His fulness to us, for making us happy
in time and eternity (Joh 4:10). A God we have professed to betake
ourselves to for our happiness (Jer 16:19).
(2) How sinners forsake God in Christ. Lowering their esteem of Him, the
value and honour they had for Him sinking low (Psa 50:21). The hearts
falling off its rest in Him, and turning restless, so that the fulness of God
cannot quiet it (Isa 30:15). Ceasing to cleave to Him by faith, and letting
go believing gripes of the promise (Heb 3:12). Looking out some other
way, for something to rest their hearts in (Psa 4:6). Growing remiss in
 duties, and slighting opportunities of communion with God a form of
duties may be kept up, but the heart is away, what avail they? Having no
regard to please Him in their ordinary walk (Eze 23:35). Laying aside the
Word for a rule, and regulating themselves by another standard (Psa
119:53). Forsaking His people for their companions (Pro 13:20).
Forsaking ordinances and the communion of saints therein (Heb 10:25-
26). Throwing away the form of religion, casting off the mask, and giving
the swing to their lusts.
(3) Why they forsake Him. There is a natural bent to apostasy in all (Hos
11:7). Many were never truly joined to the Lord, though they seemed to
be so: so having never knit with Him, no wonder they fall away from Him
(1Jn 2:19). They often have some idol of jealousy secretly preserved when
they are at their best; and that upon a proper occasion does the business;
like the young man in the Gospel, that went away from Christ grieved,
because he had great possessions. Their not pressing it to the sweet of
religion, in an experimental feeling of the power of it (Psa 34:8). The
want of a living principle of grace in the heart, that may bear out in all
changes of ones condition (Psa 78:37). They cool like a stone taken from
the fire, and wither like a branch that takes not with the stock.
Unwatchfulness. Thereby men are stolen off their feet (Pro 4:23). A
conceit of being able to live without Him (Jer 2:31). Ill company carries
many away from God (1Co 15:33).
(4) The ill of sin that is in forsaking God in Christ. It is a downright
perversion and deserting of the end of our creation. There is in it a
setting up another in the room of God. Fearful ingratitude for the
greatest mercy and kindness (Jer 2:2; Jer 2:12). Notorious unfaithfulness
to our kindest Head and Husband (Jer 2:20). Notorious unfaithfulness to
our own interest and folly with a witness. An affronting of God before the
world, casting dishonour on Him, bearing false witness against Him (Jer
2:31). A practical commendation of the way of the world, contemning
God, and seeking their happiness in things that are seen (Pro 28:4). A
sinning against the remedy of sin, making ones case very hopeless (Heb
10:26). An opened sluice for all other sins. The man that forsakes God,
exposes himself a prey to all temptations, to be picked up by the first
finder (Pro 27:8).
2. The betaking of oneself to the creature in Gods stead.
(1) The object taken up with in Gods stead.
(a) It is not God (De 32:21).
(i) It cannot satisfy.
(ii) It cannot profit.
(b) It is the world (1Jn 2:15); the great bulky vanity (Ecc 1:2); the passing
world (1Jn 2:17); the present evil world (Gal 1:4).
(2) How sinners take up with the creature in Gods stead. Raising their
esteem of and value for the creature, till it come to overtop their esteem
of God in Christ, like Eve with respect to the forbidden fruit. Bending
their chief desire towards the creature (Psa 4:6) to obtain it, and the
satisfaction they apprehend is to be found in it. Embracing and knitting
 with it in love (2Ti 4:10). Seeking a rest for their hearts in it. Trusting in
it, and having their chief dependence on it, notwithstanding the curse
pronounced against such trust (Jer 17:5-6). Using their chief and most
earnest endeavours for it. Rejoicing most in their enjoyment of it, and
delighting most in it. Sorrowing most of all for the want of it, under the
frowns of it.. Still cleaving to it, under never so many disappointments
from it; nor forsaking it, but trying another means, when one misgives
(Isa 57:10). Following the creature, whithersoever it goes, even quite over
the hedge of the law of God.
(3) Why sinners take up with the creature in Gods stead. Because the heart
of man is naturally wedded to the creature; and that bond not being truly
broken, it is apt to return upon occasion to its natural bias. Because
mans corrupt nature finds a suitableness and agreeableness in the
creature to itself (Isa 57:10). Because the creature takes by the eye and
other senses; God and His favour is the object of faith, which is rare in
the world. Because the creature promises a present good, whereas the
greatest things of God are reserved to another world. Because, by the
power of a strong delusion, conveyed into the nature of man by the
serpent in paradise, they expect a satisfaction and happiness in the
creature (Gen 3:5-6). Because they must needs betake themselves to
something within themselves, not being self-sufficient; so, having lost
God, they fall of course to the creature in His stead.
(4) The ill of this practice, taking up with the creature in Gods stead. It is an
egregious wrong done to God, and His infinite excellency (Jer 2:11). It is
a wrong done to the creature, as being a putting it out of its proper place
(Rom 8:21-22). It is a wrong done to the whole generation of the saints
(Psa 73:12-15). It is an egregious wrong to the sinners own soul, putting
the arrantest cheat upon it that one is capable of (Pro 8:36).

II. To forsake God in Christ, and take the creature in His stead, is a wretched
exchange.
1. It is an exchanging of a fountain for a cistern.
(1) The water in the cistern is borrowed water; that in the fountain is from
itself.
(2) The water must needs be sweeter and fresher in the fountain than in the
cistern.
(3) The water in the cistern is no more but a certain measure in the fountain
it is unmeasurable.
(4) The water in the cistern is mostly very scanty; the fountain is ever full.
(5) The water of the cistern is always dreggy; the fountain clear and pure.
(6) The water of the cistern is soon dried up; the fountain, never.
2. It is an exchanging of a fountain made ready to our hand, for a cistern that
remains to be hewed out by ourselves.
(1) The fountain is always ready for us; the cisterns often are unready. There
is access at any time to be had unto God, through Christ, by faith (Psa
46:1). But the creature is an unready help, so that the mans case is often
past cure, ere help can be had.
 (2) The fountain is made ready for us by another hand, the cistern must be
prepared by our own (Zec 13:1; Joh 7:37).
(3) At the fountain one has nothing to do but drink; but it is no little pains
that is necessary to fit out the cistern for us. Hard and sore work (Hab
2:13). Longsome work, that one comes but little speed in. Weary work.
3. It is an exchanging of a fountain for many cisterns.
(1) None of them are sufficient, but all defective.
(2) There is something disagreeable and vexing in them all (Ecc 1:14).
(3) They enlarge the appetite, but do not satisfy it (Hab 2:5). As one draught
of salt water makes the necessity of another, so the gratifying of a lust
doth but open its mouth wider; as is evident from the case of those, who
having once given themselves loose reins, nothing can prevail to bind
them up, till the grace of God change them. They go from ill to worse.
Now, this is a wretched exchange; for the access to one fountain is far
more ready than to many cisterns. He that has but one door to go to for
sufficient supply is certainly in better case than he that must go to many;
so he that has the fulness of a God to satisfy himself in, is in
circumstances a thousand times better than he who must go from
creature to creature for that end. The water is better that is altogether in
one fountain, than that which is parted into many cisterns. United force
is strongest; and that which is scattered, the farther it is scattered abroad,
it is the weaker. It is with greater ease of mind that one may apply to the
one fountain, than to the many cisterns. O what ease has the man that
goes to Gods door for all, in comparison of him who begs at the doors of
the creatures, ranging up and down among them! Use--Repent then of
this folly, and take the one fountain instead of your many cisterns; go to
one God instead of the multitude of created things.
Motive 1.--This will contract your cares now so diffusive, lessen your labour, and
spare you many a weary foot.
Motive 2.--Ye shall find enough in God, that ye shall see no necessity of seeking
any happiness without Him (Joh 4:14); more than shall supply the want of the corn
and wine (Psa 4:7); that shall be commensurable to your whole desire (2Sa 23:5). (T.
Boston, D. D.)

Forsaking the fountain for the broken cistern

I. The object forsaken.

1. Sin is an ungrateful rejection of God. The parental bond is broken, the
conjugal tie is dissolved, the oath of suretyship is annulled.
2. We cannot forsake God without forsaking our own mercies. Sin is always the
act of a suicide; we cannot reject the counsel of God against ourselves
without rejecting His blessings also.
3. What is the fountain which Israel hath thus forsaken? Oh! it is deep as the
unfathomed sea; free as the unbought air; more healing than Bethesdas
pool; fresh as the stream which comes forth from the throne of God and of
the Lamb.
 II. The object preferred.
1. The deadening character of all worldly enjoyments. For all the ends of
consolation and encouragement and hope the resources of the world are
worse than unavailing; The cisterns are not so empty as they are poisonous.
2. Poor as the worlds enjoyments are, they are to be obtained only at great cost
and labour. In drinking of the fountain you will have to stoop much, to
kneel long, and to lie low. In drinking from the cistern, you will have to
labour hard, to drag heavily, and to climb high.
3. Another characteristic of worldly enjoyments is their instability, their
transitoriness, their incapacity for yielding any continued happiness, or for
giving a man peace at the last. They are not cisterns only, but broken
cisterns; vessels which let out their contents as fast as they put them in;
cisterns which can hold no water. The world not only palls upon its votaries
while drinking of its waters, but its tide is always ebbing away. Not only may
we write upon it Marah for the bitterness of its taste, but also Ichabod for
the evanescence of its glory. (D. Moore, M. A.)

Broken cisterns

I. The first cistern which attracts our attention is one of SENSUALISM. The youth
who is working at it with mallet and chisel, and with hot and fevered face, dreams
that the highest enjoyment of life is that which comes through the senses. He will
inform you that he regards man as an animal more than anything else, and that it
behoves him to listen to the cry of his passions and to satisfy it. He will demand of
you why his passions were lodged in his heart, if they were not to govern him. But
the sensualist reasons as if he forgets two most important points. He forgets that the
passions are no longer what once they were. He reasons as if the soul were still as it
was when it came bright and sinless from its Creators hands; as if its original
harmony and balance were undisturbed; as if there had been no obscuration of the
moral sense and no inflammation of the passions. And he forgets, too, that while the
soul has passions they have their due place assigned them in the economy of our
constitution, and that that place is not the throne but the footstool. They can never
sit in the throne but by revolt, rebellion, and usurpation. Their position is one of
service, a service, too, assigned them by a pure conscience and an enlightened
judgment. I said the sensualist forgets these two important points rebut does he not
forget another? He strives to hew out a cistern of satisfaction by gratifying his
passions; but has he not yet learned from observation, if his own experience has not
taught him, that from their very nature the passions can never yield a constant
happiness? The more they are indulged, the less they can be gratified. The pampered
appetite becomes the jaded appetite, and at length becomes the diseased and ruined
appetite. And the man who is hewing out for himself a cistern of sensual pleasure is
like the dram drinker, who derives less stimulus and delight from the same quantity
every day, who has accordingly to increase the dose to supply the same excitement;
who at length gets beyond the range of gratification, but finds that the passion holds
him fast in its serpent coils even when all its joys are forever fled.

II. We find another earnest worker who is hewing out a cistern of WEALTH. No
sooner do we reach him than he begins to pour out his contempt of the man we have
just left. He wonders how it is possible for any one with an atom of sense to spend
his life and strength at such a cistern as that--a cistern which, even if it could be
made to hold water, proclaims the mean and degraded character of the man who
could drink it. Then turning to his own cistern he points with evident pride at this
monument of his superior wisdom; expatiates on the various powers of wealth; tells
us how money answereth all things, how it has ministered to the growth of
nations, to the development of civilisation, to the creation and sustentation of
commerce, to the advancement of the arts and sciences, to the physical and moral
improvement of mankind, and even to the extension of the Gospel itself. Now what
shall we say to this man? It will not serve any good purpose to call him hard names.
You cannot scold a man out of any sin, still less out of the sin of covetousness. Nor
must we bluntly deny all that he has said in praise of wealth. It is when we find men
mistaking its functions and properties, and labouring to hew out of it a cistern of
satisfaction, that we are constrained to remind them that such a cistern will hold no
water. Christ speaks of the deceitfulness of riches. I wonder where the man is who
can raise an intelligent and experienced protest against the epithet. Wealth is the
feeder of avarice, not its satisfaction. It inflames the thirst, it does not quench it.
But, would you learn the weakness of wealth as well as its power, look at the narrow
limits within which after all its efficacy is bounded. If there are times when one feels
that money answereth all things, there are times when one feels still more keenly
that it answereth nothing. When the brain becomes bewildered, or its substance
begins to yield and soften, what can a mans wealth do for him then? If you travel on
the sea, and a destructive storm falls upon your vessel, will the waves that engulph
the poor retire in bashful respect for a wealthy man? The digger of this well has said
something about the power of wealth: is it not well that he should learn, too, its
powerlessness in regard to many of the great needs and sorrows of life? It cannot
give you health; it cannot give you talent; it cannot give you the real and abiding
respect of your fellow men; it cannot give you peace of mind; it cannot save your
wife or children; it cannot avert death and its preliminary horrors and pains from
yourself.

III. But we must leave this worker, and make our way to another who is hewing
out the cistern of INTELLECTUALISM. He is clearly a higher type of man. There is a
refinement about his appearance which shows that his communion has been with
the thoughts of poets and philosophers He expatiates on the intrinsic greatness of
man; on his immortality; on his reason, that vision and faculty divine; on the
unapproachable supereminence of man over all the universe around him.
Knowledge, he says, is the thing for man. For this we were made. It is the element in
which we are to live, and without this there is no life worthy of man. And yet,
somehow, there seems a shade of sadness upon that face now that his glowing
excitement has passed away. Aye, it is even so. He tells us that he is not yet satisfied;
that he is hoping to be; that with all his knowledge he feels more ignorant than wise;
that if he gets fresh light he seems only to realise more fully the fact that he is
standing on the border of a vaster territory of darkness; that if he solves one mystery
it serves but to show a thousand more; and that he has been striving, too, for many
years at some difficulties which have hitherto beaten him back in hopeless
confusion. We assure him that this need not distress him, for with his limited
capacities he cannot expect to understand all things at once, and that while it is true
that death will for a moment interrupt his speculations and researches, there is
eternity before him with its illimitable scope and opportunities. He is paler now than
ever, and seizes convulsively his mallet and chisel, and works away with averted face
at his cistern, muttering between every stroke, Death, death; ah! it is death which
troubles one. What is death?--what will it be to me? Why should I die? and if I must
die, why should I fear to die?

IV. While thus he muses and mutters, let us visit the cistern of MORALITY. Its
owner accosts us at once as follows: And so you have been visiting my learned
neighbour yonder. He is incurable, and I would fain believe, insane, He has the
fancy, that man is nothing but intellect, and that our whole mission in this world is
to acquire knowledge. I have told him once and again, that if this were the chief end
of man he need not to have had either affections or conscience, and that we are
moral creatures as well as intellectual ones. Now, the cistern which I have been
working at for years is the cistern of morality and good living, for it is clear that we
ought to love God with all our hearts, and minds, and strength and our neighbours
as ourselves; and that, in fact, our happiness lies in this, and in nothing else. And it
is delightful to have something which ones own hands have made, to have a
righteousness we ourselves have wrought out, and for which we are indebted to no
one. Thus speaks the man, and while he speaks we have been looking at the cistern,
which is not without its beauty, and which shows traces and proofs of long and
careful working; and we have seen, or think we have seen, chinks great and small
which do not promise well for the serviceableness of the cistern, if it be meant, as it
is meant, to hold water. Has it been made exactly according to the pattern which you
have specified, namely, that you love God with all your heart, and all your soul, and
all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself? Will it hold any water? And the
man, chagrined to have the perfectness of his work called in question, replies: I
know that as yet it will hold no water, but it is not finished. I am striving to fill up
the defects and openings with mortar--with the mortar of sorrow for the past, and
endeavours to do better for the future. But what, we ask, if the mortar be as porous
as the stone? What if it will not hold water any more than the cistern? What if future
obedience cannot repair the mischief of the past? What if repentance without Christ
itself needs to be repented of? What if even an awakened conscience itself refuses to
accept the part for the whole? And what if God say, By the deeds of the law shall no
flesh living be justified? And what if there be a special condemnation for those who,
going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves to
the righteousness of God?

V. As we retrace our steps and visit the other cisterns, lo! we find that THE
WORKERS WORK NO MORE. The end has come to all. And on the cistern of the scholar
we find the inscription, as if traced by a mystic hand, The fear of the Lord is the
beginning of wisdom; but fools despise wisdom and instruction. And on the cistern
of the worldling we find, So is every man that layeth up treasure for himself, and is
not rich towards God. And on the cistern of the sensualist we find, To be carnally
minded is death. And as we look within we find that all is parched and dry as
summer dust, and that the description is awfully exact and literal: Cisterns, broken
cisterns, that can hold no water. (E. Mellor, D. D.)

Broken cisterns
Whilst two evils are specified, we are not to suppose they are ever committed
separately: no man forsakes the living fountain who does not also hew out the
broken cistern--for there is a search after happiness in which all men naturally
engage; and if they do not seek happiness in God, where alone it may be found, they
will inevitably seek it in the creature, though only to be disappointed. Yet
notwithstanding that these truths are attested by universal experience, there is
continually going on the same forsaking of the fountain, the same hewing out of the
cistern, so pathetically and indignantly denounced in the text. There is something
very striking in the expression hewed them out cisterns. What labour does it
indicate, what effort, what endurance! Had the cisterns been ready made to their
hands, there had not been so much with which to upbraid them. But God has caused
that it shall be actually toilsome thing for men to seek happiness in the creature.
Witness the diggings, so to speak, of avarice: the painful climbings of ambition: the
disgusts and disappointments of sensuality. God makes it an aggravation of the sin
of his being forsaken that He is forsaken for that which must demand toil, and then
yield disappointment. He sets the fountain of living waters in contrast with
broken cisterns--as though He would point out the vast indignity offered Him, in
that what was preferred was so unworthy and insufficient. It is the language not only
of jealousy, but of jealousy stung to the very quick by the baseness of the object to
which the plighted affection has been unblushingly transferred. Wonder, O
heavens, and be astonished, O earth. God speaks of His people as offering Him this
indignity; but He does not speak to His people. He tells His grievance to the material
creation, as though even that were more likely to feel and resent it than the beings
who were actually guilty of the sin. And ye who are setting up idols for yourselves, ye
who, in spite of every demonstration of the uselessness of the endeavour, are
striving to be happy without God, we will not reason with you: it were like passing
too slight censure on your sin, it were representing it as less blinding, less besotting,
than it actually is, to suppose that you would attend to, or feel the force of, an
ordinary remonstrance. It may move you more, ye worshippers of visible things, to
find yourselves treated as past being reasoned with, than flattered with addresses
which suppose in you the full play of the understanding and the judgment. Ye will
not hearken: but there are those who witness and wonder at your madness: the
visible universe, as if amazed at finding itself searched for that which its own
sublime and ceaseless proclamations declare to be nowhere but in God, assumes a
listening posture; and whilst the Almighty publishes your infatuation, He hath
secured Himself an audience, whether ye will hear, or whether ye will forbear; for
the accusation is not uttered till there have been this astounding call: Be
astonished, O ye heavens, at this, etc. But let us proceed to the case which is
perhaps still more distinctly contemplated by the passage before us--that of the
abandonment of the true religion for a false. If ever God discovered Himself as a
fountain of living waters, it was when, in the person of His own Divine Son, He
opened on this earth a fountain for sin and for uncleanness. The justifying virtue
of the work of the Redeemer, the sanctifying of that of the Spirit--these include
everything of which, as sinful but immortal beings, we can have need: by the former
we may have title to the kingdom of heaven, and by the latter be made meet for the
glorious inheritance. Nevertheless, can it be said that men in general are ready to
close with the Gospel, to partake of it as the parched traveller of the spring found
amid the sands? Even where religion is not neglected, what pains are bestowed on
the making some system less distasteful to pride, or more complacent to passion,
than practical, unadulterated Christianity! What costly effort is given to the
compounding the human with the Divine, our own merit with that of Christ; or to
the preparing ourselves for the reception of grace, as though it were not grace by
which, as well as for which, we are prepared, grace which must fashion the vessel, as
well as grace which must fill it. Truly, the cistern is hewn out, when the fountain is
forsaken. Let Christ be unto you all in all, made unto you of God, wisdom, and
righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, and the fountain gives a river
which, like the rock struck in Horeb, never ceaseth to make glad the believer. But
turn away, though by a single step, from Christ, and, oh, the toil, the dissatisfaction,
of endeavouring to make--what? a broken cistern, a cistern that can hold no
water--if creature comforts are such cisterns to those who seek happiness, creature
systems must be to those who seek immortality. For what shall endure the severity
of Gods scrutiny, but that which is itself of Gods appointing and providing (H.
Melvill, B. D.)

A broken cistern
The mother of Hume, the philosopher, was once a professor of Christianity.
Dazzled by the genius of her son, she followed him into the mazes of scepticism.
Years passed and she drew near to the gates of death, and from her dying bed she
wrote him the following: My dear son,--My health has failed me. I am in deep
decline. I cannot live long. I am left without hope or consolation, and my mind is
sinking into a state of despair. I pray you hasten home to console me, or, at least,
write to me the consolations that philosophy affords at the dying hour. Hume was
deeply distressed at his mothers letter. His philosophy was a broken cistern in
which was no water of comfort.

JER 2:14
Is Israel a servant? Is he a home-born slave? why is he spoiled?
Israel a home-born slave
Is this a contemptuous inquiry?--Israel a servant, Israel a home-born slave. Is
there not scorn underlying the interrogation, as who should say, Thou art a worm, a
thing to be crushed by the foot, or a servile thing to be made no account of by the
auditor of the universe? Nothing of the kind. There is a tone of tenderness in this
inquiry. In Bible times to be a home-born slave was to be next the son of the family;
there was a domestic interest in such a slave, full of pathos, and the condition
brought with it its own advantages and rights; a slave born in the house took rank
almost with the son, certainly immediately after the son; and the Lord seems to say,
Is not Israel a servant, a home-born slave,--has he not rights at home, has he not
domestic interests and family claims, a status which he can assert and maintain, and
the fruit of which he is at liberty to enjoy? Why then is he spoiled; why has he
thrown his inheritance away; why does he not seize the possessions to which he is
entitled, and live within the light and the security of the privilege which belongs to
him in his domestic relations? So there is no scorn in the words home-born slave.
The Divine voice infused the pathos of emphasis into the word homeborn. Who
can say home in a tone that is worthy of its music? Surely only He who has made
the universe a home for His creatures, and offered them the hospitality of His
infinite love. God comes after us, and says, Are ye not Mine; do you not belong to My
house; are you not in the covenant of My love; is not your name upon the record of
My memory; and goes not out after you all the solicitude of My heart? Why then
have you spoiled your destiny, perverted your way, gone in a forbidden course, and
exposed yourselves to the paw and the teeth of the lion? (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 2:15
The young lions roared upon him, and yelled.
Dangers outside the Divine bounds
That comes of going from home, leaving sacred discipline, taking life into ones
own hand, assuming the mastership of ones 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 whoso 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. Know that the Church of the living God is alive, and is
fulfilling her destiny, when all round about her are men more cruel than ravenous
beasts. Israel, the home-born 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.
(J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 2:18
What hast thou to do in the way of Egypt.

Words of expostulation

I. Addressing myself to the CHRISTIAN, I shall use the text in three senses, while I
expostulate with you in regard to sin, to worldly pleasure, and to carnal trust.
1. O true believer, called by grace and washed in the precious blood of Christ,
What hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of the muddy
river? What hast thou to do with the sins which once delighted thee, and
which now find happy pastime for the world? A vision flits before my eye.
The Lord God hath made a great feast; armies have met together; terrible
slaughter has been the consequence. Mens arms have been red up to the
very elbow in blood; they have fought with each other, and there they lie
strewn upon the plain--thousands of carcasses bleeding. The vultures sniff
the prey from far-off desert wilds; they fly, keen of scent. God hath made a
great feast to the fowls of heaven, and to the ravenous beasts of the earth.
 But what is that I see? I see a dove flying with the same speed as the vulture
towards the carrion. O dove, what hath brought thee there in dangerous
connection with thy fierce enemies? Whither art thou going? Is there
anything in that bloody feast that can content thee? Shall thy meek eyes glare
with the fires of anger? Shah thy fair white plumage be stained with gore,
and wilt thou go back to thy dove cote with thy pinions bloody red? The
question then cannot be answered, because when a Christian goes into sin he
commits all inconsistent act--inconsistent with the freedom which Christ has
bought for him, and inconsistent with the nature which the Holy Spirit has
implanted in him. Christian, what hast thou to do with sin? Hath it not cost
thee enough already? What, man! hast thou forgotten the times of thy
conviction? There is yet another light in which to put the sin of the believer.
Let me repeat the question once again--What hast thou to do in the way of
Egypt, to drink the waters of the muddy river? There is a crowd yonder.
They have evidently assembled for some riotous purpose. They are attacking
one man. There are very many of them. They give Him no space to take His
breath, no time to rest. Let me press through the throng and look at the man,
I know Him at once. He hath visage more marred than that of any other
man. Tis He; it is the Crucified One, it is none other than Jesus, the Son of
man, the Saviour of the world. Hark to the blasphemies which are poured
into His ears! See how they spit in His face, and put Him co an open shame.
Onward they bring Him, and you hear them cry, Crucify Him! crucify Him!
crucify Him! They are doing it: they have nailed Him to the tree: yonder is a
man with the hammer in his hand who has just now driven in the nail. Look
round upon the mob. I can well comprehend why yonder drunkard, why
yonder swearer, why the whoremonger, and the like of infamous notoriety,
should have joined in this treacherous murder; but there is one man there--
methinks I know his face. Ay, I have seen him at the sacramental table,
eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ: I have seen him in the
pulpit saying, God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ: I have seen him on his knees in prayer, pleading what he
called The precious blood. What hast thou to do in this counsel of the
ungodly, this scene of sin without a parallel?
2. The pleasures of this world do sometimes entice the people of God, and they
find some degree of mirth therein. To those Christians who can find pleasure
in the common amusements of men, this question may be very pertinently
put--What hast thou to do to drink the water of that muddy river? I can
never understand that Christianity which alternately goes out to find joy in
worldly amusements, and returns home to have fellowship with Christ. In
the life of Madame Guyon I have read an anecdote something to this effect.
She had been invited by some friends to spend a few days at the palace of St.
Cloud. She knew it was a place full of pomp, and fashion, and, I must add, of
vice also; but being over-persuaded by her friend, and being especially
tempted with the idea that perhaps her example might do good, she accepted
the invitation. Her experience afterwards should be a warning to all
Christians. For some years that holy woman had walked in constant
fellowship with Christ; perhaps none ever saw the Saviours face, and kissed
His wounds more truly than she had done. But when she came home from
St. Cloud she found her usual joy was departed; she had lost her power in
 prayer. She felt in going to the lover of her soul as if she had played the
harlot against Him. She was afraid to hope that she could be received again
to His pure and perfect love, and it took some months ere the equilibrium of
her peace could be restored, and her heart could yet again be wholly set upon
her Lord. He that wears a white garment must mind where he walks when
the worlds streets are so filthy as they are.
3. We are all tried with the temptation to put our trust in things which are seen,
instead of things which are not seen. The Lord hath said it--Cursed is he
that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his arm, but blessed is he that
trusteth in the Lord. Yet Christians often do trust in man, and then our text
comes home--What hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the water
of that muddy river? Some trust in horses and some in chariots, but we will
stay ourselves upon the Lord God of Israel.

II. CONVINCED SINNER, you feel your lost estate; Gods Holy Spirit has kindly
looked upon you, and begun a good work in your soul. And yet during the past week
you have fallen into your old sin. Ah! smarting and yet sinning! wounded and yet
rebelling! pricked with the ox goad, and yet kicking against the pricks! It is hard for
thee! And what was the cause of your sin after all? Was it worth sinning for--to
grieve your conscience and vex the Holy Spirit? I have heard of a man who had just
begun the Christian life, and he had some months of sorrow owing to a hasty
temper. His neighbour had let some of his cattle stray into the field; he asked him to
fetch them out again and mend the fence; his neighbour would not, and he flew into
such a passion with him that afterwards he sat down and cried. Said he, Why, if all
the cows in the field were sold, and I had lost the money, they were not worth the
bother I made about them, nor worth one moment of the grief which I have to
suffer. Oh! what fools we all are! Let us, however, write ourselves fools in capital
letters, if when conscience is tender we yet go and do the very thing which we hate,
and choose the very cup which was so bitter to our taste, so nauseous to us just now.
You are under conviction of sin, and you have been lately--as it is a festive season--
you have been frequenting the dancing room, or the theatre. Now these are
amusements for worldlings; let them have them; I would not prevent them for a
moment; let every man have his own amusement and his own joy. But what is this to
you? What hast thou to do with it?

III. Lastly, to any who are CARELESS. I have a hard task to bring a reasonable
question to unreasonable men. Ye tell me that ye love the vanities of this world, and
that they content you. I look you in the face and remind you that there have been
many madmen in this world besides yourselves. Yet as there is some spark of reason
left, let me see if I can kindle a flame of thought therewith. Sinner, God is angry with
the wicked every day. What have you to do with joy? you are condemned already,
because you believe not on the Son of God. What have you to do with peace--a
condemned man dancing in his cell at Newgate with chains about his wrists? What
have you to do with merriment? You! If you were sure you should live a week you
might spend six days, if you would, in sin; but you are not sure you will live an hour.
What have you to do with sin and its pleasures? God is furbishing his sword today; it
is sharp and strong as the arm which shall wield it. That sword is meant for you
except you repent. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The believers portion superior to the worlds
Thou hast tasted of better drink than the muddy river of this worlds pleasure can
give thee. If thy profession be not a lie thou hast had fellowship with Christ, thou
hast had that joy which only the blessed Spirits above and the chosen ones on earth
can know. Hast thou eaten the bread of angels, and canst thou live on husks? Good
Rutherford once said, I have tasted of Christs own manna and it hath put my
mouth out of taste with the brown bread of this worlds joy. What hast thou to do,
etc.

JER 2:19
Thine own wickedness shall correct thee.

Sin its own punishment

I. In the dealings of God with good men.

1. Neglect secret devotion, and God will refuse His blessing on other means of
grace.
2. Indulge secret sin, and God will bring that sin into open light and
condemnation.
3. Idolise created good, and God will take from us an idol, or make it a plague to
us.
4. Act with faithlessness to others, and God will permit us to suffer from the
treachery of others.
5. Undutifulness to parents punished by the defiance of our own children.
6. Indifference as to home piety returned upon us in the irreligion of those in the
home.

II. In the dealings of God with wicked men.

1. Those who resent religious persuasions, and strive to stifle conviction, are
deprived of godly parents and friends, and left to a fatal peace.
2. Those who repel the Gospel because of its humiliating truths, are allowed to
believe a lie, etc.
3. In death and judgment, the punishment of the sinner will reflect his sin.
(Andrew Fuller.)

The uses made by God of sin

I. Precautionary observations.
1. Sin, in its own nature, is inexpressibly bad. Not only the negation of all that is
good, but the absolute plenitude of all that is evil. It is wrong raising itself
against the order, purity, and happiness of the universe. The originating,
exclusive, and prolific source of all human woe.
2. If in any circumstances sin appear in a beginning, and good and happiness in
 the end, the latter will not be, in any sense, the proper conduct of the former.
Good comes of evil through causes exterior to evil, independent of evil,
hostile to evil, and which turn evil to good account against evil. Imagine a
man sleeping in a wood. A serpent strikes its fangs into one of his limbs. The
man is stung into consciousness, and starts up from his slumber just in time
to escape the pounce of a hungry tiger, whose eyes are glaring in the thicket.
The serpent had no intention of saving him. It attacked him for itself; but the
sudden anguish of the bleeding wound was the occasion of rescue from the
two-fold destruction. So, often, man dead in trespasses and sins is
maddened into activity by the remorse of wickedness, and ultimately rushes
away from the adjacent coils of Satan and the gaping jaws of hell.
3. To turn evil to good account is one of the sovereign prerogatives of God. It is
only through Divine interference and interworking that sin fails, at any time,
to effect evil, only evil, and that continually. This is one of the express laws
of the Divine conduct in the Bible. Joseph and his brethren. David and
Shimei. Preaching Christ out of envy, etc.

II. What attitude God actually assumes and maintains towards sin.
1. God has surrounded sin by limits and restrictions. The moral sentiments of
men--the moral restraints of society--the moral utterances of revealed
religion--the moral corrections of the invincible laws of the material
economy--have conspired to bind sin hand and foot, in its most monstrous
and demoniacal forms.
2. Sin is permitted, but anticipated; defiled, but used; unscathed, but bridled
and harnessed, till the reluctant monster shall be firmly yoked to the car of
the mighty victor and swell the final triumph.
(1) God uses sin to punish sin. When God employed the passion and
ambition of hostile monarchs to chastise the apostate Israelites, or when
God directed warring kings, raging with the lust of empire, to relieve His
afflicted and repentant people--in either case the Jews recognised the
operation of an inter-working and over-ruling providence, and recorded
the principles which we are explaining.
(2) God uses sin to defeat sin. Very often when two persons, two coteries,
two nations, it may be, are struggling to obtain a false object, and both
the parties or communities are equally profligate in the means which
they employ to secure success, the plans of the unprincipled tricksters
clash; all are overwhelmed with defeat and disgrace together, and the
field is left free for right quietly to triumph. In the history of every
kingdom and hierarchy, political and priestly despotism may be seen
committing suicide by outdoing its ordinary amount of enormity.
(3) God uses sin to reprove sin. God does not turn sins into whips
exclusively, by the pains and disappointments of iniquity, merely to
scourge the sinner. The element of moral reproof is uniformly associated
with the anguish of punishment. We ask not here how sin can at all
become the means of moral instruction; we only state the fact. Without
seeking the remote or proximate cause of such a phenomenon, it is
sufficient for our present purpose to say that one act, or a few acts of sin,
and the immediate consequences are often, to a man apparently
 established in irreligion, the occasion of godly sorrow for the sins of his
whole life.
(4) God uses sin to promote goodness. The odiousness of sin, when visible in
the conduct of the ungodly, is ever felt by Christians to be promotive of
piety. It undoubtedly increases their gratitude when they are reminded,
by contrast, of the obvious and revolting abominations from which they
have been rescued. The daffy sinfulness, too, of which the best are
conscious, which they frankly acknowledge, however unaffectedly
deplore, becomes a source of sincere and growing humiliation. The
transgressions, also, of the past are never remembered without grief; and
the spirit is chastened into meekness at the recollection of even bygone
and forgiven iniquities. And, beyond this, what salutary spiritual
consequences are derived from a conscious proneness to sin in the
future! To what self-renunciation does it conduct! what acts of self-
consignment to God does it prompt! and how much possible sin does it
annihilate!
(5) God uses sin to display the matchless glory of His Divine perfections. (H.
Batchelor.)

It is an evil thing and bitter.

The evil of sin

I. Inquire wherein sin consists, according to the description of the prophet.

1. Every sinner has forsaken God.
(1) He does not desire Him as his portion, but other things in preference.
(2) He is not mindful of His favour, but esteems the friendship of a fellow
creature more than His.
2. As God is not loved, so neither is He feared, at least, not in such a way as to
depart from evil.
3. From these two sources proceed all the evils that are in the world.
(1) Forsaking God has been the cause of every abomination: hence all the
wars, oppression, and injustice, between nations and individuals.
(2) From the same source also arises a rejection of Christ and the Gospel; a
contempt of religion and of religious people.
(3) Hence, also, that hardness and indifference to the Gospel in many who
attend upon it.
(4) Hence the most solemn warnings and tender expostulations are without
effect, and all the mercy of the Saviour is neglected.

II. Consider the evil and bitter nature of sin.

1. We may know and see how evil and bitter a thing sin is, by the precepts of
Gods holy law, which forbid it; and we must measure it by this rule to see
what evil there is in it.
2. We may know and see by the awful threatenings of Gods Word, by which it
stands condemned (De 28:15).
 3. We may know and see by the bitter sorrows of true penitents (Psa 38:1-6; Psa
51:1-4; Zec 12:10).
4. Know by the bitter fruits it has already produced.
5. By the still more bitter fruits it would have produced if God had not restrained
it.
6. By the bitter pains of eternal death.
7. Know it also by the bitter sufferings of the Son of God.

III. ENFORCE THE EXHORTATION: Know therefore and see that it is an evil and
bitter thing.
1. Unless we know and see this, we can neither know nor see the salvation of
God.
2. Without a knowledge of the evil of sin, we shall neither repent of it nor depart
from it to any good purpose.
3. If we know and see it not truly in this world, we shall be made to know and
see it to our cost in the world to come.
4. If we are brought to know and see it aright, we shall come to Christ; and
herein will be the proof of our knowledge being in some measure what it
ought to be (Joh 6:45). (Theological Sketchbook.)

The evil and bitterness of sin

I. Introductory observations.
1. Men in general think lightly of sin. They consider it rather as a failure or
infirmity of nature, than as positive transgression, guilt, or vileness. Nay,
fools make a mock of sin.
2. The great reason why men think so lightly of sin is, that they think lightly of
God. Our judgment of anything is always in proportion to our esteem or
disesteem of its opposite. God and sin are two contraries; and we will
unavoidably form our estimate of sin, according to that which we form of
essential holiness.
3. There is an infinite evil in sin. This may appear impossible, because man, its
subject, is a finite being. But although viewed in man, or in any creature, as
its subject, it can be only finite; with respect to God, the object against whom
it is directed, it is infinitely evil: for it is an affront to His infinite perfections.
4. All sin has an infinite evil in it. The guilt of one sin exposes to eternal wrath.
The least sin implies in it ingratitude, unbelief, rebellion, and atheism.

II. The evil of sin.

1. Because contrary to the nature of God, who is the supreme standard of truth
and righteousness. Men may talk as they will of moral rectitude and the
fitness of things. But these are terms without meaning, unless we understand
them as relating to the perfections of the Divine nature; for there can be no
notion of rectitude, fitness, or propriety, abstracted from the nature of God.
2. Because contrary to His holy law. This notion of sin is usually illustrated by
the situation of a person under a bodily disease, who not only labours under
 the want of a proper temperament of humours, but hath a positive disorder
among them. So sin, which is a moral disease, not only implies a want of
proper conformity to the law, but a real opposition to it.
3. It is an attempt against the moral government of God in the world. This is the
necessary result of its being a transgression of the law.
4. It is abominable to God. Nothing else in the universe is the object of Divine
hatred, or nothing else but on account of sin.
5. That sin is an evil thing is evident from that malignity which is in its nature.
Does the justice of God proclaim the guilt of sin? Do we learn its filth from its
contrariety to Divine holiness? Its malignity also appears by its opposition to
the alluring perfection of love.
6. Because it makes man the slave of Satan. By the law of his creation, he is the
subject of God. To Him he owes his service, and to Him only.
Inferences--
1. That those who have never seen sin to be evil and bitter have no fear of God.
2. The danger of entertaining trivial thoughts of sin.
3. The dreadful ingratitude that is in sin.
4. The impossibility of delivering ourselves from sin. The necessity of washing in
the blood of Christ.

III. The bitterness of sin.

1. Sin is so bitter in its consequences that it has deprived us of all good. It has
robbed us of the Divine image and favour.
2. Sin has subjected us to all penal evil. The curse of the law; afflictions; death
3. Sin has introduced disorder into the whole creation of God.

IV. By what proofs sinners may know and see that sin is evil and bitter.
1. By the commands and threatenings of the law. It threatens death in all its
extent: temporal, spiritual, and eternal.
2. By terrors of conscience.
3. From the complaints of Gods people, on account of sin. They everywhere,
when rightly exercised, represent it as their heaviest burden; and however
great their afflictions, they consider sin as greater than any ether.
4. By the punishments inflicted on sinners in this life. Flood: Sodom and
Gomorrah.
5. Many see and know the evil and bitterness of sin by their own eternal misery.
Hell.
6. In the sufferings of the Son of God. (J. Jamieson M. A.)

Sin evil and bitter

Many and great are the benefits arising from a proper view of the evil of sin. It
teaches us our true relation to God, and the value of Christs salvation. It shows us
the necessity of repentance, and serves to form in us that spirit of humility, which so
well state, a fallen creature. To promote this necessary branch of Christian
knowledge, therefore, I propose to set before you some of the evils contained in sin.
1. Sin is an act of rebellion against God, our supreme governor. We all feel it to
be right that a master should govern his servant, a parent his child, a king his
subjects:--and, in these cases, if obedience be refused, we immediately
censure it as wrong. Now, all the relations of father, master, and king, do not
confer a thousandth part of the right to rule, and to be obeyed, which centres
in God. If authority is attached to property, the world is His, and the fulness
of it;--if to high station, He is King of kings, and Lord of lords;--if to natural
right, whose claim can be so little liable to dispute as that of the Creator of all
things, by whom all things subsist? The language of sin is, Who is the Lord
that I should obey Him? Now, when we consider the infinite glory, power,
and goodness of God, whose authority is thus trampled upon; the meanness
of man--dust of the earth quickened into life by God; the slightness of the
motive by which in many cases he is induced to disobey God; and the
desperate boldness or unthinking carelessness with which he dares to
transgress, often showing neither reluctance, nor apprehension, nor sorrow,
surely we shall see in this one view of the subject how evil and bitter a thing
it is that we have forsaken the Lord God, and that His fear is not in us. But
to all this it may be objected, that guilt lies chiefly in the intention; and that it
is not the intention of the sinner to offend God, much less to rebel against
Him: his end is only to please himself. This may be true; but is it not
rebellion against God not to intend to obey Him? No criminal directly
proposes to insult the laws of his country. He intends only to please himself;
to serve some selfish end of his own. But when the act which he commits is
forbidden by the law, we consider him as justly liable to suffer the penalty of
disobedience. But it is pleaded, We have no distinct idea, when we sin, of
acting against the will of God, but are drawn, by thoughtlessness, to do that
which in our more serious moments we condemn. Is thoughtlessness itself,
in respect to God and our duty, no crime? This is to excuse the guilt of the
single act, by acknowledging a general principle of evil. Men, for the most
part, know that what they are about to do is forbidden by God. Their
conscience reproves them; their guilt is placed full in their view, and yet they
proceed in their course.
2. The evil of sin will further appear from this consideration, that by every act of
sin we do in effect arraign the wisdom and goodness of God. Every one who
sins decides against the wisdom and goodness of God. He declares by
actions, which always speak more strongly than words, that God would have
more promoted the happiness of man had He allowed him to indulge his
lusts; that His yoke, therefore, is hard. Now, is it not an unpardonable
presumption in us thus to set up our judgment against that of God?
3. The evil of sin appears also from its tendency to defeat the designs of God. It
introduces disorder into His dominions. It spreads desolation through His
works. It destroys the happiness, harmony, and glory of the world, and fills it
with misery and discord. All sin has this tendency. For, be it remembered, we
are not to measure the evil of sin by its effects, but by its tendency. If God, by
His power, prevents the effects which it would otherwise produce, this does
not take away from its proper malignity.
4. The evil of sin will further appear when we consider the ingratitude contained
in it. Is there, then, no guilt in sin which injures and insults our best Friend;
no evil in that disposition which allows us to be even negligent in our
 conduct towards Him to whom we owe such obligations?
5. Sin manifests also an abject and grovelling spirit. It proposes to gratify the
corrupt appetites of the flesh, and considers only the present moment: for
this, reason is dethroned, while the flesh is allowed to rule: for this, honour,
conscience, and the fear of God, are trampled under foot: for this, eternity is
sacrificed to time. It belongs only to fallen beings; it is the badge of their
shame, and the rod of their punishment.
6. Lastly, the evil of sin appears in the injury it does to others. It is the excellence
of holiness that it spreads happiness around; but it is the effect of sin, like a
pestilence, to spread ruin and desolation. All I have said of sin in general
applies, of course, to every act of sin; and yet how very different an
appearance does sin usually bear to us from what has been described! Is
God, then, an angry tyrant, who marks in secret the weaknesses and follies of
His creatures, in order, at length, to pour out His vengeance on them? Far
from us be such an idea of our gracious and merciful God. He is slow to
anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth Him of the evil. (Christian
Observer.)

Sin
1. The nature of sin. Forsaking the Lord as our God.
2. The cause of sin. Because His fear is not in us.
3. The malignity of sin. An evil and bitter thing.
4. The fatal consequences of sin. Without God.
5. Use and application. Repent of thy sin. (Matthew Henry, D. D.)

JER 2:21
How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant.

Spiritual deterioration
A mysterious action is this of spiritual deterioration. It does not set in with
obvious energy all at once, so that in one short week a man ceases to be a healthy
and fruit-bearing vine; but little by little he goes down, his tone changes, his prayers
are depleted of elements that once made them rich with spiritual significance; a
carelessness comes upon all his personal discipline; we say, he is no longer the man
he once was; then he falls again, and still further he goes down, until at last we begin
to be ashamed of his society, or to say that we never come near him without being
chilled: once he was so warm, so cordial, so affectionate, so spiritually-minded, that
to touch him was to receive virtue; but now all is changed,--his talk has fallen to a
lower level, and there comes now and then a look into his face which means that the
better self is being displaced by another identity. What I say unto one, said Christ,
I say unto all, Watch. Let us be careful lest whilst we slumber the enemy take an
advantage over us. (J. Parker, D. D.)
 JER 2:22
Though thou wash thee with nitre.

No self-expiation
One of the shortest, but most pregnant, words in our language is sin. And yet it is
one of those words least understood. The whole system of the Gospel rests on the
fact of sin, and on the dreadful evil of sin, and on the inexpiable character of sin by
any human means whatsoever. Our text puts the truth with a very startling
clearness. The nitre here mentioned was a mineral substance, and the soap was a
vegetable substance, both employed for the purpose of removing spots; and the
meaning is, adopt what means you may and all the means within your power, and
still your sin will remain, it will strike through again, and be as fresh as the day on
which it was committed. This is true of sin in both its aspects of guilt and stain: as
guilt or wrong you cannot remove it; and as a blot you cannot remove it. Let us look
at it as guilt or wrong. Who can expiate it as a matter of right? If the question be
asked, but may not God waive His right? We answer that, if He did this, it would be
an act of grace; it would be a voluntary surrender on His part of what He had a right
to claim and to inflict. But it does not require much thought to teach us that God
could never give to any of His creatures the power of expiation consistent with the
stability of His own throne and government. To grant that a man has power to
expiate a sin, would be to grant that he has a right to insult God and to sin whenever
he desires. Such an engagement would place God in the position of a being who was
trafficking in selling the right to do iniquity. You can conceive of a foolish father or
mother possessing an imperious nature, and anxious to display supreme authority,
incessantly commanding and forbidding their children to do certain trifling things--
things which, whether done or left undone, would be of no injury to the children.
This is not government. It is irritation. This is not encouraging obedience; it is
promoting rebellion. It frets the will by the assertion of needless and unreasonable
claims. But surely, the commands of God are not of this character. The commands of
God are God Himself in expression, and not merely the power of God or the will of
God, but the sense of right and justice and holiness, without which He could have no
claim on the obedience and reverence of any creature. But this is not all. Not only do
Gods commands express His own eternal nature, and not only do they appeal to our
moral nature, so that we cannot treat them as if they were simply suggestions, or
pieces of advice, or matters of taste; but they are commands which contemplate and
secure, in so far as they are obeyed, our happiness. In other words, they not only
enjoin the right way, but the happy way. To sin, therefore, is not only to disobey, but
to derange; it is not only to set at nought a Divine injunction, but to outrage your
own nature. If therefore the line of obedience to the Divine will is also, as it most
assuredly is, the line of blessedness to yourself, do you not see that there can be no
expiation for disobedience? Will punishment for a certain time be an expiation? In
no country is it held that imprisonment for theft is as good as honesty; in no country
is a fine for drunkenness as good as sobriety. But if punishment is not an expiation
for sin in human government, in the sense of being regarded as an equivalent for the
offence which has been committed, if it does not restore to a man either the
character or the standing which he occupied before, so neither is it an expiation for
sin in our relations to God. It is true that He too says, If you sin you will also suffer;
but He does not say, Your suffering will stand good instead of your obedience. When
God punishes, He says first, I cannot be trifled with, and I cannot have My laws set
at nought. The punishment means that in the first instance; it must mean that,
whether it means anything else or not. If it be asked whether punishment is not
meant to be corrective, and whether it is not meant also to be preventive, by way of
example to others who see the suffering which follows sin, I admit that these are
among the purposes of punishment; but they are secondary purposes. God says to
us, If you sin punishment will follow whether you are corrected by it or you are not,
and whether others take warning by it or not. It may be said that suffering is not the
only nitre and soap by means of which men seek to wash off the guilt of sin; that
there is repentance, and future amendment; and that these are sufficient as a set-off
against any amount of transgression. Now, it is impossible for us to determine what
repentance can do or what future amendment can do, in reference to past sin,
without the light which Scripture gives us. Repentance is a change of mind and heart
and life; and in the dispensation under which we live, repentance is connected with
faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And it must not be torn from this connection. The
parable of the prodigal son teaches us, that as a son must return to his father, and
will be received if he returns, so if a man return to God he will be received. But it was
not meant to expound the whole Gospel. The great truth is set forth that a returning
child is received; but the way of return Christ explains again and again in His other
teachings, as for example when He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no
man cometh to the Father, but by Me. The question which we have all to consider
is, how is the guilt of our sins to be dealt with that it will not be laid at last to our
charge? The answer of the Gospel is not that repentance will stand between it and
us. It is that Christ will stand between it and us. Repentance does not bear our sins;
Christ bears our sins. (E. Mellor, D. D.)

JER 2:23-30
How canst thou say, I am not polluted.
Self-vindicating sinners reproved

I. The self-vindicating ways of sinners.

1. Direct denial (Gen 4:9).
2. Vain excuse (1Sa 15:13-15).
3. Hypocritical palliation (Gen 3:11-13).

II. God substantiates His charge against His offending people.

1. By an appeal to fact.
2. By a most apt comparison.
Dromedary and wild ass, when seeking their mate, are so bent upon attainment of
desire, that efforts to catch them are vain; no one will weary himself with so fruitless
a labour. But when their time of pregnancy has advanced, they fall comparatively an
easy prey to the pursuer. So, to little purpose that you are followed with invitations
and entreaties: you will not hear the voice of the charmer, etc. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

Know what thou hast done.

What hast thou Done?
Look at thy life in the light of--
1. Gods Divine purpose.
2. Your social position, and the circumstances by which you have been
surrounded.
3. The responsibilities of the domestic relationship.
4. Your relationship to the best and tenderest of fathers.
5. The tender dealings of the Holy Spirit.
6. Your relationship with Him who, because He loved you, was content to hang
upon the Cross. (W. H. M. H. Aitken, M. A.)

JER 2:31-37
Have I been a wilderness unto Israel?
Divine questions
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 you have an
impeachment to bring even against God, do not fear to bring it. He asks for it. A
wondrous tenderness inspires the inquiry. It seems, indeed, to bring its own answer
with it. So the father might plead with his child, Have I been a wilderness unto
thee, or a land of darkness? have I been deaf to entreaty? have I been without
sympathy in the time of affliction? have I but half-opened the door when you have
sought to return to my love and my confidence? The very inquiry is a defence; the
very method of the inquiry means, It is impossible to answer this but in one way.
Having answered a question respecting God, they have next to answer a question
respecting themselves: Wherefore say My people, We are lords; we will come no
more unto Thee? Literally, Why do My people say, We will rove at will? That is
licence, not liberty. They have lost the centre, and are plunging evermore in chaos,
without being able to give an account of themselves or to use what benefit might lie
within their power. Why this new cry, namely, We will do as we like? Why this so-
called free thought? why this progress which means running round and round and
never advancing by one measurable inch? How very early men begin to be free-
thinkers! How soon sin says to a man, Rove at will; do what you like: you are a man!
Then the poor fool thinks he is a man, and begins to play fantastic tricks before
high heaven. He forgets that we have only, liberty to obey. Then the Lord seems to
adopt a kind of taunting tone: Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her
attire? When did either of them forget a pin, a jewel, a toy, a feather? What, a
memory for little things, for dressing, for adornment, for outgoing, for public
excitement! What a recollection for dates, when the date is filled up with an
amusement, a new sensation! But no memory for sacrifice, for prayer, for holy
sacrament, for consecrated day, for revelations from heaven,--a memory that will
hold all the fiction that ever was written, but a memory like a sieve in respect of
everything that is written in the Bible! What a voice is the Lords! How strident, how
mocking! how tender, beseeching, importunate, full of lamentation! My people
have forgotten Me days without number. Could the complaint have been stated
more pensively? The very voice in which it is uttered adds to the poignancy of the
distress. Who likes to be forgotten? Who likes to be the one member of the family for
whom no flower is brought, for whose birthday no provision is made, for whose little
wants, or great, no one cares? Now the voice changes, and the element of accusation
enters into it very sharply (Jer 2:33): Why trimmest thou thy way to seek love? --
why this continual invention in incidental reforms? why not go to the root of the
matter? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. It is useless to paint the
branches, or hang bird cages upon them, or tie to them fruit gathered from other
orchards. Down with the tree, up with the roots, burn them, and in its place let there
be a tree of the Lords right-hand planting. But all this trimming and adaptation and
partial reform indicates a species of ingenuity and cleverness--therefore hast thou
also taught the wicked ones thy ways. The substantive is feminine--therefore hast
thou also taught wicked women thy ways: you have been inventive, you have issued
new programmes of evil; you have said in effect: See how clever we are: here is a
new method of profanity, here a novelty in blasphemy, here a cloak that baffles
scrutiny, here an impervious garment--waterproof and fireproof, deluge and
lightning cannot get through this covering. No doubt there is a great deal of
ingenuity in wickedness. Bad men have wonderful sagacity in some cases, great
mental penetration, and quite a striking method of doing their own work in their
own way; they are inventive, mentally fertile; as to their fecundity in the way of
devising evil methods and evil practices, it is immeasurable. But God knows it, and
founds a charge upon it. Mark the hardening process of sin 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. The blood of the prophets was
found in the skirts of those who had slain the good men. But in thy skirts,--is not
that a term which indicates concealment? God says, I have not found out this blood,
or the sin with which it is connected, by secret search--by digging down and finding
a hole in the wall, as the prophet Ezekiel found a hole in the wall and entered into
the chamber of imagery; this is not a cellarful of blood; this sin is not confined to the
basement of the life house: you have advanced beyond that. Cain, who introduced
social sin into the world, performed his murder in secret, wiped his lips, and stood
before God as an innocent man. We have made advances upon that infantile crime.
Now our crime is public. The sin which you are half afraid of today, you will make a
boon companion of before very long. The words you now use with blushing and
trembling of voice, you will use familiarly by continued practice. We cannot rest at a
certain point, saying, I will go no farther than this. Such may be our intention at the
time being, but we subtly and imperceptibly advance until we become adept in evil.
Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? thou also shalt be ashamed of
Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria (verse 36). Literally, Why all these shifting
policies? why all these new alliances? why be performing a kind of moral conjuring?
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 of
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. 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, etc. (verse 37). Observe the expression, Thine hands upon thine
head. It was the Oriental sign of dejection and despair. Seeing a man in that
attitude, the meaning was: He has no more hope; his spirit is full of chagrin; he has
been utterly disappointed, and his soul is dead within him; and his confidences are
all battered down; the day of prosperity, even nominal and superficial, is gone
forever. There are many confidences, and they look well. What can look better from
the outside than golden wealth: the foundations silver, the gates made of precious
stones, the front of the house gleaming white marble, the roof of the house one sheet
of gold; and behind horses and chariots, and man servants and maid servants, and a
retinue endless? What can look better as a confidence than health--rude health,
rosy-cheeked health, bright-eyed health: the voice as sound as a bell, the arm as
strong as iron, a strength that never knew what it was to be weary--real genuine
health of blood and bone and sinew and skin; a man whom death dare not touch? Or
the confidence of invention--that fertility of mind which always has a new shift,
which can always see a back door out of every difficulty? Or pleasure--sunny, merry,
dancing pleasure, with a tune for every hour of the day, and as happy in the night
season as in the daytime; bells ringing the whole four-and-twenty hours round; and
as for laughter and joke and all kinds of mirthfulness, why here they are? The Lord
hath rejected thy confidences. One bolt of lightning, and the whole gold house has
gone down. One chill some damp night, and the health house is ruined from attic to
basement. One touch by the invisible hand, and the brain that had in it a thousand
inventions trembles, and cannot remember. One keen disappointment, and pleasure
is struck dead; its face is an annoyance, its rattle is an insult, its invitations are
blasphemies, in face of a woe so terrible. There is but one abiding confidence--Rock
of Ages, cleft for me. There is but one refuge from the storm--Jesus, refuge of my
soul, (J. Parker, D. D.)

An unjust imputation repelled by Jehovah

To an ingenuous mind God never appears so irresistible, so overpowering, as
when He addresses His creatures in the language of tender expostulation. Did all
men possess such a disposition, He would seldom address them in any other
language, and even now, destitute of it as they naturally are, He condescends
occasionally to employ it one instance of its use we have in our text.

I. SHOW WHEN PROFESSED CHRISTIANS TREAT THEIR GOD AND REDEEMER AS IF HE

WERE TO THEM A WILDERNESS, A LAND OF DARKNESS. The mention of a wilderness,
especially of a wilderness as it appears at night, when darkness prevails, suggests to
us ideas of dreariness, solitude, and gloom; of a place where there is nothing to
cheer, to nourish, or shelter us, where numberless obstacles impede the wanderers
progress, and through which is no discoverable path. Every declining professor of
religion, every one who serves God with reluctance, who does not find pleasure in
His service, regards Him precisely in this light, and treats Him as if He were a
wilderness, a land of darkness. When a professor becomes slack and remiss in
waiting upon God, careless in walking with Him, and negligent in seeking
communion with Him, does he not practically say, God is, to me, a wilderness? In
the same manner does every one regard it, who in any place of worship, whether
private, social, or public, feels as if he were detained there, and as if he would prefer
some other situation or employment. Still more loudly does the professing Christian
declare that he regards God as a wilderness, when he repairs, in search of happiness,
to the scenes of worldly pleasure, or to the society of worldly-minded men. He then
says to them in effect, the ways of wisdom are not ways of pleasantness; a religious
life is a life of constraint and melancholy; I should die with hunger and thirst, did I
not occasionally forsake the wilderness in which I am doomed to live, and refresh
myself with the fruits on which you are feasting.

II. Apply to all, who have treated him in this manner, the pathetic, melting
expostulation in our text.
1. The temporal blessings which you enjoy. Look at your comforts, your
possessions, your children, your friends, your liberty, your security. Did you
find all these blessings in a wilderness, or did they come to you out of a land
of darkness?
2. The religious privileges with which you have been favoured. Did you find the
Bible, the sanctuary of God, and the Gospel of salvation, in a wilderness?
Surely, a wilderness, where such blessings are to be found, must be
preferable to the most fertile spot on earth!
3. Those who are professors of religion, we may remind of the spiritual blessings
which they have, or profess to have enjoyed.
(1) You have found the table of Christ spread for your refreshment. You have
enjoyed precious seasons of communion with Him. You have tasted the
first-fruits of the heavenly inheritance, celestial fruits, the food of angels,
such as earth does not produce. Was it a wilderness which produced the
celestial fruits, on which you have feasted?
(2) Has God been a wilderness, a land of darkness to this Church,
considered as a body? Look back and see what it was twenty years since.
Consider how it has been preserved, blessed, increased, during the
intervening period.
4. Yet, notwithstanding all that has been said, there are probably some who feel
as if, in one respect at least, God has been to them no better than a dark and
dreary wilderness. We allude to those who, though they have professedly
paid some attention to religious subjects, and have perhaps enrolled
themselves among the visible followers of Christ, have found no happiness in
religion. Such persons often say in their hearts, We have spent much time in
religious pursuits, and have made many endeavours to find that rest and
peace and consolation which Christ promises to His disciples, and of which
many Christians talk so much. But all our endeavours have been in vain; and
we must say, if we speak the truth, that our way has been like that of a man
travelling through a wilderness, where he finds no path, no refreshment, but
meets with thorns and briars and obstacles at every step. In reply to such
complaints, we remark, that the persons who make them compose several
different classes, and that the complaints of each of these classes are wholly
unreasonable and without foundation.
(1) The first class we shall mention, is composed of those who, to use the
apostles language, go about to establish their own righteousness, and do
not submit to the righteousness of God. That such persons find no
happiness in God, in religion, is not wonderful; for to God, and to
religion, they are entire strangers. It is only by believing in Jesus Christ,
that men are filled with joy and peace.
 (2) The second class we shall mention, is composed of the slothful. That they
should find no happiness in religion, is not surprising; for inspiration
declares, that the way of the slothful man is a hedge of thorns.
(3) A third class of complainers is composed of such as an apostle calls
double-minded men, who are unstable in all their ways. They are
engaged in a vain attempt to reconcile the service of God and that of
mammon. In making this attempt they wander from God, and lose
themselves in a wilderness; and then inconsistently complain, that
wisdoms ways are not paths of peace, that God is to them a land of
darkness. But their complaints are as unreasonable as those of a man,
who should bury himself in a dungeon, and then complain that the sun
gave no light. Permit me now to improve the subject--
1. By applying it to the members of this Church, and to all the professed disciples
of Christ before me. Let me say to each of them, Have you never treated your
God and Redeemer as if He were a wilderness, a land of darkness?
2. In the second place, let me apply this subject to impenitent sinners. (E.
Payson, D. D.)

God no barren wilderness

I. A demand.
1. It has the force of a remonstrance or protestation. Men are wrongly
opinionated respecting God.
(1) Because God is pleased sometimes to suspend and delay the expressions
of His goodness to them.
(2) Because God does not always reward them as they desire and expect.
2. It has the force of a remembrance or seasonable intimation; i.e., I have been
the contrary, I have in reality been a paradise.
3. It has the force of a reproach; i.e., Israel hath rather been a wilderness to Me!
And so it represents to us the unfruitfulness of Gods people. Three things
aggravate this.
(1) The mercies they enjoy.
(2) The means (of improvement, advantages) they partake of.
(3) The expectations which are upon them.
4. It has the force of an appeal or provocation to them; i.e., let Israel speak what
they know of Me.

II. An expostulation.
1. The charge is two fold.
(1) Their assertion: We are lords, whereby they hold forth their own
greatness, self-sufficiency, and independence.
(2) Their resolution: We will come no more, etc.
2. The censure, wherefore? signifies that--
(1) It was without reason.
(2) Against reason. Consider--
 (a) Their relation. My people.
(b) Their indebtedness.

III. AN INVITATION. By generation He meant the people of the time. There is a

reflection in the phrase upon the sinfulness and wretchedness of the age, as if to say,
Into what a time and age are we fallen!
1. Unto what this generation is invited. To see the Word of the Lord, i.e., mind
it and attend to it.
2. The weightiness and seriousness of it.
(1) As it respects Gods own justification.
(2) As it respects Israels condemnation. (T. Horton, D. D.)

A just challenge
You cannot hear such a text as this without feeling greatly solemnised. I do not
suppose they said this literally, but practically they said, We are lords; we will come
no more unto Thee. Also, how the words impress us with the necessity of a better
dispensation,--in other words, of a better covenant, of a better religion, that should
take a saving hold of the people, and make them all that which the Lord Himself
would approve.

I. The just challenge.

1. What the Lord was to them. Salvation. Those among them who were
spiritually minded, and were taught of God, saw in the Paschal lamb, Christ
Jesus; saw in the salvation from Egypt, Christ Jesus; saw in the victory that
was wrought for them, Christ Jesus.
2. How it was they failed. They defiled the land.

II. THE SELF-EXALTATION. We are lords. What does it mean? It means that they
set their authority above the truth of God. Now it becomes us to see that all the parts
of our religion are of Divine authority. So far from the Christian as he goes on
finding that he is lord over his own self, and lord over this, and that, and the other,
he finds out, as he goes along, more and more of his poverty; he decreases more and
more. Ah! he says, If I were black in my own eyes a few years ago, I am blacker now:
if vile in my own estimation a few years ago, I am viler now. And thus as we sink the
Saviour rises, grace reigns, and we glory in being poor sinners at the feet of Jesus,
indebted to God from first to last for our eternal salvation.

III. THE BLIND DECISION. We will come no more unto Thee. I do not apprehend
that this means that they would give up the supreme God, but that they would come
no more unto Him in that representation of Him which His truth gave, in that
representation of Him which His prophets gave. We will thus come no more unto
Thee--not in that way. In Isa 29:1-24 you have these instructive words, This people
draw near Me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour Me, but have removed
their heart far from Me. They are not conscious of that, You say to the Pharisee in
the Saviours day, Do you love God? Of course I do. But is not your heart removed
from Him? No;--they were not conscious of it. Every erroneous seeker says he loves
God; what, then, is the sense in which their hearts were removed from God? what is
the sense in which they would come no more to Him? Their fear, saith Isaiah (29),
toward Me is taught by the precept of men. The Saviour comes to the same point
when He says, Ye will not come unto Me that ye might have life. And when He had
opened up the beauties of the everlasting Gospel in Joh 6:1-71, it was not the
supreme God abstractedly, but it was God in His own way of saving a sinner that
they hated, and they went back and walked no more with Him. (J. Wells.)

JER 2:32
Can a maid forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet My people have
forgotten Me.
The bride and her ornaments: the sin of forgetting God
It is a clear proof of the great love of God to His people that He will not lose their
love without earnest expostulation. He loves us too well to suffer us to go on in our
iniquity. He will scourge rather than abandon; chide rather than lose.

I. A VERY GRIEVOUS SIN. My people have forgotten Me days without number.

1. Observe whom they had forgotten: it will help us to see the sin of it. It would
not have mattered half as much if they had forgotten their dearest friends--
the husband his wife, or the mother her child; but here are favoured men and
women who have forgotten their God, their Father, their life, their all. God,
the good, the best, who has a chief right to be remembered. There is great
evil in our hearts, or it would be so hard to forget God as to be impossible. A
friend has gone away from us, and we do not see him; but he has left so many
tokens of his goodness that we are reminded of him every day. Is it not so
with God? Has He not left us innumerable tokens of His affection for us?
Ought we to forget when so many forget-me-nots are round about us? But,
supposing that friend has not gone away at all, but is living with us in the
house, and enters even into our chamber, what shall we say if we forget one
who is constantly with us? No man is so present with his friend as God is
with His people.
2. Who were they that forgot God? Not strangers, not heathen; but My people.
That is to say, a people not only chosen and redeemed, but brought to know
Him, brought into fellowship with Him, brought into relationship with Him,
brought absolutely into union with Him,--they have forgotten Me.
3. Observe sadly the space in which they had forgotten: in the case of Israel, it is
added, days without number. How long is it since you were in the habit of
walking with God? How long is it since you have seen the face of the Well-
Beloved? I ventured to put that question once to a professor, and, shaking
his head, he replied, Dont ask me that: if you will ask me whether I have
been a drunkard, whether I have been dishonest in business, whether I have
done any positive action by which I have degraded the Christian name, I can
answer you without fear; but if you ask, How long since I have had fellowship
with Christ, I cannot--I dare not--answer you.
4. How is God forgotten? What are the manifestations of this offence?
(1) Some professors evidently forget God by their worldliness They have
 been fattened with the treasures of the world, but their souls have been
starved to very skeletons, for they have not fed upon the things of God.
(2) Some have forgotten God by self-seeking. They live unto themselves.
(3) Some, too, show that they forget God by the failure of their trust. They
are in trouble, and they are very anxious. Why? Because they have
forgotten God, though He has promised to help them.
(4) Alas, there are some who add to this a forgetfulness of God through
neglect of private devotion. Prayers are slurred over; drawing near to
God becomes a form and a pretence.
(5) And you and I can do it in a very high sense by a breach of communion,
by getting out of fellowship with God, by walking contrary to Him, so that
He walks contrary to us. It is very bad walking and very bad living when
God and ourselves are at cross purposes.
5. If ever we do forget God, it leads to all sorts of mischief. We lose our joy and
our comfort; and then we lose our strength and our watchfulness; and then
we backslide by little and little; and then, probably, we fall into one sin, and
then into another sin, if not into a third more grievous still

II. THE CHIDING QUESTION which is the very marrow of the text. Can a maid
forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire?
1. I suppose that question is put, first, because there are many trivial things
which occupy minds so that they cannot forget them. How sad it is that the
grandest things, the best things, should not equally engross our thoughts!
2. If a bride did forget her attire, or a maid did forget her ornaments, it would be
very unreasonable behaviour. But how infinitely more unreasonable it is that
you and I should forget God. He is our diadem of glory: He is our beauty of
holiness. In Christ we are arrayed in raiment of needlework, and our
garments are of wrought gold. Can we, shall we forget Him?
3. It would have been a most unseasonable thing for a maid to forget her attire
at her wedding. A bride who forgets her attire would be something like the
foolish virgins who forgot to take oil in their vessels with their lamps. And,
certainly, it is a most unseasonable thing for me and you to forget our God
while we are here. Let the soldier, when the arrow is flying from every bush,
forget his armour, but let us not forget our God. Let the hungry man, when
famine rages through the land, forget his store of bread, but let us not forget
the food of our souls, which is our Lord Jesus.
4. Notice the conduct of the maid or the conduct of the bride, with regard to her
ornaments.
(1) She labours hard to obtain her ornaments and to gain her attire. Many
women in the East save up every coin that they have, and turn all into
silver. It is their lifes work to provide themselves with ornaments against
the marriage day. While they do this, let us do better: let us store up the
thoughts of Christ, and the words of Christ, and the things of Christ, and
let us labour to get more and more of Christ, that we may be adorned
with Him and made comely in His comeliness.
(2) When the Eastern woman has with great difficulty obtained her
ornaments and her attire, then she thinks a great deal of them: she
 preserves them with much care; she will, if possible, prevent a thief from
taking away a ring or gem; she locks them up carefully. Oh, that we did
store up every bit we get of our Lords loves and put it by to keep it, never
losing any pearl that we find, or any ring that we fashion by experience.
(3) How joyfully the Eastern woman puts on her jewels, puts on her attire.
She has these things to wear them. I am ashamed of those Christians who
are ashamed of Christ. They have jewels: I hope they have; but they are
very chary of ever showing them.

III. A few words of CALL TO REPENTANCE, if we have in any measure forgotten

God. I am sure, first, that our God does not deserve to be treated so. You use no
other friend so ill. Have you forgotten? Will not the time past suffice for that? A half
a minutes forgetfulness of God is half a minute too long. Let it not come to be days
without number. But, if the number be ever so small, let us weep to think we should
have forgotten Him at all. Think, if He had forgotten you--forgotten you in your
merriest moment, ay, in your holiest moment, what would have been your portion?
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

Forgetfulness
The Almighty entered this grave charge against His ancient favoured nation, My
people have forgotten Me days without number.

I. THE SAME CHARGE LIES WITH TOO GREAT FORCE AGAINST ALL CHRISTENDOM. The
true secret of this lurks in the obstinate ungodliness of the carnal mind. This hinders
the recollection of God in the following modes--
1. In habitual inattention to Divine truth, when presented to the mind. Some try
to excuse their ignorance of God and His inspired Word, pleading, I have
such a bad memory, when the memory is quite good enough, if Divine
truths were once welt lodged in it by due attention. No memory, however
excellent, can retain that which was never allowed to make an impression
(Heb 2:1).
2. In neglect of reflection on Divine truth read or heard. Where there is little
meditation on God and His Word, it is vain to expect a rich experience, or a
solid religious character.
3. In the occupation of the mind with comparative trifles. Filling our measures
with chaff, we leave no room for good and solid grain. The maid thinks of her
ornaments, and the bride of her attire. The young--and not they only, but
many to whom increasing years have brought no wisdom--fill their thoughts
and conversation with the fashions, the amusements, and entertainments of
the season; and so can have, in their foolishly occupied minds, no grave
recollection of that God with whom they have to do. It was a judicious
answer of Themistocles to Simonides, who had offered to teach him the art of
memory, Rather teach me the art of forgetfulness; for the things which I
would not I remember, and cannot forget the things I would.
4. In excess of worldly cares. There are grave anxieties regarding success in
business, or the attainment of a coveted position, that so press upon the soul
as to preclude the earnest recollection of religious truth. Hence it happens
that shrewd men, who easily remember whatever affects the markets, cannot
 remember how to buy the truth; and readily quoting the stock and share
lists of commercial enterprise, cannot accurately quote the verses of the
blessed Word of God.

II. TO SHOW THE EVIL OF FORGETFULNESS, let it be considered how much a

religiously stored memory tells on the development of the Christian mind and
formation of the Christian character. It constitutes knowledge, it deepens
repentance, it fortifies faith, it supplies comfort, and moves continual thankfulness.
(D. Fraser, M. A.)

JER 2:35-37
Thou sayest, I have not sinned.

Obstinate impenitence
1. Blind to its own guilt.
2. Blasphemes God by accusing Him of unjust anger.
3. Will not escape just punishment. (Naegelsbach.)

Denial of guilt
At one of our seaside resorts, a cab proprietor was fined 10 and costs for not
having licences for twenty-seven carriages. His excuse was that they were relics of
antiquity, kept to lend out while others underwent repair. Some make a like plea
when their sins are discovered: they do not sin as a regular business, though it is
true they keep some of the old relics of antiquity. If we keep the devils carriages,
even under such a pretence, we will find them turn into funeral cars ere long. Do not
keep wine in the cellar, and you will not drink it. He who has a pistol may shoot.
Make not provision for the flesh (Rom 13:14). Neither give place to the devil
(Eph 4:27). Do not keep even an old stool for him. Away with all his furniture. Old
things are passed away.

JER 2:36
Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way?

Living to purpose

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING AN OBJECT IN LIFE. There is a vast difference

between the state of a man when running a race, and when sauntering about to kill
time. There is an equal difference between the men who pass through this city on
business, and those who come to the metropolis merely to see sights. Plant yourself
upon London Bridge, the city side, about nine oclock in the morning, and look into
the faces of the men who are crossing that bridge. Go into the National Gallery, or
into the British Museum, any day when these places are thronged, and look into the
faces of the persons who are there. A very different state of thought and feeling you
will find revealed by those faces. Now in this difference we see the importance of a
well-defined and all-commanding object. An object in life sufficient for a man,
brings him out, educates him. The prize calls out the school boy who contends for it;
the honours of the university elicit the mind, and the scholarship of the man who
wrangles for them--and any object has a similar effect, the pursuit of which fully
calls out a mans powers. This is education. Instruction is not education. Education,
as the very word implies, is the calling forth of what is within a man; and the objects
and subjects of pursuit do more in our education than the mere reading and study of
books. Desiring a particular end, and determining to obtain it, the man asks, What
have I that I can use in order to reach this end? An object calls out a man. And an
object keeps the man out. It calls him out, and maintains the manifestation and the
development. He is not like the snail, but is like the bee, or as the ant. His powers
are never withdrawn--in all working time they are outstretched. Neither is there
incessant and useless change in his operations. He who gads about to change his
way, having no fixed and definite object, but changing his object almost with the
change from month to month, and from season to season, never lays hold of
anything that is worth securing. But a man with a good object, with a commanding
object, and a sufficient object, cannot afford to be unstable. Now, if a mans powers
he called out, and kept out amid obstacles and conflicting circumstances, the
education of the man is yet further advanced. He is opposed, say, in the pursuit of
his object. Well, this opposition keeps the earnestness and the seriousness alive
within him. It is a great advantage to be opposed in the pursuit of our object. If men
will only take opposition with good temper, and be quiet, and of a meek and patient
spirit, they will always be the better for it. Annoyances arise--he feels that if he yields
to them he shall be unfitted for his pursuit. What does he? He keeps down his
susceptibilities to fretfulness, and he learns quietness of heart. How soon the man
learns this, who is in constant intercourse with the Saviour about all the objects of
his pursuit, and who tells Him everything that dwells on his mind about everybody,
and about every circumstance! He can see the invisible; he can assure his heart of
what his hand does not now grasp--and thus he is educated by his object.

II. While it is important that every man should have some object, it is more
important that the object of pursuit to every man should be good. Say that a man
sets out with fame as his end. He means to be known; he means to get into every
newspaper. Such a one does everything to be seen and to be spoken of. That which
will not tell upon his reputation he will not do. He wishes the trumpet to call
attention to everything which he executes; he wishes to be called the best scholar, or
the noblest patriot, or the richest merchant, or the most devoted philanthropist of
his day. He wishes to be called first; and he pursues that end. Now, such an end will
make a man proud and vain. In all matters of morality and religion such a man will
be most unsteady. Consider wealth a mans object. He plans and labours to get
money--to get it for spending or for hoarding; and money is the mans goal. This will
make him narrow-minded, and selfish in heart. Men will rise and fall in his
estimation according to their possessions, and objects will be pursued as they secure
to him money. Perhaps this was the goal of Judas; and see what effect it produced
upon him. He lost his soul in running to it. Consider power a mans end. He lives
and toils to subdue others to himself. This makes a man ungenerous, cruel, unjust,
and often impious. Admit pleasure to be a mans object. This destroys the
proportions of the human constitution, and throws out of their right and proper
place the several parts of our human nature. Now, put in contrast with fame, money,
power, as the chief end of man, the good of others. Say that men are living to effect
some object in connection with the well-being of their fellows; then you have such a
character as that of John Howard, Wilberforce, Elizabeth Fry, Buxton. Howards
object, as you know, was the release and the relief of the prisoner; and while John
Howards disposition led to the choice of this pursuit, that disposition to do good
grew marvellously under the training influence of his object. Wilberforce was
naturally sympathetic, but his efforts for the slave marvellously enlarged his heart.
Buxton would have been a noble man anywhere, but his pursuit of the extinction of
slavery made him grow like the palm tree, and flourish like the cedar in Lebanon.
Many a female culprit would confess their obligations to Mrs. Fry; but Newgate was
a school of grace to the prisoners friend and teacher: and if she could hear us
talking of her now, she would say to us, Speak not of anything I did, but rather tell
what all this did for me. It was far more blessed for me to communicate, and to give,
and to strive in that prison to do good, than it ever was simply to receive. (S.
Martin, M. A.)

As to gadabouts
The illustration by which this prophet of tears deplores the vacillation of the
nation to whom he wrote, is a homely one. Now they wanted alliance with Egypt,
and now with Assyria, and now with Babylon, and now they did not know what they
wanted, and the behaviour of the nation reminded the prophet of a man or woman
who, not satisfied with borne life, goes from place to place gadding about, as we say,
never settled anywhere or in anything, and he cries out to them: Why gaddest thou
about so much to change thy way? Well, the world has now as many gadabouts as it
had in Bible times. Gadabouts among occupations, among religious theories, among
churches, among neighbourhoods, and one of the greatest wants of the Church and
the world is more steadfastness and more fixedness of purpose. It was no small
question that Pharaoh put to Jacob and his sons when he asked, What is your
occupation? Getting into the right occupation not only decides your temporal
welfare, but may decide your eternal destiny. Last summer a man of great genius
died. He had the talents of twenty men in surgical directions, but he did not like
surgery, and he wanted to be a preacher. He could not preach. I told him so. He tried
it on both sides of the sea, but he failed, because he turned his back on that
magnificent profession of surgery, which has in our time made such wonderful
achievement that it now heals a broken neck, and by the X-ray explores the temple
of the human body, as if it were a lighted room. For forty years he was gadding about
among the professions. Do not imitate him. Ask God what you ought to be, and He
will tell you. It may not be as elegant a style of work as you would prefer. It may be
callous and begrime your hands, and put you in suffocating atmosphere, and stand
you shoulder to shoulder with the unrefined, but remember that if God calls you to
do one thing you will never be happy in doing something else. All the great successes
have been gained through opposition and struggle. Hard pounding, said
Wellington at Waterloo,--hard pounding, gentlemen; but we will see who can
pound the longest. Yes, my friends, that is the secret, not flight from obstacles in
the way, but who can pound the longest. The gadabouts are failures for this life, to
say nothing of the next. There are many who exhibit this frailty in matters of
religion. They are not sure about anything that pertains to their soul or their eternal
destiny. Now they are Unitarians, and now they are Universalists, and now they are
Methodists, and now they are Presbyterians, and now they are nothing at all. They
are not quite sure that the Bible was inspired, or, if inspired, whether the words or
the ideas were inspired, or whether only part of the book was inspired. Gadding
about among religious theories, and never satisfied. All the evidence is put before
them, and why do they not render a verdict? If they cannot make up their mind with
all the data put before them they never will. If it is a good book, your eternal
happiness depends upon the adoption of its teachings. Once and forever make up
your mind whether it is the book of God or the book of villainous pretenders. So,
also, many are unfixed in regard to their spiritual condition, and day after day, and
year after year go gadding about among hopes and fears and anxieties. Why do you
not find out whether you are His or not? There are all the broad invitations of the
Gospel. Accept them. There are all the assurances. Apply them. This moment you
have all the information pointing to the road that terminates at the gate of the
Golden City, and the voyage that anchors in the haven of eternal rest. Why go on
guessing when you have all the facts before you? My text also addresses those who in
search of happiness are going hither and yonder looking for that which they find
not. Let all the gadabouts for happiness know that in kindness and usefulness and
self-abnegation are to be found a satisfaction which all the gaieties of the world
aggregated cannot afford. Among the race of gadabouts are those who neglect their
homes in order that they may attend to institutions that are really excellent, and do
not so much ask for help as demand it. One bad habit these gadabouts, masculine or
feminine, are sure to get, and that is of scandal distribution. Such gadabouts have
little prospect of heaven. If they got there they would try to create jealousy among
the different ranks of celestials. Therefore let us resolve that we will concentrate
upon what is right thought and right behaviour, and waste no time in vacillations
and indecisions and uncertainties, running about in places where we have no
business to be. Life is so short, we have no time to play with it the spendthrift. (T. De
Witt Talmage.)

JER 2:37
The Lord hath rejected thy confidences, and thou shalt not prosper in them.

The danger of false confidences

In the state and conduct of Judah we have a picture of the state and conduct of the
world, in religious matters, at the present day; and as that nation, by their distrust of
God and want of reliance on His power and goodness, wrought for themselves the
degradation and the miseries of a long captivity, so those who are seeking for
themselves present and eternal peace by any other means than those which God has
appointed, and are lulling their souls into security by false confidences, are heaping
up for themselves wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous
judgment of God.

I. THE GENERAL MERCY OF GOD IS THE GROUND OF CONFIDENCE WITH MANY, BUT
THIS IS A CONFIDENCE WHICH THE LORD HATH REJECTED. The Scriptures are full of
declarations which show the utter fallacy of this trust. We may assure ourselves that
those who hold to it have ideas of sin very different from those given us in that sure
Word of Prophecy unto which we do well that we take heed. Let us ponder the fact,
that if man, as the Scriptures tell us, was formed in the image of God, by every act of
transgression we must be effacing that image, and spoiling Gods most glorious
workmanship; and if God can look upon such a thing with indifference, and allow it
to pass with impunity, He must be reckoned as altogether heedless of the grossest
interference with His wise purposes which we can possibly, suppose. Now, is such a
thing at all countenanced in the Scriptures? No. God is of purer eyes than to behold
iniquity. Evil cannot dwell with Him, nor fools stand in His sight. And so jealous is
He of His glory, that in His dealing with the first of our race He annexed the penalty
of death to transgression. Adam transgressed, and he died, spiritually and
temporally. And where in this is the evidence of a God all mercy? Why did not
paradise smile on our first parents as before? Why did the sword of the cherubim
keep them out from their first and most beauteous habitation? It was because God is
a God of justice, and His veracity stood pledged for the fulfilment of His righteous
threatening. And He stands as pledged still with regard to all but those who, being in
Christ Jesus, have escaped condemnation. Upon the wicked He shall rain snares,
fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest; this shall he the portion of their cup.
And hath He said it, and will He not do it; hath He spoken, and shall He not make it
good?

II. MANY TRUST TO THEIR OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS FOR ACCEPTANCE WITH GOD, BUT
THIS ALSO IS A CONFIDENCE WHICH THE LORD HATH REJECTED. Do and live is the
motto of the religion of such persons. They purpose to get to life, and their way to it
is by keeping the commandments. God, say they, has annexed the promise of future
felicity to obedience, and we obey that that felicity may be ours for a reward. Now,
this would do very well, did we retain our original standing with God; but whether
man be now that holy being he was when God pronounced him to be very good, let
the state of the world, let your own hearts witness. The conscience of every man who
knows aught of the law of God, and is at all accustomed to compare his conduct and
his feelings with its requirements, will testify, that it is as true now as on the day
when it was written that all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God: But
many, who trust to themselves that they are righteous, will endeavour to get rid of
these considerations, by saying, that though they have sinned, they have repented:
that is, they have felt sorry for their sin, and that God will receive penitence as an
atonement. This is trifling with the character of God, and with that righteous
government which it is His immutable purpose to maintain throughout the whole of
His dominions. Even human legislators have not failed to see how subversive such a
principle would be of the good of civil society if put in practice in the world. Would it
be right--would it be consistent with good government, that crime should go
unpunished, if the criminal, when brought to the bar of justice, should express
sorrow for his offence? All know that it would not. And will God fail to vindicate His
law, His justice, His veracity because of a few sorrowing tears and sighs? But it is
said that Jesus, by His obedience and suffering, has obtained an abatement of the
law; that He has softened it down in order to fit it to human infirmity; that it is not a
perfect, but a sincere obedience that is required; and that if we fall short in any
thing, the merit of Christ comes in to supply the deficiency.
1. We observe that Christ came for no such purpose as to temper the law to our
infirm circumstances; for if the law was originally right, if that wisdom which
 enacted it, and which cannot err, saw it to be fit and necessary, it must be
immutably so. What! did Christ die that we should not be obliged to love God
and our neighbour, so much as we were originally bound to do? Did He give
Himself to procure for us a liberty to sin with impunity? No one in soberness
of spirit will say so.
2. But, with regard to the merit of Christ supplying only for the little that we may
have fallen short, we observe, that it is altogether at variance with every
dictate of Scripture on the subject of the sinners salvation. Was not the
sacrifice of Christ a full satisfaction to Divine justice? Did He not magnify the
law, and make it honourable? And can it be necessary that to His infinite
satisfaction and merit we should add our obedience, soiled and imperfect as
it must be at best, in order to obtain pardon and acceptance with God? What
an unhallowed mixing of the clean and unclean; what a confounding of
Christ and Belial would be here! Besides, why will men be so perverse as to
seek justification by the law, whether it be abated, as it is not, or whether it
stands in its original force, as it does to those who are under it, and as a rule
of life to all? Why will men be so perverse, when it is said so pointedly, that
by the deeds of the law no living flesh shall be justified? We apprehend
that, to every candid person, the foregoing considerations are sufficient to
show how unsafe a foundation, on which to build for eternity, are our own
righteousness, and those things connected with it which we have noticed.
What, then, is the confidence, by depending on which we may look forward
securely to eternity? It is the righteousness of Jesus, made ours by
imputation, and received by that faith which is of the operation of God.

III. Too many content themselves with a bare speculative knowledge of the true
way of salvation and this is a confidence which the Lord hath rejected. There is a
form of godliness without the power. In order to a real saving knowledge of the
subject of redemption, we must have a deep impression of the truths which the
subject involves: the deep depravity of our nature; our alienation from God; the
hatefulness and repugnancy of sin to the Divine nature; our inability to rescue
ourselves from perdition; the love, the wisdom, the condescension, all infinitely
displayed in the plan and the execution of our redemption, and the readiness and
ability of Christ to save. (P. MGuffie.) .

JEREMIAH 3

JER 3:1-5
Return again to Me, saith the Lord.

The backslider invited to return

We have here a wonderful display of Gods character: forbearance, pity, and love.

I. WHAT IS INFERRED. A departure from God.

1. The life of an ungodly man is one long departure from God. Every step he
 takes leads him farther away.
2. What departures we find even in the holiest and best! Secret neglects.
Seductions in daily avocations and companions. Tampering with sin.

II. WHAT IS DECLARED. A returning to God as a promising God, as a forgiving God,

as our God and Father in Christ Jesus, in real humiliation of spirit before Him; for
whoso confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall have mercy. Observe, the return is
not a mere turning away from sin; it is finding the way back again to God. The very
fruit and work of the blessed Spirit.

III. WHAT IS DISPLAYED. Touching tenderness.

1. God Himself speaks.
2. He points to the Cross. (J. H. Evans, M. A.)

Return to God
1. Let Christian believers behold in these words with whom it is that they have to
do. There have been times when the Lord made you rejoice before Him--
when your fellowship with Him was delight. And so He would have had you
to continue. But your joy changed into sorrow, your light was quenched in
darkness; not because you were forsaken, but because you forsook. You did
evil in the sight of the Lord, and He delivered you into the hands of the
Philistines. But He did not forsake you utterly, nor cast you off forever. He
brought you back, and restored to you the joy of His salvation. Soon you
forgot it all. You did evil again in His sight. He departed from you, and you
were carried captive by your enemies. In the land of Babylon you wept, and
hung your tuneless harps upon the willows, for you could not sing the Lords
song in a strange land! You remembered Zion, and eagerly longed that your
captivity might come to an end. And the Lord ended your captivity and
brought you back. Yet, notwithstanding all your sad experiences, you have
again and again forgotten and forsaken Him. What should be your feelings
when you think of these things? Should there be any sorrow like unto your
sorrow? Yet be not afraid; conclude not that your sins must of necessity have
separated forever between you and God; say not that for you there is no hope
in Israel, and no place left for repentance. Had you to do with man it might
be so. Were you to be dealt with as you have sinned, It could not but be so.
But the Lord God is merciful and gracious, His love continues as strong as
ever. He cannot bear to give you up. He compassionates your weakness. He
laments your folly.
2. Let those who are still in the gall of bitterness--alienated from the life of God,
through the ignorance that is in them, be assured that this language is
addressed even to them. You are His, although you are now strangers and
foreigners; for His hand did form you, and you were not designed to be His
enemies. You have chosen to be so; but all the enmity is on your side. Your
enemy He has never been; nor is He now your enemy! He is emphatically the
friend of sinners. (R. J. Johnstone, M. A.)

Backsliding process
 A church is sometimes astounded by the fall of some professor in it: this is the
fruit, not the seed or the beginning of backsliding. So a man is laid on a sick bed, but
the disorder has only now arrived at its crisis; it has for some time been working in
his system, and has at length burst out and laid him low. So the sin of departing
from God and secretly declining has been going on while the profession has still
been maintained; the process of backsliding has been working silently yet surely
until a temptation has at last opened the way for its bursting forth, to the scandal of
Gods people and true religion. In the sight of God the man was fallen before, we
only now have first discovered it. (H. G. Salter.)

Therefore the showers have been withholden.

God inflicting punishment on those who turn away from Him

If God is immanent in the universe, not a Deity immeasurable distances away
from His creation; if without Him it could not hold together for a moment, there is
nothing unreasonable in the thought that He should sometimes show resentment at
the spirit of evil, indicate some emotion at least in the presence of ingratitude. We
do the sage ourselves. Parents sometimes give children to feel that the penalty of ill-
behaviour is the withdrawment of a privilege, the abbreviation of a holiday, the
suspension of a pleasure. Sometimes by deprivation God inflicts punishment upon
those who turn away from Him. In this case the penalty was one of deprivation--the
showers had been withholden. Sometimes the penalty is positive, and there are too
many showers. God drowns the world that denies Him. He does not withhold the
showers for want of water; the debt, go is always ready: the river of God is full of
water. It may be unscientific and ignorant to think that God interferes with nature,
but it stands to our highest reason as a probable truth. If He made it, He may
interfere with it; if He constructed it, He may sometimes wind it up, visit it, operate
upon it, assert His eternal proprietorship. If the great landlord allows us to walk
through his fields freely and joyously, he may sometimes, say, once in twenty-one
years, put up a fence or a boundary, which being interpreted means, This path is
mine, not yours; the boundary will be taken down again tomorrow, but it is here
today to signify that you have acquired no rights by constant use. It is not an
unnatural intervention, nor do we see that it is an unreasonable intervention on the
part of God if we deny Him, neglect Him, scorn Him, operate wholly against the
spirit of His holiness, that He should now and again withhold the shower, or send
such deluges upon the earth as shall wash away our seed and make a desert of our
garden. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The chief cause of calamities

Great honour has always been paid by all nations to their supposed gods, and it
has always been reckoned a crime to rob them of the glory of which they were
supposed to be so jealous. One of the Greek comedians in a stage play asks this
question, Who was the wicked author of the vines being blasted by the frost? And
he gives the answer, He who gave the honours of the gods to men. This heathen
writer teaches us a lesson when we fail to trace our trials to the first cause. Who shall
say that some dishonour of the name of God may not be the cause of our afflictions?
Sorrow does not come out of the dust. The seeds of disease are not driven about
recklessly. The lightning does not strike by chance. There are reasons for what
seems evil which we cannot trace, and perhaps one of the chief causes of the
calamities which befall men may be found in their want of regard for the honour and
glory of the Divine Name. (Quiver.)

JER 3:4
Writ thou not from this time cry unto Me, My Father, Thou art the guide of my
youth?
The Divine Guide
We are all travellers, but are not all travelling in the tame direction. We need a
guide. There is only One to be relied upon.

I. Why we need a guide.

1. Because of our ignorance of the way.
2. Because of our liability to take the wrong path.
3. Because of our liability to leave the right path after we have chosen it.

II. We should take God as our guide.

1. Because He knows the way.
2. Because He knows the trials that will befall us.
3. Because He knows the perils that we shall encounter.
4. Because He is our Father, and therefore kind and considerate.

III. We should ask God to guide us now.

1. Because the present time is the best.
2. Because the present time is the safest.
3. Because the present may be the only time. (Homilist.)

Taking God as our Guide in youth

I. It is due to God.
1. He is your Maker, who gives you all things; therefore He has a supreme and
sole right to you.
2. He has bought you at a vast expense, that you might be delivered from the
curse of sin and the wrath to come. If an artist pays a large sum of money to
get back his own painting from some one into whose hands it has fallen, and
then labours to improve it, would you not say that he has a good title to such
painting? Thus with the ransomed children of God.

II. It will be good for yourselves.

1. You need a guide.
(1) Consider your character. Ignorance of the future, and without
experience, should you not tremble to go alone?
 (2) Consider your situation. The road is beset with dangers, infested with
robbers, filled with bypaths!
(3) Consider the importance of your steps. Begin to wander, and who shall
tell the issue? Worn out with fatigue, benighted in that trackless
wilderness, you fall a prey to the forest beast, or are dashed in pieces over
a hidden precipice. One evil habit may lead you to ruin, must cause you
pain and trouble. One false step in youth may mar you forever.
2. God is infinitely the best Guide. That He is a sure and safe Guide, none can
doubt. He is wise, knows all things, and can proportion trials to your
strength. He never fails. You live in a world of changes; but He is the same
yesterday, today, and forever. But He is also a pleasant Guide. He is powerful
to bring you out of trouble; He is gracious in it. In the day of the east wind
He stays His rough wind, and tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. (J. C.
Herdman, M. A.)

Gods tender expostulation with the young

I. The particulars of the proposal.

1. That you should make God your Father; to love honour, and obey.
2. To choose God for the Guide of your youth; to regard His authority, follow His
will, and comply with His directions.
(1) By His Word.
(2) By His Spirit.
3. To do these things instantly, without delay.

II. Motives for co-reliance.

1. The grace and condescension of the proposal.
2. The reasonableness of such a proceeding. Refuse the offer of His heavenly
guidance, and you will be like a vessel in a boisterous sea without a pilot to
direct your course.
3. The seasonableness of the proposal. From this time. The time past cannot
be recalled. You may deeply regret that you have hitherto neglected to make
God your Father, and to choose Him for the Guide of your youth. But regret
will not recover the time which is past. Opportunities lost are gone forever.
Your business is to improve those which remain. The present time is still
your own. (E. Cooper, M. A.)

God the Guide of youth

I. The proposal.
1. It requires penitence. You must feel your depravity and lament your guilt.
2. It includes prayer. A life of communion with God.
3. It implies yielding yourself up to God, to walk in His ways, be guided by His
counsel, and glorify His name.
 II. YOUR OBLIGATIONS. To whom will you give your affections if you withhold
them from Him?

III. Advantages to be gained by compliance.

1. Safety. While leaning on your own wisdom, and walking in your own strength,
you are liable to stray, stumble, fall.
2. Happiness. In His favour is life. No peace to the wicked.
3. Honour. Associated with the servants of God, angels, archangels, etc. Yes, and
with Christ Himself, whose meat was to do Gods will.

IV. Combat objections.

1. Sins too great for pardon. Christs grace sufficient.
2. So weak. He takes by the hand, helps, upholds.
3. What need for being so religious? But you have no religion at all, if not wholly
in earnest.
4. Not yet. This is impious as well as foolish. Every day and hour you are on the
brink of death.

V. YOUR REPLY. Only two answers: will, or will not. Turn not away. (J.
Wooldridge.)

The importance of early dedication to God

I. THE ASSUMPTION. That the person is in a state of unregeneracy. Multitudes are

thus. Refusing to listen to God. In the neglect of the claims of God there is an
amount of daring of which we can hardly form a conception, especially in the case of
the child of many prayers.

II. THE IMITATION. Why should you from this time say, Thou art the Guide of my
youth?
1. The claims of Him who asks it.
2. The dangers of delay.
3. The final consequences of refusal. (D. E. Ford.)

God condescending to be the Guide of youth

I. Has not God already acted a most wise and friendly part?
1. Review your general privileges. Who formed you from nothing into being?
who assigned you a rank among human creatures? who prepared in a
parents heart the affections which welcomed and nourished the helpless
stranger? who reared you up to youth? who kindled the dawn of mason?
whose hand opened for you the warm and widening circle of friendship?
2. You are bound by peculiar obligations. It is no small thing that an heritage
has been found for you in Britain. You are not the children of savages,
mingling in their barbarous manners.
 II. IS NOT GOD ABLE TO FILL UP, THROUGH ALL FUTURE PERIODS, THE RELATIONS TO
WHICH HE INVITES YOUR NOTICE? He offers Himself as a Father and as a Guide. His
power, His wisdom, and His goodness will support the titles.

III. DOES NOT THE SEASON OF YOUTH NEED SUCH A FATHER AND SUCH A GUIDE?
What can preserve the morals of youth? Shall the frail bark live in the tempest? Shall
flames surround a military magazine, and not produce an explosion? Can a lamb
make its way through a herd of wolves?

IV. MAY NOT THE SEASON OF YOUTH BE THE ONLY ONE THAT SHALL DISPLAY SUCH
ADVANTAGES AS ARE ATTACHED TO IT? You know not that you shall survive this age;
that you are under sentence is felt by yourselves, and sometimes lamented. Can you
charm death away? Can you obtain a momentary respite? (Evangelist.)

An address to youth

I. Youth needs a guide.

1. We are expressly assured by the prophet, That the way of man is not in
himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. And if this be true
of old travellers who have long been moving Zion-ward, how much more of
those who are only beginning to start!
2. There is one kind of knowledge in which the young must be deficient--that
which is derived from trial, and which we call experience.
3. Now, too, the passions and appetites begin to rage in their violence. These
becloud the understanding, and prevent reflection; and rendering them
averse to reproof and impatient of control, urge them on, and plunge them
into a thousand improprieties and embarrassments.

II. GOD IS READY TO BECOME YOUR LEADER, and it is your duty and privilege to
place yourselves under His direction. He is infinitely wise, and cannot lead you
astray. He has conducted millions; and the wayfaring man, though a fool, has not
erred under His direction. He is infinitely powerful. He can support you under the
heaviest burdens, deliver you from every adversary, and make all things work
together for your good. He is infinitely kind. He will bear with your infirmities, and
sympathise with you in all your troubles. And He is infinitely faithful: not a word
shall fail of all that He has spoken.

III. HOW YOU ARE TO ENGAGE HIS ATTENTION. Cry unto Him. This familiar
expression intends prayer and supplication; and it prevents you from using as an
excuse for the omission of the duty--that you are not masters of words, and cannot
deliver yourselves in proper language. For what is prayer? Is it not the desire of the
heart towards God? If you cannot pray--cannot you cry unto Him?

IV. THERE ARE PARTICULAR SEASONS IN WHICH HE EXPECTS TO BE SOUGHT AFTER BY

THE YOUNG, and from which He dates the expostulation--Wilt thou not from this
time, etc.
 1. When they leave the house of their friends, and the wing of their relations.
2. When bereaved of their parents.
3. At the commencement of a new period of life.
4. When the young see friends or companions carried off by a premature death.
5. At times of peculiar convictions and impressions. (W. Jay.)

Youth encouraged to seek unto God

I. The import of this language.

1. Gratitude.
2. Confidence.
3. Prayer.
4. A determined compliance with Gods will.

II. The force of the appeal made by God.

1. Tender expostulation.
2. Seasonable admonition.
3. As arising from events which point out most clearly your need of an interest
in the Divine favour. (R. Winter, D. D.)

God to be chosen as a Guide by the young

I. You greatly need some faithful and effective guidance in the shaping of your
lives.
1. Because the path of duty and of safety is often exceedingly difficult to find.
Often, when determining what you are bound to accept as duty or to receive
as truth, you have many circumstances to consider, many probabilities to
estimate, many opposing arguments to weigh. While the general direction in
which you are to move, if you intend to live wisely, is obvious enough, you
may still find perplexities at every point, to extricate yourself from which will
try, perhaps baffle, your utmost wisdom, who is sufficient for these things?
2. Because your own strong impulses are likely to mislead you. It is easy to
believe that to be right or useful which accords with inclination. It is hard to
think that to be obligatory, or best, to which the feelings are averse, and
which involves the necessity of self-denial.
3. Because there are many who will studiously seek your ruin.
(1) There are found even in the best conditions of society, the openly
debased and vicious.
(2) Besides these, there are many--corrupt in heart--who will seek to reach
you with influences fitted to destroy your virtuous sentiments, and
principles, and ultimate well-being.
4. Because so many are continually ruined. Where many fall, there is reason that
all should fear.
 II. The reasonableness, the wisdom, of making God your guide.
1. You owe it to God Himself thus to honour Him with your confidence. It is His
right.
2. God alone can afford you a sufficient guidance. Where can you find another to
whose care and leading you can safely and without anxiety, commit the
infinitely precious interests of your being?

III. When should Gods offered guidance be accepted? From this time.
1. The present is a practicable time--a time in which without hindrance God may
be intelligently and cordially accepted as a guide.
2. The present is the very time that God Himself proposes. Remember now thy
Creator.
3. It is at the present time that your need of the blessing in question is becoming
manifest and urgent.
4. The present may not improbably be the only time in which you will have it in
your power to secure the Divine guidance (Pro 1:24-29). (Ray Palmer, D. D.)

Divine guidance for lifes journey

Rev. Mark Guy Pearse says: I have read somewhere of one of our naval officers
who sailed from Mexico round the Cape Horn to Rio, a distance of eight thousand
miles, and for ninety days neither touched land nor scarcely saw a sail. At last he
judged himself to be some twenty miles from Rio, and lay-to for the night. The next
morning it was a dense fog, and he came on very cautiously, and when the fog
suddenly lifted there in front of them rose the well-known Sugar-loaf Rock at the
entrance of Rio Harbour. Thus it is that in spite of the great and wide sea where no
landmarks or guide marks are, where are restless tides and currents and changeful
winds, yet heaven stoops to teach men if they will be taught. The sun in the heavens
gives every day its unerring counsel, the stars come out at night to whisper their
cheery assurance. So He bringeth men to their desired haven. Now, if men can
believe that, and so believe it as to trust themselves to it, I do not wonder that any
can doubt that heaven bends over us to teach us where we are and whither we are
going. If it is scientific to believe that heaven can grade us over the great sea, it does
seem to be just simple common sense to think that heaven can lead us safe.
God the best Guide
The sailor, out on the restless sea, has one unfailing star to which he can always
look with confidence, knowing that it will always be found at the same place. He may
perhaps admire the brilliancy of Venus, or look with wonder at the ever-changing
moon, but when he wants to take his bearings he looks at the unfailing,
unchangeable polar star. Thank God that we have an unfailing Guide that will
remain the same when the heavens have passed away. He, our Lord and Master, is
the one absolutely unfailing star of hope to which we can look with implicit
confidence.

JER 3:5
 Thou hast spoken and done evil things as thou couldest.

The limitation of evil

I. SOME OF THE RESTRAINING INFLUENCES OF LIFE. As thou couldest. By many

considerations we are restrained from fulfilling the evil impulses and designs of
which we are conscious; our potential wickedness is not allowed to become actual.
1. There is the restraint imposed by revelation. The possession of Gods Word
was a grand discipline to the people of Israel. To know the moral perfections
of God, to discern the moral significance of human life, to possess the moral
law expressed with such clearness, fulness, and force, was a rare privilege.
This kept Israel back from the things of lust and cruelty and shame which
defiled and destroyed their heathen neighbours. Are we not today restrained
by the same gracious influence? Our poet speaks of the silver streak that
comes between us and the Continent, delivering our nation from fears, wars,
and contagions. Is not that revelation which is in our hands a silver streak
coming between us and contemporaneous paganism?
2. There is the restraint imposed by grace. The direct Divine action on our mind,
will, conscience, feeling. This was the master-restraint of the antediluvian
world. As a horse is held in by bit and bridle, as a ship on some rocky coast is
held by her anchor, so have we all in dangerous clays been restrained by the
Spirit of grace. Let men quench that Spirit, and the disastrous consequence
is soon revealed.
3. There is the restraint imposed by society. Our civilisation, which is the grace
of God organised, is full of restraining influences to which we owe far more
than we sometimes think. The civil law. Public opinion. Social etiquette.
Business. Domesticity. If it should be suggested that the laws, institutions,
and properties of society which forbid excess are themselves expressions of
the moral sense, it will at once be palpable to most that these
circumscriptions are dictated by fear, policy, and selfishness rather than by
any love of righteousness for its own sake. That one wolf holds another wolf
in check must not be construed to mean that we are a flock of lambs.

II. Notwithstanding the restraints of life, we discover the wickedness of our

nature by going as far as possible in the direction of transgression. Israel hitherto
had abstained from the extreme acts of transgression which would have involved
immediate retribution, but they showed their disposition by playing with the fire, by
trifling on the edge of the abyss. So in these days we show what we really are by
going as far as we dare or can in actual disobedience. We go as far as our material
will permit. As thou couldest. As thou couldest with impunity. We are
intemperate, with a due regard to our health; freer indulgence would destroy us, and
that is not what we mean. We are uncharitable, with a due regard to our reputation;
we must not infringe the law of libel. We are ambitious and vain; but our ostentation
must be limited by considerations of pride and covetousness. As thou couldest with
decency. We must not qualify our reputation; we must not be guilty of bad manners,
bad form, bad taste. As thou couldest with advantage. Carrying out unrighteousness
right up to the point where it ceases to be lucrative, and breaking it off just there.
And let none conclude that sins toned down by such considerations are of less
malignant quality, or less offensive before God, than are sins of a more violent or
exaggerated order.

III. Many would at once proceed to greater lengths of wickedness if the restrictive
influences of life were withdrawn.
1. Note the extent to which men resist these saving influences. As some
engineers are wishful to drive a tunnel under the Channel and establish
immediate relations with the Continent, so men are busy in all directions
ingeniously attempting to evade the silver streaks which heaven has
mercifully placed between them and the excesses of passion and appetite.
The criticism of the Bible in the literary world, the impatience felt with it in
the individual life, are frequently nothing more than a revolt against its noble
righteousness. We fret at the narrowness of the way which leadeth unto life.
In the name of free thought, of a free press, of free restitutions, the nude m
art must be encouraged, outspoken writings protected, sexual life must be
unfettered. With what strange infatuation do we rebel against and seek to
escape the crystal deep which God has established between us and ruin!
2. The second sign of the irregularity and inordinativeness of our desire is found
in the popularity of certain imaginative literature Modern society has put
distinct and authoritative limits to many forms of indulgence; but human
nature shows its old quality unchanged, for when it can no longer gratify
itself in the actual world it betakes itself to the ideal world.
Conclusion--
1. Let us recognise the glory of Gods preventing grace. The Dutch call the chain
of dykes which protects their fields and their firesides from the wild sea, the
golden border. Gods grace directly affecting our heart, or expressed in the
constitution of society and the circumstances of life, is a golden border
shutting out a raging threatening sea of evil.
(2) Let us confess the folly of our self-righteousness. The consciousness of a
self-righteousness often stands in the way of men attaining the
righteousness which is of God, but the foregoing reflections show how
little our self-righteousness is worth. Looking into our heart, we know
ourselves to be worse than the world takes us to be. As Victor Hugo
expresses it, Our dark side is unfathomable . . . One of the hardest
labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which
it is difficult to efface. Almost all our desires, when examined, contain
what we dare not avow.
(3) We see the necessity and urgency of the grace which converts and
perfects. It is by no means wholly satisfactory that we are kept by
restraining grace; the grace which converts us into a new self is what we
must most earnestly covet and pursue. Christianity brings us a motive of
unparalleled grandeur; it fills the soul with the highest visions,
convictions, loves, ambitions. And there is a sublime concurrence of
forces in its motive. (W. L. Watkinson.)

The sinners desperate depravity

 I. God in His providence has surrounded the sinner with many circumstances
operating powerfully to modify human character.
1. Education. This makes Christendom differ from the dark places of the earth,
which are full of the habitations of cruelty.
2. Human law. Look at some country in a state of anarchy. Look at some city or
village where law is suspended. Look at France, while under the reign of
terror, when law was abrogated, and see one company after another pass
under the guillotine; and the executioners of today the victims of tomorrow;
and, tell us, is not character greatly modified by municipal law?
3. The law of God. If men have no other belief in it, but that which may be
denominated the faith of history, it still greatly modifies human character.
4. The troublesome supervision of conscience. This everlasting censorship, while
it has held men back from sin, has been hated, warred against, scowled upon,
by the whole human family.
5. The whole Gospel has modified human character beyond all calculation. It so
commends itself to their reason, and applies such power to their consciences,
that it becomes exceedingly difficult to understand it. It is so tender,
majestic, commanding, and reasonable, that it for a time melts and overawes
many who ultimately reject its provisions.
6. All the Gospel institutions--every thing associated with Christian worship
operates in modifying human character, and rendering it in appearance
better than it is.
7. The desire of heaven has the same effect. None, perhaps, are so abandoned as
not to hope that they may, after all, live and be happy after death.
8. The fear of hell
9. The expectation of judgment.
10. Public sentiment.
11. Domestic affection. The silken cords which entwine round the family circle
prevent the commission of many a crime.

II. By these circumstances every sinner is actually restrained in his wickedness

and held down in his downward career.
1. Men are uneasy under these circumstances, which shows them to be
restraints. Let men be unrestrained, and they will be easy. It is only pain of
some kind that renders them uneasy, and willing to change their position.
Hence they will not come to the light, lest their deeds should be reproved.
2. Men are constantly trying to alter their circumstances. But they are too
indolent by nature to try to alter their circumstances, unless they are
circumstances of restraint.
3. When men at length alter their circumstances in any of these respects, they
often show out a worse character; manifesting what they would have been
before, if they might, if these restraints had been sundered and they let loose
upon the world.
4. When these restraints are all removed, men are uniformly far more wicked
than if they had not been imposed.
 III. Every sinner does make the attempt and succeeds as far as God will let him to
sunder these ligatures that would hold him fast to reason, hope, and heaven.
1. See how he breaks over and breaks through the restraints of education. He
Cries to throw off what he knew of God, and all he had learned of the
Saviour, and of the operations of the Holy Spirit; all he had learned of the
operations of the Godhead, in the history of the Church. And when he cannot
forget, he raves at his own recollections.
2. When he has tried for a time, but has tried in vain, to retrace the process of
education, he finds himself reined in by human laws. If he cannot forget God,
perhaps he can snap asunder the power of human control. He can evade all
human ties. He can rise above the law, and tread it down like the mire of the
street. Or he can violate its precepts and despise its regulations, and hold on
and hold out in despite of all its sanctions, presuming in his heart that God
will not know, neither will the Almighty consider it. Thus he blesses himself
in his own delusion, and trusts for safety in his own righteousness. But he
meets with more disturbance yet.
3. From the law of God. Impenitent and unbelieving, he has read in that law
what, if he cannot put down, he is a ruined man: Thou shalt have no other
gods before Me. Thus is dashed, at the first stroke, the whole fabric of a dark
and fatal idolatry. If man worships his money, or his merchandise, or his
farm, or his friend, or anything but God, or gives anything else his supreme
affection, even if he does not professedly worship it, he is condemned of God.
And He adds, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
But how unfashionable it would be to care about this commandment, and let
the apprehension that God will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name
in vain, produce a serious moment, or a pang of distress!
4. Not quite so easily does he dispose of the troublesome supervision of
conscience. This vicegerent of Heaven stays often many a month after open
war is declared. It sometimes will hold close conference with the heart,
although the heart may wish to be alone. It will not go to sleep in the grave: it
will watch, even while the wretch is dying, to secure the honour of God, and
gather courage for a fresh attack just by the dying pillow And the agony of its
first onset in the unseen world, hard by the place of dying, devils cannot
know. For they have never spurned a dying Saviour, and they have never
died. But all the embrasures that can be opened upon the soul by this moral
avenger must be closed, or its eternal thunders will be heard and felt.
5. But still he has a slight conflict with the institutions of the Gospel. Every
church-going bell fills his conscience with guilt, and each return of the day of
rest reminds him of a mothers prayers. He must pervert its holy design, or
writhe under the lashes of a guilty conscience.
6. The hardened sinner would dislodge himself from all thought of heaven or
fear of hell. And yet these are very powerful ligatures, and often the last to be
sundered. When men think of relinquishing heaven, they sometimes forget,
that awakening previous question, If I abandon the thought of heaven,
where shall I then be? What means that worm which never dies? What mean
those chains of darkness--and that gnashing of teeth--and that quenchless
fire?
7. The sinner must have broken through all the restraints of public sentiment,
 before we can know how bad he would be; and this ligature he tries to snap
asunder. But he will find that public very populous, before he gets through.
After he has gone his round with mortals, and has learned not to care what
men think of his conduct, he must cease, too, to care what is thought of his
deeds in heaven.
8. There yet remains to be noticed one of the most powerful motives of restraint,
the domestic affections. It is impossible to guess what men would be, till they
throw off the hold, for instance, that a mother has upon a profligate son. (D.
A. Clark.)

JER 3:6-11
Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also.

Comparative criminality

I. State this decision of the Lord.

1. Israel, from the time they became a distinct nation, cast off God; therefore,
given into Assyrian captivity and divorced by God.
2. Judah had retained the worship of God, but revelled in idolatry.
3. Because of their apparent superiority, Judah would scarcely own her
relationship to Israel.
4. Though their sins were ostensibly less, they were committed with tenfold
aggravations. Their advantages had been greater; larger number of prophets
sent them; enjoyed stated ordinances; presence of God in their midst (in
Temple).

II. CONFIRM THIS DECISION OF THE LORD. Specious insincerity is worse than open
profaneness, because--
1. It argues a deeper depravity of heart.
2. It casts more dishonour upon God.
3. It does more extensive injury to man. Address--
(1) Those who are careless about religion.
(2) Those who profess religion. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

Judah hath not turned unto Me with her whole heart, but feignedly:--
Hypocrisy
The word feignedly is literally, with a lie. See the picture: here is one figured as a
penitent woman, who comes to pray--in other words, to tell lies in the sanctuary,
and to heap up falsehoods upon the altar where the fire has gone out. But is this
possible? It is not only possible, it is actual, it is the history of today. Could we but
see things as they really are, we should see that the largest figure amongst many
competitive figures is that of hypocrisy. That admits of many colours and many
definitions and modifications. All hypocrisy is not the same as to external attitude
and bulk and colour. How subtle it is! It likes a little prayer; it does not object to go
where the music is good, and where the preaching is pointless; it can speak
smoothly, when it is full of anger; it can promise musically, and disappoint
mockingly and triumphantly; it can sit like a saint, whilst its heart is far away or is
plotting mischief. There is, then, a return to God which is no return; there is a going
to Church which is not going to church; there is a piety which is impious; there is a
calling to God as Father which God Himself replies to ironically, as if men would call
Him anything to flatter Him into the suspension of His judgment or the conferring
of an immediate favour. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 3:12-15
Return, thou backsliding Israel.

The backsliders return

I. The invitation to return.

1. From one who
(1) has been wronged (Jer 3:13);
(2) might therefore justly be angry;
(3) but is merciful (Jer 3:12).
2. To one who
(1) has been grossly disobedient;
(2) has been equally ungrateful;
(3) is reaping consequences of disobedience and ingratitude.

II. THE CONDITION OF RETURN. Confession is the condition of return, because--

1. Genuine confession of sin can proceed only from genuine contrition for sin,
which is not unfrequently brought about (Luk 15:17) by a comparison of the
lamentable consequences of backsliding, with happiness previously enjoyed.
2. Godly sorrow or genuine contrition worketh repentance to salvation not to
be repented of; i.e. it finds relief only in that confession which is the
condition of return. True repentance involves--
(1) Contrition for sin against God.
(2) Confession of sin to God.
(3) Return from sin towards God (Act 20:21).

III. Results of the return.

1. Gods anger will be averted (Jer 3:12).
2. God will Himself escort the wanderer home.
3. A happy future. Comprising
(1) life under a rule which can commit no errors, legislative or judicial (Jer
3:15);
 (2) a promise that the restored shall not walk any more after the
imagination of their evil heart (Jer 3:17), the cause of their backsliding.
(H. A. Hall, B. D.)

Return! Return!
1. It is a fearful thing that a believer should backslide.
(1) Such mercy has been shown to him.
(2) Such love has been enjoyed by him.
(3) Such prospects lie before him.
(4) Such comfort is sacrificed by his backsliding.
2. It is a wretched business for the man himself, since by it nothing is gained,
and everything is endangered.
3. It is injurious to the whole church to which the backslider belongs.
4. It is mischievous to the outside world.
5. What is the immediate duty of the backslider? the immediate remedy for his
backsliding?--Return.

I. Wonder awakened by the call.

1. The usual jealousy of love.
2. The abundance of the sin (Jer 3:2).
3. The obstinate continuance in evil, notwithstanding chastisements (Jer 3:3).
4. The refusal of tender persuasion (Jer 3:4).
5. The perversion of mercy (Jer 3:5).
6. The warnings which had been despised (Jer 3:6-11). It is a great increase of
iniquity when we perceive the suffering which it causes others, and yet
persevere m it ourselves.

II. Memories aroused by the call.

1. Does it not remind you of other days?
(1) When you first came to Jesus.
(2) When you were happy with other believers.
(3) When you could teach and warn others.
(4) When you began to go aside, a little.
(5) When you have sinned grievously through this backsliding.
2. Indulge these memories till they affect your heart.

III. Reasons urged for obeying the call.

1. It is God Himself who utters it.
2. Anger will be removed (Jer 3:12).
3. Love continues (Jer 3:14).
4. Healing will be given (Jer 3:22).
 IV. Directions given to make obedience to the call easy.
1. Only acknowledge thine iniquity (Jer 3:13). What a simple matter!
2. Lament the evil (Jer 3:21).
3. Own the sad result (Jer 3:25).
4. Trust in God for restoration (Jer 3:23).
5. Heartily renew allegiance (Jer 3:22).

V. Promises made to those answering to the call.

1. Special guidance (Jer 3:14).
2. Suitable food (Jer 3:15).
3. Spiritual insight (Jer 3:16-17).
4. Childlike spirit (Jer 3:19). (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Backsliding
Let us have up the backsliders, and ask them why they slid back. Of course they
have excuses. All wrongdoers have. You interview any defaulting bank officer, etc.,
and they will tell you a tale of sweet and childlike artlessness to account for their
weakness, as they will call it.
1. I was deluded into being confirmed by the urgent solicitations of the rector, or
my parents, or my Sunday school teacher. I was over-persuaded by my wife
or my friends. I acted hastily. Now just put this into plain English and look at
it. You were deluded into an attempt to rise to a higher plane. You were over-
persuaded to strive to be a better: man or woman. You acted hastily in
resolving to strive to get the better of evil passions and ugly habits. How does
that sound?
2. My rector said that there would be a great comfort in being a communicant,
that it would bring a peaceful conscience, and a joy in life, and a satisfaction
of heart. Now I did not find it so. After I became a communicant, my old bad
feelings returned, and I gave way often to evil thoughts, words, and deeds,
and the world did not change, and I was not very different, and so I stopped
the whole thing. Now, if you had a very sick friend, and the doctor should
leave pills which if steadily taken would bring relief, what would you reply on
hearing your friend say after taking two or three, I feel no better, I will take
no more? You would reply: The doctor never said a dose or two would
answer. He said that if persevered in the pills would bring relief. Would you
blame the doctor or the medicine, if your friends bad symptoms still
continued?
3. It was such hard work. Why, there was no end to the care we had to take. We
had to watch our words all the time to see that we let out no scandalous or
ugly or impure ones, and our steps that we went nowhere which would be
likely to peril our Christian profession. We found that to be consistent we
had to struggle, and to meet opposition, and to go contrary to our own
wishes, and when we fell, it was so hard to get back, we got discouraged and
gave up. Young men have told me that, whom I saw, just to keep their places
in the store, working like very galley slaves, thinking no self-denial too great
to hold on there, rising early, going without sleep, hurrying through their
 meals, restraining their tempers, bearing patiently with troublesome
customers and overbearing employers. Do you not see the awful
inconsistency, the poor futility, of this excuse? (C. Locke, D. D.)

Israel invited to renew her marriage by repentance

I. God sends messengers of mercy and not of judgment (Jer 3:12).

II. God requires that they humble themselves before Him (Jer 3:13).

III. God urges the most affecting considerations, in order to prevail upon them.
1. The merciful disposition He felt towards them.
2. The relation under which He still regarded them.
3. The benefits which He was still ready to confer upon them. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

A proclamation from the King of kings

Backsliders are very many. Departing from the living God is no strange thing.
Many Christians are one while hot, and another lukewarm, and even cold. They are
diligent and fervent today, but idle and indifferent tomorrow. Even the best of
believers are not always at their best. Who among us has not had cause to make
confession that he has not kept up to his first love at all times; neither has his lamp
been always clearly burning?

I. THE PROCLAMATION: Go and proclaim these words towards the north, and say,
Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the Lord.
1. It was to be a proclamation, for God is King; and if His subjects rebel He does
not lose the rights of His sovereignty. He sends, therefore, to them a royal
message with all the power which belongs to the word of a king. Go and
proclaim.
2. This proclamation is sent to the worst of sinners, to the very basest of
backsliders. They broke their marriage bonds to the one living and true God,
and made themselves loathsome in His sight by the most detestable
idolatries. It is sad that there should have been such a race of backsliders;
but it is glorious to think that to such as these the message of Gods mercy
was sent.
3. The Israelitish people were not only the worst kind of backsliders, but they
had already reaped in a very large measure the result of their backslidings,
for they had been carried away captive. They had suffered the loss of all
things because they had departed from their God, and yet they had not
learned the lesson which affliction was meant to teach It was still needful to
call them to repentance, and God bade them return to Him: His
proclamation was to them.
4. I see some mercy, and that of no little kind, in the messenger who was sent to
deliver this message, for it was Jeremiah, that man of a broken spirit, who
could say of himself, I am the man that hath seen affliction.
 II. A PRECEPT. It is a very simple one, and as short as it is clear. It is given in the
proclamation,--Return, thou backsliding Israel.
1. Return,--be as you were; come back: repent, and do your first works. Hearken
this is the precept; return unto your Saviour; just as you are, come back to
Him. Come back as you came at first, with your sin acknowledged, looking to
His Cross for pardon. Did you grow too great, and think you could live
without your Saviour? Return! Did you dream of being so perfect that you
did not want His righteousness, for your own would suffice? Away with that
glittering bauble, that idle notion of thy perfection, and come back, and beat
upon thy breast, and say, God be merciful to me a sinner. Repent of thy
pride, and return again to thy Lord Jesus Christ.
2. Return at once. Delays are always dangerous, but never so dangerous as when
they are proposed by backsliders.
3. And come thou back with all thy heart. Let there be no mimic repentance; no
pretended returning. Thou shalt find the Lord if thou seek Him with all thy
heart, and all thy soul.
4. And mind that thou return practically; that is, that thy life shall be changed,
thy idols broken, thy omitted duties fulfilled with eagerness, neglected
means of grace pursued with fervour; that done which thou hast left undone,
and that evil forsaken into which thou hast gone with such headlong folly.

III. THE PROMISE. I will not cause Mine anger to fall upon you. See that anger,
like a black cloud, charged not with refreshing rain, but with fire flakes that shall
bum as they fall: ay, burn their way into the very core of your being, as with the fires
of hell. Not a flake of it shall burn you if you return unto your God. There is full, free,
and immediate forgiveness to be had. I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy
transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins. Return unto Me. This is a grand motive for
coming back: the sin that separates is put away. He will wash you thoroughly from
your iniquity, and cleanse you from your sin, and whatsoever you need He will give
to you, and He will not upbraid you. I find that the passage might be read, I will not
cause My face to fall upon you, meaning this--that if the child of God comes back,
God will not look angry at him any more. I will not cause My anger to fall upon you.
I will not even cause My face to fall at the sight of you; but I will receive you
graciously; I will in tender mercy put away your transgressions, and reveal My love
to you.

IV. The argument.

1. Here is, first, Gods mercy. Nothing delights God more than to forgive sin: at
this blessed work He is at home. He is happy at it; He finds pleasure in mans
turning to Him, and finding life. Mercy as His last-born attribute. Until sin
came there was no room for mercy--the mercy that forgives, and therefore
mercy is Gods Benjamin, the son of His right hand, and He delights to give
to it ten times as much as to His other attributes when they feast together. It
is the heaven of His heaven to receive a hell-black sinner to His heart, and
put away his sin. I am merciful, saith the Lord. Therefore come to Him,
and believe in His mercy; and doubt no longer, but lovingly receive what He
lovingly gives.
2. As for you who once knew Him, and loved Him, and rejoiced in Him, I want
 you just to dwell on that second argument, namely, marriage. Return, for I
am married unto you, saith the Lord. It is done, and though you do not
stand to it He does, the great transaction still stands on His part: though you
believe not, He abideth faithful. He has bought you with His blood, and the
price will never return into His veins. Wherefore, come back to Him.

V. THE ADVICE that He here gives as to how we are to return. He says, Only
acknowledge thine iniquity. Alas, I have so wandered! Acknowledge it. But I
have done it so many times! Acknowledge it. But I have wandered against light
and knowledge! Acknowledge it. It is not a hard thing to do, to get thee to thy
chamber, and before God confess thy faults. You have, first of all, to have a
knowledge of it, and then to acknowledge it. Feel thy sin, and then confess it. Be
convinced of it, and then plead guilty at the judgment seat. What am I to
acknowledge?
1. Your breach of covenant--that you have transgressed against Jehovah your
God.
2. Next acknowledge your greedy sin--that thou hast scattered thy ways to the
strangers under every green tree.
3. Confess also your hardness of heart. God has spoken, and you would not hear;
He has entreated, and you would not regard Him; He has come very near to
you, and you have turned your back upon Him.
4. Confess also your ingratitude. His voice, which is your Fathers voice, you
have not heard or obeyed. What unnaturalness! (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Love of the world

I. THE GROUND OF THE APPEAL. I am married unto you. A man to have slidden
back must at one time have been forward. He cannot have truly wandered from the
Lord, unless he has personally known Him. To those, therefore, who are the children
of God by faith in Christ Jesus is the appeal made, Turn, O backsliding children,
etc.

II. TO WHOM THE APPEAL IS ADDRESSED. The Christian who seeks first his worldly
advantage, and fails to see that his chief end is to glorify God, is led step by step
farther and farther from the Most High.

III. The appeal itself.

1. The context shows the spirit in which it is to be complied with (verse 13). First
must come confession. As the old proverb has it, Sensibility to a fault is half-
way to amendment.
2. In the text itself we have the appeal in one word--Turn.
3. The promise associated with this appeal (verse 23). This is a promise of
Almighty power. I remember hearing a brother who, when asked who
converted him, replied, God converted me, who else could do it? So may we
say of the healing of the backslider, Who but God can do it? Blessed be the
name of the Almighty, He promises to do it.
4. The language used by the backslider as setting forth the One to whom he
 returns (verse 22). (W. P. Lockhart.)

To backsliders

I. The nature of backsliding.

1. It is going back.
(1) Easily.
(2) Gradually.
(3) Silently.
2. It is generally preceded by--
(1) Pride (Pro 16:18).
(2) Vain confidence (Mat 26:33).
(3) Negligence (Mat 26:58).
3. A man may be--
(1) Enticed by sinful pleasures.
(2) Led back by sinful companions (1Ki 11:1-43).
(3) Driven back by sinful fears (Mat 26:69-74).

II. The misery of backsliding.

1. Heavy losses.
(1) Self-respect.
(2) Tender conscience.
(3) Sweetest enjoyments.
(4) Brightest hopes.
2. Severe disappointment. His holy expectations are lost, of what he might have
been and done for Christ, and the after rewards.
3. Terrible disgrace.
(1) Before the world, as a hypocrite.
(2) Before the Church, as the thief (Jer 2:12).
(3) Before God (Psa 51:3-9).

III. The remedy for backsliding. Return, etc.

1. Immediately.
(1) Delay makes your case worse.
(2) God is willing to pardon.
(3) The Church is waiting to receive you.
2. Humbly.
(1) Confessing sin.
(2) Abhorring sin.
(3) Forsaking sin.
3. Believingly. Remember--
 (1) The love of your espousals.
(2) The individuality of your relationship.
(3) The love of your husband.
(4) Your own duty. (The Study.)

The mercifulness of the Divine nature

When the Duke of Argyll was taken in rebellion in Scotland, and brought before
James the Second, the King said to him, You know that it is in my power to pardon
you? It is reported that the prisoner answered, It may be m your power, but it is
not in your nature to forgive,--a speech which, whether true or not, cost him his
life. He died like a stoic, executed at Temple Gate. What a contrast to the Divine. To
err is human, to forgive is Divine.
I am married unto you.

The relationship of marriage

These be dainty words--a grateful anodyne for a troubled conscience. Such
singular comfort is fitted to cheer up the soul, and put the brightest hue on all her
prospects. The person to whom it is addressed hath an eminently happy position.
God speaks to His Church in her most abject estate, and though He does not fail to
rebuke her sin, to lament it, and to make her lament it too, yet still in such an estate
He says to her, I am married unto you. Oh! it is grace that He should be married to
any of us, but it is grace at its highest pitch, it is the ocean of grace at its flood tide,
that He should speak thus of backsliding children.

I. Consider the relationship which is here spoken of.

1. The affinity of marriage, though exceedingly near of kin, is not one of birth.
Marriage is not a relationship of natural birth but of voluntary contract or
covenant. Such is the relationship which exists between the believer and his
God. Whatever relation there was originally between God and man, it was
extinguished by the fall. Now, Christian, just contemplate what you were,
and the degraded family to which you belonged, that you may magnify the
riches of His grace who espoused you in your low estate, and hath so bound
Himself with all the pledges of a husband that He saith, I am married unto
you.
2. Marriage union is the result of choice. The first choice is with God. That
choice was made, we believe, before the foundation of the world. God never
began to love His people. He saw them in the glass of His decrees; He
foresaw them, with His eye of prescience, in the mass of creatureship, all
fallen and ruined; but yet He beheld them, and pitied and loved them. They
shall be Mine, saith the Lord. Here we are all agreed; and we ought to be all
agreed upon the second point, namely, that we also have chosen our God.
3. Marriage is cemented by mutual love. Where there is not this mutual
affection, it deserves not the name of marriage. Need I talk to you of the love
of God? It is a theme we are scarcely competent to talk of.
4. This marriage necessitates certain mutual relations. I cannot say duties, for
the word seems out of place on either side. How can I speak of the great God
making pledges of faithfulness? and yet with reverence, let me word it so, for
 in my vocabulary I have hardly words to set it forth. When God becomes a
husband, He undertakes to do a husbands part--to nourish, to cherish, to
shield, to protect, to bless those with whom He condescends, in infinite
mercy, to enter into union. And now, what upon our side? The wife has to
reverence her husband, and to be subject unto him in all things. That is
precisely our position towards Him who has married us. Let His will be our
will. Let His wish be our law.
5. It also involves mutual confidences. In a true marriage, the husband and wife
become one. Henceforth their joys and their cares, their hopes and their
labours, their sorrows and their pleasures, rise and blend together in one
stream. The Lord our God has said it. The secret of the Lord is with them
that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant. Now, Christian, just see:
you stand in the relation of a spouse, and you must tell your very heart out to
Christ.
6. This marriage implies fellowship in all its relations. Whatsoever a husband
possesses becomes his wifes. She cannot be poor if he be rich; and what little
she has, whatever it may be, comes to him. When Christ took His people, He
gave them all He had. Now, it is saying but very little when I add, that,
therefore, whatever we have, belongs to Him--oh! it is so little, so very little,
but one wishes it were more.
7. The very crown of marriage is mutual delight and complacency. The wife of a
Persian nobleman, having gone to a feast which was given by the great
Darius, was asked by her husband whether she did not think that Darius was
the finest man in the world. No, she said, she did not think so; she never saw
any one in the world who was comparable to her husband. And doubtless
that is just the opinion which a husband forms of his wife and a wife of her
husband where the marriage is such as it should be. Now, certainly Christ
sets a very high store upon us. He does not see us as we are, but in His
infinite grace He sees us as we are to be. The sculptor says he can see a bust
in a block of marble, and that all he has to do is to chip away the extra
marble, and let the bust appear. So Christ can see a perfect being in every
one of us, if we are His people; and what He is about with us day by day is
taking off the excrescences, making us to be like Himself. And as for us, who
are His people, I am sure we can say that there is no delight which can equal
communion with Christ.

II. HOW FAR DO YOU AND I EXPERIMENTALLY UNDERSTAND THIS? Oh! blind eyes,
that cannot see beauty in the Saviour! Jesus! they are besotted, they are mad, who
cannot love Thee! It is a strange infatuation of the sons of men to think that they can
do without Thee, that they can see any light apart from Thee, Thou Son of
Righteousness, or anything like beauty in all the gardens of the world apart from
Thee, Thou Rose of Sharon, Thou Lily of the Valley! O that they knew Thee! But,
Christian, I speak to you. Surely you know something about this, that God is married
to you? If you do, can you not say with me, Yes, and He has been a very faithful
husband to me? Well, then, speak well of Him, speak well of Him! Make this world
hear His praise! As for you who do not know Him, I should like to ask you this
question, and do you answer it for yourselves. Do you want to be married to Christ?
Do you wish to have Him? Oh! then, there will be no difficulties in the way of the
match. If thy heart goes after Christ, He will have thee. Whoever thou mayst be, He
win not refuse thee. Oh! He seeks thee! And when thou seekest Him, that is a sure
sign that He has found thee. Though thou mayst not have found Him, yet He has
found thee already. The wedding ring is ready. Faith is the golden ring which is the
token of the marriage bond. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

One of a city.--
One by one
The revelation of God to man is progressive. A revelation depends upon the power
of the person revealing to give, and equally upon the power of the person receiving
to receive. God could not, if He would, reveal the whole truth concerning Himself to
the human race at the outset--not because He was unable to impart, but because the
human race was unable to accept. The revelation of God in human history has
therefore been a gradual and a progressive revelation. The wise men of all nations
have always believed in one God. But there was one nation in which the wise men
were wise enough to believe that the common people should also be taught that
there is one God; and so, while in all the surrounding nations the doctrine of the
unity of God was an esoteric doctrine--that is, a doctrine reserved for the few--in the
Hebrew nation the prophets took this interior and secret doctrine, and, by many a
trope and figure, and by many a direct affirmation, gave it to the common people.
And thence they went on to learn and to teach that this God is a righteous God. The
gods of the nations about were either unmoral or immoral; but the doctrine of the
prophets, of the Old Testament was, God is a righteous God, deals righteously,
expects righteousness. Connected with that was the teaching that God stands in
relation, not to the whole human race, for that was too large a doctrine for them to
accept at first, but in special relation to the Jewish race; and then that He did stand
in relation to the other people also, but in the relation to the other people of a judge,
and in the relation to the Jewish people of a Father. And so grew up, in the earlier
period of Jewish history, the notion that God had chosen one nation, and was
dealing with that nation--guiding, guarding, inspiring, redeeming it. Time passes on.
This nation sins more and more, and the prophets see the gathering clouds--
gathering for its destruction. They see the Assyrians and the Chaldeans on the north
and east gathering against the nation, and they begin to say, Although you are Gods
chosen people, God will punish you and carry you away captive; but still Israel is
Gods nation, and God will save Israel; though He carries you away captive, He will
so discipline you that He will bring you back as a nation, and as a nation you shall be
saved and redeemed. Time went on another hundred years or so, and the
prophesied disaster drew near, and Jeremiah came, and he brought another
message. He said, No, this nation is not to be saved; but God will gather out of the
nation here one and there another; He is married to the nation, but the nation as a
nation He has given up as hopeless; nevertheless, He will take one out of a city, and
two out of a family, and will bring them to Zion; He will deal with them one by one.
When Christ came upon the earth, He met the old impression that Israel was to be
treated as a nation, and it almost seems at first as though He shared that hope; but
His later message was, God will take away the kingdom from Israel; and will give it
to a new people that will bring forth the fruits thereof; this people He will gather one
at a time from all the world, gathering them into the one great Israel of God.

I. GOD AS A CREATOR AND RULER OVER NATURE DEALS IN INDIVIDUAL WAYS. Mr.
Ruskin has called attention with great eloquence to the difference between the old-
time workman and the new-time workman. The old-time workman worked
individually, himself carved the whole piece, whatever it was, and so put himself into
that carving; it was the product of his hand not only, but of his brain and his heart,
and was the manifestation of himself. The modern industrial products are the
products of machinery They are multiplied and cheapened, but they are no longer
individual. Now, men think of God as one who puts a great machinery in operation,
and that works out the product. But not so does the Bible represent Him, and not so
does modern philosophy represent Him. God is not a first great cause. He is the
perpetual, eternal, everlasting, and only cause, the cause that lies beneath all
phenomena, so that every product of nature is a new and different manifestation of a
God who is in every phenomenon. This is the reason for the infinite variation in
phenomena. God never made two faces alike; never made two blades of grass alike;
nothing that ever came from Gods hand, was exactly the repetition of anything else
that ever came from Gods hand.

II. As in nature, so in His dealings with humanity.

1. He gives to each individual in the Church and each citizen in the nation His
personal work. Humanity is not like a great army that is marching along in
serried rank, and if one man drops out another man can take his place; nor
like a factory in which a thousand men are working, and if one drops out
some one else can come in and carry on his work. It is individual and
personal work, and God comes to you, and says, I have something for you to
do, and if you do not do it, it will be left undone; there will be one vacancy,
one citizen left out of the assembly, one blank space in the page.
2. So He deals with each individual in all the discipline of life. He never sends a
tear, a heartache, a failure, what men call a disaster, except as He sees the
need for it. He knows what each soul wants, and to each one He adjusts the
medicine according to the necessity.
3. So, in all the administration of His love, God deals with you one by one. We
discuss the question of indiscriminate charity. The phrase is a contradiction
in terms. Charity is discrimination. Love cannot be undiscriminating. God
does not give His benefits by wholesale. God does not sound a trumpet when
He does His alms, to gather the people to receive them. In all His
benefactions, He deals with one at a time. My God shall supply all your
need--that is Pauls declaration. Special providences! There are no other. All
providences are special. God does not throw men out to the influence of
certain great generic laws and then interfere to help them on special
occasions. Gods loving kindness and tender mercies are over all His works.
Every life is guided and directed by the hand of an infinite love, if we only
will allow it to guide. (Lyman Abbott, D. D.)

JER 3:15
I will give you pastors according to Mine heart.
The character and teaching of Christs ministers

I. THEIR CHARACTER. To be a pastor after Gods heart, a man must not only
theoretically understand, but practically feel the truths he sets forth in his teaching.
How describe the burden of a guilty conscience, if he has never felt it himself? How
expatiate on the love and unfold the preciousness of a Saviour, whilst himself still
out of Christ? How exhort hearers to set affections on things above, when his own
thoughts are entirely absorbed by things below?

II. THEIR TEACHING. What they have found to be, by Gods blessing, useful to
themselves, they will bring before their people. They will not daub the wall with
untempered mortar, crying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace; but, will cry
aloud and lift up their voice like a trumpet, to warn the unconverted of their
danger, and convince them of their guilt. Nor will they show the disease without, at
the same time, declaring the remedy. They will prove to their hearers their
numberless shortcomings, in order that they may be led the more highly to prize the
Saviours merits. Conclusion--
1. Seek the increase of such pastors.
2. Help to provide for such pastors. (C. Clayton, M. A.)

The duty of a pastor

I. To feed the Church with knowledge and understanding. This is by preaching

the Gospel.
1. There is spiritual wisdom in understanding the mysteries of the Gospel, that
we may be able to declare the whole counsel of God, and the riches and
treasures of the grace of Christ unto the souls of men (Act 20:27; 1Co 2:1-4;
Eph 3:7-9).
2. Authority is required. What is authority in a preaching ministry? It is a
consequent of unction, and not of office.
3. Experience of the things preached.
4. Skill to divide the Word aright.
5. The knowledge and consideration of the state of the flock.
6. To be actuated by zeal for the glory of God, and compassion to the souls of
men.

II. Continual prayer for the Churches over which Christ has made them
overseers.
1. No man can have any evidence in his own soul, that he doth conscientiously
perform any ministerial duty towards his flock, who doth not continually
pray for them.
2. This is the way whereby we may bless our congregations.
3. What shall we pray for?
(1) For the success of the Word that we preach unto them.
(2) For the presence of Christ in all our assemblies.

III. To preserve the truth and doctrine of the Gospel that is committed to the
Church. What is required hereunto?
1. A clear apprehension in ourselves of those doctrines and truths which we are
 so to defend.
2. Love of the truth.
3. Let us take heed in ourselves of any inclination to novel opinions, especially
in, or about, or against such points of faith, as those wherein they who are
fallen asleep, found life, comfort, and power.
4. There is skill and ability required hereunto, to discover and be able to oppose
and confound the cunning sophistry of adversaries. Great prayer,
watchfulness, and diligence are required, that we may be able to attend unto
these things. And those who are less skilled may do well to advise with those
who are more exercised in them to give them assistance.
5. That we labour diligently for the conversion of souls. (John Owen, D. D.)

The true teacher

1. There are some teachers of religion who are teachers according to Gods
heart.
2. All such teachers are the gift of God.
(1) He prepares them for their office.
(2) He designates the sphere of their ministry
3. They are distinguished by the care and fidelity with which they minister to the
spiritual wants of their people. (E. Cooper, M. A.)

Pastors according to Gods own heart

I. What those qualifications are which render men pastors after Gods own heart.
1. Their being sent and commissioned by God.
2. Their being thoroughly instructed in the knowledge of Gods mind and will.
3. Their being exemplary in their conversation of the goodness and purity of
their own doctrine (1Ti 3:12).
(1) In word, that is, in observing a decent gravity in discourse.
(2) In conversation; a sweet and obliging deportment.
(3) In charity; a hearty goodwill to all men as we have opportunity.
(4) In spirit; that is, in an active zeal for the glory of God, and the good of
souls.
(5) In faith, that is, in an immoveable constancy and fidelity to our religion,
in holding fast the form of sound words, and contending earnestly for the
faith once delivered to the saints.
(6) In purity, that is, in abstaining from all fleshy lusts, from worldly
mindedness, intemperance, and wantonness.

II. How much such pastors do conduce to the glory, and beauty, and perfection of
the Church.
1. In soundness of faith, to which there is nothing can more conduce than pious
and learned pastors; who being not only purged from vicious affections, and
inspired with an hearty zeal for truth; but also accomplished with parts and
 learning to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and to separate the
innovations of false teachers from the ancient truths of Christianity, cannot
but be highly instrumental to the restoring the faith of their Churches,
wherever they find it corrupted and sophisticated, to its primitive lustre and
simplicity.
2. In purity of worship; for the end of all Church assemblies being to worship
God, and the worship of God consisting in a devout acknowledgment of the
infinite perfections of His nature, by such internal and external acts, as right,
reason, and revelation directs: all such as are truly devout, and sincerely
affected with the Divine perfections, must look upon themselves, as greatly
concerned to worship God, in such manner as is most suitable to His will and
nature. And this the pastors of the Church are more peculiarly concerned in,
being the guides of the public worship.
3. A Churchs glory and perfection consists also in the vigour of its discipline, in
the just and vigilant administration of the power of the keys, in admonishing
such as go astray, in excluding them the communion of the Church if they
continue obstinate, and readmitting them upon their repentance.
4. A Churchs glory and perfection consists in unity of communion and
affections, so that there be no schisms in the body, but that all its members,
being incorporate in the same communion, be knit and fastened to one
another by the ligaments of mutual love and charity; to which excellent effect
there is nothing in the world can more conduce than learned, prudent, and
pious pastors.
5. The glory and perfection of a Church consists also in sanctity of manners; to
promote which, also, nothing can be more conducive than pastors according
to Gods own heart.
(1) Their being commissioned from God to teach and govern His flock must
give their doctrine a very great authority in the minds of all that have any
reverence for God, and thereby render it more prevalent and effectual
(2) Their doctrine, supposing they are pious and learned, will be throughout
holy, and in all points tending to promote the interest of piety and virtue.
(3) Their holy doctrine will be enforced by their holy examples, which will
preach more effectually than their tongues. (John Scott, D. D.)

The constitution, character, and duties of the Gospel ministry

I. God is engaged by covenant to provide a perpetual public ministry for His

Church.
1. A public stated ministry in the Christian Church is a Divine institution.
2. It is the ordinance of God that a public ministry should be continued in His
Church unto the end of the world.
3. God hath covenanted with His Church to supply her congregations with a
public ministry--And I will give you pastors.
(1) Promises, made upon the footing of a permanent relation between God
and His Church, which have respect to a benefit of a permanent nature,
are to be understood as securing to the Church that benefit indefinitely
 throughout every period of time.
(2) Many promises delivered by the prophets were designed to refer
immediately to the New Testament Church; and were so applied by the
apostles of our Lord. Some of these refer to the Christian ministry (Isaiah
Iii. 6, 7, 10; Rom 10:14-15).
(3) The Redeemer, in whom the promises are made, and in whom they are
accomplished, has solemnly engaged never to leave His Church entirely
destitute of a public ministry. He walks amidst the golden candlesticks.
He holds the stars in His right hand. He gives power to His witnesses.

II. God hath set distinguishing marks upon the ministry, of which He approves--
Pastors according to Mine heart.
1. The pastor according to Gods heart has received a regular call to the ministry.
(1) The call of God to ecclesiastical office is inward, when there is a Divine
influence experienced upon the mind, inclining and commanding the
person to devote himself to the service of the Church.
(2) It is outward, when accompanied with external evidence for the
satisfaction of the Church. The inward call may satisfy a mans own
mind; but others must, in order to receive Him, have some external
evidence.
(a) Ordination constitutes the call of God to the ministry of
reconciliation in the Gospel Church (1Ti 3:1-7; Tit 1:5-9; Rom 10:15).
(b) Ordination to the holy ministry is to be performed by imposition of
hands (1Ti 5:22; 1Ti 4:14; Heb 6:2; Act 13:2-3).
2. The pastor according to Gods heart has a life corresponding to the functions
of his holy office.
(1) A ministry evidently impious will meet with few advocates. This evil can
be tolerated only in a Church which has far departed from truth and
holiness.
(2) The pious minister is constrained by the love of a crucified Saviour to
diligence in his sacred office. He perceives the danger of sinners; and,
anxious for their salvation, he warns them of it frequently and fervently.
From house to house he visits, examines, exhorts. In afflictions, he
soothes; in temptation, admonishes; in sickness, comforts; and in death,
resigns their departing spirits into the hands of that God who created
both him and them.
(3) The pastor, who is near the heart of God, is faithful to God and His
Church. He deals plainly with sinners, uninfluenced by their frowns or
their smiles.

III. The sum of pastoral duty is the edification of the Church.

1. The pastor according to Gods heart preaches to his congregation the Gospel
of Christ. This is the food which he diligently provides for immortal souls.
2. The pastor of whom God approves is in duty bound, from time to time, to
examine the religious state of his congregation.
3. It is the duty of the Christian pastor to administer the sacraments of the New
 Testament to the members of his Church.
4. It is the duty of a Christian minister to exercise authority over his flock. This
is necessary to their edification, and is implied in feeding with knowledge.
The power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven is in the hands of every
Christian minister. (A. MLeod, D. D.)

Pastors office no sinecure

To a person who regretted, to the celebrated Dr. Johnson, that he had become a
clergyman, because he considered the life of a clergyman an easy and comfortable
one, the Doctor made this memorable reply: The life of a conscientious clergyman
is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family
than he is able to maintain. No, sir, I do not envy a clergymans life as an easy life,
nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life.
The pastors obligation to feed the people
The Rev. Robert Hall of Bristol was asked what he thought of a sermon which had
been delivered by a proverbially fine preacher, and which had seemed to excite a
great sensation among the congregation: Very fine, sir, he replied, but a man
cannot feed upon flowers.

JER 3:16
The ark of the covenant of the Lord.

The ark of the covenant

When inward piety is low the externals of religion are frequently cried up. Those
who know nothing of God are the very people to exclaim concerning themselves and
their brethren, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these. The more
phylactery, the less sanctity. On the other hand, whenever the Spirit of God is largely
poured out, although the ordinances of God are carefully attended to, yet as external
things they are sure to be put into their proper place, and that proper place is a
secondary one.

I. The symbol reverenced.

1. The ark of the covenant was the object of great reverence, and very fitly so,
because it symbolised Gods presence, the presence of Jehovah, the living
God, in the midst of His people.
2. That presence of God meant blessing; for God was with His people in love to
them. The Lord abides not with His enemies, but with His chosen. So long as
He gave the token of His presence it was a sign that He had not cast them off
as hopeless.
3. The ark was held in reverence by the Israelites because it was their leader.
When the time came to march through the wilderness the ark went in the
forefront.
4. The ark was to the Israelites, after their wanderings were over, the fixed
centre of their nationality, even as while they were in the wilderness it had
 always been placed in the centre of the camp.
5. Marvel not that the men of Judah paid great reverence to this ark when, in so
many ways, it was a token for good to them. What they did to this ark is
mentioned in the text. First, they recognised it as the ark of the covenant of
the Lord. They were wont to say, The ark of the covenant of the Lord. They
spoke much of it, and prided themselves upon the possession of it. Nay, they
not only spoke of it: but they loved it; for we read, Neither shall it come to
mind, or as the margin has it, Neither shall it come upon the heart. In the
next place, they remembered it, as the text plainly informs us. If they were
captives they prayed in the direction in which the ark was situated; wherever
they wandered they thought of God and of the coffer which represented His
presence. Next, they visited it. On certain holy days they came from the
utmost ends of their land, in joyful companies, singing from stage to stage,
and making joyful holiday as they went up to the place where God did dwell
between the cherubim. Visiting it, they were accustomed also to speak highly
of it; for in the margin of your Bibles you will find, Neither shall they
magnify it any more. They used to tell to one another what the ark had
done; the glory that shone forth from it, the acceptance of the offering whose
blood was sprinkled upon it on the day of atonement, and the testimony
which was heard from between the cherubic wings.

II. THAT REVERENCE OBLITERATED. They were to say no more, The ark of the
covenant of the Lord. Yet that fact was to be a blessing. They were no more to speak
of the ark itself, because they would have that which the ark was intended to
foreshadow.
1. Our Lord Jesus by His coming has put out of His peoples thoughts the
material ark of the covenant, because its meaning is fulfilled in Him; and
this, first, in the sense of preservation. He said, Thy law is within My heart.
It was not within His heart alone, but within all. His life; His whole thoughts,
words, and acts went to make up a golden chest in which the precious
treasure of the perfect law of God should be contained.
2. Next, the ark signified propitiation; for over the top of the sacred box, which
held the two tables of the law, was the slab of gold called the mercy seat,
which covered all. When God looks down upon His law, He does not see it
nakedly, but He beholds it in the person of His Son. He sees it there perfectly
preserved, without taint or flaw of any kind, and He rejoices therein.
3. The next word is a very blessed one, and that is covenant. The ark was called
the ark of the covenant. Ah, how soon we should lose the sweet things of
God if we were under the covenant of works, and how soon we should miss
the gentle sovereignty of His shepherd rod! I thank God that in Christ Jesus
we have a covenant of grace which can never fail, and never can be broken,
and in Him we have all that our souls desire: pot of manna and rod of Aaron,
covenant provision and covenant rule we find in Him.
4. Because this ark was the ark of the covenant of God it was from it that He was
accustomed to reveal Himself, and so it is called the ark of testimony. We
say no more, The ark of the testimony, but we rejoice that God was made
flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, and saw the Father in
the Son.
 5. This ark also signified enthronement; for the top of the ark was, so to speak,
the throne of God. It was the throne of the heavenly grace. If you would see
the throne of God, behold the person of the Christ; for in Him dwelleth all
the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Oh, what a blessing to have such a throne
to come to--to Jesus Himself, who is the throne of the invisible God!
6. As it was the place of Gods enthronement, so it was the door of mans
approach. You and I need not speak of the ark of the covenant; for we have a
blessed way of approach. We do not come to Christ once in the year only, but
every day in the year, and every hour of the day.
7. The ark was the place of gracious power. On the top of the mercy seat stood
cherubic figures, types of angelic power, and of all the powers of providence
which God is pleased to use in the behalf of His people. Yet we will not speak
of the ark, neither will we remember it, neither will we visit it; for we see in
Christ Jesus that all the power of God is on our side: He is God with us,
and if God be with us, who can be against us?
8. The ark was much reverenced by the Jews, because it was the centre of their
nationality. Find me a dozen spiritual men, and describe their different
modes of thought; but let them sit together and begin to talk of the things of
God, and of the covenant of grace, and of the work of the Spirit in the soul,
and of the preciousness of the blood of Jesus, and you will see that they are
one. There is, there must be, an essential unity among those who are
quickened by the Spirit: and I rejoice that the name, the person, and the
work of Jesus are at this hour the centre of Christendom.

III. This reverence transferred.

1. Let us say that Jesus is our covenant. We are told, They shall say no more,
The ark of the covenant of the Lord. People must talk, it is natural to them--
what else are their tongues for? Let us, then, say concerning Christ that He is
the ark of the covenant of the Lord. Say this, say it often, nobody will rebuke
you; it is a subject upon which you may be as fluent as you please. This is a
kind of note of which the human ear, when once it is cleansed, never grows
weary.
2. The text takes you a step further; for it says of the original ark, Neither shall
it come to mind. or (I give the margin), Neither shall it come upon your
heart. Let Christ come upon your heart and dwell there. Oh, love the Lord,
alive His saints! You can love other things too much; but not your Lord.
3. And, next, if we should ever grow dull or cold at any time, let us take the third
step in the text, and let us remember the Lord. O memory, leave no other
name than that of Jesus recorded upon thy tablets.
4. The next thing is, let us visit Him. We cannot set out on journeys now to go to
Jerusalem on foot,--little bands of us together; yet let us visit Jesus. Let us
continually come to the mercy seat. No prayer, no power. The ark of the
covenant is gone when the people no longer come together to cry unto the
Lord.
5. The last thing is, Neither shall that he done any more; but the margin has it,
Neither shall that be magnified any more. Transfer your reverence, then,
and as you cannot magnify the literal mercy seat, come and magnify Christ,
who is the real mercy seat. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Christ, the true ark of the covenant

I. A MOST ALARMING AND UNWELCOME ANNOUNCEMENT. That the ark would

disappear, and another not be made. Israels safety and prosperity were connected
with the ark of covenant. By some regarded with superstitious awe rather than
reverential fear; yet by all as of incalculable value to the nations.

II. A bitter and irreconcilable loss.

1. Prophecy soon fulfilled.
2. Loss deeply lamented.

III. A surpassing compensation predicted.

1. Must have seemed incredible at the time; yet afterwards proved consolatory.
2. How was the prediction fulfilled? In the appearing of Christ, the antitype of
the ark.

IV. The realisation in Christ of the ark symbolised.

1. The Divine nearness.
2. The Deity bending mercifully over mere
3. The helpful and healing grace of God.
Conclusion--
1. Israelites who early became Christians, and enjoyed the presence of Christ on
earth, must have readily surrendered and forgotten the ark in the realisation
of Jesus and His tender grace.
2. Believers, though now not realising Christ bodily among them, experience His
Spirits indwelling, revealing Christ within.
3. Contrite sinners can rejoice in the tenderness, lowliness, and compassion of
Christ. (R. Gordon, D. D.)

JER 3:17
The throne of the Lord.

The Church Christs throne

1. Jerusalem had been of old the throne of God: the symbol of God rested on the
ark. Hence called the city of the Great King.
2. Jerusalem became the throne of God as never before when Emmanuel visited
her. Yet she rejected her King.
3. Christ by His death founded a kingdom in which His Church has become the
true throne of God.

I. IN THE CONVERSION OF SINNERS THE KINGLY POWER AND AUTHORITY OF CHRIST IS

MANIFESTED. Each case is a victory of Christ over the enmity of the carnal mind
and the resistance of hellish foes.

II. IN MAINTAINING HIS ASCENDENCY OVER THE LIVES AND AFFECTIONS OF HIS
CONVERTS. Law in their members at war with Him. The world strives to wrest them
from His rule. Satan strives to recover his lost power. But they are held in
obedience to Christ, and kept by the power of God unto salvation.

III. IN GOVERNING THE WORLD PROVIDENTIALLY FOR HIS CHURCHS ADVANTAGE.

Christ reigns as mediator: works all things for our good and His glory; and by, and
for, and from His Church He puts forth His power, that shall subdue all enemies
under His feet. How does Christs rule affect individual members of His Church?
1. To what extent can and may they enjoy personally the presence of their King?
Sits enthroned in their heart and affections individually.
2. Christ must hold unrivalled and unlimited sway and sovereignty over their
liven His kingship absolute: their affections undivided: they habitually and
entirely under the constraining influences of His love.
3. They will recognise that His care extends to every individual believer, sending
expressions of His kindness and love to each, and never--save in
faithfulness--afflicting them. (R. Gordon, D. D.)

JER 3:19
How shall I put thee among the children.

Put among the children

I. A most delightful condition of privilege and enjoyment.

1. A real and endearing relation, not a mere figure or shadow. Though all worlds
wait on His will, Gods heart is a Fathers heart; and its home, its place of joy
and singing, is among the children.
2. This relationship implies dependence. The two principles of trust and
obedience constitute the great requirements which the Head of the redeemed
family urges upon all His children.
3. The relation between child and parent implies solemn obligations. The
children of God are required to exhibit a character and conduct in harmony
with their illustrious relationship. The glory of the Father, the honour of His
name; the welfare of the whole household of faith; the furtherance of sacred
truth in the world are interests dear to their hearts. They are partakers of the
Divine nature, each one resembles the children of a king.
4. This relation implies the possession of privileges--If children then heirs, etc.
All that the Jew possessed in Canaan, all that Adam delighted to see in
Paradise, falls short of the expectations of the believer. The inheritance is
incorruptible, undefiled, and it fadeth not away.
 II. Some formidable difficulties in the way of conferring the blessings of sonship.
1. This relation between God and man is not natural By nature children of
wrath, etc.
2. Justice demands the infliction of the penalty of sire Mercy pleads for
compassion and forgiveness. In the courts of earthly sovereigns there is no
escape from the dilemma. The sovereign can punish, and thus inflict justice;
or pardon and show mercy. But in Christ all the requirements of law are
satisfied, while the freest manifestation of mercy is made.
3. The character and condition of the sinner himself. Shall the leper be brought
into companionship with the pure and the sound? Shall the outcast and the
profligate nestle with the virgin and the holy?

III. The solution of the difficulty and the process of attaining the full enjoyment
of the privilege. Thou shalt call Me, My Father.
1. Prayer is the birth cry of the soul. Like that first welcome sound by which the
mother knows she has a living child. Every kind of sorrow and distress have
driven men to their knees, but there are no prayers, for their fervour, like
those which are the fruit of conviction of sin.
2. The spirit of adoption. My Father. Not by the thunders of Sinai, or the
curses of Mount Ebal, are men preserved in Christ Jesus, but by the all-
powerful grace of the Holy Spirit.
3. The salvation of a child of God is evinced by the spirit of perseverance. (W. G.
Lewis.)

Among the children

I. A difficult question.
1. As to the Holy Lord.
2. As to the unholy person.
3. As to the family.
4. As to the inheritance.

II. A wonderful answer.

1. It is from God Himself, and is therefore a perfect answer.
2. It is in the Divine style: Thou shalt; and thou shalt not. Omnipotence
speaks, and grace reveals its unconditional character.
3. It is concerning a Divine work.
4. It is effectual for its purpose.

III. A matchless privilege.

1. We are indeed made children of God, and joint heirs with Christ.
2. We are as much loved as the children.
3. We are treated as the children.
(1) We are forgiven as a father forgives his children.
 (2) We are clothed, fed, and housed as children.
(3) We are taught, ruled, and chastened as children.
(4) We are honoured and enriched as children.
4. We are placed under filial obligations--to love, honour, obey, and serve our
Father. This should be regarded as a high honour, not a burden. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Regeneration
is not a change of the old nature, but an introduction of a new nature. Not
Ishmael changed, but Isaac born, is the son of the promise. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Adoption
Whom God adopts, He anoints; whom He makes sons, He makes saints.
(Watson.)

A wonderful change
One of my parishioners at East Hampton, converted after having lived, through
three or four revivals, to the age of fifty, and having given up hope, used to exclaim
for several weeks after his change, Is it I? Am I the same man who used to think it
so hard to be converted, and my case so hopeless? Is it I? Is it I? Oh, wonderful!
(Lyman Beecher.)

The true source of salvation

I. How the obstructions to the restoration of the Jews shall be surmounted.

1. God Himself presents to them the formidable difficulty. Jews always
obdurate. How restored to favour of God?
(1) Extent of their wickedness forbids it.
(2) Honour of God forbids it. To admit rebels to privileges encourages
rebellion.
2. These obstacles, though formidable, shall be surmounted. As God spake the
universe into existence, so will He form the new creation.

II. How alone the difficulties in the way of our salvation can ever be overcome.
1. There are immense difficulties. Our wickedness equals or exceeds that of the
Jews.
2. But these shall be overcome. God will interfere for us in way of sovereign
grace and by the exercise of His almighty power.
Conclusion--
1. To those who question the possibility of their own salvation. God is able.
2. To those who have entertained no such fears. You think salvation easy; but
only Christs blood could atone for such sin as yours; only the Divine Spirit
could renew your depraved heart.
3. To those who profess to have been brought into the family of God. Obey and
 trust Him, as your Father; let nothing lead you to turn away from Him.
(C. Simeon, M. A.)

JER 3:21-25
Return . . . and I will heal your backslidings.

Hope for the worst backsliders

I. THE CALL FROM GOD. Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your
backslidings.
1. It is a call to come back to God; and that means, first, remember Him; begin
to think of Him; let Him be a living God to you.
2. The next thing is, really turn to Him.
3. There is one word in this call from God which proves that you are invited to
come back just as you are, He says, Return, ye backsliding children; not
Return, ye penitent children. I notice also that He does not say, Heal your
wounds first, and then come back to Me; but He says, Return, ye
backsliding children, with all your backslidings unhealed,--and I will heal
your backslidings.

II. The method of obeying this call.

1. He who would return to God, and find salvation, must distinctly renounce all
other trust except that which God Himself gives him and sets before him in
the Gospel. First, there must be a distinct renunciation of all righteousness of
your own. The next thing that you must renounce is, your own strength.
With that must also go all trust in your own knowledge and abilities, and
even in your own understanding.
2. There must also be a hearty, true-minded acceptance of God alone as our one
hope. Notice how the text says, Truly in the Lord our God is the salvation of
Israel. There must be no playing at this acceptance of God as our one hope;
there must be no mocking of God by a pretended yielding up of ourselves to
Him. It must be a true acceptance of God, to be our God henceforth and
forever. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The essence of love

I. A KINDLY REMEMBRANCE. God, speaking to backsliders, says, I remember thee.

II. A SHOCKING CALAMITY. Ye who once were as a lighthouse set upon a rock, to
guide men, are now a delusion and a snare. Your light has gone out. What a
corruption there would be if it were not for the salt of the ocean. When you were
converted to God you were the salt in the ocean of humanity, but now the salt hath
lost its power. You are useless, and humanity seethes in the pollution of sin. You live
probably in a house where there are wicked ones; you work amongst swearers, and
sceptics, and drunkards, but you are powerless. The salt has lost its savour. Oh,
backslider, dismantled, ruined, empty, may God rebuild you!

III. A LOVING MESSAGE. Return. Have you read of the widow whose daughter fell
into the pathway of wrong! One night the poor girl returned to her mothers cottage.
She went up the garden path and stood in the little porchway, and, to her surprise,
she saw the door a little way open. She pushed it and entered. She went into the little
room which used to be her own, and found a night light burning there, and her bed
ready, as it always had been. She lay upon the bed, and was awoke by her mothers
kiss. Mother, how is it that you left the door unlatched and the light burning? It
was that you might not have a minute to wait when you came back. This is just the
way in which our heavenly Father treats us. It is the essence of love!

IV. A GRACIOUS PROMISE. Poor backslider, you are wretchedly miserable; for
Gods message has sunk very deep into your heart. You have drunk from the cup of
sin; but you have also been bitten by the poisonous serpent, and the worm of
unhappiness is gnawing at your heart. God says, I will heal thy backslidings. He
will not let wound keep running. He will heal it; not like the burns and scalds that
have left terrible marks upon our flesh. When we return to God He heals the wound;
and there shall be no mark left of it, for He says, I have blotted out thy
transgressions. (W. Birch.)

Backsliding children

I. WHAT IT IS TO BACKSLIDE. In Scripture the word backslide means a turning

away from God altogether. It is usually, if not always, the sin of idolatry; it is the wife
departing from her husband, as in this chapter (Jer 3:1-2; Jer 3:8; Pro 14:14). There
may be in a spiritual sense a real though not apparent departing from God. There
may be an unfaithfulness, not an act only, but a state. There may be half-
heartedness for a time. The once tender conscience may become hardened; the once
lowly spirit may become lifted up. With some it shows itself in worldly
entanglements, seeking increase of business. In the midst of all this there may be no
grossness, but specious arguments for exculpation. But there is woeful neglect of
secret transactions with God. Prayer is not wholly omitted, but not conscientiously
followed up. Perhaps there may be a lightness of spirit in prayer; perhaps there may
be hardness. There may be an expressed value for the doctrines of grace; but they
are as opiates to lull to sleep, not as stimulants to rouse to action. But, irrespective of
all false notions with respect to the truth, there is oft much backsliding. The
comforts of life have acted, it may be, as drags upon the wheels. Perhaps the very
trials of life, instead of drawing us as magnets, have acted as repellants, and driven
us away from God. Perhaps very weariness of body and exhaustion of mind have led
to secret neglectings of God, and what was occasional at last became habitual. It is
by the small edge of the wedge the whole wedge is at last inserted. When a river
bursts through its embankment, one little spadeful of earth might have stopped the
flood. He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little. But the point is
this--there may be fearful backsliding in heart, and not a speck of grossness in the
life; and satisfied am I, that if we do not feel this, we shall, if we are Gods children,
be taught it, it may be with many stripes.
 II. THE TENDER EXPOSTULATION. Return. Here were idolaters in the grossest
sense, and yet were they called to return. Before any symptom of amendment, any
humblings of soul, yet Return. So Hearken unto Me, not ye broken-hearted only
that walk, or are beginning to walk, righteously, but ye stout-hearted that are far
from righteousness. What an aspect of tenderness! and what losers are they that
see not this! The first overture was from God. The outstretched hand to an idolater,
to a rebel. Oh, how clearly does it show us that if there were no election, there would
be no salvation. Nature will reject all providences, all mercies, all overtures, even the
outstretched hand of God.

III. THE ANSWER. Behold, we come unto Thee, for Thou art the Lord our God.
See the overcoming power of love. There was reproof of their departures,
expostulation with them for their sin, there was displeasure for their iniquities, but
there was the most winning display of love in them all, and it was this which
overcame. Force may compel, fear may deter, reason may persuade, and the Holy
Spirit may use them all, but the great principle that moves the human heart is love.
(J. H. Evans, M. A.)

An invitation to backsliders
The Jews were a people prone to idolatry. Though favoured with peculiar
privileges, they were bent to backsliding. At the time when these words were
addressed to them, Josiah sat on the throne. He was a pious king and strove to
uproot idolatry. His efforts were seconded by Jeremiah; but both king and prophet
failed. Many years before, the ten tribes of Israel, for their apostasy, had been
carried into captivity. And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah hath not
turned unto Me with her whole heart, but feignedly, saith the Lord (verse 10). This
state of things deeply affected the prophets mind, and caused him to give utterance
to the most plaintive and pathetic language.

I. THE CHARACTERS ADDRESSED. Backsliding children.

1. These are undutiful children. They have proved unfaithful to their solemn
vows and sacred obligations--to their Christian brethren--to their God and
Father. He said, Surely they are My people, children that will not lie; but
they turned back and dealt unfaithfully like their fathers; they were turned
aside like a deceitful bow. What crime can equal that of rebellion against
parental authority? An unfaithful servant or steward is bad enough, but an
unfaithful, undutiful child is vastly worse.
2. Ungrateful children. And theirs is ingratitude of the basest kind. It resembles
the ingratitude of a freed slave who forgets his emancipator, and sells himself
again into bondage.
3. Unwise children. Are they not unwise who forsake their own mercies and
follow after lying vanities; who prefer broken cisterns to the fountain of
living waters?
4. Unhappy children. They are often unhappy in their circumstances. Others
may enjoy the world, but they cannot. Recollections of their lost Paradise,
and apprehensions of future wrath, tend to embitter every earthly comfort.
5. Unsafe children. Heavens just wrath is awakened against them. Hells
 blackest gloom and fiercest flame await them.
6. But children still though they have forfeited the privileges of adoption, and
have been deprived of the witness of the Spirit, their relation to God as their
Creator is not dissolved, and their former interest in His favour is not
forgotten.

II. The invitation given. Return.

1. By sincere repentance.
2. Earnest prayer.
3. Evangelical faith--faith in Christ.
4. Renewed self-dedication.

III. THE PROMISE MADE. I will heal your backslidings. The Lord heals
backslidings in many ways,--frequently by restoring.
1. Providential blessings. Many men are chastised here that they may not be
punished hereafter. The Israelites never departed from God without feeling
the effects of His displeasure in their temporal circumstances.
2. Peace of conscience.
3. Purity of heart. How polluted is the heart of a backslider! His last state is
worse than his first.
4. Honour and usefulness. (J. Hodgson.)

Behold, we come unto Thee; for Thou art the Lord our God.

True repentance

I. It proceeds from the inmost heart.

1. Weeping (verse 21).
2. Shame (verse 25).

II. IT IS FREE FROM ALL DISSIMULATION. Its principle is sorrow at having grieved
God by the abuse of His love (verse 21).

III. It is made known by the honest fruits of repentance.

1. Apostasies healed (verse 22).
2. Detestation of evil (verse 24).
3. Yearning for the Lord (verse 25). (Origen.)

Conversion to God

I. What is it for sinners to come to God?

1. A relinquishing of everything that is contrary to God, and keeps us at a
distance from Him.
2. A making use of Christ as the way to God.
 (1) There would have been no place for repentance if Christ had not
interposed with His blood.
(2) There never would have been any principle or exercise of repentance if
Christ did not produce it by His Spirit.
3. A giving up of ourselves to God, and resting in Him as our end.

II. How should sinners come to God, in obedience to the precept, and upon the
encouragement of the promise?
1. How must they come in obedience to the precept?
(1) Sinners are to come to God humbly; and that in consideration of the
command of God, upon two accounts. All acts of obedience to God are to
be performed with humbleness of mind. Returning to God after former
acts of disobedience requires special humiliation.
(2) We are to come to God readily. When God is so kind to admit your
return, there is no reason that He should wait for it.
2. How must they come upon the encouragement of the promise?
(1) Sinners are to come to God believingly, with regard to the promise: for
these two reasons,--
(a) If faith be not the spring of all our motions towards God, they cannot
be acceptable to Him.
(b) The promise does encourage such a faith, as much as we need or can
desire. Besides His gracious entreaties, affectionate offers,
importunate pleadings, you have His positive assurances that He will
receive you if you return (2Co 6:17).
(2) Sinners must come joyfully to God. The promise is ground of rejoicing,
as well as of hope and trust; and God never designed that our sorrow for
sin should be so extreme as to stifle or drown the joy of conversion. God
who makes the promise rejoices in the performance (Zep 3:17; Luk
15:15). We who have the benefit of the promise must needs be still
doubtful of it if we do not rejoice in it. If we had faith suitable to the
faithfulness of God, it would transport the soul into an ecstasy, that we
who have lifted up our heels so oft against God should be taken into His
arms.

III. Wherein lies the blessedness of this?

1. When a sinner comes back to God he is brought out of a most miserable,
wilderness condition, wherein if he had remained he must have perished.
2. When a sinner comes to God salvation comes to him.
3. When a sinner comes home to God, all his fellow creatures shall be some way
or other serviceable to him, either willingly and gladly, or by constraint and
over-ruling necessity.
4. When a sinner is come to God he must visit God by prayer in all his
necessities, and be sure of sufficient relief.
5. A sinner that is come to God may sweetly walk and converse with God,
through the residue of his life; and the benefit and sweetness of such
communion is not to be imagined by those that have it not; they that are far
 from God can be no judges of the blessedness of those that are near unto
Him.
6. A sinner that is come to God may go to Him with comfort and confidence at
death, whether sooner or later.
IV. USE.
1. This shows that they who will not come to God are not come to themselves
(Luk 15:17).
2. Ministers will have a dreadful and unpleasing account to give of those whom
they leave unpersuaded.
3. God will be justified in their condemnation, to whom His precepts and
promises avail nothing.
4. The devil can lay no blocks in our way against our coming unto God but what
we may easily remove or courageously leap over, if we look no further than
this text.
5. How unreasonable would it be if any of the storms we meet with in our way to
God should ever drive us back, or shipwreck our faith!
6. How happy would it be if the efficacy of this doctrine were equal to the
concernment of it! It extends to all that are born into the world, and
therefore should operate upon all. (T. Cruso.)

The call of God obeyed

I. The state of the persons here addressed. Backsliding children.

1. They had forgotten the Lord their God. All sin may be traced to this. God is
forgotten by us. We forget the majesty and purity of His nature; His nearness
to us; that His eye is ever upon us; and that darkness and light are both alike
to Him. We forget His unspeakable love and goodness, and our manifold,
increasing obligations. Strange that, amidst innumerable tokens of
remembrance, we should be careless and thoughtless!
2. They had perverted their way. This is the natural effect of forgetting God.
Have not we perverted our way? In innumerable instances we have struggled
against the voice of reason, the voice of conscience, the voice of God; and,
against the plainest dictates of His Word, have wandered in foolish,
forbidden paths.
3. They were filled with painful regret. The high places were the seat of Israels
idolatry: there they committed abomination, and provoked the Holy One of
Israel to anger. But where they sinned, there they gave vent to their sorrow;
and there they supplicated Divine forgiveness and favour. And, truly, if we
are the subjects of genuine repentance, we shall do the same: where we have
sinned, we shall sorrow too.

II. The gracious language of God to these backsliding children.

1. A friendly call. Return. Doubtless authority marks this word, and the word
of Jehovah is never to be trifled with. It is an invitation given; but it is also a
command, which may not be slighted; a solemn charge, which cannot with
impunity be refused.
 2. A precious promise. I will heal, etc.
(1) Backsliding inflicts a disease, a dangerous and fatal disease. But the
promise before us implies that God is ready to restore health and cure.
(2) The effects of sin are numerous and destructive. Sin not only dishonours
God, and wounds the soul, but it creates a thick cloud of mental
darkness: it is the fruitful source of trouble and disquietude. But when
the Lord promises to heal backslidings, He engages to extract this
bitterness, to avert this punishment.
(3) The promise here is not indiscriminately given; it is to the sinner that
returns to God. Return, and I will heal your backslidings. He does
this by an act of sovereign favour (Mic 7:18-19).

III. The obedient reply of these people.

1. This reply is practical: We tome unto Thee. As the prodigal: he did not
spend his time in fruitless wishes or satisfy himself with good intentions and
right resolutions: his language was, I will arise, and go to my father.
Immediately, he arose, and came to his father.
2. The reply is prompt; made with the utmost readiness, and given without the
least demur. The call is, Return; the answer instantly subjoined is, Behold,
we come. It reminds us of the promptness of the Psalmist, in his compliance
with the voice of heaven (Psa 27:8).
3. The reply is deliberate. The note of attention intimates this. Behold! we
come. Though the penitent believer is ready, he is not rash; though, under
the influence of Divine grace, he soon determines, he does it advisedly; his
repentance is of that kind which never needs to be repented of.
4. The reply is unanimous. Here is the prayer and resolution of the Church: she
prays as one person, actuated by one spirit draw me: she resolves as many
persons, answering, with cheerful concurrence, we will run after Thee.
5. The reply springs from a clear conviction of duty, interest, and obligation.
Thou art the Lord our God. It is the language of faith, and hope, and love;
especially of gratitude, and self-dedication. (T. Kidd.)

Return to God
1. In the first place, we see what a true recovery from this state really is, Behold,
we come unto Thee. This is true repentance. It is coming back to God, a
returning home. There may be a turning to doctrinal comfort, and no
returning to God. Till this, the backsliding continues. Behold, we come to
Thee, say all returning backsliders; we come and lay our sins, our idols,
ourselves, at Thy feet. And nothing short of this is real repentance, anything
short of this is, under fair pretexts, soul deceptions.
2. But what else does it imply? Returning by the right way--faith. There is no
real return to God but in the way we first met Him--in Jesus: No man
cometh unto the Father but by Me. All the tears, all the sorrow and
resolutions of amendment, have no power to bring us back to God. But when
faith lays hold upon Jesus and His great atonement, it brings me up at once
to God. I hang back no more. I hide myself no more. I make no vain excuses
now. I hate my sins. I lie low. It is a valley, and it suits the lowly lily well.
 3. And who is the author of all this? The same blessed Spirit who first revealed
Jesus, and God the Father in Him. And nothing short of this. When sin in
any measure regains power, deadening process instantly begins. The soul is
commanded to confess; but in proportion to the length of time of the
departure, and the degree of power of it, there seems an inability to confess.
There is a want of spiritual sensibility. Oh then, how should we beware of the
first appearance of evil! Beware, lest any of you be hardened through the
deceitfulness of sin.
4. Consider the great motive by which it is led back, the motive by which He
works. It is the overcoming power of love. There was displeasure. Wounds
were inflicted, wounds pungent and trying--wounds full of anguish were
they, such as no human balm could assuage; but it was but the varied
countenance of love. These wounds did but speak two things--His unsullied
holiness, and equally His untiring love.
The subject has a two-fold bearing. First, as it regards our treatment of others,
then that of our own souls.
1. First, others. We are all, as saints, more or less called amid our familiar
friends and associates, to deal with those in whom we hope there is a spark
of grace, yet little true, spiritual, holy light.
2. And now a few words to the believer in reference to himself. It may be that
some one may be conscious--This is my own state. I have been not merely
today, nor yesterday, but for many yesterdays, departing from God. Alas!
that this should be so common. But, however, trifle not with it. It is not to be
trifled with. Seek instant healing. Tarry not. Every instant of delay only
increases the disease. Nothing but the blood of the Lamb can heal. Take
heard that it be applied by none but the Holy Spirit. (J. H. Evans, M. A.)

God forgotten
Lady Glenorchy, in her diary, relates her being seized with a fever, which
threatened her life, during the course of which, she says, the first question of the
Assemblys Catechism was brought to my mind--What is the chief end of man?--as
if some one had asked it. When I considered the answer to it,--To glorify, God and
to enjoy Him forever,--I was struck with shame and confusion. I found I had never
sought to glorify God in my life, nor had I any idea of what was meant by enjoying
Him forever. Death and judgment were set before me; my past sins came to my
remembrance; I saw no way to escape the punishment due unto them, nor had I the
least glimmering hope of obtaining pardon through the righteousness of another.
From this unhappy state she was shortly after delivered, by faith in the Lord Jesus.
(W. Whitecross.)

The call to repentance and its response

You may pound a lump of ice with a pestle into a thousand fragments, but it will
still continue ice. But bring it beside your own bright and blazing fire, and soon in
that genial glow, the living waters flow. A man may try to make himself contrite. He
may search out his sins and dwell on all their enormity and still feel no repentance.
But come to Jesus with His words of grace and truth. Let that flinty, stony spirit
bask in the beams of the Sun of Righteousness, then will it melt. (James Hamilton.)
Responding to the call
It is as when a man is in court, and is called for, to go into the witness box. He is
standing in the crowd, and his name is celled: what happens? As soon as he hears
his name he begins to push through the throng to reach his place. What are you
at? says one. I am called, says he. Stand back; why do you push so! says
another. I am called by the judge, says he. A big policeman demands, Why are
you making such confusion in court? But, says the man, I am called. My name was
called out, and I must go. If he cannot come, if it is not possible for him to get
through the throng, one of the authorities calls out, Make way for that man--he is
summoned by the court. Officers, clear a passage and let him come. Such is the
kind of response which God looks for as He calls sinners to repentance. Behold, we
come unto Thee; for Thou art the Lord our God.
The far-reaching consequences of sin
For many years the trees of the forest had been lopped, and now, though the new
ownership and laws forbade that any hatchet should be lifted up upon any tree, they
could not outgrow the olden days. The drunkard is such a pollarded tree, he may
stop drinking, but his body will long suffer. The same applies to all unchastity.
Sometimes the mind rather than the body suffers, and memories of sin deform the
intellectual powers, even after the sin is discontinued. False teaching is another form
of lopping, affecting the soul. What branches of Bible truth some are giving up, with
the result of hindered and deformed growth--growth never recovered. Thus in the
natural, physical, mental, and spiritual realm lopping is a serious business.

JEREMIAH 4

JER 4:1-4
If thou wilt return,. . .and if thou wilt put away thine abominations . . . then shalt
thou not remove.

The pleadings of God

A strange ministry is that of Almightiness. It is almightiness--almost. So we come
upon a mysterious if in all the history of Gods administration. If thou wilt
return--why not make them return? Here man is stronger than God. We have seen
in innumerable instances how true it is that God, who can handle universes, can do
nothing with the heart He has made except with the hearts consent. Behold God,
then, as a pleader. If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the Lord, return unto Me: and
if thou wilt put away thine abominations out of My sight,--if thou wilt swear, The
Lord liveth, in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness,--if thou wilt do these
things, the issue will be glorious; it will also be beneficent, it will have an
evangelistic effect upon the world. The meaning is, the heathen nations round about
shall see thy return, and they will begin to own the power of God. That is the
converting force that must be brought to bear upon the whole of the nations. The
Church must be so beautiful as to attract attention. When Christians do right,
pagans will believe; when Christians claim their uniqueness of quality and exemplify
it, the men who get up arguments against Christianity will be ashamed of their own
ingenuity, and run away from the things their hands have piled, saying, We cannot
build fortresses against such quality of character. This is true missionary work. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

Putting away of sin

A great warrior was once persuaded by his enemies to put on a beautiful robe
which they presented him. Not suspecting their design, he wrapped himself tightly
in it, but in a few moments found that it was coated on the inside with a deadly
poison. It stuck to his flesh as if it had been glued. The poison entered into his flesh,
so that in trying to throw off the cloak, he was left torn and bleeding. But did he for
that reason hesitate about taking it off? Did he stop to think whether it was painful
or not? Did he say, Let me wait and think about it awhile? No! he tore it off at once,
and threw it from him, and hastened away from it to the physician. This is the way
you must treat your sins if you would be saved. They have gone into your soul. If you
let them alone you perish. You must not fear the pain of repentance. You must east
them from you as poison, and hasten away to Jesus Christ. Do this, or your sins will
consume you like fire. (T. Meade.)

And thou shalt swear.

On swearing

I. THE COMMAND. Did Christ countermand this? (Mat 5:34.) The Son forbid in the
Gospel what the Father bids in the law? God bids thee swear, so thy oath be truthful
and needful; Christ forbids swearing which is truthless and needless.

II. THE FORM. God bade us swear; now He tells us how. The Lord liveth. It is,
then, impiety to swear by creatures. God prevents all evasion by the name He here
gives--the Lord; not any god the swearer would substitute, as some swear by
angels, called in Scripture Elohim, and superstition worships them as gods.

III. Three particulars.

1. In truth. Perjury is impious--makes that which is the sign and seal of truth,
the cloak of falsehood.
2. In judgment. Swear not upon guess only.
3. In righteousness. To any act against right or religion bind not thyself, let not
any bind thee. (R. Clerke, D. D.)

Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.--

Soul agriculture

I. Proper attention to the SOIL.

1. Variety of condition.
2. Capability of improvement.
 II. Proper attention to the SEED.
1. Care in selection of true spiritual seed. The Gospel--
(1) Perfect in itself.
(2) Fitted to grow in all climates.
(3) It does not sow itself.
(4) It is the support of life.
2. Attention must also be paid to its growth.

III. Proper attention to the SEASON.

1. Youth.
2. The season of moral seriousness, when the heart has been softened.
(Homilist.)

The life of the sinner a foolish agriculture

The people referred to as sowing among thorns are those, perhaps, who are
endeavouring by religious study and effort to get the seeds of Divine good into them
when their hearts remain full of worldly things.

I. A GRAND EVIL. Sowing precious seed in bad soil involves three things.
1. Loss of seed. The precious grain has been thrown away.
2. Loss of labour. All the efforts employed go for nothing.
3. Loss of hope. All the bright anticipations of a glorious future frustrated.

II. AN URGENT DUTY. Break up your fallow ground. This means in one word
evangelical repentance for sin.
1. This in moral, as well as material, agriculture is hard work. A skilful
ploughman, a strong plough and a vigorous team are necessary. It is hard
work to repent.
2. This in moral, as well as in material, agriculture is indispensable work.
(Homilist.)

The fallow ground broken

I. THE NECESSITY OF FALLOWING THE GROUND is obvious to all who are practically
acquainted with tillage: and such as are experimentally informed on the subject of
the evil and barrenness of their own hearts, will admit the absolute requirement of a
similar mental process. All your carnal hopes, and criminal opposition to the Divine
will, must be completely eradicated.

II. THE NATURE of this part of a farmers business will well Illustrate the
correspondent toil of a believer. No attempt to cleanse the heart, however
disagreeable, is intentionally neglected by the sincere believer--no effort is relied
upon; all is subservient to the expected influences of heaven.
 III. THE ADVANTAGES of this procedure. Those who make thorough work with
their own hearts, will find that their religious joys and better hopes, though delayed,
shall be most vigorous; their subsequent sufferings from the grieving thorn and
pricking brier shall be fewer; and a richer harvest shall at length crown their toil.
1. If you desire permanent prosperity and joy in the Holy Ghost, break up the
fallow ground--sow not among thorns.
2. Be personal in this labour. Turn your eyes from others to yourself.
3. Remember your own unworthiness, and the poverty of your unassisted
endeavours. (W. Clayton.)

Ploughing and sowing

This season of spring, with its ploughing, and sowing, and opening of life, typifies
the time which God has given for forming in us enlightened principles and virtuous
habits, holy motives and pure desires, and for becoming possessed of the grace and
goodness which Jesus has to impart, in order that we may grow up into the Divine
life of God, which shall abide with us through old age as the source of true
enjoyment, and as the first beginnings of eternal glory. The ploughshare of the
Divine Word must pierce into us, and break up our hardness and indifference, and
make us impressible and movable, to fit us for bringing forth the fruits of
righteousness. For example, the seedtime of life, like that of spring, regulates and
determines the moral results which the future shall unfold, whether in time or in
eternity. Our life on earth is the scene of moral causes and operations--the sowing
time of our spirit--the period for the earnest cultivation of our moral nature; and it
is to us all the more important, because it is far-reaching in its effects, stretching
beyond the present earthly existence into eternity, bearing the flowers and blossoms
of spiritual beauty and grace, a manifestation of Deity in humanity. And if these
moral causes do not operate--if the seed time of life be wasted--if the cultivation of
the moral nature be neglected, equally true the effects of such a life are eternal,
stretching beyond the present earthly existence, and bearing into eternity the fruits
of moral depravity and corruption. Now, this cultivation of our moral nature is no
easy task. Even in matters connected with this life, if we neglect any duty from time
to time, or if we delay entering upon any employment necessary to our material or
social well-being, indolence increases, disinclination to perform the duty
strengthens, dislike to the employment springs up, until habit entirely unfits us for
action. In the same way, to ignore religious truth in its relation to our heart, and to
neglect religious duties, is to deepen false impressions, strengthen ignorant
prejudices, and confirm evil habits. This also is certain, that if good seed is not
germinating in our hearts, thorns of evil are, do what we will. If, for instance, our
mind is not exercised with religious truth, and no effort made on our part to
understand intelligently the revelation which God has made of human salvation; or
if the heart be unopened to the power of the Divine Spirit and the moral impressions
of Divine truth; and if we continue to refuse accepting Christ as the Saviour of our
soul; then our mental and moral nature will become as hard-baked fallow ground,
almost impenetrable to the ploughshare of heaven. The indifference of the mind to
religious truth keeps the heart spiritually cold, and the coldness of the heart induces
in the mind a distaste for spiritual things. On the other hand, any powerful
awakening in connection with religion or religious truth, whether it affect the mind
alone, or the heart alone, or both together, is in the highest sense beneficial to our
soul. Whatever acts on the mind so as to turn it in upon itself, whatever makes the
soul depend upon God, and believe in an invisible spiritual world as a reality, though
accompanied with strong excitement or inward conflict, is good, and leads to
spiritual power. Besides, the precise form of treatment that does good to one
spiritual nature, is not always successful with every other, even in like
circumstances, any more than the same culture would be successful with different
soils in the same climate. We cannot, therefore, project our own feelings and
experience into the mind and soul of others, as if we were examples of the only way
in which Divine grace and power plough all human souls for the seed of salvation.
This breaking up of our moral nature is nothing else than the softening of our hearts
under the influence of Divine truth--a humble, penitent spirit, a constant sense of
the evil of sin, a willingness to be reconciled to God, whom our transgressions have
offended, and an earnest desire after a holier life in God. It is only in such a heart as
this that Divine truth will take root, and grow up and bring forth fruit. As the ground
must be broken before the tiny fibrils of the root can descend into the earth, which
they do, as by a sensitive instinct, in search of vegetable nourishment and life; so the
spiritual nature must be humbled and made penitent--broken under a sense of sin,
and under the operation of Divine law--in order that the seed of the Divine Word
may hide itself deep down into the subsoil of the soul, until it establishes itself firmly
there. While the tangled threads of the root are shooting themselves downwards,
and gathering strength and nourishment from the soil, the blade in spiral form
shoots itself upwards to the light, and the leaf opens, then comes the ear, and then
the full corn in the ear, ripe for the sickle of harvest. In the same way Divine truth
and heavenly principles, spiritual thought, emotion, and life descend and ascend, as
by an unchangeable law. In every truly spiritual life there is this two-fold operation--
a movement upwards and downwards, a working within and without, a meditative
disposition expressing itself in active habits, believing prayer, conjoined with
earnest effort in doing good. (W. Simpson.)

The duty of moral cultivation

Our nature at its largest is but a small farm, and we had need to get a harvest out
of every acre of it, for our needs are great. Have we left any part of our small
allotment uncultivated? If so, it is time to look into the matter and see if we cannot
improve this wasteful state of things. What part of our small allotment have we left
fallow? We should think very poorly of a farmer who for many years allowed the best
and richest part of his farm to lie altogether neglected and untilled. An occasional
fallow has its benefits in the world of nature; but, if the proprietor of rich and
fruitful land allowed the soil to continue fallow, year after year, we should judge him
to be out of his wits. The wasted acres ought to be taken from him and given to
another husbandman who would worthily cherish the generous fields, and
encourage them to yield their harvests. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

A fallow field
Do you know what happens to a fallow field? how it becomes caked and baked
hard as though it were a brick? All the friable qualities seem to depart, and it
hardens as it lies caked and unbroken; I mean, of course, if year succeed year, and
the fallow remains untouched. And then the weeds! If a man will not sow wheat, he
shall have a crop for all that, for the weeds will spring up, and they will sow
themselves, and in due time the multiplication table will be worked out to a very
wonderful extent; for these seeds, multiplying a hundredfold, as evil usually does,
will increase and increase again, till the fallow field shall become a wilderness of
thorns and briars and a thicket of dock nettle and thistle. If you do not cultivate your
heart, Satan will cultivate it for you. If you bring no crop to God, the devil will be
sure to reap a harvest. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 4:11-13
A dry wind of the high places in the wilderness toward the daughter of My
people, not to fan, nor to cleanse.

Untempered judgments
The prophet intimates that God will one day send a judgment upon His people
comparable only to the sirocco of the desert. The harvestman welcomes almost all
the winds of the summer time but this. Their gentle currents lend themselves to the
winnowing processes that are necessary to complete the toil of the year. But the
sirocco comes with no element of helpfulness or beneficent service in its terrible
wings. It is the agent of unmixed ruin, overthrow, death; the symbol of judgment
without mercy. The successive invasions that were soon to close in upon the Holy
Land were to be of this unmixed character. The flower of one generation was to
perish in the overthrow. Whole districts were to be depopulated and re-peopled by
alien races. The wind that came from the desert Came to crash and to scorch and to
destroy. It was not to fan, nor to cleanse. Some men claim that all judgment must
be ultimately puttying. This inspired utterance however assures us that there is such
a thing in the Divine economy as punishment that is purely punitive and not
disciplinary.

I. LET US INQUIRE IF THIS PENAL ELEMENT HAS A PLACE IN THE BEST HUMAN
GOVERNMENTS. If we work out to its logical conclusion the theory that all
punishment must be disciplinary only, we shall be bound to adopt methods of
procedure in our law courts more grotesque than the most audacious caricature has
ever imagined. We must have no short sentences if all penalty is to be educating. We
have no right to discharge a man, however slight his transgression, till he has given
sufficient assurance that his character has been entirely transformed. Judge and jury
would no longer need to concern themselves with the particular category into which
his crime came. The only question for them to ask would be, how far does the root of
evil go down in this mans character? and what amount of force will be necessary to
pull it up? Some men, who are incapable of amendment through pain, can perhaps
be stirred to better desires, or at least taken away from their criminal tendencies, by
wholesome excitements. Experts would have to step into the witness box. In some
cases it might be found that a garrotter would be more sensibly improved by
wholesome excitements than by flogging. Carlyle inveighed from time to time
against this unhealthy sentimentalism which would sap the foundation of all human
and Divine law alike. In the Life of Bishop Wilberforce reference is made to a party
at which Monckton Milnes, Thomas Carlyle, and other distinguished men were
present. The conversation turned upon the question of capital punishment. Mr.
Monckton Milnes was arguing against death-penalties, on the ground that we could
not know how far the offender was responsible and consciously wrong. Carlyle broke
out, None of your heaven-and-hell amalgamation companies for me! We do know
what is wickedness. I know wicked men I would not live with: men whom under
some conceivable circumstances I would kill or they should kill me. No, Milnes;
there is no truth or greatness in that. Its just poor, miserable littleness. There was
far more greatness in the way of your German forefathers, who, when they found
one of those wicked men, dragged him to a peat bog, and thrust him in, and said,
There! go in there. There is the place for all such as thee:

II. IF THIS PENAL ELEMENT IS ADMITTED INTO HUMAN GOVERNMENTS, UPON WHAT
CONCEIVABLE PRINCIPLE CAN IT BE EXCLUDED FROM THE DIVINE? Many causes
combine to weaken the sense we have of our own authority to punish wrong-doing.
It is a strictly delegated authority. We always feel ourselves bound to greater
restraint and circumspection in the exercise of delegated than original rights. We
often feel ourselves incompetent judges of all that has transpired. We judge and
punish in dim twilights. That tends to make us hesitating and indeterminate. And
then the sense of our own authority to judge and to punish is weakened by the
recollection we have of our own desert of punishment in many things. Unless the
offence is very flagrant, we fear to incriminate ourselves by judging another. And
yet, notwithstanding all these things, we are absolutely sure of our clear abstract
right to punish even in cases where the punishment has no educating purpose to
fulfil to the individual, whatever it may have to the community. How much stronger
is Gods right! His authority is original, and not delegated. He guarantees in every
soul He judges the sufficiency of the past training and discipline. He dwells in the
perfect light. His judgment can never be unnerved by the fear of error.

III. Disciplinary are distinguished from penal judgments, not so much by any
quality in the judgments themselves, as by THE TEMPER OF THOSE WHO BECOME THE
SUBJECTS OF SUCH JUDGMENTS. The question whether purely penal elements can
enter into Gods government is one that must be looked at from the standpoint of
the transgressor rather than that of the Judge. Are there incorrigible elements in
human nature? As a matter of fact, judgments very often fail to sober and to purify
here. There are men who can never be taught wisdom by the longest succession of
business reverses. There are men who, humanly speaking, can never be taught
common morality, however heavy the penalties they are made to pay for its breach.
There are worldly men whom no number of sicknesses and providential
bereavements can discipline into religiousness. Where there are unreformable
elements in human character, disciplinary judgment necessarily passes into the
purely punitive stage. It is often argued that the keener judgments of the life to come
will produce penitence in those who have continued stubborn under the milder
judgments of the present life. There is not only no proof of that, but nothing even to
suggest that it is probable. We cannot predicate anything from the cumulative power
of pain. The wind does not become purifying by mere increase of the force with
which it blows. After reaching a certain pitch of violence it can neither fan nor
cleanse.

IV. The judgment that has passed out of the disciplinary into the penal stage for
the individual is still DISCIPLINARY IN ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE RACE AT LARGE. The
wind that blows to crush and to scorch and to uproot in one zone of the earth, after
it has passed into new latitudes, and been tempered by the seas over which it travels,
may become a wind of winnowing beneficence. The penal visitation of one
generation may become the saving chastisement of the generation that follows it.
We must not get into the habit of supposing that Gods purposes ever terminate in
the individual. That mystery of unending punishment, which seems to frustrate the
Divine purpose of mercy to the individual, may fulfil a purpose of gracious
admonition to the race. The law of vicariousness pervades the moral universe just as
widely as the law of gravitation overspreads the natural universe. There is a
priesthood of vicarious judgment as well as of mercy. As great fires are kindled in
times of plague to burn up the germs of infection floating in the air, so the
atmosphere of Gods universe may need to be kept pure by the flames of a
quenchless Gehenna. (T. G. Selby.)

JER 4:14
Wash thine heart from wickedness.

Purity necessary to salvation

I. The natural depravity of the human heart.

1. This doctrine requires definition. Depravity of the heart includes--
(1) The entire absence of the Divine image.
(2) A natural aversion to God and godliness.
(3) A universal propensity or disposition to evil.
2. This doctrine demands evidence.
(1) Divinely revealed.
(2) Practically exemplified.
(3) Deeply lamented.

II. The spiritual purity which the lord requires.

1. The possibility of obtaining purity of heart. This appears from--
(1) The design of redemption (Heb 9:13-14).
(2) The ability of the Saviour (Joh 1:16; 1Co 1:30).
(3) The promises of Scripture (Eze 36:26-27; 1Pe 1:3-4).
(4) The experience of believers (Rom 6:22; 1Jn 1:7).
2. The important duty of seeking purity of heart.

III. The absolute necessity of personal holiness.

1. A necessary property of religion.
2. A necessary meetness for heaven. (Sketches of Four Hundred Sermons.)

The heart to be kept pure

 You have seen, said Spurgeon, the great reservoirs provided by our water
companies, in which the water to supply thousands of houses is kept. Now the heart
is the reservoir of man, and our life is allowed to flow in its proper season. That life
may flow through different pipes--the mouth, the hand, the eye; but still all the
issues of hand, of eye, of lip derive their source from the great fountain and central
reservoir, the heart; and hence there is great necessity for keeping this reservoir in a
proper state and condition, since otherwise that which flows through the pipes must
be tainted and corrupt. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee?--Vain
thoughts:--

I. CHARACTERISTICS. Those thoughts are vain--

1. From which we do not and cannot reap any good.
2. Which cannot associate in any agreement with useful and valuable ones.
3. Which have to be kept out in order for the mind to attend to any serious or
good purpose.
4. Which dwell largely and habitually on trifling things.
5. Which trifle with important things.
6. Which are fickle, not remaining with any continuance on a subject.
7. When the mind has some specially favourite trifle, some cherished, idolised
toy.
8. Which continually return to things justly claiming a measure of attention,
when the thinking of them can be no advantage.
9. When the mind dwells on fancies of how things might be or might have been,
when the reality of how they are is before us.
10. Which men indulge concerning notions and schemings of worldly felicity.

II. Corrective.
1. Have specified subjects of serious interest to turn to when thought reverts to
these vanities.
2. Make a sudden charge of guilt on your mind when vain thoughts prevail.
3. Have recourse to the direct act of devotion.
4. Interrupt and stop them by the question, What is just now my most pressing
duty?
5. Have recourse to some practical occupation, matter of business, or a visit to
some house of mourning.
6. Constrain your habitual thinking to go along with the thoughts of those who
have thought the best, by reading the most valuable books.
7. Think to a certain purpose--towards a purposed end.
8. Reflect on how many things we have to do with which vain thoughts interfere;
and also, what would have been the result of good thoughts instead of so
many vain.
9. Discipline of the thoughts greatly depends on the company a man keeps (Pro
13:20).
10. If the complaint be urged, that this discipline involves much that is hard and
difficult, we answer, It is just as hard as to do justice to a rational and
 immortal spirit placed here a little while by God for its improvement, and
then to go where appoints. Hard, but indispensable. (John Foster.)

Bad lodgers, and how to treat them

I. Here are certain bad lodgers.

1. Many thoughts may be called vain because they are proud, conceited
thoughts. Thus, whenever a man thinks himself good by nature, we may say
of his thoughts, Vanity of vanities: all is vanity. If you are unrenewed, and
dream that you are better than others because your parents were godly, it is a
vain thought. Every thought of self-righteousness is a vain thought; every
idea, moreover, of self-power--that you can do this and do that towards your
own salvation, and that at any time when it pleases you you can turn and
become a Christian, and so there is no need to be in a hurry, or to seek the
help of the Holy Spirit:--that also is a vain thought.
2. Another sort of vain thoughts may be ranged under the head of carnal
security. The poet says, All men think all men mortal but themselves, and
often as the saying is quoted never was a proverb more generally true.
3. I know another set of thoughts: they are better looking, but they are equally
vain, for they promise much and come to nothing: they are vain because they
are fruitless. These vain thoughts are like the better order of people in
Jerusalem--good people after a sort--that is to say, they really thought that as
God threatened them with judgments, they would turn to Him. Certainly
they would. They had no intention of being hard hearted. Far from it; they
owned the power of the prophets appeal; they felt a degree of awe in the
presence of the just God as He threatened them, and of course they meant--
they meant to wash their hearts, and they meant to put away all their
forbidden practices; not just yet, but by and by. Some men brood so long
over their future intentions that they all of them become addled eggs, and
nothing whatever is hatched. O man, whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do
it, do it, do it with thy might.

II. Now, let me show what bad lodgers they are.

1. First, they are deceitful. The man that says, When I have a more convenient
season I will send for thee, does not send for Paul any more: he never
intended to do so. A man says, Tomorrow; but tomorrow never comes.
When that comes which would have been tomorrow it is today; and then
he cries, Tomorrow, and so multiplies lies before God.
2. Vain thoughts are bad lodgers, for they pay no rent; they bring in nothing
good to those who entertain them. There is the ledger of self-righteousness,
for instance: what good does self-righteousness ever do to the man who
entertains it? It pretends to pay in brass farthings: it pretends to pay, but the
money is counterfeit. What good does it do to any man to harbour in his
mind the empty promise of future repentance? It often prevents repentance.
3. The next reason for the ejectment of these lodgers is this: that they are
wasting your goods and destroying your property. For instance, every
unacted resolution wastes time, and that is more precious than gold. It also
wastes thought, for to think of a thing and to leave it undone is a waste of
 reflection. It is a waste of energy to be energetic about merely promising to
be energetic; it is a great waste of strength to be forever resolving to be
strong, and yet to remain weak.
4. Worst of all, these vain thoughts are bad lodgers because they bring you
under condemnation. There have been times when to entertain certain
persons was treason, and many individuals have been put to death for
harbouring traitors. Rebels condemned to die have been discovered in a
mans house, and he has been condemned for affording them a hiding place.
Now, God declares that these vain thoughts of yours are condemned traitors.
Are you going to harbour them any longer?

III. Let us see what to do with these bad lodgers.

1. The first thing is to give them notice to quit at once. Let there be no waiting.
When a man is converted it is done at once. There is a line, thin as a razors
edge, which divides death from life, a point of decision which separates the
saved from the lost.
2. Suppose that these vain thoughts will not go just when you bid them begone. I
will tell you what to do to get rid of them: starve them out. Lock the door,
and let nothing enter upon which they can feed.
3. The best way in all the world that I know of to get rid of vain thoughts out of
your house--these bad lodgers that have gone in and that you cannot get out-
-is to sell the house over their heads. Let the house change owners. When
you have dope that, you know, it will be the new owner that will have the
trouble of turning them out; and He will do it. I recommend every sinner
here that wants to find salvation to give himself up to Christ. Ah, now the
stronger than they are has come, and He will bind the strong ones, and He
will fling them out of window, and so break them to pieces with their fall that
they shall never be able to crawl up the stairs again. He knows how to do it.
He can expel them; you cannot. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Vain thoughts
Heart compared to house, to entertain and lodge guests; into which, before
conversion, all the light wanton thoughts that post up and down in the world have
open access; while they, like unruly gallants, revel day and night, and defile those
rooms they lodge in. How long? whilst I, with My Spirit, and Son, and train of
graces, stand and knock, and cannot find admittance?

I. What is meant by thoughts?

1. The internal acts of the mind; reasonings, resolutions, consultations, desires,
cares, etc.
(1) The thinking, meditating, musing power in man, which enables him to
conceive, apprehend, fancy.
(2) Thoughts which the mind frames within itself (Pro 6:14; Jam 1:15; Isa
59:4-7).
(3) Thoughts which the mind in and by itself begets and entertains.
2. What vanity is.
(1) Unprofitableness (Ecc 1:2-3).
 (2) Lightness (Psa 62:9).
(3) Folly (Pro 12:11).
(4) Inconstancy (Psa 144:4; Psa 146:4).
(5) Wicked and sinful (2Ch 13:7; Pro 24:9).

II. The particulars wherein this vanity of the thinking, meditating power of man
consists.
1. In regard to thinking what is good.
(1) A want of ability to raise and extract holy and useful considerations and
thoughts from the occurrences and occasions which surround us.
(2) A loathness to entertain holy thoughts.
(3) The mind will not be long intent on good thoughts.
(4) If the mind think of good things, it does so unseasonably; intrudes on
prayer and interrupts it (Pro 16:3).
2. The readiness of the mind to think on evil and vain things.
(1) This vanity shows itself in foolishness (Mar 7:22), which proves itself in
the unsettledness and independence of our thoughts.
(2) If any strong lust or passion be up, our thoughts are too fixed and intent.
(3) A restless curiosity concerning things not affecting us.
(4) Taking thought to fulfil the lusts of our flesh.
(5) Acting sins over again in our imagination.

III. Remedies against vain thoughts.

1. Get the heart furnished and enriched with a good stock of sanctified and
heavenly knowledge in spiritual truths.
2. Endeavour to preserve and keep up lively, holy, and spiritual affections in the
heart.
3. Get the heart possessed with deep and powerful apprehensions of Gods
holiness, majesty, omniscience, and omnipresence.
4. In the morning when thou awakest, as did David (Psa 119:18), prevent the
vain thoughts the heart naturally engenders by filling it with thoughts of
God.
5. Have a watchful eye upon thy heart all day; though vain thoughts crowd in, let
them know that they pass not unseen.
6. Please not thy fancy too much with vanities and curious flights (Job 31:1; Pro
4:25).
7. Be diligent in thy calling (2Th 3:11; 1Ti 5:13); only, encumber not the mind too
much (Luk 10:41).
8. In thy calling and all thy ways commit thy goings to the Lord (Pro 16:3). (T.
Goodwin, B. D.)

Vain thoughts
 I. What are vain thoughts?
1. Unprofitable imaginations.
2. Unscriptural opinions.
3. Unholy desires.
4. Unseasonable ideas.

II. The solemn inquiry. How long?

1. Shall it be till some temporal judgment be sent to awaken you out of your
carnal security?
2. Till habit rivets these vain thoughts, and makes repentance and conversion
harder than ever?
3. Till the grieved Saviour forsakes thee, and the resisted Spirit ceases to strive
with thee?
4. Till the sentence goes forth, cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground? (J.
Jowett, M. A.)

The vanity of man as a thinker

I. It is the glory of man that he can think.

1. Thought brings the outward universe into mans soul, and thus makes it his
own.
2. Thought enables us to subordinate the outward world to our service.
3. By the power of thought we construct new universes.
4. Thought determines our condition.
(1) Even materially, it influences our health, shapes our countenance, tunes
our voice.
(2) Spiritually, our condition is almost absolutely governed by thought. By
thought we can pierce the heavens, enter into the holy of holies, hold
fellowship with the Infinite. By thought we can break forth from our own
little earthly sphere--make God our centre, and run a wider and brighter
orbit than the stars.

II. It is the curse of man that he thinks wrongly.

1. Vain thoughts find a lodgment in the minds of some. If the thoughts cherished
be vain, the life pursued will be vain. In order in some measure to estimate
the amount of vain thought cherished by men, let us do three things.
Compare the true theory of happiness with the conduct which men pursue in
order to obtain it; the true theory of greatness with the efforts which they put
forth in order to realise it; and the true theory of religion with their conduct
in relation to it.
2. The expulsion of vain thoughts is a matter of urgent importance.
(1) They can be got rid of. By consecration of our energies to true work. By
companionship with truthful souls. By realising the constant presence of
the heart-inspecting God. By a change in the governing dispositions of
the mind.
 (2) The urgent necessity of this. They waste the mental life; corrupt the
heart; imperil the soul. (Homilist.)

Vain thoughts

I. THE EVIL OF PERMITTING VAIN THOUGHTS TO LODGE WITHIN US. By vain thoughts
may be meant all unlawful desires, vile affections, wicked tempers, and mischievous
imaginations of every kind. If these, or any other evil thoughts to which we are
subject, lodge in our breasts, they must render our persons abominable to God,
corrupt all our performances, and produce many bitter fruits.

II. THE NECESSITY OF WASHING OUR HEARTS FROM WICKEDNESS. As it would be

madness in the husbandman to sow his seed upon ground that was covered with
thorns, so it is equally foolish to expect the fruit of good living in any person whose
heart lies fallow, unbroken, and overspread with the cares of the world, the
deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things, which our Saviour calls thorns.
(W. Richardson.)

The place of thought in the making of character

Anyone who has visited lime stone caves has noticed the stalactite pillars,
sometimes large and massive, by which they are adorned and supported. They are
natures masonry of solid rock formed by her own slow, silent, and mysterious
process. The little drop of water percolates through the roof of the cavern and
deposits its sediment, and another follows it, till the icicle of stone is formed, and
finally reaching to the rock beneath, it becomes a solid pillar, a marble monument
which can only be rent down by the most powerful forces. But is there not going
forward oftentimes in the caverns of the human heart a process as silent and
effective, yet infinitely more momentous? There in the darkness that shrouds all
from the view of the outward observer, each thought and feeling, as light and
inconsiderable perhaps as the little drops of water, sinks downward into the soul,
and deposits--yet in a form almost imperceptible--what we may call its sediment.
And then another and another follows, till the traces of all combined become more
manifest; and if these thoughts and feelings are charged with the sediment of
worldliness and worldly passion, then all around the walls of this spiritual cavern
stand in massive proportions the pillars of sinful inclination and the props of
iniquity, and only a convulsion like that which rends the solid globe can rend them
from their place and shake their hold. (American National Preacher.)

Bad lodgers
John Huss, seeking to reclaim a very profane wretch, was told by him that his
giving way to wicked, wanton thoughts was the original of all those hideous births of
impiety which he was guilty of in his life. Huss answered him, that although he could
not keep evil thoughts from courting him, yet he might keep them from making a
lodging place in his heart; as, he added, though I cannot prevent the birds from
flying over my head, yet I can keep them from building nests in my hair.
Vain thoughts
A true Christian, who, by experience, knows what it is to deal with his own heart,
finds it infinitely more difficult to beat down one sinful thought from rising up in
him than to keep a thousand sinful thoughts from breaking forth into open act. Here
lies his chief labour, to fight against phantasm and any apparitions, such as thoughts
are; he sets himself chiefly against these heart sins, because he knows that these are
the sins that are most of all contrary to grace, and do most of all weaken and waste
grace. Outward sins are but like so many caterpillars that devour the verdure and
flourishing of grace; but heart sins are like so many worms that gnaw the very root
of grace. (Bp. E. Hopkins.)

JER 4:19-26
I am pained at my very heart.

The prophets lamentations over his peoples doom

I. The complaint or lamentation itself.

1. The parts affected. The soul and inward man.
(1) The secrecy of it, the mind and soul being inward and hidden.
(2) The mind receives and digests the thoughts.
(3) The mind is the mother of thoughts, conceiving and generating them.
2. The grief of those parts.
(1) God need not go far for the punishment of wicked men; He can do it from
within themselves; can punish a man with his own affections and
thoughts.
(2) What good cause we have to regulate and control our affections, avoid
passion and excess of emotion, take care to be pacific, and enjoy a
sabbatic tranquillity in our spirits.
3. The passage or vent.
(1) The speech of discovery. He cannot help revealing these workings of his
own spirit.
(2) The speech of lamentation. He must bewail and utter complaint, his
anguish was so great (Job 7:11).

II. The ground or occasion of his lamentation.

1. The tidings or report itself.
(1) The trumpet of providence.
(2) The trumpet of the Word.
(3) The trumpet of vision, or extraordinary prophetical revelation.
2. The conveyance of it to the prophet.
(1) The soul, through the corporeal organ of hearing.
(2) The soul immediately, as being that which had communion with God.
(3) The soul emphatically; that is heard, indeed, which is heard by the soul.
Hence--
 (a) Gods excellency: He speaks.
(b) Mans duty: he hears.
3. The improvement or use he makes of it.
(1) His meditations aroused his affections.
(a) This is the aim of a revelation.
(b) We should endeavour to bring revelations for others to our own
spiritual advancement and profit.
(2) What these affections were which the tidings aroused.
(a) An or at his peoples obstinacy.
(b) Fear of the coming judgment.
(c) Grief at his peoples state and doom (T. Herren, D. D.)

The alarm of war.

War
The alarm of war. A dreadful alarm; one that conjures up horrors and miseries
that can scarcely be too deeply coloured. It sends a shudder through the system to
think of the wealth of faculty and of resource that is expended over the problem how
men can most effectually blow up and slay their fellows, and spread ruin and
devastation upon the earth. Strip the thing of all the plumage of romance; look at it
in its naked literalness, and it is simply horrible. That is true, too true, undeniably
true. But let us learn a lesson. What capacities of heroism, of lofty patriotism, of
courageous and unstinting self-sacrifice are called forth by the sound of the
trumpet! Well, if only this potency of action, this burning enthusiasm, could be
transferred to the Holy War that we are called to wage--ay, what then? Who are the
real world heroes? An Alexander, a Napoleon? No, not the wakeful conquerors
whose path has been as the whirlwind, but the men and women of whom the world
often heard little, for the world does not know its best benefactors--the men and
women who have broken the chains of the slave; who have lifted the poor from the
dunghill; who have spoken the word of truth for which the soul of man was waiting;
who have helped their kind to nobler and higher life; and all and only for God and
for humanity. To them the statues and the monuments should be reared, and the
canvas animated, and the laurel entwined. They are your leaders, O Christian
people. Their fight is your fight, and it is His fight who is the Captain of our
salvation. If I were to say to you in regard to this highest and noblest warfare, as
Marshal Blanco said to the Cuban Spaniards, Do you swear to follow in this fight?
would you reply Yes, we do? I suppose you would. But just pause. Have you ever
parted with a single comfort, with an enjoyment, with something that you feel to be
good, if not necessary for your well-being; a something to which you are quite
entitled; to secure an unselfish end; to better some cause; to get more into the inner
place of human soul; to spread the knowledge of Gods Christ and of your Fathers
kingdom in our world? Oh, that as we raise the vision of one kind of war that is
blistered all over with mourning, lamentation, and woe, oh, that there might rise
upon our souls the vision of that other war that has no such blisters, that is written
all over with the characters of true, noble, glorious life or death! Oh, that this vision
might take some shape and some consistency and some solidarity within us. There is
no life that is worth anything that is not a fighting life. God made us to fight; He set
us in the world to fight. The enemy is around us, before us, without us, aye, and
within us. I ask, who of you are ready, humbly, reflecting, but earnestly, to lift up
your hand to Him, your risen Lord, who is beckoning you, and say, By Thy help,
Lord, I will. Here am I. I have been but a laggard; I have been content to fight in the
rear. Take me on to the van, and let me have some worthy part with Thee in this
great holy war. Here am I, Prince of Peace, send me. (J. M. Lang, D. D.)

The alarm of war

I. Of hearing the sound of the trumpet and the alarm of war.

1. We ought to have our ears open to the voice of God in the dispensations of His
providence (Mic 6:9).
2. When we hear the sound of the trumpet, and the alarm of war, we ought to
consider the causes of these alarms. The prophets often denounce war as a
judgment of God against His people, or against the Gentiles. In publishing
such threatenings they, for the most part, speak of the sins that have
provoked God to afflict His creatures with this calamity; and when they do
not specify the grounds of the Lords controversy, as in chap. 49, they leave
no room to doubt that God is justly displeased. God has just reason, for our
sins at present, not only to threaten, but to punish us with His vengeance.
We ought to wonder at His forbearance, that He has not long since caused
the sword to reach unto the whole of the nation, to avenge the quarrel of His
covenant.
3. The probable or possible consequences of these alarms of war ought to come
under our view when we hear the sound of the trumpet and the alarm of war.
When we make that preparation which religion enjoins against possible evils,
if these evils should not overtake us, we are no losers, but gainers. The fear of
evil has often been productive of much good. Happy is the man who feareth
always, and especially in times when there is peculiar cause of fear; but he
who hardeneth his heart shall fall into mischief.

II. The impression which the sound of the trumpet and the alarm of war ought to
make upon us.
1. Those external scenes of distress which are the consequences of war must give
pain to a heart that is not contracted and hardened by a reigning selfishness
of spirit.
2. Souls precipitated into an eternal world must awaken awful sensations in
those who believe that, when the dust returns to the earth as it was, the spirit
returns to God who gave it.
3. The influence that wars may have upon the interests of religion is a source of
anxious concern to the lovers of God (Lam 1:9; Lam 2:6-7; Lam 2:9). Amidst
the ravages of war, even in our own times, we have too often heard of the
alienation or destruction of houses ordinarily employed in the services of
religion. Should God, in His wrath, refuse us His help against those who
threaten the subversion of our liberties, who can foresee what dismal
consequences in the state of religion would ensue?
4. Gods indignation, apparent in the alarms of war, ought to impress every
 mind with deep concern.

III. What improvement is to be made of the sound of the trumpet and of the
alarm of war?
1. Let us consider our ways, and inquire how far we are chargeable with those
provocations of the Divine majesty which expose us to danger from our
enemies. When God threatens judgments, He observes our behaviour. He
returns and repents when men are ready to acknowledge their offences, and
to forsake them; but woe to those who are at ease in their sins, and never
inquire what are the causes of the Lords contendings with them.
2. We ought to humble ourselves before God, on account of our iniquities.
Observe in what manner Ezra and Daniel bewailed and confessed their own
iniquities, and the iniquities of their people (Ezr 9:1-15; Dan 9:1-27). What
would we think of a child that did not mourn when his father was justly
displeased with him? We would think that he was cursed with a disposition
that totally disqualified him for enjoying the sweetest pleasures that man can
taste. By this similitude the Scripture teaches us how unnatural a thing
insensibility to the chastisements of the Divine hand ought to be reputed
(Num 12:14).
3. Supplications for pardoning and reforming grace ought to accompany our
humiliation. We are greatly encouraged to pray by the many examples of
successful petitioners for public mercies in Scripture. The ways of God are
everlasting. He delights in mercy. He puts words into our mouth for
imploring His mercy. He hath left us many promises of merciful returns to
our prayers, that we may be encouraged to come boldly to His throne of
grace for mercy to ourselves, to our friends and brethren, to the Church, to
our king and country.
4. We are warned by the sound of the trumpet and the alarms of war to make
God our refuge, and the Most High our habitation. To trust to ourselves is
the fruit of atheism. If there is a God, He rules in the army of heaven and
amongst the inhabitants of the earth; and He does according to His pleasure.
He sits upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as
grasshoppers. He bringeth the princes of the earth to nought; He maketh its
judges as vanity. But the name of the Lord is a strong tower of defence,
some may say, only for the righteous (Pro 18:10). And we are conscious of
so many evils, that we have no reason to hope for protection from the Holy
One, who takes no pleasure in wickedness, and will not suffer evil to dwell
with Him. It is true, the Lord our God is holy; but it is true likewise, that He
is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and
sin. Him that cometh unto Me, says Jesus, I will in no wise cast out. You
have perhaps heard some ridiculous stories of men that, by some magical
secret, were rendered invulnerable in battle. You would not be afraid to
encounter the most formidable armies if you were masters of such a secret;
but, if thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. He
that liveth, and believeth in Me, shall never die. Who is he that can kill those
who cannot die? The words, you will say, must be figuratively understood;
for who is the man that liveth, and shall not see death? But, however they are
to be understood, they are true and faithful sayings of the Amen, the faithful
and true Witness, of Him that liveth, and was dead, and is alive for
 evermore, and holds the keys of the spiritual world, and of death. You are
called to mourning in days of danger, but not to that kind of mourning which
swallows up the soul. You are called to mourn, that you may rejoice; to be
afflicted for your sins, that you may flee from wrath to Christ, and find in
Him safety, security, and joy.
5. The sound of the trumpet and the alarm of war is a loud call to us to cease to
do evil, and to learn to do well. Our faith in God is a delusion if we hold fast
our iniquities. Our faith in Christ, if it is genuine, will purify our hearts and
lives. We are exposed to danger, not only from our own personal sins, but
from the sins of our fellow subjects; and therefore we ought not only to
forsake sin, but to use all our influence to turn other sinners from the error
of their ways. It is a righteous thing with God, that those who do not duly
oppose the prevalence of sin should share in the miseries which it brings. We
ought not only to renounce all iniquity, but to live in the habitual practice of
every duty which God requires. (G. Lawson.)

JER 4:20
Suddenly are my tents spoiled, and my curtains in a moment.

Sudden sorrow
Jeremiah was describing the havoc of war, a war which was devastating his
country and bringing untold miseries upon the people. How grateful we ought to be
that war is not raging in our own land. Blessed be the Lord, who has given centuries
of peace to the fertile hills and valleys of His chosen isle. There are, however, in this
land, and in all lands, whether at war or peace, many calamities which come
suddenly upon the sons of men, concerning which they may bitterly lament, How
suddenly are my tents spoiled and my curtains in a moment. This world at its best
is not our rest. There is nothing settled below the moon. We call this terra firma,
but there is nothing firm upon it; it is tossed to and fro like a troubled sea evermore.
We are never for any long time in one stay; change is perpetually operating. Nothing
is sure but that which is Divine; nothing is abiding except that which cometh down
from heaven.

I. A sudden spoiling happens to human righteousness.

1. Let us look at the history of human righteousness, and begin in the garden of
Eden, and lament the fall. Adam in his perfection could not maintain his
righteousness, how can you and I, who are imperfect from the very birth,
hope to do so?
2. A second instance of this very commonly occurs in the failure of the moralists
resolutions. See yonder young people, tutored from their childhood in
everything that is good: their character is excellent and admirable, but will it
so abide? Will not the enemy despoil their tents?
3. Another liability of human righteousness is one which I must not call a
calamity, seeing it is the commencement of the greatest blessing: I mean
when the Spirit of God comes to deal with human righteousness, by way of
illumination and conviction. Here we can speak of what we know
 experimentally. How beautiful our righteousness is, and how it flourishes
like a comely flower till the Spirit of God blows upon it, and then it withers
quite away, like the grass in the hot sirocco. The first lesson of the Holy
Ghost to the heart is to lay bare its deceivableness, and to uncover before us
its loathsomeness, where we thought that everything was true and
acceptable. I would ask all who are under conviction of sin to answer this
question, When thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do? May you reply, We
know what we will do. We will flee from self to Jesus. Our precious things are
removed, and our choice treasure is taken from us; therefore do we take the
Lord Jesus to be our all in all.
4. But there will come to all human righteousness one other time of spoiling, if
neither of those should happen which I have mentioned before. Remorse will
come, and that very probably in the hour of death, if not before.

II. The words of our text are exceedingly applicable to THE SPOILING OF ALL
EARTHLY COMFORTS.
1. Sudden destruction to all our earthly comforts is common to all sorts of men.
It may happen to the best as well as to the worst. As darts the hawk upon its
prey, so does affliction fall upon the unsuspecting sons of Adam. As the
earthquake on a sudden overthrows a city, so does adversity shake the estate
of mortals.
2. Sudden trial comes in various forms. Here below nothing is certain but
universal uncertainty. One way or another, God knoweth how to bring the
rod home to us, and to make us smart till we cry out, How suddenly are my
tents spoiled, and my curtains in a moment.
3. Now this might well be expected. Do we wonder when we are suddenly
deprived of our earthly comforts? Are they not fleeting things? When they
came to us did we receive a lease of them, or were we promised that they
should last forever? All that we possess here below is Gods property; He has
only loaned it out to us, and what He lends He has a right to take back again.
We hold our possessions and our friends, not upon freehold, but upon lease
terminable at the Supreme Owners option; do you wonder when the holding
ceases?
4. Since these calamities may be expected, let us be prepared for them. How?
say you. Why, by holding all earthly things loosely; by having them as though
you had them not; by looking at them as fleeting, and never expecting them
to abide with you.
5. Let us take care to make good use of our comforts while we possess them.
Since they hastily fly by us, let us catch them on the wing, and diligently
employ them for Gods glory. Let us commit our all to the custody of God,
who is our all in all. Such a blessed thing is faith in God that if the believer
should lose everything he possesses here below he would have small cause
for sorrow so long as he kept his faith.
6. But let us solemnly remind you that in times when we meet with sudden
calamity God is putting you to the test, and trying the love and faith of those
who profess to be His people. When thou art spoiled, what writ thou do?
You thought you loved God: do you love Him now? You said He was your
Father, but that was when He kissed you; is He your Father now that He
 chastens you?

III. There may come A SUDDEN SPOILING OF LIFE ITSELF. In a moment prostrated
by disease and brought to deaths door, frail man may well cry out, How suddenly
are my tents spoiled, and my curtains in a moment!
1. It is by no means unusual for men to die on a sudden.
2. Not one man or woman here has a guarantee that he or she shall live till
tomorrow. It is almost a misuse of language to talk about life insurance, for
we cannot insure our lives; they must forever remain uninsured as to their
continuance here. When thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do? When on a
sudden the curtains of our tent shall rend in twain, and the tent pole shall be
snapped, and the body shall lie a desolate ruin, what shall we then do? I will
tell you what some of us know that we shall do. We know that when the
earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved we have a building of God, a
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. As poor, guilty sinners
we have fled to Christ for refuge, and He is ours, and we know that He will
surely keep what we have committed to Him until that day: therefore are we
not afraid of all that the spoilers can do. We are not afraid of the spoiler; but,
O worldling, when thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do? (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The wailing of the bereaved

I. Our first sorrowful theme is SUDDEN BEREAVEMENTS. Alas! alas! how soon may
we be childless; how soon may we be widowed of the dearest objects of our
affections! Ah! this were a sad world indeed, if the ties of kindred, of affection, and
of friendship all be snapped; and yet it is such a world that they must be sundered,
and may be divided at any moment.
1. Let us learn to sit loose by our dearest friends that we have on earth. Let us
love them--love them we may, love them we should--but let us always learn
to love them as dying things. Oh, build not thy nest on any of these trees, for
they are all marked for the axe. See thou the disease of mortality on every
cheek, and write not eternal upon the creature of an hour.
2. Take care that thou puttest all thy dear ones into Gods hand. Thou hast put
thy soul there, put them there. Thou canst trust them for temporals for
thyself, trust thy jewels with Him. Feel that they are not thine own, but that
they are Gods loans to thee; loans which may be recalled at any moment--
precious benisons of heaven, not entailed upon thee, but of which thou art
but a tenant at will.
3. Further, you who are blessed with wife and children and friends, take care
that you bless God for them. Sing a song of praise to God who hath blessed
you so much more than others.
4. And then permit me to remind you that if these sudden bereavements may
come, and there may be a dark chamber in any house in a moment, and the
coffin may be in any one of our habitations, let us so act to our kinsfolk and
relatives as though we knew they were soon about to die.

II. SUDDEN DEATH, AS WE VIEW IT MORE PARTICULARLY IN RELATION TO OURSELVES.

There are a thousand gates to death. How many there be who have fallen dead in the
streets! How many sitting in their own homes! Well, our turn must come. Perhaps
we shall die falling asleep in our beds after long sickness, but probably we shall be
suddenly called in such an hour as we think not to face the realities of eternity. Well,
if it be so, if there be a thousand gates to death, if all means and any means may be
sufficient to stop the current of our life, if really, after all, spiders webs and bubbles
are more substantial things than human life, if we are but a vapour, or a dying taper
that soon expires in darkness, what then?
1. Why, first, I say, let us all look upon ourselves as dying men, let us not reckon
on tomorrow. Oh! let us not procrastinate; for taken in Satans great net of
procrastination, we may wait, and wait, and wait, till time is gone, and the
great knell of eternity shall toll our dissolution.
2. And then take care, I pray you, that you who do know Christ not only live as
though you meant to die, but live while you live. Oh, what a work we have to
do, and how short the time to do it in!
3. And let us learn never to do anything which we should not wish to be found
doing if we were to die. We are sometimes asked by young people whether
they may go to the theatre, whether they may dance, or whether they may do
this or that. You may do anything which you would not be ashamed to be
doing when Christ shall come.

III. THE SUDDEN CHANGE WHICH A SUDDEN DEATH WILL CAUSE. You see yonder
Christian man, he is full of a thousand fears,--he is afraid even of his interest in
Christ, he is troubled spiritually, and vexed with temporal cares. You see him cast
down and exceeding troubled, his faith but very weak; he steps outside yon door,
and there meets him a messenger from God, who smites him to the heart, and he is
dead. Can you conceive the change? Death has cured him of his fears, his tears are
wiped away once for all from his eyes; and, to his surprise, he stands where he
feared he should never be, in the midst of the redeemed of God, in the general
assembly and church of the first-born. If he should think of such things, would he
not upbraid himself for thinking so much of his trials and of his troubles, and for
looking into a future which he was never to see? See yonder man, he can scarcely
walk, he has a hundred pains in his body, he is more tried and pained than any man.
Death puts his skeleton hand upon him, and he dies. How marvellous the change!
No aches now, no casting down of spirit, he then is supremely blest, the decrepit has
become perfect, the weak has become strong, the trembling one has become a David,
and David has become as the angel of the Lord. But what must be the change to the
unconverted man? His joys are over forever. His death is the death of his happiness-
-his funeral is the funeral of his mirth. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Wise to do evil.--
Readier to do evil than good
This is a mystery, and yet nothing is more palpable and provable. How easily we
learn to go down to hell! What a toil it is in all life to climb, until we get into the
meaning of it, and become real mountaineers; then we say, Let us go upward, for we
feed upon the very wind, we grow strong by the very exercise; we pant to stand upon
the highest pinnacles of nature. But how easy it is not to obey! how easy not to go to
church! How delightfully easy to throw off the yoke and to terminate the discipline
of life! Employers of labour know this; labourers themselves are well acquainted
with it; all schoolmasters and trainers of the young would assent to the proposition
instantly and without reserve, and every living man would say, That is true. If that is
true, the whole point is yielded. Why should it be true? The direct contrary ought to
be the case: it ought to be hard to be crooked and rough and foolish and vain and
worldly. It ought to be almost impossible for a man made in the image and likeness
of God to drink himself to death, to rob his neighbour, to play the fool, to sleep with
the devil. Given creation at the beginning, and it never could occur to the finite
intellect as a possibility that man should think one ignoble thought, utter one untrue
word, commit himself to one dishonourable policy; the exclamation would be, It is
impossible! But we have done it I We have broken all the ten commandments one by
one; we have shattered them in their totality; we have run away from God. We have
done miracles which have astounded the heavens. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Godlessness is supreme folly

Do you count him a wise man who is wise in anything but in his own proper
profession and employment, wise for everybody but himself, who is ingenious to
contrive his own misery and to do himself a mischief, but is dull and stupid as to the
designing of any real benefit and advantage to himself? Such a one is he who is
ingenious in his calling but a bad Christian, for Christianity is more our proper
calling and profession than the very trades we live upon; and such is every sinner
who is wise to do evil, but to do good has no understanding. (J. Tillotson.)

Piety-the truest wisdom

If any mans head or tongue should grow apace, and all the rest of the body not
grow, it would certainly make him a monster; and they are no other that are
knowing and talkative Christians, and grow daily in these respects, but not at all in
holiness of heart and life, which is the proper growth of the children of God. (H. G.
Salter.)

JER 4:30
Though thou rentest thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou make thyself fair.
Hypocrisy discovered
This renting of the face is, literally, enlarging of the eyes through kohl or
antimony--a trick of artificial beauty. And the poor creature has taken out her best
clothes, painted herself with the fairest colours, done all she could from the outside,
and behold the issue is: Thy lovers will despise but after all is over men feel that
this is unreal, untrue, utterly rotten at the core; they say this is a goodly apple
rotten at the heart. Let us understand the, that whether we be discovered now or
then, we shall be discovered. The hollow man shall be sounded, and shall be
pronounced void. Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting; and thou,
poor fool, hast covered up the hectic flush of consumption with indigo that will wash
off, or with some other colour that can be cleansed away; thou hast made thyself
look otherwise than as thou art: but all that is external shall be taken from thee, and
thou shalt be seen in thy naked hideousness and ghastliness. This is right! The
revelation will be awful; but it ought to be made, or heaven itself will be insecure.
Oh, what disclosures then! The canting hypocrite without his cloak; the skilful
mocker who has lost his power of jesting; the knave who always said a grace he had
committed to memory before he cut the bread he had stolen; the preacher who knew
the right, and yet the wrong pursued; the fair speaker, who knew the very subtlety of
music as to persuasion, and yet decoyed souls down the way at the end of which is
hell. Then the other revelation will also be made. There may be men of rough
manners who shall prove to have been all the while animated by a gentle spirit;
there may be those who have been regarded as Philistines who are Gods gentlemen;
there may be those who have been thought as unworthy of courtesy who shall be set
high among the angels. (J. Parker, D. D.) .

JEREMIAH 5

JER 5:1-9
Run ye . . . and see . . . if ye can find a man.

A man; or, The Divine ideal unrealised

I. THE DIVINE IDEA OF A MAN. One that executeth Judgment, that seeketh the
truth. This involves--
1. A righteous working out of the Divine will so far as it is apprehended.
2. An earnest endeavour for further knowledge of the Divine will.
3. How different is the Divine ideal of a man from that which popularly prevails.
(1) The ideal of the muscular force.
(2) That of the secular--wealth.
(3) That of the intellectual--knowledge.
(4) That of the vain--show.

II. The lamentable rarity of a man.

1. A sad revelation of the moral condition of Jerusalem in the days of the
prophet. Such corruption amongst a people who had such religious
privileges, and in the very scene where the temple stood, shows the
wonderful forbearance of God and the terrible perversity of the human heart!
2. The condition of our own age. Verily, we are a fallen people.

III. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF A MAN. And I will pardon it. For the sake of a man,
God promises to pardon Jerusalem. The value of a man to society, to the race, is
everywhere represented in the Bible.
1. A man is a condition on which God favours the race. Sodom and Gomorrah.
2. A man is an agent by which God improves the condition of the race. He
educates, purifies, saves man by man. (Homilist.)
The sinfulness of Jerusalem
1. Deliberate and wilful perjury (Jer 5:2). So familiarised with oaths as not to
care whether the matter sworn to was true or false.
2. Idolatry. Strange to see how madly this people ran after the lying vanities of
the Gentiles, after they had received such manifold and undeniable proofs of
the power, wisdom, and goodness of a living God, who was present with
them; after so many laws enacted against idolatry, so many signal judgments
inflicted on them for falling into this sin, such a hedge set about them to keep
them from mingling with other nations, lest they should learn their ways.
3. Adulteries and fornications. This was a crime of a high nature, a complication
of sins, and productive of so many sad consequences that death was the just
punishment allotted to it.
4. Their shameful prevaricating with Gods Word, and torturing it to make it
speak contrary to its genuine meaning. To this end they encouraged false
prophets, who would prophesy smooth things, etc.
5. They were very unthankful to God, and insensible of His blessings conferred
upon them.
6. They were very fraudulent in their dealings one with another, both in word
and deed.
7. That which portended the extirpation of these Jews was, that not only all the
fore cited iniquities were notorious in practice, but were moreover approved
of, as it were, and settled among them by common consent.
8. This is enough to prove that it was fit for nothing but the fire, and it hath
received that just recompense of reward. And the history of it is recorded for
the instruction of all other cities who have the sacred Scriptures to instruct
them. They may hear Jerusalem warning them, saying, Look upon me, and
learn to fear God. Will ye steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, and
sacrifice to the idols of your own imagination, and hope to escape the wrath
of God better than I have done? Let my calamities conduce to your salvation,
and put away those sins from among you which have laid me in ruinous
heaps, and turned me into a monument of the Divine fury. Look upon me,
and learn to fear God.
9. Those who are enemies to religion, and help to banish the fear of God out of
the world, by denying the authority of His Word, or by putting a wrong sense
and construction upon it, are as bad members as can be found in any society
of men, because they do what they can to subvert the very foundations of
truth, and deprive us of the last remedy which is left to repair the breaches of
piety and virtue in a sinful world. (W. Reading, M. A.)

A man
We all know the two meanings of the word man--the one which distinguishes a
human being from a beast, the other which is applied only to those who possess the
highest qualities of manhood. Such are the salt of the earth, such would have been
the saviours of Jerusalem. Ay, such an one was the Saviour of this world, the man
Christ Jesus. A union of qualities is needed to make up a man in this high but true
sense. These qualities are partly physical, partly mental, and partly spiritual. We
know what false ideas are attached to manliness. It is often entirely associated with
brute strength. He is a man, think many, who has the greatest strength of arm and
power of body. But though beneficial, and often beautiful, this manly strength does
not make the man. In some of the most splendid specimens of bodily physique you
have the mind of a child and the weakness of a fool, or, still worse, the unrestrained
appetites of the beast, or the desperate wickedness of a fiend. How often, too, are the
views of men taken as the stamp of manhood. Too often the youthful ideal of
manliness is not self-restraint, but self-indulgence, to abandon duty, to pursue
pleasure, to wreck the happiness of others, to be lord of ones self, that heritage of
woe--how many cherish these as the highest functions of a man! There may be other
false ideals, but I wish to come to the scriptural ideal of the man who, if he could be
found, would have saved the city and state of Jerusalem. What are the leading
characteristics? To do justly, to seek truth. How commonplace, how stripped of the
glory and pride dear to young imaginations, how possible for all to reach.

I. The first test, whether we are worthy to be called men, is THE RIGHTNESS OF OUR
ACTIONS, THE INTEGRITY OR JUSTICE OF OUR DOINGS. What is our conduct in life? Are
we conforming ourselves to the Divine standard? Let us look at detail in right-doing
in the different positions which we are called to fill. A deal of our lives is spent in our
homes. There, if anywhere, we are genuine. We cannot seem to be what we are not
before those who know us best, and who can read us through and through. How
often there we fail to be men! The man who does justly is eminently tender, willing
to enter into the feelings of others, to deal justly with them, to extend to them the
sympathy of his strong nature. He is also helpful. The very presence of some men is
helpful; you may not ask their advice, but to know they are near you is in itself a
strength; and in the home relationships is it not the special province of the father,
the husband, the son, the brother, to be helpful, to lift burdens, to smooth
difficulties, to unravel the knots of this tangled existence? Do you not know homes
where they who should be helpful only hinder the family life, where they are
burdens and disgraces, taxing not only the family love, but wasting means all too
narrow, and depriving their own kindred of their due share of lifes blessings? Such
are not men, still less are they men who presume on others weakness. Many a
husband shelters himself under his wifes love from the penalties of his neglect, if
not of worse treatment. Many a lad, who, above all, wants to be thought manly, takes
advantage of his parents fondness, and wastes their hard-earned money in riotous
living, while they believe it is being usefully spent on his education or advancement
in life. Such men will never save a State, will never rise to such a height of nobility
that they can leaven with the true spirit of goodness and righteousness the mass
around them.

II. The second test of manhood is SEEKING TRUTH. Truth is, in the Old Testament,
not only mental but moral, is not only intellectual knowledge, but the knowledge of
God and of His will. We need in this present day men equally ready to seek truth in
all spheres of knowledge--in science, in philosophy, in politics, in religion. We
cannot be too earnest in seeking all light, wherever it comes from. We should
remember the words of the poet: Truth is the strong thing; let mans life be true,
and we should pursue our search in humility, in reverence, and in faith--above all, in
regard to Divine things. That is a duty laid upon us all--to seek God, who is truth; to
cleave to Him at all costs; to do His will, whatever it be. We may be mistaken as to
what His will is; we may be troubled by doubts and difficulties, moral or intellectual;
but we must remember that if we try to do justly we shall know the doctrine whether
it be of God.

III. In doing justly, in seeking truth, you will be men because you will be
FOLLOWERS OF THE MAN CHRIST JESUS. When we think of Christ as man we too often
think only of His sorrow, of His persecution, of His death. True man He was in all
these points, and nothing soothes us more in our time of trouble than that blessed
knowledge. But I wish you to realise Him as man not only in the weakness but in the
strength of humanity. I wish you to recognise in Him the ideal man, who did justly
and sought truth. Think of His life, of His tenderness to His mother, of His
helpfulness to His friends. Think of the ideal which He set before men. Is not the
life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? is His counsel to the
multitude eager for the outward. Lay not up treasure upon earth is His warning to
the rich and over-careful. One thing is needful is His reply to the cumbered
housewife. Read these Gospels, and tell me if there ever breathed a purer, more
righteous, more unselfish spirit. (J. R. Mitford Mitchell, D. D.)

The courage of the true prophet

It is difficult, says a great historian, to conceive any situation more painful than
that of a great man condemned to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted
country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede
its dissolution; and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear, one by one, until
nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. Such was the fate of
Jeremiah. His writings are among the saddest in Scripture. He was no Elijah, no
Isaiah, no John the Baptist, no Savonarola, not a man of mighty thunderings, whose
strong spirit can face corrupted nations and never quail. There are some men whose
courage seems to rise in proportion as they have to face insensate fury of opposition.
Such was the spirit of Phocion. Have I said anything wrong then? he exclaimed,
when the Athenians cheered his speech. Such was the spirit of Coriolanus. Such was
the spirit of the great Scipio. Christians who believe that Christ really did mean
something when He said, Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you,--
Christians, a few of them, have also believed that there is a beatitude of insolence
and of malediction. Heavens! what mistake have I made! was the answer of a
strong governor when told that he was beginning to get popular. But Jeremiah was
not naturally a man of this strong fibre. Timid, shrinking, sensitive, he was yet
placed by God in the forefront of a forlorn hope, in which he was, as it were,
predestined to failure and to martyrdom. In this chapter Jeremiah is striving to
bring home to his people that things are not as they should be. Diogenes, in Athens,
searched the streets with a lantern at noonday to find a man; Jeremiah, in
Jerusalem, says that neither in its streets, nor in its broad places, can he find one
man, one just, strong servant of the Lord. He thought, perhaps, that had there been
such, God might pardon Jerusalem as He had once pardoned Sodom. But he could
not find them. He found profession, but not sincerity; chastisement, but not
amendment; remorse, but not repentance. Then he thought, I have been too much
among the multitude, who are ignorant and foolish; I will go to the upper strata of
society; I will get me to the great men, to the priests, the statesmen, the men of
culture; they surely have had leisure to learn the way of the Lord and the judgment
of their God. But the prophet was utterly disappointed; the upper thousands were
worse and more helpless than the lower myriads; they had altogether broken the
yoke and burst the bands, and so he adds--Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall
slay them, a wolf of the evening shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their
cities. What was the exact idea of the threatened punishment we do not know. The
general meaning is clear; the days were evil alike among high and low; there were
carelessness, unbelief, self-seeking, insincerity, and, amid all, men were completely
at their ease; they were quite secure that no evil could happen to them. Jeremiah
thought differently; he knew that greed, falsity, unreality, corruption, cannot last.
God cannot forever bear with them; men cannot forever endure their burden; they
may be long-lived, but doomsday comes to them in the end. Has it not always been
so? The great world empires of idolatry--what could once have seemed more secure
than they were in cruel strength? Where are they now? In any age, whenever any
true prophet has spoken, the world has always been thrown into violent antagonism;
it denies him every quality he possesses; he may be the humblest of men, but he will
assuredly be charged with pride, Whom makest thou thyself? If he be hopeful, he
will be called Utopian and unpractical; if he be despondent, he will be called
maudlin; if he feels strongly, he is excited and an enthusiast; if he speaks strongly,
he is gushing and hysterical; in the one case he is a Samaritan, and in the other he
has a devil. A sneer has been made on the very name of the prophet of whom we are
speaking, and the world thinks it has effectually depreciated any warning about
present evil or future peril, when it has called it a Jeremiad. Neither the world nor
the Church can tolerate a prophet until they have killed him: kings cannot away with
him. Ahab imprisons Micaiah, Joash kills Zechariah, Herod slays John in prison,
Eudoxia banishes Chrysostom, Sigismund burns Huss. Priests hate him with still
more perfect hatred; the priests of Jerusalem ridicule Isaiah; the priest Pashur put
Jeremiah into the stocks; the priest Amaziah expels Amos; the priests Annas and
Caiaphas slew the Lord of glory; the priest Ananias bid them smite Paul over the
mouth. The true prophet, if God ever give us one again, must face all this. He, like
St. Paul, must be weak and despised for Christs sake. But, besides this, he will
especially have to bear the one charge which has always been brought against all
prophets since the world began--that what he says is exaggerated, and that what he
says is uncharitable. Doubtless, the impatient Amaziahs and the Pashurs of
Jeremiahs day said, What business has this man to bring such sweeping
accusations? Look at our priests, how active they are, how many services they have,
how careful they are to burn exactly the two kidneys with the fat; look at the scribes,
how accurate they are in counting the very letters of Scripture; look at all the
eminently respectable persons who go to church and pay their tithes of mint and of
anise and of cumin. And as for danger, that is all hysterical nonsense. This is not the
Lords messenger; evil shall not come upon us. Yes, but it did come before
Jeremiah was hurried to his death; it came as with a deluge; it came as with a
thunder crash; it came as with a hurricane. On these conventional priests, on these
careless aristocrats, on these money-making middle classes, on these immoral
multitudes the flash fell, and the glory and freedom of Israel were hurled forever
into the dust. Thousands who are not prophets might draw a very flattering picture
of this age, which might be represented as nearly all that could be wished; they could
point to its placid comfort, its domestic virtues, its slightly expanded egotism, and
say there never was an age so respectable; they would point to all the threepenny
pieces, and even to all the shillings in the plate, and say there never was an age so
charitable; they would point to the endless multiplication of sermons and services,
and say there never was an age so deeply religious they would point to the
mushroom growth of fussy organisations, and say that the Church never was so
vigorously, zealous. I fear that the truth would force the prophet to speak; he would
point out the great gulf fixed between true religion and sentimental formalism; he
would say that the sums that the nation dribbles in charity are in relation to its
wealth no proof of our magnanimity, but the measure of our indifference; he might
say that in spite of all our organisation, all the religious machinery in London is put
into play on Hospital Sunday with the result of collecting some 20,000, which you
will see perhaps in the paper the next day has been given in a two days sale for
china and bric-a-brac. He might say that sermons and services, day after day, may
perhaps only be treading into deader callosity the self-satisfaction of Pharisaic
hearts; he might say that the praise of our languid virtues was the best opiate to lull
our souls into indifference and let them rot asleep into the grave. (Dean Farrar.)

True manhood
We are to set before us an ideal of manly character and life, and practically to seek
its realisation. Of the elements of true manhood, let us specify the following:--

I. INTEGRITY. There are statesmen who tell us that morals have no place in
politics. But the true statesman makes a conscience of politics. Again, there is
perhaps a higher moral sentiment developing in business; yet one still hears of an
undue advantage being taken of profiting by a mans ignorance or necessities, and
that even by religious tradesmen.

II. PURITY. Some men boast of foul passions as the marks of manhood. It is
effeminate to be pure. Initiation into vice is the baptism of manhood. But moral
determination is altering that. A total abstainer is no longer jeered at.

III. RELIGION. I do not mean the religion of monks, or of ecclesiastics, or of

sentimentalists, but the religion of Jesus Christ, a reverent recognition of God, of
holiness, of human life. Can anything be more noble than fidelity to the noblest
things we know T Has the world any nobleness like the nobleness of holy character?
(H. Allon, D. D.)

Right kind of men

I. In the estimation of God the true excellence of man is moral and religious.
1. A strict obedience to the Divine will as far as it is known.
2. An earnest endeavour to attain an accurate acquaintance with the Divine
Word.

II. There are states of society in which men of this description are exceedingly
rare.
1. They may be removed by death.
2. They may be withdrawn into concealment.
3. They may be reduced in numbers by the progress of degeneracy.

III. In the worst states of society such men are very valuable.
 1. They avert Divine judgments
2. Draw down Divine blessings.
3. Promote the work of reformation. (G. Brooks.)

Wanted-A man
Philosophers in all ages have complained that human creatures are plentiful, but
men are scarce. But philosophers made their ideal too high, their conception of what
man ought to be too lofty. I have no sympathy with the cynic of whom history
informs us, that, being ordered to summon the good men of the city before the
Roman censor, proceeded immediately to the graveyard, called to the dead below,
saying he knew not where to find a good man alive; or that gloomy sage, that prince
of grumblers, Thomas Carlyle, who described the population of his country as
consisting of so many millions, mostly fools, and who could speak in praise of no
one but himself and Mrs. Carlyle, the latter deserving all the praise she got for
enduring him. When anyone complains, as Diogenes did, that he has to hunt the
streets with candles at noonday to find an honest man, we are apt to think that his
nearest neighbour would have quite as much difficulty as himself in making the
discovery. If you think there is not a ,true man living, you had better, for
appearance, put off saying it until you are dead yourself. In looking for a man, look
for a man with a conscience--a man who, like Longfellows honest blacksmith, can
look the whole world in the face, and fear not any man. Look for a being that has a
heart. A warm, loving nature is true manliness. In looking for a man, look for a
magnanimous man; a broad mind, that not only observes what passes in the limited
range of its own sphere, but is not afraid to look abroad; is far-sighted and not afraid
of excellence in others. In your search for a man, look for a being that has a soul--
the capability of solemn thought. Thousands today worship Bacchus and Venus.
Their hearts are set on having a good time. Others apply themselves so intensely to
their business that they find pleasure only in worshipping the mighty dollar. The
man who so inordinately loves money for its own sake, and becomes insensible to all
refined enjoyments, after a while ceases to be a man. Faith in Jesus Christ makes
manly men. He is our model--a model containing all the elements of true manhood;
a model of sympathy and love; a model of purity and uprightness. Christ-men are
wanted. (M. C. Peters.)

A man
Two things, according to this text, are needed to make a man: practice and
principle--principle sought out with a view to practice, practice conform to principle,
and both according to what is right and true; both are morally, mutually helpful,
both are necessary. You may be as strong as a lion, fleet as a deer, brave as a bulldog,
beautiful as a gazelle, clever as Satan, but unless you seek the truth, and do the right
first and foremost in the face of day, you have not yet come up to the mark of a man.
Is that what the world says and thinks? Oh no. Its heroes, perhaps yours, are too
often not the morally good, but daring adventurers, successful soldiers, lithe
athletes, quick-witted speculators, fortune-making merchants, subtle-tongued
declaimers, gifted writers, skilful artists, politic statesmen, wearers of titles, and so
on. These are the men that too often the world takes its praises and its prizes to,
heedless of character and principles, pleading its own large-mindedness in putting
truthful and righteous men behind and below mere physical and intellectual power
and agility. These are the favourites that the base and meaner sort go gaping after
and copying, and thus it is that it often happens that real men are comparatively
rare and hard to find. (J. S. Drummond.)

The value of one true man to the State

What have men and women to look to for the defence and prosperity of nations?
Astute diplomatists, enlarged navies and armies, and forts and guns, scientific
discoveries, commercial treaties, cultivation of art, legislative enactments? Think of
these what you please. I tell you that these are not, any nor all of them, the true
shields and saviours of nations; these do not form the backbone and centre of a
strong body politic. It is not for these that God is sending upon us any blessing; not
the providing of such that will lead Him to say, I will pardon Jerusalem and scatter
the swollen storm clouds What was it then? It was a man. Goethe says no greater
good can happen to a town than for several educated men thinking in the same way
about what is good and true living in it. But Goethes standard is insufficient; it falls
short of the Divine. The defenders and the benefactors of nations and of their fellow
men are the morally and religiously good in them; men whose lives are regulated by
the teachings of God; men who seek to act as Christ did are the men that are worthy,
and that are looked upon by God as blessings to the nations. Ay, and even one such
is a mighty pillar, and on occasion even one such may be the saviour and mainstay
of the State. (J. S. Drummond.)

Make yourself a man

When President Garfield was a boy, and was asked what he would be, his reply
was: Well, first of all, I must make myself a man; for, if I do not succeed in that, I
shall not succeed in anything.
Godly men the preservative of society
One of the greatest services which a man can render society is to believe the truths
of God sincerely, and maintain them steadfastly. It is the happiest state for a
community when there exists within it a vigorous Christianity--a phalanx of strong
minds, fully persuaded as to the revealings and requirements of the Most High. Like
the willows by the water courses which are not only green, but whose roots,
penetrating and interlacing in the soft and spongy soil, prevent it from being swept
away by the rushing torrent, these men of gentle manners, but profound
convictions, are the living network, the rampart of roots unnoticed and unthanked,
who keep society from crumbling piecemeal into the gulf of licentiousness and
atheism and crime, which is forever surging and foaming past it Like the metallic
clamps and rivets, the bands and girders, which, in a region of earthquake, keep the
precarious houses from tumbling to pieces, law and police magistracy are a mere
mud masonry, and but for the binding power of such consciences, but for the
fastening force of their convictions who believe in God, in the upheavings of mans
passions, in the volcanic throes of his lust and violence, the framework of society
would soon be shaken all to pieces. Like the fragments of iron in a mass of stone,
which draw it towards the magnet, it is the faith which He finds in the earth, which
at any period draws the earth towards its Maker, or makes a community a people
near to God. (James Hamilton, D. D.)
A hero is a real man
What is it to be a hero? A hero is simply the English form of the Greek heros,
which primarily meant a man, a real man, a separate and unmistakable man, as
distinct from anthropos, or mankind in general. By a recognition of this very truth,
that a mans distinctness as a man among men works and measures his exceptional
character and capabilities, the Greeks came to call a grand man, or a great or
preeminent man, a hero, as another way of saying that he was distinguished man.
Dost thou know what a hero is? asks Longfellow and then gives answer, Why, a
hero is as much as one should say--a hero. A hero is a man. There is heroism in all
real manliness. A real man is a real hero. This it is which gives force to Carlyles
question, If hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a hero? The
answer is, that it requires character, exceptional character, to make one willing to be
a man. Most men are afraid to be themselves. They shrink from being
distinguished. Their preference is to conform themselves to the common standard
of their sphere--to be like others, rather than to be like themselves alone. Where this
feeling prevails, heroism is an impossibility. One acting on this preference cannot be
distinguished. He who is unwilling to exercise and assert his character, in spite of all
the world, cannot be recognised as the possessor of character. He cannot be
measured apart from the common standard to which he, of choice, conforms
himself. (Great Thoughts.)

Manliness
Ask a young woman what quality in a man she admires most, and the answer you
are sure to get is manliness. The answer is highly creditable to the feminine taste.
God also puts a great value on true manhood.

I. TRUE MANHOOD. Many spurious standards of manhood are met with in the
world. By many young men, unfortunately, it is thought manly to be a proficient in
swearing, in gambling, in drinking, in forbidden pleasure Not to toe the line in
these evil customs is to be pronounced no man at all According to this breed of
youth, piety is held at a considerable discount; it is not a thing for men, however it
may suit parsons, Sunday school children, and old women of both sexes. Now look
at the type of manhood spoken of in our text. According to our text a man is one who
doeth righteousness and seeketh after the truth. Not the man of great muscularity
and great physical power. Not the man who has seen much of the world, so called,
which too often means a man who has worked for the wages of sin, which is death;
neither of these is the true type of manhood according to Scripture. Let no one,
misled by a popular confusion of ideas, dislike our text because it brings a mans
own imperfect righteousness before our attention. It is most true that no measure of
human righteousness can ever avail the sinner as a substitute for the righteousness
of Christ by faith. A sinners heart resembles Lady Macbeths hands, stained beyond
all human cleansing. We cannot and we need not by our own efforts establish a
righteousness able to justify and make reconciliation for the ungodly. Yet that does
not mean that we may be callous about the sovereign claims of Gods eternal laws of
righteousness. It is of the essence of Christian duty and Christian manhood to love
righteousness and hate wickedness. The true man is he that executeth judgment,
that seeketh the truth. See where the true man should be found, in the broad places,
in the streets, in the thoroughfares, the market places; the spot where the struggle of
daffy life is fought out. In other words, the true man is contemplated under the
character of a man right in the whirl of the stream--a merchant, a craftsman, a
trader. And as every varied situation in life has its own special temptations and
virtues--as the virtue of the soldier is courage and his temptation faint-heartedness.
There are graces and virtues that belong to the home, domestic virtues, cloister
graces--gentleness, forbearance, devoutness; and these, too, form part of a true
mans outfit in life. But the virtue of the marketplace is right dealing and integrity,
and he who in the competition of the marketplace, in its barterings and changes,
keeps his hands clean, his name honourable, his character honest, is, according to
the verdict of Scripture, a true man. From these words it would appear that such
men were scarce in Jeremiahs day. Are they more plentiful now? Yes, I believe they
are. A dreadful state of society. Multitudes of males, but not one mare Multitudes of
gentlemen, but not one honest man. Yes, surely we are better today, thank God. Yes,
we all know men who would rather empty their pockets of shillings than fill their
mouths with lies. And what are they? They are men. They are the saviours of society,
they are the salt of the earth. But unrighteousness is still, as it ever has been, mans
chiefest sin.

II. THE VALUE OF TRUE MANHOOD. The value of true manhood is seen, not in its
scarceness, but in the splendour of its reward. What is true manhoods reward? God
does a wonderful thing, all because a true man or two are found in the wicked city.
What is that? He forgives the wickedness of the corrupt and unfaithful city (Jer 5:7-
9; Jer 5:23-31). Could it be easy for God to overlook the errors Of such a people? You
think so? Easy for God Almighty, though not for us. Well, perhaps you are right. If
so, why stand aloof from such a forgiving and merciful God? Let us not fail to see
that here in Jeremiahs time God expresses Himself willing to pardon the wicked for
the sake of the righteous few, as He undertook to do in the time of the patriarch
Abraham (Gen 18:23). See, then, the nature of true manhoods rewards. God does
not promise that when the true man is found He will honour and reward him. Surely
in being a true man he has honours and rewards that cannot be exceeded. Jerusalem
is to enjoy the reward. She is to be spared for his sake. Something like this happens
in the experience of our great military heroes, our Wellingtons, our Wolseleys, our
Robertses. No doubt some of these splendid captains have, at dutys call, covered the
battlefield with their men and scored brilliant fighting victories that had very little
meaning or importance to us as a nation But putting aside these cases--take the case
of wars in which both great heroism has been shown and the cause has been worth
fighting for when the great captain comes home, what does he find awaiting him:
stars and stripes, treasure and titles? Ay, all that, but more than that. Not only has
his heroism won all these more or less precious honours for himself, but what is
better, because it concerns more people than himself, he has secured for his country
a standing, a place, a position, which it may be she never enjoyed before. And that to
a true man is reward more sweet and satisfying than all the poor personal honours
that can be put upon his head. The worst calamity to a people is not when its trade
and commerce decline, but when its supply of true men fails. Our thoughts, when we
think of truest manhood, cannot help turning to the Lord Jesus Christ, that man
who is our hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest. For the sake
of this one Man, all our sins are freely pardoned. (H. F. Henderson, M. A.)

JER 5:3-8
 O Lord, are not Thine eyes upon the truth?

Truthfulness
The allusion is not to doctrinal truth, or truth in the abstract, but to practical truth
as it should exist in the hearts and lives of men. The Lord bade them produce a
single truthful man in all Jerusalem, and Jeremiah answers that if truth were to be
found the Lord Himself best knew where it was, for His eyes were ever upon it. Look
well at this picture of the progress of the deceitful. They begin with being dishonest
to their fellow men, and at last they become Satans commission agents, trappers for
the devil, fowlers who ensnare men as bird catchers take the winged fowl. This was
the state of affairs in Jeremiahs time. We have not, I trust, quite such a condition of
things among us today, as a plague universally prevalent, but we have much of the
disease of deceit in all quarters, high and low, and to what a head it may come time
alone can show.

I. The utter folly of all pretence.

1. Hypocrisy is useless altogether, for God sees through it. The instantaneous
imagination which flits across the mind like a stray bird, leaving nor track
nor trace, God knows it altogether.
2. Nor is it only useless: it is injurious. You spoil your sacrifice if there be any
tincture of the odious gall of hypocrisy about it. Everything about you and
me that is unreal God hates, and hates it more in His own people than
anywhere else.
3. Moreover, pretence is deadening, for he that begins with tampering with truth
will go on from bad to worse. Once begin to sail by the wind of policy and
trickery and you must tack, and then tack again and again; and as surely as
you are alive, you will yet have to tack again; but if you have the motive force
of truth within you, as a steamboat has its own engine, then you can go
straight in the teeth of wind and tempest.
4. Falsehood and pretence before God are damnable. I cannot use a less forcible
word than that. I have constantly seen almost all sorts of people converted--
great blasphemers, pleasure seekers, thieves, drunkards, unchaste persons,
and hardened reprobates,--but rarely have I seen a man converted who has
been a thorough-paced liar. The heart which is crammed with craft and
treachery seems as if it had passed out of the reach of grace.

II. THE GREAT VALUE OF TRUTHFULNESS. The great value of it is this--that it alone
is regarded by God in matters of religion: His eyes are upon that which is truthful
about us. For instance, suppose I say I repent. The question is--Do I really and
from my heart sorrow for sin! The same holds good in reference to faith. A man may
say, I believe, as thousands say their creed,--I believe in God the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, and so on. Ah, but do you trust in God with your whole
heart! Are you sincerely believing in God and Gods Word, and Gods Son, and Gods
Gospel?--refer, if not, all your professed faith is useless. As to love to Christ, you
know how very easy it is to sing sweet hymns about love to Jesus, and yet how few
are living so as to prove their attachment to the Redeemer. The same truth bears
upon all the ordinances of religion. When we professed to worship God, how much
praise was there in the song? As much as the heart made. As to prayer. A large
prayer meeting. Yes, but the largeness of the number of attendants is not always a
gauge of the quantity and power of prayer. The quantity of heart in the prayer
decides its quality. This is equally true of all your private worship. That daffy reading
of the chapter is a very excellent thing; but do you read with your soul as well as with
your eyes? That morning prayer and that evening prayer, those few minutes
snatched in the middle of the day--these are good. I will not wish you to alter the
regularity of your devotion, but still it may all be clockwork, godliness with no life in
it. Oh, for one single groan from the heart!

III. The influence of truthful men.

1. It is so great with God that one of them can save a city from destruction.
Hence the value of good men in bad localities. When you go into a hamlet or
village where there is no religion, do not be so very sorry at your position, for
God may have great ends to be served by you. All light must not be stored up
in the sun; scatter it over earths poor lands that need it, lest all the trees of
the field die in perpetual night. God blesses us to make us blessings. Ask of
God that you may be so sincere, so truthful, that He may bless those round
about you for your sake.
2. This influence is such that it never was attributed to any man on account of
his riches. No. The Lord is no respecter of persons, and He seeth not as man
seeth. Sincerity before God is approved; true reliance upon Christ the Lord
accepts: and for this He blesses us, and others through us.
3. And, mark you one other thing. If you are upright before God, and you should
happen to fall among people that despise you and reject you--it is a sad thing
to have to say, but it is true, and a proof of the great influence of truthful
men,--your word, when you speak for God, shall be like fire, and those round
about you shall be wood, and it shall devour them. If you are not a savour of
life to life to men, you will be a savour of death to death to them.

IV. The necessity and the means of our being true and sincere before Him whose
eyes behold truthfulness.
1. These times require it. This is an age of tricks and policies. Oh, the lying puffs
you meet with everywhere in books and broadsides innumerable. Meet the
prince of darkness with the light; he cannot stand against it. Our times
require our sincerity.
2. So does our God also require it. I have already spoken to this, and I need not
repeat the solemn strain.
3. So do our souls require it. Our eternal welfare demands it. Oh, there must be
no mistake about our being true before God, for when it comes to dying
work, nothing will stand us then but sincerity. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved.

Gods chastisements designed for mans conversion

I. Turning to the Lord presupposes A DEEP CONVICTION THAT YOU HAVE GONE
ASTRAY, both from way of duty and of safety. That all your highest interests have
been neglected.
1. The exceeding sinfulness of sin.
2. The purity and strictness of Gods law, the equity and terror of its penalty.
3. Your obligations to Him as Creator, Preserver, Redeemer.

II. Turning to God supposes a pull conviction of the necessity of immediate

response.
1. If you die in your present condition, you will certainly be lost.
2. You have no time for delay.
3. It will wound your heart to think this work has not been done long ago.

III. If afflictions should prove the means of turning you to God, they will ROUSE
YOU TO MOST EARNEST PERSEVERING ENDEAVOURS that you may truly find Him.
1. Pray without ceasing.
2. Accustom yourself to solemn meditation.
3. Seek the society of those who know the Lord.

IV. If afflictions should turn you to God, you will be made deeply sensible of your
inability and the necessity of the Holy Spirits grace to your conversion.
1. Your endeavours avail to avoid hindrances and seek helps.
2. Yet your own heart is against you, and the disease of sin is irrecoverable but
by Divine grace.

V. If ever you turn to the Lord, you will realise that CHRIST IS THE ONLY WAY OF
ACCESS TO GOD. You will come as criminals upon the footing of grace, not merit; will
renounce all your righteousness; a broken-hearted rebel. Till then, you have nothing
to do with Jesus.

VI. If you are turned to God, you will experience A GREAT CHANGE IN TEMPER AND
CONDUCT.
1. Heart and mind will take a new bias; thoughts and affections towards God;
aspirations towards heaven; Jesus dear to you; all things become new.
2. Your practices will follow the inward impulse and principle of religion.

VII. If turned to the Lord, your MIND WILL HABITUALLY RETAIN THAT TURN. Your
religion not a transient fit, but permanent and persevering. (President Davies.)

Unsanctified affliction

I. Some of the forms of unsanctified affliction.

1. Insensibility.
2. Hardihood.

II. Some of the means by which this evil may be kept away.
1. By seeking ascertain and to accomplish the design of our affliction.
 2. By repressing every tendency to murmuring or impatience.
3. By avoiding immoderate sorrow. (G. Brooks.)

Fruitless chastisement
Chastisement is designed by God to bear fruit in a purged and penitent heart; but
it may be so neglected, resisted, or abused, as to become fruitless.

I. The sign of fruitless chastisement is impenitence.

1. Chastisement is the red lamp warning of danger, and urging us to stop in the
course we are pursuing.
2. But, that it may serve this purpose, there must be--
(1) Reflection;
(2) Sorrow for sin;
(3) Return.

II. The cause of fruitless chastisement is hardness of heart.

1. Insensitiveness. The sufferer may feel the smart of the lash on his back, and
yet be dead to the sting of shame in his heart.
2. Wilful resistance. The evil is in the will that refuses to yield to the mercy that
comes disguised in bitterness.

III. THE CONSEQUENCE OF FRUITLESS CHASTISEMENT IS AN AGGRAVATION OF

FUTURE EVILS. The rebellious sufferer may imagine that he is free to do as he will
with his sufferings; but even they are talents for which he will be called to account.
For observe--
1. Gods searching watchfulness. O Lord, are not Thine eyes, etc. God searches
the heart He chastises. He sees the rebellious thought, the stubborn self-will.
2. Mans increased guilt. The more there is done to awaken a consciousness of
sin, the more culpable is the indifference still persisted in.

IV. The remedy for fruitless chastisement is to be found in the grace of the
Gospel. This will give--
1. The new heart;
2. The promise of forgiveness. Christ brings love and hope, and thus He brings
also the tears of repentance. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

Unsanctified affliction
This might not unfitly be called one of the lamentations of Jeremiah. The words
may suggest to us the consideration of a subject more or less belonging to all of us,
namely, the danger of unsanctified or unimproved afflictions. The remedies of
heaven cannot be inoperative; they must aggravate the maladies which they are not
allowed to heal, and will make the face harder than a rock, if they induce not a
tender and softened heart.

I. Unsanctified or unimproved chastening.

 1. The first impression in the text seems to set forth that misuse of it which
comes of insensibility. Thou has stricken them, but they have not grieved;
Thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction. The
language may be taken to describe, not so much the receiving of correction in
the spirit of defiant and avowed contempt, as the act of setting lightly by
affliction, of not bestowing upon it the attention it deserves, having no
reverence for its Author, and no consideration for its design or end. A
calamity may visit us, but we think only of its human author; sickness may
lay us prostrate, but science is sufficient to explain how it came,--it is chance
or a skilled hand that causeth the shaft to pierce between the joints of the
harness, and there is some poison in the atmosphere which has caused the
withering of our favourite gourd. Thus, placing secondary agencies before
our eyes, we can see no further, and look no higher. We see, then, why God
was angry with the Jews, and why He will be angry with us, when His
chastisements are received with unreflecting indifference. It is that, whether
avowedly or not, such insensibility amounts to atheism. On this view--
unavowed, of course--is based the indifference of unconverted men under
chastisement: they feel that it is not correction, but the natural result of some
law which no one can help. Why should they grieve at that which comes of an
unhindered, self-governing, moral necessity
2. But the text adverts to a yet more offending and presumptuous deportment
under affliction, namely, when the chastisements of God are received in a
stouthearted, rebellious, defying spirit. Not only have they refused to receive
correction, but they have made their faces harder than a rock. In this case, as
we see, God is net left out of sight. On the contrary, He is believed and felt to
be the Author of all permitted sufferings. The awful impiety is, that He is
regarded as the unjust Author. We stand amazed at the impiety of that
Roman emperor, who, because the lightning flash interrupted the pleasures
of his banquet, feared not to hurl his blasphemous reproach against the
powers of heaven. But let us consider how much of the spirit of these men is
in us, when we indulge in angry chafings at the arrangements of Divine
Providence; full of fury, like a wild bull in the net, or fretting as a bullock
unaccustomed to the yoke. How often do you find people under bitter
reverses angry and out of humour with everybody about them; with friends
who have had nothing whatever to do with their trouble, nay, who perhaps
are trying all in their power to lighten them; but the fire of anger is in their
bosom, and it must vent itself somewhere; it would vent it on God if it dared,
but this is too dreadful to think of; yet it is with Him that they are at anger,
and the thought of the heart is as much theirs as ever it was Jonahs, that
they do well to be angry. Extreme, therefore, as the ease of the text may seem
to be, it is an extreme to which any rebellious thoughts may ultimately lead
us, if not watched over and prayed against in their first beginnings.

II. How these dreadful effects may be prevented and the chastenings of God
turned to a sanctified account.
1. First, we must he careful to acknowledge the design of God in sending our
trials, and do all we can to bring that design about. Our trials may be of
different kinds, one man being afflicted with this and another with that.
Every heart has its own plague, and every soul its own leprous spot, and the
 Great Physician mixes our cup accordingly; that is, as pride lifts up the heart,
or covetousness enslaves the will, or as vanity fills the mind, as human idols
are exalted to Christs throne, or the love of this present world makes us
slothful in the ways of God, does He apportion to each His remedial sorrow,
to each His purging fire. Now this being so, can it be otherwise than
displeasing unto God, if we take the smiting patiently, but still refuse the
correction; if we submit to the discipline, but disregard the profit; if we allow
the ploughshare of affliction to go over us, and yet cheek the springing up of
those peaceable fruits of righteousness which chastisement yieldeth to them
that are exercised thereby? The rod has a voice, and you must hear what it
says.
2. Again, in order that chastening may be blessed to us, we must have a care that
we do not become weary under it, however long it may continue. He who
faints under the Divine correction first makes sure that he shall faint, and
then, by casting off all effort, brings about the fulfilment of his own
prophecy. He makes himself helpless. The feebleness of his graces arises
from want of exorcise. He has hung up his shield of faith, he has cast off his
helmet of hope, he wields the sword of the Spirit with an unsoldierly and
trembling hand, and then he wonders that he faints in the day of battle.
Chastisement thus received will yield no peaceable fruits of righteousness. So
far from our trials being designed to supersede the exercise of our spiritual
graces, the great battle of our faith is to be fought on this field.
3. In like manner we are in danger of losing the benefit of chastening, when,
through immoderate grief, we unfit ourselves for the active duties of life. The
connection between our bodily and mental states is so intimate, that long-
continued disturbance of the one will always be followed by serious
derangement of the other. Hence it is that protracted and cherished griefs
are found to produce a general disturbance in our active and intellectual
powers; duties are neglected, a state of apathy is induced, and all the higher
demands of our social position are made to wait on a sinful and unprofitable
grief. Conceive rightly of Him from whom that chastening comes, as of
infinite holiness to do nothing unjust, of infinite love to do nothing unkind,
of infinite wisdom to do nothing unsuitable to your best, truest, everlasting
interests. And then conceive rightly of yourselves, as transgressors from the
womb, as children of disobedience, as outcasts by nature from light and
hope, and enemies by works from truth and godliness. And then consider
what God sends trials for, and the certainty that, received aright, they shall
all work together for good. The arrows of God can never miss their aim; with
Him there are no bows drawn at a venture; His shafts speed home infallibly.
Taken from the quiver of infinite love, winged with purposes of unerring
mercy, they make no heart wounds which they do not more kindly heal, and
kill nothing in us which were not better dead. (D. Moore, M. A.)

They have refused to return.--

Decided ungodliness

I. Who have refused to return?

1. Those who have said as much. With unusual honesty or presumption, they
 have made public declaration that they will never quit their sinful ways.
2. Those who have made a promise to repent, but have not performed it.
3. Those who have offered other things instead of practical return to God--
ceremonies, religiousness, morality, and the like.
4. Those who have only returned in appearance. Formalists, mere professors,
hypocrites.
5. Those who have only returned in part. Hugging some sins while hanging
others.

II. What this refusal unveils.

1. An intense love of sin.
2. A want of love to the great Father, who bids them return.
3. A disbelief of God: they neither believe in what He has revealed concerning
the evil consequences of their sin, nor in what He promises as to the benefit
of returning from it.
4. A despising of God: they reject His counsel, His command, and even Himself.
5. A resolve to continue in evil. This is their proud ultimatum, they have
refused to return.
6. A trifling with serious concerns. They are too busy, too fond of gaiety, etc.

III. What deepens the sin of this refusal?

1. When correction brings no repentance.
2. When conscience is violated, and the Spirit of God is resisted. Repentance
seen to be right, but yet refused: duty known, but declined.
3. When repentance is known to be the happiest course, and yet it is obstinately
neglected against the plainest reasons.
4. When this obstinacy is long-continued, and is persevered in against
convictions and inward promptings.
5. When vile reasons are at the bottom: such as secret sins, which the sinner
dares not confess or quit; or the fear of man, which makes the mind
cowardly.

IV. What is the real reason of this refusal?

1. It may be ignorance, but that can be only in part, for it is plainly a mans duty
to return to his Lord. No mystery surrounds this simple precept--Return.
2. It may be self-conceit: perhaps they dream that they are already in the right
road.
3. It is at times sheer recklessness. The man refuses to consider his own best
interests. He resolves to be a trifler; death and hell and heaven are to him as
toys to sport with.
4. It is a dislike of holiness. That lies at the bottom of it: men cannot endure
humility, self-denial, and obedience to God.
5. It is a preference for the present above the eternal future. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Refusal to return
Lord Byron, a short time before death, was heard to say, Shall I sue for mercy?
After a long pause he added: Come, come, no weakness; lets be a man to the last!
Surely these are poor;. . .I will get me unto the great.--
The ignorance of the poor and the insolence of the great

I. The character of many of the poor as here described.

1. Their obstinacy in sin was owing to their ignorance.
(1) Of religion.
(2) Of Gods providences.
2. Their ignorance was in great measure occasioned by their poverty.
(1) This deprived them of education.
(2) All their thoughts and cares are about their worldly wants.
(3) They absent themselves from Gods house because of poor attire.
(4) They associate with persons like-circumstanced and like-minded, who
encourage one another in neglect of religion.
(5) They thereby lose all self-respect, sin impudently, and glory in their
shame.

II. The character of the great as here described.

1. They had a better knowledge of religion than the poor.
2. They acted as bad as the poor, or worse.
3. Their conduct was chiefly owing to their greatness.
(1) Lifted up with pride, they resented admonition.
(2) They think religion is only to restrain the vulgar, not to bind those in
rank.
(3) They shrink from showing reverence for God and being exact in religious
observances.
(4) Worldly things have mischievous influence upon their hearts.
(5) Flattered by others, they forget or but formally pay homage to God.
(6) They mind earthly things, neglecting the culture and interests of the
soul.
Application--
1. Learn what is the most important and profitable knowledge.
2. The advantages of being placed in the middle condition of life (Pro 30:8).
3. What an excellent charity it is to furnish the poor with the means of
knowledge. (Job Orton, D. D.)

JER 5:9
Shall I not visit for these things?
Unsanctified affliction followed by heavier judgments
The physician, when he findeth that the potion which he hath given his patient
will not work, he seconds it with one more violent; but if he perceive the disease to
be settled, then he puts him into a course of physic, so that he shall have at present
but small comfort of his life. And thus doth the surgeon, too: if a gentle plaister will
not serve, then he applies that which is more corroding; and to prevent a gangrene,
he makes use of his cauterising knife, and takes off the joint or member that is so ill-
affected. Even so God, when men profit not by such crosses as He hath formerly
exercised them with, when they are not bettered by lighter afflictions, then He sends
heavier, and proceeds from milder to sharper crosses. If the dross of their sins will
not come off, He will throw them into the melting pot again and again, crush them
harder in the press, and lay on such irons as shall enter more deep into their souls. If
He strikes and they grieve not, if they be so foolish that they will not know the
judgment of their God, He will bring seven times more plagues upon them, cross
upon cross, loss upon loss, trouble upon trouble, one sorrow on the neck of another,
till they are in a manner wasted and consumed. (J. Spencer.)

JER 5:10
Go ye up upon her walls, and destroy; but make not a full end: take away her
battlements; for they are not the Lords.

Storming the battlements

I. I shall regard this text as spoken concerning THE CHURCH. The Church has very
often gone to king Jareb for help, or to the world for aid; and then God has said to
her enemies, Go ye up against her; but make not a full end: take away her
battlements; for they are not the Lords. She shall not have them. I am her
battlement. She is to have none other.
1. The Church of God has sometimes sought to make the government its
battlements.
2. There are churches who make battlements out of the wealth of their members.
Now, we do love to have wealth and rank in our own midst; we always thank
God when we have brought among us men who can do something for the
cause of truth; we do bless God when we see Zaccheus, who had abundance
of gold and silver, giving some of his gifts to the poor of the Lords family; we
like to see the princes and kings bringing presents and bowing before the
King of all the earth:--but if any church bows before the golden calf, there
will go forth the mandate, Go ye upon her walls; but make not a full end:
take away her battlements; for they are not the Lords.
3. There are some other churches relying upon learning and erudition. The
learning of their minister seems to be a great fort and castle. Never let it be
said that I have despised learning, or true knowledge. Let us have as much as
we can. We thank God when men of learning are brought into the Church,
when God renders them useful. But the Church nowadays is beginning to
trust too much to learning; relying too much on philosophy, and upon the
understanding of man, instead of the Word of God.
 4. But I think that the worst battlement the churches have now is an earthwork
of great and extreme caution. It is held to be improper that certain obnoxious
truths in the Bible should be preached; sundry reasons are given why they
should be withheld. One is, because it tends to discourage men from coming
to Christ. Another is, because certain persons will be offended on account of
these rough edges of the Gospel. Gods Church must be brought once more to
rely upon the pure truth, upon the simple Gospel, the unalloyed doctrines of
the grace of God. Oh, may this Church never have any bulwark but the
promises of God!

II. We shall now address the text to the CHRISTIAN--THE REAL CHILD OF GOD. The
true believer also has a proneness to build up sundry battlements, which are not
the Lords, and to put his hope, his affection, in something else besides the word of
the God of Israel.
1. The first thing whereof we often make a fortress wherein to hide is--the love of
the creature. The Christians happiness should be in God alone. He should be
able to say, All my springs are in Thee. From Thee alone I ever draw my
bliss. We fix our love on some dear friend, and there is our hope and trust.
God says, What though ye take counsel together, ye have not taken counsel
of Me, and therefore I will take away your trust. What though ye have walked
in piety, ye have not walked with Me as ye should. Go ye no against her, O
Death! Go ye up against her, O affliction! Take away that battlement--It is
not the Lords.
2. Many of us are too prone to make battlements out of our past experience, and
to rely upon that instead of confiding in Jesus Christ. There is a sort of self-
complacency which reviews the past, and says, There I fought Apollyon;
there I climbed the hill Difficulty; there I waded through the Slough of
Despond. The next thought is, And what a fine fellow am I! I have done all
this. Why, there is nothing can hurt me. No. If I have done all this, I can do
everything else that is to be accomplished. What does God say whenever His
people do not want Him; but live on what they used to have of Him, and are
content with the love He once gave them? Ah! I will take away your
battlements. He calls out to doubts and fears--Go ye up upon his walls;
take away his battlements, for they are not the Lords.
3. Then again we sometimes get trusting too much to evidences and good works.
We often get a pleasing opinion of ourselves: we are preaching so many
times a week; we attend so many prayer meetings; we are doing good in the
Sabbath school; we are important members of the Church; we are giving
away so much in charity, and we say, Surely I am a child of God. I am an
heir of heaven. Look at me! See what robes I wear. Have I not, indeed, a
righteousness about me that proves me to be a child of God? Then we begin
to trust in ourselves, and say, Surely of your graces, Christians!

III. Now, to bring the text to THE YOUNG CONVERT, to the man in that stage of our
religious history which we call conversion to God.
1. In the forefront of the city of Mansoul frowns the wall of carelessness--an
erection of satanic masonry. It is made of black granite, and mortal art
cannot injure it. Bring law, like a huge pickaxe, to break it: you cannot knock
 a single chip off. At last a gracious God cries out--Take away her
battlements, they are not the Lords. And at a glance down crumbles the
battlement. The careless man becomes tender-hearted; the soul that was
hard as iron has become soft as wax; the man who once could laugh at gospel
warnings, and despise the preaching of the minister, now sits down and
trembles at every word.
2. The first wall is surmounted, but the city is not yet taken: the Christian
minister, under the hand of God, has to storm the next wall--that is the wall
of self-righteousness. How hard it is to storm this wall! it must be carried at
the point of the bayonet of faithful warning; there is no taking it except by
boldly climbing up with the shout of, By grace are ye saved through faith,
and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.
3. Thus the double rampart is passed, but another still opposes our progress--
Christs warriors know it by the name of self-sufficiency. Oh! blessed day
when God directs His shots against that.

IV. I take this passage as it respects THE UNGODLY AND THE SINNER AT LAST. How
many there shall be at the last great day who will sit down very comfortably behind
certain battlements that they have builded! There is one man--a monarch: I am
irresponsible, says he; who shall ever bring anything to my charge? I am an
autocrat: I give no account of my matters. Oh! he will find out at last that God is
Master of emperors, and Judge of princes; when his battlements shall be taken
away. Another says, Cannot I do as I like with my own? What if God did make me, I
shall not serve Him. I shall follow my own will. I have in my own nature everything
that is good, and I shall do as my nature dictates. I shall trust in that, and if there be
a higher power He will exonerate me, because I only followed my nature. But he
will find his hopes to be visionary, and his reasons to be foolish, when God shall say,
The soul that sinneth it shall die; and when His thundering voice shall pronounce
the sentence--Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire. Again, there is a company of
men joined hand in hand, and they think they will resist the Eternal, yea, they have a
plan for subverting the kingdom of Christ. They say, We are wise and mighty. We
have fortified ourselves. We have made a covenant with death and a league with
hell. Ah! they little think what will become of their battlements at the last great day,
when they shall see it all crumble and fall. With what fear and alarm will they then
cry: Rocks, hide us! Mountains, on us fall! (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Mans battlements or Gods battlements

These words show us that if we would ensure safety we must embrace Gods plan
of salvation.

I. Mans battlements.
1. Some build battlements without Christ as the corner stone. To read His
history, admire His character, wonder at His miracles; but to leave out all the
mystery of the Incarnation, to deny the efficacy of the bloodshedding, to
substitute reason for faith, is to build battlements which are not the Lords.
2. Some build battlements with their own merits. As in the former case the
foundation was faulty; so here is the superstructure. The good heart and
the good life and the good intentions will not bear scrutiny. Salvation is
 of grace, and not of debt.
3. Others build battlements of external forms and ceremonies. They are like that
foreign people who rear walls of painted canvas, guarded by painted
sentinels, and armed with painted guns. There is no reality in such a religion.

II. What, then, are Gods battlements?

1. Repentance. No one strikes the penitent who confesses error, and asks
forgiveness with many tears.
2. The second line of defence is Faith. Repentance does not save. We are saved
by grace, through faith.
3. There is a third range, higher still, Holiness. A man may tremble behind the
battlements of faith, even as the devils believe and tremble. That man only is
safe and happy who is penitent, believing, and holy. (J. Batsman, M. A.)

The danger of false confidences

Oh, that England would learn that increased wealth and swollen fortunes and
material prosperity are no signs of a nations strength. Pagan Rome was never richer
than when she had scarce a freeman left. In the Middle Ages, Papal Rome stood
raking into chests the countless gold of her jubilee, just before she suffered her most
humiliating shame. Spain was dropping to pieces of inward decay when all the gold
of the New World was flowing into the treasure of her kings. Your glory, said
Oliver Cromwell, is the ditch which guards your shores. I tell you your ditch will not
save you if you do not reform yourselves. Some nations have had a false ideal of
absolutism, many, and especially modern nations, have had a false ideal of liberty.
(Dean Farrar.)

The removal of false trusts and defences

It was a great mercy for our city of London that the great fire cleared away all the
old buildings which were the lair of the plague, a far healthier city was then built;
and it is a great mercy for a man when God sweeps all his own righteousness and
strength, when He makes him feel that he is nothing and drives him to confess that
Christ is all in all, and that his only strength lies in the might of the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes in a house of business an old system has been going on for years, and it
has caused much confusion and allowed much dishonesty. You come in as a new
manager, and you adopt an entirely new plan. Now try if you can, and graft your
method on to the old system. How it will worry you. Year after year you say to
yourself, I cannot work it; if I had swept the whole away and started afresh, clear
from the beginning, it would not have given me one-tenth of the trouble. God does
not intend to graft the system of grace upon corrupt nature, nor to make the new
Adam grow out of the old. Salvation is not of the flesh, but of the Lord alone. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

False refuges

I. Worthless refuges trusted in.

1. Infidelity. Such a rampart is nothing more than a deliberate closing of the eyes
to danger. It is like the sand in which the foolish ostrich hides its head and
 thinks himself safe. It is like watching an avalanche descending upon us and
consoling ourselves that we are only led by a fanciful vision.
2. Personal merit. There are those who exercise far higher thoughts of human
nature and of their own particular abilities than the case justifies. And they
estimate their good qualities so highly that they think they surely ought to
obtain some recognition from the Almighty.
3. Divine Fatherhood. Some think that because God made man He is therefore a
universal Father, and they assume that a Father could not, be so unkind to
His children as to let justice overpower mercy.

II. WORTHLESS REFUGES DENOUNCED. Go ye up and destroy.

1. The Author of this destruction. The immediate instrument may be mans
natural enemies, but the real author is God. He will cast down all false hopes
and crush all evil anticipations.
2. The reason assigned--For they are not the Lords.
3. The limitation--Make not a full end. The object is not destruction of the
soul, but the taking away the false hopes which lull it into fancied security.
God takes away earthly hopes, so that He may bestow heavenly ones. He
crushes worthless props, so that He may lay under us His eternal arms. (J. J.
S. Bird, B. A.)

JER 5:14
I will make My words in thy mouth fire.

The potential word

Three elements of the power of the Gospel are here found.

I. The I WILL of the Almighty. That will is an ocean deep and wide as eternity and
infinity. In that shoreless deep all the mighty orbs, suns, systems floated first by
mere will of Jehovah. To that will every line of inspiration becomes either a ray of
light, law, and peace, or a thunderbolt of justice.

II. THE WORDS OF THY MOUTH. The language is human, but Divine in its source.
In all the dealings of heaven with our race, created instruments have been used. A
long line of prophets and patriots have been guided with the authority and power
from the eternal throne. So that whether Jehovah will to rouse all the stormy
elements of clouds above, and waters beneath, as by a shepherds staff, and styled
the rod of God, on the kingdom of Egypt, or drive a broad dusty highway through
the waves of the sea,--it is the same glorious God that is present in this sacred book.
Ten thousand angels of the lifeguard around heavens throne could not change the
heart of the weakest child. But aided by the will of the eternal majestic I of the text,
a babe in the manger at Bethlehem will awaken a song that shall ring out in anthem
heard far up among the golden spheres of heaven, and echo round and round our
redeemed and regenerated world.
 III. A FIRE purifies but consumes the chaff. (W. H. Van Doren, D. D.)

Gods Word as fire

seems to me that the Word of God in our churches is too much like a sight which
you not infrequently see in our streets in winter: a heap of coals cast down from a
cart in front of a house upon the frosty ground, with the snow lying all around it, and
falling upon it from the bosom of the storm. It is a remarkable conjunction when
you come to think of it--a heap of coals and a heap of snow. The snow lies upon the
heap of coals as cold and unmoved as it could lie over a heap of granite stones; and
yet that heap of coal contains a vast quantity of potential heat, heat enough to melt
all the snow in the street and convert for the time being the winter around into
summer. But so long as the coal is as cold as the snow, so long does it produce no
effect. Supposing you were able to apply a burning coal from your kitchen fire to the
cold coal outside, what a wonderful change you would produce. You would let loose
the potential heat; you would transform that cold inert mass of coal into a fiery
furnace, which would melt and evaporate all the snow around it. And more
marvellous still would the effect of the Word of God be upon you, coming to your
cold, hard, frost-bound heart, with power from on high kindled with the fire of Gods
Holy Spirit. The potential heat in it would be set free, and it would transform your
whole nature and life. (H. Macmillan.)

JER 5:19
When ye shall say, Wherefore doeth the Lord our God these things unto us?

In the time of tribulation

I. ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GOD AS THAT SUPREME RULER OF ALL FROM WHOSE HAND

AFFLICTIONS COME. It is one great secret of that peace which passeth all
understanding to mark the hand of God in all the changes and sorrows of this ever-
varying scene of things; the want of this it is which so frequently leaves the men of
the world a prey to vexation and despair. Secondary causes are but the links in the
chain of providence; follow them by the light of Gods Word and the guidance of a
simple faith, and you will find that chain depending from the very throne of God
Himself, held in His own hand; every part of it adjusted as He sees it best to permit,
according to the counsel of His own will.

II. A conviction that when God sends affliction He has a reason for what He does.
1. God often uses affliction for the purpose of correcting His childrens faults,
and bringing them to a sense of their guilt.
2. The promotion of our growth in grace is another reason of Gods afflictive
dispensations. Holy men are by trial weaned from a vain and evil world; are
brought more and more to realise experimentally what religion is; and are
enabled to enjoy in a peculiar manner the consolation of the Gospel of Christ.

III. A WISH TO KNOW WHAT THAT REASON IS. Not that we may be satisfied that God
is just in what He does. But that understanding what the reason of His dispensation
is, we may ask ourselves, have, then, those dispensations wrought in us the result
designed? But how is he to ascertain it? I apprehend that we shall generally be
guided to it when depending on the Holy Spirit for direction; we simply look at the
nature of the trial, and the state of our own hearts. (J. Harding.)

JER 5:20-25
O foolish people, and without understanding.

Gods judgment of self-will

The text is part of a message which was to be declared in the house of Jacob, and
published in Israel. It shows that three results were produced by self-assertion
against the rule of God; will the same cause produce the same effect? Let us see the
results of self-will as shown in the text, and compare them with the testimony of our
own experience.

I. SELF-WILL IN RELATION TO THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT DESTROYS THE NATURAL

CAPACITIES AND FACULTIES OF MAN. Foolish people, without understanding, etc.
How different this description to the original portraiture of man! Foolish, blind,
deaf--such is man when he has turned his back upon God, and taken life into his
own hands. It would seem as if all the faculties of our nature were dependent for
continuance upon their religious use; moral paralysis is equivalent to intellectual
stagnation; not to pray is to die. Is it not much the same as if a flower should be shut
out from the light and dew? The soul is, so to speak, withdrawn from the source of
its being--cut off from the fountain of life, and allowed to exhaust its little resources,
to languish in loneliness, and to die of hunger. If, then, we leave God, how soon does
our poverty come as an armed man, and our want as one that travaileth? We shall
most clearly see how the natural faculties of man are impaired, and indeed
destroyed, by irreligion, by considering that the same truth holds good in the
ordinary business of life,--separation from God means folly, blindness, and general
incapacity, even in earthly things. Take the case of our daily bread, and see how the
doctrine is sustained. Let any man set aside Gods plan of obtaining daffy bread, and
call upon his own genius to supply it; let the earth remain uncultivated; let the seed
remain unsown: can it be doubted that the insane man would soon be taught by
famine what he would not learn from reason or infer from revelation? There is no
violence in transferring the argument from the body to the soul: on the contrary,
such transference would seem to be a logical necessity; for if God is essential to the
inferior, is He not essential to the superior? If man cannot do the less, how can he
do the greater? A man who would not eat bread because he could not make his own
will dominant through every detail of the process of germination would be pitied or
despised; yet men who cannot by their own will or power make one grain of corn for
the support of the body are often found resenting Gods offers of enlightenment and
guidance of the soul! What wonder that God should call upon the heavens to be
astonished and the earth to be horribly afraid? And what wonder, repelled and
dishonoured as He is, that He should say: Behold, the days come, saith the Lord
God, that I will send a famine in the land, etc. Think of God sending a famine upon
the soul,--of minds pining and dying because Divine messages have been
withdrawn! We know what the effect would be if God were to withhold the dew, or
to trouble the air with a plague, or to avert the beams of the sun: the garden would
be a desert, the fruitful field a sandy plain, the wind a bearer of death, summer a
stormy night, and life itself a cruel variation of death,--so penetrating, so boundless
is the influence of God in nature. Is it conceivable that the withdrawment of Gods
influence would be less disastrous upon the spirit of man? Out of God there is no
true being; the spasm, the convulsion, which is mistaken for existence is an impious
sarcasm upon life.

II. SELF-WILL IN RELATION TO THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT PLUNGES THE SOUL INTO
IRREVERENCE. The fear spoken of (Jer 5:22) may be taken as expressive of homage,
veneration, and, in fact, everything that enters into a complete idea of worship. The
destruction of veneration may be regarded as the final triumph of self-will. There is
a very simple philosophy of spiritual retrogression. It turns upon mans self-
magnifying power, and his consequent ambition for self-government. He says: If
there be a God, He is at all events unseen; I am the highest power that comes within
the cognisance of my own senses; other beings, such as demons and angels, have
been spoken of; but they are fictions of genius, dreams of ill-regulated minds; I am
king, I am god. This is the natural creed of Sight, and it has many virtual
subscribers. Now, it is to the senses themselves that God addresses the appeal of the
text. He would appoint the ocean as umpire in the great controversy. Look, He says
in effect, at the sea: it is bounded by the sand; its great fury cannot prevail against
the limit which I have appointed: can you enlarge the decree which determinates the
movement of the deep? Can you beat back the waves, or silence the roar of the
billows? Stand by the seashore, then, and learn that there is a will higher than your
own, a power which could crush your puny arm; listen, and let your soul hear a voice
mightier than mans; incline your ear, and let the spirit hear the going of God upon
the quiet or troubled waves; reflect, wonder, bow down, and worship.

III. SELF-WILL DISSOCIATES THE GIFTS OF NATURE FROM THE GIVER (Jer 5:24).
Revolted man will accept the rain because he cannot live without it, but the Giver
will not be so much as named; the corn will be gathered, but those who bear the
sheaves will have no harvest hymn for God. How rapid, tumultuous, fatal is the
course of moral revolt! The purpose of God was evidently to have His Name
identified with the common mercies of life, that our very bread and water might
remind us constantly of His gentle and liberal care. He was not to be confided to
purely spiritual contemplation, to be the subject of the souls dream when lost in
high reverie, or to be thought of as a Being far off, enclosed within the circle of the
planets, or throned in the unapproachable palaces of an undiscovered universe: He
desires to be seen spreading our table in the wilderness, causing the earth to bring
forth and bud for our benefit, turning our weary feel towards the water springs, and
nourishing us in the time of weakness. Men may eat unblessed bread, and be bodily
the stronger for it, but it is a sore and lasting reproach to the soul. The course of
moral revolt ends in this, ends in the deposition of God and in the worship of self.
Man ploughs, sows, reaps, and considers all the influences which cooperate in the
production of results as mere features of inanimate nature existing and working
apart altogether from intelligent or moral will. The universe becomes a stupendous
machine; they who get good crops have used the machine skilfully, and they whose
fields are fruitless have misunderstood or misapplied the machine. The universe was
designed to be the temple, the very coveting, of God; but the worship of self has
wrought a bad transfiguration upon it, and now the thief, the unclean beast, and the
lying prophet prevail on every hand. The demoralisation of man may have a
mischievous effect upon nature itself. We sometimes speak of a bad harvest: what if
behind it there has been a bad life? When the heart is right towards God, God will
not withhold His blessing from the earth: Let the people praise thee, O God; let all
the people praise Thee: then shall the earth yield her increase. Physical blessing will
follow spiritual worship; no good thing will be withheld from them that walk
uprightly. In the light of these statements we have a double view of the unity of the
moral and material systems of government. One view is from the human side: when
man sins, commits a trespass in the spiritual region, he finds the result of his sin in
the physical department; the reflection of his spiritual misrule is seen in dried
fountains and fruitless fields, in devastating storms and fatal plagues; the universe
takes up arms in defence of law. Another view is from the Divine side. God shows
favour upon the earth for reasons derived from the spiritual character of the people,
and demonstrates the superiority of the soul over the body by making its condition
the measure of His material benefactions. How terrific, how hopeless, then, is the
condition of the sinner! (J. Parker, D. D.)

Indifference

I. What God has done to produce pious consideration.

1. He has given powers of mind adapted to it. Eyes--to see, discern, read, etc.
Ears--to hearken, messengers of truth. Understanding--to know, weigh,
reflect, etc.
2. He has given us the means to answer to these powers. His Word, His servants,
His providence, etc.
3. He has given us His Holy Spirit--to strive, convince, etc.

II. The indifference men often exhibit.

1. The indifference of some is total, without any concern. Live stocks and stones.
2. Others are considerate only of the externals of religion.
3. The consideration of some is only to the intellectual parts of the truth. A
mental study; philosophical attention; such as they give to literature.
4. The consideration of others is occasional. Under very arousing discourses,
providences, sickness, bereavements, etc.

III. The consequences of this indifference.

1. It is extremely foolish. Moral insanity.
2. Detrimental to the soul. Makes it blind, deaf; robs it of spiritual food and
enjoyment; degrades it.
3. Specially offensive to God. Rebellion. Gratitude.
4. Must end in the souls ruin. No moral fitness without devout consideration.
Application--
1. Examine and test yourselves.
 2. Seek the quickening influences of the Divine Spirit.
3. Be resolved and wise now, lest you perish. (J. Burns, D. D.)

Fear ye not Me? saith the Lord.--

Solemn reasons for fearing the Lord

I. Argument from Gods government of the sea.

1. Suited to impress man with an idea of--
(1) Infinite power.
(2) Consummate wisdom.
(3) Special goodness.
Two fold--
(a) Negatively, in checking the threatening invasion of the sea;
(b) Affirmatively, in giving rain, etc.
2. Mans revolting tendencies.
(1) God has prescribed the bounds of mans actions and thoughts by
befitting laws. As the sea has bounds, so there are limits to every finite
being.
(2) To overstep these limits is rebellion against the Great Lawgiver.
(3) Man has revolted, differing in this from the sea.
(4) Man can do what the sea cannot.
(a) Man has a heart, the sea has not; a will power.
(b) This power in man has been prostituted to evil.

II. Argument from Gods bestowment of the harvest.

1. Until the Gospel was communicated to the world, attentive observance of the
dispensation of providence was the principal means whereby Gods Spirit
drew the Gentiles to Himself, and led them to piety and obedience.
(1) It was the religion of nature (Act 14:15-17; Rom 1:19-20).
(2) From Gods works alone, His being, power, mercy, may be fully and
satisfactorily proved, without the advantages of revelation.
2. Although we enjoy the full light of the glorious Gospel, we can never too
closely keep in mind the fact that all things we see and enjoy are ordained by
God.
(1) We have less need than the heathen to learn about God from His outward
and visible works.
(2) Yet we are beholden to His providence for all essential natural blessings.
(3) Nothing in nature could reach maturity but for the fatherly care of God.
3. From the natural events around us we may--
(1) Learn diligence in our spiritual concerns, that the Word of Life may ripen
in our hearts.
(2) Pray that the heavenly Sower will not pass us by in barrenness.
(3) When observing the tender blade, reflect on the weakness of our advance
 in piety, and entreat Him who tempers all the elements to work all
things together for our good.
(4) When the harvest hour is nigh, let us think how short our time is, and
pray that we may not be found blasted or unfruitful. (Bp. Heber.)

Persuasives to the fear of God

I. He complains of the shameful stupidity of this people.

1. Their understandings were darkened. Possessing intellectual faculties and
capacities, they did not employ and improve them.
2. Their wills were stubborn: not submit to rules of Divine law.

II. He ascribes this to the want of the fear of God.

1. If you keep up awe of God you will be observant of what He says.
2. Because we neglect to stir up our wills to holy awe of God we are so apt to
rebel.

III. He suggests some things proper to possess us with a holy fear of God.
1. We must fear the Lord and His greatness. He keeps and manages the sea.
(1) By this we see His universal sovereignty; therefore to be had in
reverence.
(2) This shows how easily He could drown the world again by withdrawing
His decree; therefore we lie continually at His mercy, and should fear
to make Him our enemy.
(3) Even the unruly waves obey Him neither revolt not rebel; why, then,
should our hearts?
2. We must fear the Lord, and His goodness.
(1) Because He is always doing us good.
(2) Because these blessings are consequent upon His promise.
(3) Because we have such a necessary dependence upon Him. (M. Henry, D.
D.)

Which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea.--
Adoration of God in nature
1. The more blessings they enjoyed, the more thankful they should have been.
2. Having rejected God spiritually, He yet continued to manifest Himself to
them in nature.
3. Gratitude to God for the fruits of the seasons is a common ground on which to
argue effectually even with the darkest heathen.
4. The heathen are denied excuse for their ignorance and idolatry, because of the
marks of Gods love and power in the world around them.
5. Yet the heathen, in outward forms at least, surpassed Jews and Christians.
6. There was, then, great sin on the part of Israel when, even as natural men,
they ignored the mercies of Gods ordinary providence, and were not
 softened and converted by His unmerited goodness.
7. A bounteous season ought to awaken love and thankfulness to God.
8. God is exceedingly jealous of the honour due unto His name.
9. The eye is blind to God in natural wonders, and the ear deaf amid His works,
because the heart has not embraced Him in the Gospel of His Son. (J.
Garbett, M. A.)

Gods government of the sea and mans revolting tendencies

1. God is the Author and Governor of the sea.
2. God binds the sea within certain limits by law.
3. Gods laws are permanent till He wills a change by a perpetual decree.
4. God is ever prevent in His laws and contrivances.
5. Gods presence in the laws of the sea, as well as in every other law, should
have a restraining and reverencing influence upon men.

I. GODS GOVERNMENT OF THE SEA. Suited to impress man with an idea of--
1. Infinite power.
2. Consummate wisdom.
3. Special goodness.

II. Mans revolting tendencies.

1. God has prescribed the bounds of mans actions and thoughts by befitting
laws. Love to God and man.
2. To overstep these limits is rebellion against the great Lawgiver. When
thoughts are unholy and imagination irreverent, the soul has overstepped its
proper limits, and is in rebellion against its Creator.
3. Man has overstepped his proper limits, and therefore rebelled. They are
revolted and gone. Differing in this from the sea.
4. Man can do what the sea can not, namely, overstep his proper limits and
transgress the laws of his being.
(1) Man has a heart. The sea has not. Man has a will power--a power to act to
a great extent as he likes.
(2) This power in man has been prostituted to evil. Man, morally, has lost
his equilibrium, his heart has become rebellious; and heart rebellion is
the source of all rebellions--of hand and head rebellions. Conclusion--
1. God must govern heart and will by heart and will influences.
2. It is easier for God to rule suns and systems and oceans than one man,
because he has a heart, and a rebellious one.
3. Man, as a rebel, contrasts unfavourably with the material creation--the earth
and sea, etc. God notices this with a painful emotion. Fear ye not Me, etc.
(Homilist.)

The sand barrier

Take a handful of sand up; and how easily it filters through the fingers. This
slippery sand is part of Gods wall against the sea. By agglomeration it is strong. The
restraining of the waters has made the earth habitable. Every coastline, however
indented, flat, or rocky, has been traced by that Hand which gave to the sea its
decree.

I. There are NATURAL LAWS which are, like the boundaries of the sea, not to be
passed. We all know what would be the result if the force of gravitation did not hold
us in our place on the earths surface, or if we determined to ignore the law by
leaping from a precipice. There are also laws of health which restrain us. We can
easily damage our physical frame by neglect. Pains we must then endure, compelling
to obedience.

II. In SOCIETY we have limits, bounds and restraints which are of greatest value.
The opinions of our fellows are restraints. Laws are the bounds within which the
moral would secure the immoral. The good man fears them not, because he has no
wish to break them. He values them, because they protect him from the lawless.

III. There are in KNOWLEDGE certain limits and bounds which are of great value.
Those who think deeply are the most conscious of this. Let us be thankful for such
bounds. Let us remember what ennui and pride would follow if we could know all.
Further, where would be the need for faith--that noblest act of the soul? Let us be
humble. What is all we know, compared with what God has to reveal to us? Let us
seek to become more fitted to pass beyond the limitations of the present, and to
appreciate more the widening of our sphere of knowledge in the future world.

IV. As the sea has its bounds, so has LIFE its limits. Decay and death must come
sooner or later. Hearts can beat only a determined number of times, even as a
watch, when once wound up, can go only a certain time. Every tick brings it nearer
to the last beat. When the spring runs down, another beat cannot be got out of it.
What are mans years to immortality? (Job 14:5). There is wisdom in this decree. If
men were to live beyond a certain point they would be hindrances; and if there were
no death, men would be altogether forgetful of God their Judge.

V. We may apply the text to the TRIALS to which man is subjected. God sets
bounds to them. He will not allow us to be crushed or swamped. He knows what we
can bear, and how much is good for us. Murmur not. Trust in Him. He can deliver,
check, remove the restraints, hindrances, and trials, and even bring blessing out of
them. (Homiletic Magazine.)

God the ruler of the waves

God rules the waves, not Britannia. (John Newton.)

Sea and soil; Divine providence

By the mouth of His prophet, Jeremiah, God upbraids His people for their
impiety; but it is worthy of notice that He reproaches them not for their
forgetfulness of His miraculous deliverances, but for their heedlessness of His
regular kindness to them. It is not that they are neglecting Him who saved them
from the wrath of the Egyptians by the marvels of the Red Sea passage; it is that they
are failing to honour Him who has always been keeping the sea in its bed.

I. Gods constant kindness to us.

1. In keeping in check the destructive forces upon the earth (verse 22). The sea
at rest, kept within its bounds, is an object of surpassing beauty; its surface is
the great highway of the nations. But when it breaks its bounds, it causes
terrible destruction. As with the sea, so with the air. The pure air we breathe
is life itself; the soft breeze is refreshment and invigoration; the wind aids us
in our industries and carries our ships across the water. But the cyclone, the
hurricane, is danger, destruction, death. The occasional storm reminds us of
the continuance from week to week of that balance in the atmospheric forces
which the wisdom and the power of God sustain, and which makes possible
and practicable our pleasant lives. This also holds with the interior of the
earth. Beneath a thin crust of rock are stored and hidden great central fires.
What if they were loosened! The earthquake and the volcano are the
reminders that there are forces beneath our feet and of which we have no
control whatever; but a mightier hand than ours has shut them in, and keeps
us in safety and in peace.
2. In putting into exercise productive powers (verse 24). God has been fulfilling
His promise, and neither seedtime nor harvest has failed from the earth.
There have come droughts and storms: our trust and our patience have been
tried; our intellectual resources have been developed, and our character has
been disciplined thereby; adverse material conditions have been
strengthening and quickening our manhood; the culture of the field has been
the culture of the race; the method of Gods giving has greatly enhanced the
value of His gift. Divine wisdom has accompanied Divine bounty at every
step.

II. OUR HUMAN RESPONSE. Too often it has been--

1. That which is our reproach. Men have taken everything from the God of their
life, and they, have--
(1) Denied His existence; or
(2) Questioned His interest in His childrens well-being; or
(3) Practically disregarded the operation of His hand, and rendered Him no
thanks; or
(4) Contented themselves with bare formalities from which all genuine
feeling has been left out. But prophet and psalmist and apostle invite us
to a response--
2. Which is becoming and acceptable.
(1) Reverence. Fear ye not Me? Have we no adoration for this Lord of all
power and wisdom, who keeps the sea in its place and who covers the
barren soil with a golden harvest?
(2) Gratitude. Shall we not bless the Lord, who filleth our mouth with
good things?
(3) Service. He who gives us the bread which nourishes our body has placed
us under a far greater obligation in that He has given us the Bread of Life.
Eating of the one, we live a lower life for a few more years; but
 partaking of the other, we live the larger and higher life for evermore
(Joh 6:58). (C. Clarkson, B. A.)

Gods barriers against mans sin

The majesty of God, as displayed in creation and providence, ought to stir up our
hearts in adoring wonder and melt them down in willing obedience to His
commands. The almighty power of Jehovah, so clearly manifest in the works of His
hands, should constrain us, His creatures, to fear His name and prostrate ourselves
in humble reverence before His throne. The contemplation of the marvellous works
which He doth upon the great and wide sea, where He tosseth the waves to and
fro, and yet keepeth them in their ordained courses, should draw forth our devoutest
emotions, and I could almost say, inspire us with homage. Have these great things of
God, these wondrous works of His, no lesson to teach us? Do they not while
declaring His glory reveal our duty? Our poets, both the sacred and the uninspired,
have feigned consciousness to those inanimate agents that they might the more
truthfully represent their honourable service. But if because we are intelligent
beings, we withhold our allegiance from our rightful Sovereign, then our privileges
are a curse, and our glory is a shame. We might learn, even without the written
oracles of Scripture, that we ought to obey God, if our foolish hearts were not so
darkened; thus unbelief of the Almighty Creator is a crime of the first magnitude. If
it were a petty sovereign against whom ye rebelled, it might be pardonable; if He
were a man like yourselves, ye might expect that your faults would easily find
forgiveness; but since He is the God who reigns alone where clouds and darkness are
round about Him, the God to whom all nature is obedient, and whose high behests
are obeyed both in heaven and in hell, it becomes a crime, the terrible character of
which words cannot portray, that you should ever sin against a God so marvellously
great. The greatness of God enhances the greatness of our sin. I believe this is one
lesson which the prophet intended to teach us by the text. But while it is a lesson, I
do not think it is the lesson of the text. There is something else which we are to learn
from it. God here contrasts the obedience of the strong, the mighty, the untamed
sea, with the rebellious character of His own people. The doctrine of the text seems
to be this--that without supernatural means God can make all creatures obedient
save man; but man is so disobedient in his heart, that only some supernatural
agency can make him obedient to God, while the simple agency of sand can restrain
the sea, without any stupendous effort of Divine power more than He ordinarily puts
out in nature: He cannot thus make man obedient to His will. Now, look back into
history, and see if it has not been so. What has been a greater problem, if we may so
speak concerning the Divine mind, than that of restraining men from sin? How
many restraints God has put upon man! But what of this fact?--you say--we know
it is true; verified in your own ease. Come, now, I want to ask of you, whether it
cannot be said of you truly, The sea is bound by sand; but I am one of those people
who are bent on revolting from God, neither can any of His restraints keep me from
sin. Let us review the various restraints which God has put upon His people to keep
them from sins which, nevertheless, are altogether ineffectual, without the
accompanying power of grace.
1. Then, remember there is a restraint of gratitude which, to the lowly
regenerated heart, must necessarily form a very strong motive to obedience.
I ask thee, O saint, viewing thy sins as sins against love and mercy, against
covenant promises, covenant oaths, covenant engagements, ay, and covenant
 fulfillments, is not thy sin a desperate thing, and art not thou thyself a
rebellious and revolting being, seeing that thou canst not be restrained by
such a barrier of adamant as thy soul acknowledges? Next notice, that the
saint has not only this barrier against sin, but many others.
2. He has the whole of Gods Word given him by way of warning; its pages he is
accustomed to read; he reads there, that if he break the statutes and keep not
the commandments of the Lord, his Father will visit his transgressions with a
rod, and his iniquity with stripes. And yet, O Christian, against all warning
and against all precept, thou darest to sin. Oh! art thou not a rebellious
creature, and mayest thou not humble thyself at the thought of the greatness
of thine iniquity?
3. Again, the saint sins against his own experience. When he looks back upon his
past life he finds that sin has always been a loss to him; he has never found
any profit, but has always lost by it. Will you put the poisoned goblet to your
lips again? Yes, you will; but because you do so in the teeth of your
experience, it ought to make you weep, that you should be such desperate
rebels against such a loving God, who has put not merely a barrier of sand,
but a barrier of tried steel to keep in your lusts, and yet they will break forth;
verily, ye are a rebellious and revolting people.
4. Then again, God guards all His children with providence, in order to keep
them from sin. Ah! strange things happen to some of us. It was only a
providence which on some solemn occasion, to which you never look back
without regret, saved you from sin which would have been a scab on your
character. Bless God for that! But remember, notwithstanding the girdlings
of His providence, how many times you have offended; and let the frequency
of your sin remind you that you must indeed be a rebellious creature.
5. Yet, once more let me remind you, that the ordinances of Gods house are all
intended to be checks to sin. Bow down your heads with shame while ye
consider your ways, and then lift up your hearts, Christians, in adoring love,
that He has kept you when your feet were making haste to hell, where you
would have gone, but for His preserving grace. Will you not pray, that God
should not cast you away, nor take His Holy Spirit from you, though you are
a rebellious creature, and though you have revolted against Him?

II. Apply it to SINNERS. Come, then, sinner; in the first place, I bid thee consider
thy guilt. The mighty ocean is kept in obedience by God, and restrained within its
channel by simple sand; and thou, a pitiful worm, the creature of a day, the
ephemera of an hour, thou art a rebel against God. The sea obeys Him; thou dost
not. Consider how many restraints God has put on thee: He has not checked thy
lusts with sand but with beetling cliffs; and yet thou hast burst through every bound
in the violence of thy transgressions. Perhaps He has checked thy soul by the
remembrance of thy guilt. Thou hast felt thyself a despiser of God; or if not a
despiser, thou art a mere hearer, and hast no part nor lot in this matter. Dost thou
not remember thy sins in the face of thy mothers counsels and thy fathers strong
admonitions? Thou knowest the threatenings of God; it is no new tale to thee, when
I warn thee that sinners must be condemned. Consider, then, how great is thy guilt;
thou hast sinned against light and knowledge; thou art not the Hottentot sinner,
who sins in darkness; thou hast not sinned ignorantly, thou hast done it when thou
knewest better. Some of you have had other things. Dont you remember, some little
time ago, when sickness was rife, you were stretched on your bed? Methinks I see
you; you turned your face to the wall, and you cried, O God, if Thou wilt save my
life, I will give myself to Thee! Perhaps it was an accident; thou didst fear that death
was very near; the terrors of death laid hold of thee, and thou didst cry, O God, let
me but reach home in safety, and my bended knees and my tears pouring in
torrents, shall prove that I am sincere in the vow I make! But didst thou perform
that vow? Nay, thou hast sinned against God; thy broken vows have gone before thee
to judgment. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 5:23-24
But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and
gone.

Israels apostasy
Our state of heart and mind toward God is shown, not by those emotions which
are kindled in us on receiving any extraordinary mercy, nor by what we do under the
influence of those emotions, but by the habitual condition of our hearts and minds
toward God as concerned in His everyday gifts and our everyday doings.

I. The accusation made.

I. God complains of revolt and rebellion against Him. The only rightful ruler over
all: whose power is absolute and independent, whose wisdom is unerring, whose
justice perfect, and whose goodness infinite: whose statutes are all right,
rejoicing the right-hearted, whose commandment is all pure, enlightening the eye
that is single.
2. And what thought was it in their hearts, which God construed as rebellion
against Him? It took in Israels heart the simple and familiar form of mere
unthankfulness to God for common mercies.

II. The proof of their rebellion and revolt.

1. They did not in the gift of a good harvest discern God at all.
2. If, as I feel too much afraid it is, this part of the proof of a rebellious heart be
in us, of necessity the other part will not be wanting: and as God saith in the
text of His people of old, Neither say they in their hearts, Let us now fear the
Lord our God, so neither shall we say the same. The goodness of God is
meant to lead men to repentance. (F. C. Clark, B. A.)

Sin is revolt and rebellion against Christ-our King

One day, over in Australia, at Maryboro, an unusually fine-looking man came in
and said, I want to talk with you. I dont know about your preaching. I am a moral,
upright man, and nobody can deny it. I should like you to tell me what you have got
against me. I said, Are you a Christian? No, sir. Well, then, I charge you with
high treason against your King. God made Him so, and I charge you--and I looked
him right in the eye--with the crime of high treason against your King. An awful
cloud came over the mans face. He got up and walked out of the room. Months
passed away. We had been over to Tasmania, and got back to Australia, and were
preaching at Ballarat, about forty miles, I think, from Maryboro. At the close of one
of my meetings, a fine-looking man came and said, Do you remember me? I
replied, I have seen you somewhere but 1 cannot trace you. Do you remember
charging a man with high treason? I said, I have charged many a man with high
treason. He said, Do you remember charging a specific man? and he narrated the
circumstances. Yes, I said, I do. He replied, I am the man. You will never charge
me with it again. He held out his hand and I held out mine. He took me in his
mighty grip, and dropped on his knees and I on mine. He looked up and said, Lord
Jesus, I hand in my allegiance; I give up my treason and take Thee as my King. You
men ought to do it tonight. (A. Torrey.)

JER 5:24
Let us now fear the Lord our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the
latter, in his season: He reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.

The former and the latter rain

Such are the climate and soil of Palestine, that all agricultural operations are most
manifestly dependent upon the periodical rainfall. Hence the people speak of the
weather and the crops with a more immediate reference to God than is usual with
us. It is said that the common expressions of the peasantry are such as quite strike
travellers with their apparently devout recognition of the Almighty agency. Certainly
we may account for a very large number of what may be called the agricultural
promises of the Old Testament, from the fact that little of the food of the people was
gained by manufacture or commerce, and the whole population depended upon the
field, and the field upon the rain. Although our climate does not so immediately
remind us of our dependence upon God, yet it would be well if we remembered
whence all our blessings come, and looked up to the hand from which our daily
bread is distributed. When He giveth seasons propitious for the harvest, let us thank
Him for it; and if at any time He restraineth the blessings of the elements, and
leadeth the air with blight and mildew, let us fear and tremble before Him, and
humble ourselves before His chastening hand. Gratitude for providential mercies is
not, however, the subject of this discourse. I intend to use the text rather in a
spiritual sense. As it is in the outward world, so is it in the inward; as it is in the
physical, so is it in the spiritual: man is a microcosm, a little world, and all weather
and seasons find their image in him. The earth is dependent upon the rain from
heaven, so are the souls of men, and so are their holy works, dependent upon the
grace shower which cometh from the great Father of Light, the giver of every good
and perfect gift.

I. THE WORK OF GOD AS IT IS CARRIED ON WITHOUT. It is needful, whenever any

holy enterprise is commenced, that it should be early watered by the helpful Spirit of
God. Nothing beginneth well unless it beginneth in God. It cannot take root, it
cannot Spring up in hopefulness, except the Holy Spirit shall descend upon it; it will
wither like the grass upon the housetops if the celestial dew of the morning fall not
early upon it. The like grace is equally needful after years of growth; there is urgent
need of the latter rain, the shower of revival, in which the old work shall be
freshened, and the first verdure shall be restored; for without this latter rain, the
period of harvest, which is the end aimed at, will be disappointing.

II. Apply the text to our spiritual life within us.

1. Here note that usually the spiritual life, as soon as it is commenced,
experiences a former rain, or a delightful visitation of grace. So blessed was
our first conversion to some of us, that those first days are as green and
fragrant in our memories as if they were but yesterday; they are as fresh and
fair as if they had but just budded in the garden of time. To hear anyone talk
of a precious Christ and of pardon bought with blood, and of full and free
salvation, was heaven to us. If, in those days, we had to suffer anything for
Jesus, we only regretted we could not suffer more. That was the early rain.
The seed had just been sown, and the Master to make it take deeper root and
spring up faster into the green blade, gave us the sacred shower of His loving
presence. There was much tender wisdom in this gentleness, for the newborn
soul is very weak then. Besides, our Master at that time gave us the early
rain, as it were, to give our young plant a start in commencing our heavenly
growth--a growth to which we might look back in after years. How often have
we been refreshed since then in our times of sorrow, by recollecting the
months past, when the candle of the Lord shone round about our head!
Beloved Christian, if thou art now this day in the dark, pluck a torch from the
altars of yesterday, with which to kindle the lights of today. The faithful
Promiser was with thee then; thou hadst His love to cheer thee then: go to
Him yet once more, and thou shalt receive the latter rain of renewed grace
from Him who giveth grace upon grace.
2. It is very usual in the life of grace, for the soul to receive in after years, a
second very remarkable visitation of the Holy Spirit, which may be compared
to the latter rain. Believe me, the life of grace is no dead level, it is not a fen
country, a vast fiat. There are mountains, and there are valleys. There are
tribes of Christians who live in the valleys, like the poor Swiss of the Valais,
who live in the midst of the miasma, where fever has its lair, and the frame is
languid and enfeebled. Such dwellers in the lowlands of unbelief are forever
doubting, fearing, troubled about their interest in Christ, and tossed to and
fro; but there are other believers, who, by Gods grace, have climbed the
mountain of full assurance and near communion. Their place is with the
eagle in his eyrie, high aloft. They are like the strong mountaineer, who has
trodden the virgin snow, who has breathed the fresh, free air of the Alpine
regions, and therefore his sinews are braced, and limbs are vigorous; these
are they who do great exploits, being mighty men, men of renown. The saints
who dwell on high in the clear atmosphere of faith, are rejoicing Christians,
holy and devout men, doing service for the Master all over the world, and
everywhere conquerors through Him that loved them. And I desire, oh, how
earnestly I desire you to be such men!
3. The text speaks of a third thing. There is the former rain, and the latter rain,
and then he says, He has reserved for us the appointed weeks of harvest.
Yes, if we shall get this latter rain--and may we have it!--it will then be time
 to be looking forward to our harvest. Consider well that the harvest begins in
the field, though it ends in the garner. Going to heaven begins upon earth;
and as the text tells us of weeks, so may I add that going to glory is often a
long work. We are like a balloon while it is tied to the earth, it cannot mount;
even so our ascent to heaven is delayed by a thousand detaining cords and
bands, and the process of setting us free is cutting the ropes one by one. The
wheat may well rejoice for the sharp cuts of the sickle, because it is the sign
of going home to the garner. After the wheat is cut it stands in shocks, shocks
of corn fully ripe, not growing out of the earth, but merely standing on it. The
shock is quite disconnected from the soil. How happy is the state of a
Christian when he is in the world but is not linked to it! His ripeness drops
here and there a grain into the soil, for he is still ready to do good, but he has
no longer any vital connection with aught below, he is waiting to be in
heaven. Here comes the wain. The corn is put into it, and with shoutings it is
carried home. Soon will our Heavenly Father send His chariot, and we who
have been ripened by the latter rain, and separated from earth by His Spirits
sickle, shall be borne in the chariot of triumph, amidst the shoutings of the
angels, and the songs of thrice blessed spirits, up to the eternal garner. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

The God of harvest

I. SOME OF THE ASPECTS OF THE OPERATIONS OF THE GOD OF HARVEST. The artist
will not be called a painting, or the poet an ode, although it is his production;
neither will God allow creation to stand for Himself. But the artists painting, and
the poets ode, reveal perception, and genius, and feeling, and inspiration, which
lead us to the threshold of their personality. So creation is brimful of the power,
wisdom, and goodness of its Maker, and providence teems with evidences of care,
beneficence, and tenderness on the part of its Author.
1. The God of harvest is the God of life. Take upon the palm of your hand one
grain of corn, and examine it. We are told that it is one leaf folded up tightly.
Whether it is strictly so or not, there is an outer garment to ward off the
severity of the weather, and there is a finer inner garment, with
underclothing. But where is life? Is it between the folds, or is there some
small particle of matter in the centre which is its secret cell? What is the
action which takes place when life springs forth? What are light, and heat,
and moisture in relation to life? How does life appropriate to itself
substances that have in them no life? And lastly we ask, How does life rise up
a hundredfold from the ashes of its own death? These are questions which
we cannot answer. To answer them would destroy their very design, for they
are there to conduct an inquiry which ends not in themselves but in God.
2. The God of harvest is the God of progress and beauty. There is a process
which appears to us to be death, and not any step towards the expansion of
life. When the grain has been in the earth some time there is a dissolving of
its compactness, as if it could not hold its own against contending forces. It
bursts also, as if its girdles were broken. The next step which might be
expected to follow is its reduction to the consistency of the clod in which it is
lodged. But we are not correct in our estimate of that process. Life has found
in the earth what she delights to find at all times--a secret spot to unfold her
 powers. Silently and unobserved she unfolds the leaf, and sends it forth into
the blade and the ear. The process we have alluded to is one of repulsion,
without a single comely feature to relieve it. But the fact is, nature is there in
her laboratory preparing to send forth life dressed in magnificent beauty.
The cornfield, width its golden crop, is one of the loveliest sights in nature.
Progressive steps develop the hidden beauties of life. If we further continue
our observation, that which we consider to be the termination of all life is its
real commencement. The present is the time of ploughing and sowing, the
reaping will come by and by.
3. The God of harvest is the God of final and beneficent issues. God works in
cycles, but providence is not without intermissions in the turn of the wheel.
Periods of action are sharply marked off. Summer and winter may be said to
reverse each other, although their revolutions accomplish but one end. These
changes prove the existence of a guiding hand, as much as the tacks which
the ship makes prove that the man is at the wheel. The thought that all these
changes, with a direct and a reversible action, bring about ends transcending
in goodness and beauty everything of the kind in the actions themselves,
ought to influence us not to seek in labour the joy of harvest. The
husbandman does not grind and bake all his corn, but is as careful to keep
the best of it for seed, as he is anxious the other part should be wholesome
food for his family. So we cannot hope for future joy if no present seed is
sown. Good seed cast into good ground--the Word of God sown in the heart--
will be watered by His Spirit, Words spoken from the heart, and actions
prompted by love, sown in the breasts of others, will grow into a plenteous
harvest. The Lord has reserved a period of rejoicing for Christian workers.

II. Reverence and gratitude are due to the God of harvest.

1. A due regard for His honour. Reverence is a state of feeling produced by a
sense of the majesty of God, and is the principal element in true worship.
This holy passion is better felt than described. It is not a passion wholly
created by a sense of sinfulness, which would be simply a dread of His
displeasure, but an intense regard for Gods glory. His name is never
pronounced except with a feeling of awe, and His works with a sense of
reverence. His Word is holy, and His presence sought in the deepest
humility. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
2. A deep sense of gratitude. Reverence for God does not crush the love of the
soul. It has no frowns, but a smile. We worship and look up. We read the
heart of the Giver in the gifts. All His servants are loaded with gifts for us.
The earth has He given to the children of men. Its magnificence, its
attractions, its beauties, its riches, its harvests, are all ours. More than the
earth, yea, and more than the heavens, hath He given unto us, Who gave
His only begotten Son.
3. An earnest desire for service. The hurry must be fed, and the naked clothed.
The widow needs a friend and the orphan a father. Have we nothing to lend
to the Lord by giving to the poor? Is there not a holy ambition in our souls to
emulate Him who went about doing good? (T. Davies, M. A.)

Voices of God in the harvest

 I. THERE ARE VOICES OF GOD IN THE YEARLY HARVEST. God has mercifully set our
lot in an age when the perils of famine and of desolating wars are very seldom
known, and in very limited degrees. In past ages the yearly harvest was much more
hazardous than it is now that countries are more settled and agricultural science so
much farther advanced. Yet in those days God did not withhold His promised
harvests from the world, only from parts of it. Not one single year of the worlds
history has passed by without a gathered harvest somewhere; only the imperfect
communication between distant countries did not then permit the surplus of one
land to supply the deficiencies of another. Can any true soul look upon the valleys
covered over with corn, and fail to hear them shouting for joy and also singing of
the goodness of God? What merciful care of His creatures is thus displayed! How
surely a moments failing interest on the part of God would leave our harvest only a
heap in a day of sadness and of desperate sorrow! There are many who can discern
something of the goodness of the God of providence, who yet try to persuade
themselves that it is another kind of God who deals with men as sinners--another
God, and this God only a God of stern demands, severities, and vengeance. It is not
so. The God of redemption is the very God of bounteous nature. His yearly mercy is
designed to carry home to our hearts the very call made by Christ, and by the Word-
-the call to repentance and trust. In the salvation by Jesus Christ we ought to see in
sublime glory that very goodness that spreads our fields with waving corn. In the
yearly harvest there is also a voice speaking out Gods faithfulness. Every year He is
only doing what He promised our forefather He would do for him and for his
descendants; He is only keeping His word. Gods faithfulness to His promise is
painted in splendid colours right across the sky in every sun-glinted shower. Gods
faithfulness to His promise is sung out by every cloud-flecked, waving cornfield,
every gathered sheaf, and every loaded barn.

II. The special voices of God in this years harvest.

III. The voices of God in the scripture use of the harvest.

1. In Scripture, and by the Lord Jesus Christ, the harvest is used as an
illustration, and employed to impress Christian duty, especially the duty of
working diligently and earnestly in Christs work, the ingathering of sinners
to His love, salvation, Church, and heaven.
2. Harvest is also used in Scripture to point a call to us to prepare for the
judgment day, and the eternal world. (R. Tuck, B. A.)

Harvest thoughts
The harvest, with its long train of preparatory works--ploughing and seed time,
spring and autumn rains, the rest of winter and the heat of summer--is not only the
great support of our life in this world--the great business of the year, as far as bodily
health and strength are concerned; but it is throughout an instance of our Heavenly
Fathers teaching us, without book, many of the truths which it most concerns us to
know.
1. He meant us to take notice, first, of His continual presence and power in
bringing forward the fruits of the earth. We are not so stupid as to imagine
that corn will spring up of itself in our fields, whether it be sown at all or no.
 When we see a piece of land well stored with it and free from weeds, we do
not ascribe it to chance, but we acknowledge that the hand of man has been
busy in that place. But consider how much more skilful the work is, to form
out of a dry seed, by mixture with a little earth and water, the several parts of
an entire plant--the root, the stalk, the blade, the flower, the grain--and be
ashamed to recollect how seldom you have thought of that infinite skill and
wisdom, in comparison with the notice you have taken of mans part, so very
fax inferior, in the work of bringing food out of the earth. Man does his
portion of labour and goes away, and sets about something else: but the work
of God is forever going on, and therefore we may be sure the workman is
forever present.
2. It is the more shameful not to take notice of this; because the growth of corn
is, from beginning to end, a work of Gods mercy as well as of His power. It is
a sort of token, to our very outward senses, that He has not left us nor
forsaken us, for all we have done to provoke Him; and who is there, that has
a just sense of his own sin and unworthiness, who will not thankfully receive
every thing, both in nature and in Scripture, which encourages him to
meditate on so cheering a truth as this?
3. Then, the manner in which the harvest is made available for the supply of our
wants may offer abundance of useful instruction although He does so much
for us, in forming, watching over, nourishing, and ripening the plant, yet it is
not His will we should enjoy the benefit of it without exertion on our own
part. In the sweat of our face we must eat bread: we must put it in the
ground in the first instance: we must fence, manure, weed, and reap, or all
Gods mercy in giving us the fruits of the earth, will at last be thrown away
upon us. It is no otherwise in what concerns our spiritual happiness and
eternal salvation. We must do our part by faith and prayer and sincere
obedience, or we cannot expect God to do His. We must employ so much
common sense, as to look forward to another world, and not to mind trifles
any more than we can help, while eternal things are open before us. The
cultivation of the earth, like the other employments of this life, is not blessed
alike to all; and it very often may happen, that God sends prosperity on a bad
mans harvest, while the crop of the righteous fails. This, to unbelieving
dispositions, is another excuse for irreligious thoughts, and practices; as if
God had not warned us beforehand, that He maketh His sun to rise on the
evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. God
does not think so much of the good things of this world, as to account them a
sufficient reward for His faithful servants; by them, or by the want of them,
He is trying us in this world, to fit us for our real reward in the next: and to
murmur because good harvests, or any other worldly goods, are not
bestowed on men according to their behaviour, is as if a man on a journey
should be angry and discontented, because he does not find all the comforts
of repose and home whilst he is moving along the road. (Plain Sermons by
Contributors to Tracts for the Times.)

The God of nature

I. THE DOCTRINE ASSERTED. The Lord our God giveth, etc. He is the immediate
bestower of what we call natural benefits.
1. The Giver of rain.
(1) He provides it in mercy to mankind.
(2) He withholds it in judgment upon nations.
2. The Appointer of harvest. He reserveth, etc. Important and interesting
season. God has appointed it--
(1) As an immutable ordinance (Gen 8:22).
(2) As a time of rejoicing.
(3) As a means of instruction.

II. The duty inferred.

1. Cultivate continual acknowledgment of God.
2. Exercise entire dependence upon God.
3. Render perpetual thanksgiving to God.
4. Devote ourselves to the faithful service of God. (H. Parr.)

Harvest voices
Is there not a modern tendency to exclude God from the harvest field, to put an
atheistic trust in secondary causes--subsoil ploughing, artificial manures, the
rotation of crops and the like? Nature to the seeing eye and listening ear is
sacramental. Earth is crammed with heaven, and the air is redolent with a celestial
music.
1. The prophet would have us cherish that filial, reverent and thankful fear
towards the great Giver of all which will save us from perverting His gifts.
Without a due recognition of God our temporal prosperity becomes a curse.
Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. An engraving by Retseh illustrating a great
poem gives us the angels dropping roses from the skies on the heads of
denizens in Inferno. Reaching them these fragrant gifts turn to molten lead
but to scorch and burn. Is it not thus when the blessings of a kindly
providence fall on selfish and ungrateful hearts? The intended boon becomes
a bane and the perverted gift a corrosion and a blight. Such is the
characteristic sign of worldliness. It is a profanation of lifes gifts to basest
uses, and a missing of the higher good. But the bounteousness of each glad
harvest time should remind us that we are pensioners on the lavish goodness
of our Heavenly Father in order that we may use it as He alone wills, for we
are beneficiaries every one, and, as such, trustees of heavens manifold
mercies and gifts.
2. The thought of life out of death is conveyed to the spiritual mind. Except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit.
3. Another suggestion from the harvest is that of cooperation with God. Take a
field of corn; it has not come of itself. Geologists never find amid the
fossilised remains of primeval vegetation a trace of corn. It is specifically a
human product. Wild wheat is unknown. Corn is the product of civilised
man. It implies tillage, and this in a sense not true of many other products
that minister to mans need. So also is it in the development of Christian
 character. We are workers together with God. We do not attain to
eminence by accident, or, as it were, automatically. It is true that salvation
is of God; we are saved by grace through faith; and that not of ourselves: it
is the gift of God. But there is sense in which salvation is a process, a
diligent culture, a strenuous warfare, a glad but real obedience. We must
work out what God works in if we are to come to a real possession of truth
and of Christian excellence. The graces of Christian life are not like pictures
thrown on a screen by a magic lantern, they are rather like the strands woven
in a costly fabric by the weaver at his loom. To change the figure, finished
husbandry of soul involves sedulous and patient culture, prayerful self-
examination, and a mastery of that inner realm of our being where desire,
motive, volition play their determining part in human character. Truth is
real, something trowed, when it has become a working and victorious
principle in the life. Other than this, it is like so much unused capital locked
up in a bank, or so much unworked land on a farm. The Chinese, it is said,
discovered the magnetic needle centuries before it was known in the western
world. But it was a mere toy. They did not use it for new voyages of discovery
or for enterprise in commerce. Its practical utility was nil. May not we
commit a similar futility in Christianity?
4. Again, Everything in its season, the harvest seems to say, First the blade,
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. So each period in human life has
its appropriate work. We cannot postpone duty and expect the reward of
honest diligence. A pious, well-instructed youthhood should go before the
active responsibilities and burdens of mid life, as both of these must precede
and determine the mellow ripeness of advanced age. No one period in life
can do the work of another period. Each has its own function and
opportunity. Religion is a sublime forecast to be made use of in lifes early
season, and not an afterthought darkened only with unavailing regrets when
the summer has ended and the harvest we had wished is forever beyond our
reaping. Know thy opportunity was written on the temple of Delphos. It is
written deep on the face of time.
5. Let us remember that as the grain of one harvest is the seed of the next, so our
life is reproductive, and its influence far-reaching and beyond our power to
compute. Moreover, there is a wondrously cumulative power in Christian
work and influence; the reaping is larger than the sowing. A self-multiplying
process is ever going forward, and the results lie beyond our reckoning. We
think of the beginning of things, the initial stages of great reform
movements, the so-called forlorn hopes of the past, and with grateful wonder
we greet today their fruitful, immeasurable issues. It is difficult for even the
most sceptical and slow of belief to resist the lesson of history, that moral
and spiritual forces rule and shape the destiny of this world, and that
humanity and Christianity are meant the one for the other. (Aldersgate
Magazine.)

Lessons from the harvest

I. In reference to God.
1. Admiration.
 (1) We may admire the wisdom of God, in all the means that He uses to
ripen our corn, and in bringing each field of the same kind to perfection
nearly at the same time, so that all, or at least a considerable part of it,
may be cut down together, and yet all be fit for use.
(2) The wisdom of God, our preserver, is evident again in bringing the
different species of corn to perfection at different times, so that one is not
ready till after another is cut down.
(3) The same wisdom is also seen in making the harvest at somewhat
different times in different parts of the country, so that those who have
reaped it in an early part may procure a few weeks longer work by
repairing to a later district,--an arrangement of Divine Providence
productive of greater convenience to the farmer, and longer employment
to the labourer.
2. Dependence. We can only lay the seed down in the ground and cover it with
the soil. God does all the rest.
3. Gratitude. Remember how many difficulties are in the way of every harvest,
and how nicely He must adjust the balance of all the influences required to
produce it. Too much rain or too little; too powerful and constant sunshine,
or too unfrequent; too violent winds, or too dell and general calm, would
render our autumn unfruitful. Consider, also, how many arrests there are
which we have seen, and of whose fruits we have partaken.
4. Confidence. The sun may fail to ripen the corn, the seed may lose its
germinating power, the rain may spoil it, or the wind may shake it; but God
has said we shall have harvest, and we always have it. But nothing can by any
possibility deprive the blood of Christ of its purifying and saving efficacy:
how much more, then, may we expect that promise to be accomplished
which says, He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life?

II. In reference to ourselves.

1. Activity. Although the corn may be ripe in the fields, it will be useless unless
gathered into the barn. So is it with Gods blessings through Christ. Our
Saviour has died; but what will this avail unless we use the means by which
we may obtain the benefits He has purchased?
2. Death.
3. Judgment. (W. Dickson.)

Reflections on harvest

I. THE REGULAR RETURN OF HARVEST IS AN OBVIOUS PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE AND

PROVIDENCE OF GOD. The fruits of the earth, so necessary to the support of animal
life, depend on causes beyond the reach of human power. The whole management of
the natural world is in hands superior to ours, in the hands of an invisible, almighty
Being.

II. The time of harvest naturally calls us to pious meditations and reflections.
1. The seasons are so ordered, as to remind us of the shortness of human
foresight. From past experience we expect a harvest in its appointed weeks,
 and rarely is our expectation frustrated. But the event is not always adjusted
to the measure of our hopes. It often falls short, and often exceeds them. The
management of the seasons, however, is in unerring hands. Rational beings,
in the care of infinite wisdom and goodness are always safe, while they
proceed in the line of their duty, and never ought they to indulge anxiety.
With Him who governs futurity, they may calmly trust all events.
2. Our dependence is apparent, as in many other things, so especially in the
return of harvest. If God sends His blessing, none can revoke it. If He
withhold His smiles, our toil is fruitless.
3. Scripture speaks of harvest as a season of gratitude and joy.
4. Harvest teaches diligence and frugality.
(1) God supplies our wants, not by an immediate providence, but by
succeeding our prudent labours.
(2) Those precious fruits of the earth which are dealt out only at certain
seasons, and which by no art or industry of man can at other seasons be
obtained, should be applied to honest and virtuous purposes; not
wastefully consumed in criminal indulgences.
5. Harvest inculcates benevolence. Religion consists in an imitation of Gods
moral character, especially of His diffusive and disinterested goodness.
6. Harvest reminds us of the shortness of life, and calls us to the diligent
improvement of our time. Food and raiment are needful for the body; seek
them you may; but rather seek the kingdom of God, and these things will be
added.
7. Harvest should be a season of self-examination. We are Gods husbandry.
Much has He done for us. What could He have done more? Have we
answered His cost? The field, which bringeth forth herbs, meet for Him by
whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God. But that which beareth
thorns and briars, is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.
8. Harvest reminds us of our obligation to faith and patience. We have a kind of
natural faith, which, standing on the ground of past experience, looks
forward with expectation of a future harvest. Let Christians, enlightened by
revelation, look beyond this world to things unseen; and, relying on the
promise, truth, and grace of God, anticipate the blessings of the heavenly
state. (J. Lathrop, D. D.)

Lessons from the harvest

I. THE BLESSINGS. Fruitful showers, and brilliant suns, and azure skies, and earth
covered with its bright green clothing, are, indeed, in themselves, blessings; but this
character is much more emphatically applied to them when we remember that they
are not only beautiful spectacles to delight our eyes and to minister to our senses of
enjoyment, but that they yield that sustenance, without which, the globe would soon
be thinned of the tribes which inhabit it, and there would be no human eye to rejoice
in its beauties. Yes, the great blessing is, that human life is to be sustained by the
produce which the fruitful seasons have thus secured to us. What blessings, then,
are the former and the latter rain and the appointed weeks of the harvest, which
supply this food. But it is chiefly on account of our never-dying souls that the fruitful
seasons are a blessing. There is this and that person who now, perhaps, are but
cumberers of the ground, bus who are upheld in life one year longer, that the seed of
eternal life may be now sown in their hearts--that they may, at length, be made
fruitful unto God, and become heirs of a glorious immortality.

II. The source of these blessings.

1. Man, when he would account for any event, in his ungodliness, frequently
ascribes is to chance or good luck. But there is no such word in a Christian
mans vocabulary. We must carefully distinguish between the agency of the
Lord our God and second causes. There is a sad tendency in man to put the
instruments which God makes use of to bring to pass all His will in the place
of God Himself.

III. The return which God requires.

1. As individuals, let the undeserved goodness of the Lord lead you to fear Him.
Ask the gift of the Holy Ghost, to impress your heart with a deep and abiding
sense of Gods goodness, at the present time--to humble you under a sense of
your own ingratitude; to lead you to Jesus Christ for pardon, peace, and
acceptance with God.
2. As heads of families, let us fear the Lord our God. As for me and my house,
we will serve the Lord.
3. As subjects of our beloved Sovereign--as members of the commonwealth--let
us fear the Lord our God. The national character is made up of the
aggregate of individual character. (H. Caddell, M. A.)

JER 5:26-31
As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are
become great and waxen rich.

Wicked professors the bane of the Church

I. God has a people on earth.

1. His creation.
2. Called by Him from darkness to light.
3. Privileged, pardoned, regenerated, adopted.

II. In the Church there is an unhappy admixture of wicked men. This applies to--
1. Those religious establishments whose constitution and discipline offer no
restraints to the admission of such characters.
2. Mere hearers of the Gospel.
3. Those who have entered the Church without real conversion.
(1) Some professors are secretly wicked.
(2) Some professors are deceivers.
 4. Those wilfully inactive in the Church.
5. Those who interrupt the peace and harmony of the Church.

III. This mixture of the wicked with the godly is a fact. Are found--by whom?
1. Frequently by themselves (1Jn 2:19).
2. Persecution has, and so has temptation.
3. By Christians, to whom their unholy course is a grief.
4. By God (Rev 3:18). Odious to Him.
5. Some will not be found till the day of judgment (Mat 3:12; Mat 13:28-30).

IV. The injurious influence of the conduct of such professors.

1. They bring reproach upon religion (Rom 2:24).
2. The hearts of the godly are grieved and their hands weakened (Jos 7:12; Jos
7:25; 1Jn 2:7; Php 3:18).
3. The Church is in danger of being injured by them (Hos 5:3).
4. It frequently prevents accessions to the Church.
5. The guilt of such persons is highly aggravated, and their punishment will be
awful. (Helps for the Pulpit.)

Wickedness rampant in the city

We have, in this chapter, a most melancholy set of pictures of untruthful men,
which are drawn to the life with a grimly graphic touch which strongly reminds one
of the series of Hogarths sketches known as the Rakes Progress. They hold the
mirror up not only to the life, but to the heart of the men of the times. Jerusalem
was rotten at the core: the nation was deceitful through and through. As a cage is
full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit. They had schemes without number,
plots without end, and tricks without limit, moving about in their minds like birds
herded together in a little cage. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

My people love to have it so.--

Gods people love to have it so
Earnest people like to believe that the world is growing better all the time. They
look upon the bright side of things; they behold the spread of the spirit of
Christianity more and more in the affairs of nations; wars are discouraged; a higher
standard of personal obligation obtains; the wrongs of the wretched and oppressed
are being championed, and in many very important particulars redressed; man
everywhere in civilised lands seems possessed of an enthusiasm to make the best of
himself.
1. All of this sort of thing had its counterpart in the story of Israel in the olden
time. We have gone beyond the ancient people of God in all sorts of ways;
nevertheless, human nature is strangely akin still to what it was in those
days.
(1) We have a host of prophets in these days. They begin by enlarging, as
they call it, the notion of inspiration, so that it may include every one
who fancies he has a bit of wisdom all his own to give to the world. Any
 bright author, or preacher, or poet may be a prophet, and if he is really
bright, as men count brightness, his inspiration will not be gainsaid by
many. We all love prophets, men of ideas, or great original thoughts. And
they have many pleasant gospels to proclaim. For example, There is good
in everything, every system, every creed, every earnest deed. It is a great
mistake to suppose there is any absolute good, and that such things as do
not square with its declarations are evil. There are many prophets of the
good-in-everything doctrine. Another message to the world is that God is
all mercy. It is a beautiful doctrine, is it not? It is certainly one most
acceptable in these days, that there is no hell. Yet another of the
prophecies which we love to hear is that the essence of all true religion is
doing good to our fellow men. Charity and philanthropy are going to save
souls. We are even told as if it were of direct revelation from out of
heaven that God will not ask what a man believed, but only how he lived,
when he appears for judgment. And the prophets who proclaim this truth
are popular indeed. Still further, we have the gospel of making the most
of ones self, the gospel of progress, development. Man has in himself all
the possibilities of perfection, and if he will but develop himself on sound
lines, the future has no limitations for him. All sacraments and
supernatural helps of any kind are childs play, mythical superstitions,
unworthy of thought on the part of strong-minded men.
(2) And as it was in Jeremiahs time, so also is it true today, that the priests
bear rule by the means of these modern prophets. Think of the topics
with which our modern pulpits generally deal. The unreality and
absurdity of the doctrines of the Christian creed; the falsity of the notion
of sin as something to be seriously treated, a moral iniquity, and one to
be condignly punished; the nobility of man as a splendid, unfallen
creature, called upon to make the most of himself, and so to rise to God-
like proportions. What is the explanation of this universal enlargement of
the scope of sermon utterance? We are told that preaching of this sort
reaches people. Your venerable Gospel, such as the Fathers loved, does
not pay in these days; wherever you find it preached you will find dearth
of money, dearth of works of mercy. So the pulpit must keep abreast of
the times, and the priests can only hope to bear rule, lead their flocks and
maintain their influence and position, by heartily accepting the
revelations of the new prophets and basing their gospel upon them.
(3) Jeremiah added of the men of his time, that Gods people loved to have it
so. No doubt this is the real explanation of the success of the prophets
and the priests; they have hit upon the things which appeal to the
popular heart. Once in a while the heart of the God-serving community is
fired with a revival of earnestness and breaks away from the degrading
embrace of the world, and then the popular voice of the believing
community demands a high spiritual tone of the clergy. As a rule,
however, the unbelieving world is too strong for the professors of
religion, and gradually lowers their moral tone towards its own cynical,
utilitarian standards. Then the believers refuse to hearken to a gospel of
strictness from their preachers, and demand an easier doctrine at the
penalty of refusing to listen at all. This threat almost always brings the
priests to terms, and they weakly salve their consciences by the thought
 that it is most important to keep some hold upon the people, and that
half the Gospel is better than none.
2. It is a very common temptation to rail at the degeneracy of our own time, at
the shortcomings of our own Church. We are all of us apt to fancy ourselves
prophets of the Lord when we know that we are in earnest, and the reason
we fancy ourselves so strong in that role is because one cannot easily see all
sides of a question at one time. Most earnest people are very one-sided, often
very unfair in their judgments. So I would not have you fancy for a moment
that I wish to pose as a Jeremiah denouncing and endeavouring to reform
the abuses of the Church of his time. We have an impersonal Jeremiah to
utter the solemn warnings of the Lord in our ears. It is the voice of the
Church herself. Well, we are very much concerned with the rest of the verse,
My people love to have it so. Is that true?
(1) Are we quite powerless to prevent things from being so bad as they are?
One need not rush into every controversial fray, and yet one may often
speak his mind fairly and clearly and so free his soul from the guilt of
silence. One can speak in the company of his fellows and say, I do not
believe there is good in everything, for all systems of religion and
philosophy which do not emanate from God must be wrong. There can
only be one true doctrine about unearthly things, and whatever opposes
itself to that which God has revealed is false and bad. There are
abundant opportunities in most of our lives for bearing our witness
against the fashionable delusion that works of mercy on behalf of our
neighbours are the sure passport to heaven, and that nothing else is
needed. We can say strongly and firmly, Nay, that is but the second
commandment, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. The first and
greatest of all is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. And no one will get to
heaven on account of his benevolence to his fellows who neglects to
worship and serve his Maker.
(2) It is not to be forgotten, however, that there is more than bearing witness
in speech. There is the living of the life. (Arthur Ritchie.)

And what will ye do in the end thereof?--

What will ye do in the end?

I. THERE IS AN END. Every step is getting nearer to the termination.

II. IT WOULD SEEM TO BE OF GREAT IMPORTANCE AT THE END, WHAT HAS BEEN THE
CHARACTER OF THE COURSE. It is not so much a question with God how the man died,
as what the man was when he came to die.

III. It is the part of a thoughtful and wise man, often to consider the connection
between the present and the anticipated result. Every one admits this in matters of
worldly experience.

IV. THIS QUESTION SHOULD BE FREQUENTLY AND EARNESTLY ENTERTAINED BY

YOUNG MEN. It is most important how you begin, so that as you go on habit may be
on your side and become your friend. (T. Binney, D. D.)

A question for the beginning

A large part of the wise conduct of life depends on grave consideration of
consequences. It is a sharp pointed question, that pricks many a bubble, and brings
much wisdom down into the category of folly.

I. A QUESTION WHICH EVERY WISE MAN WILL ASK HIMSELF. The consideration of
consequences is not the highest guide, or always a sufficient one; or, by any means,
in every case, an easily applied one. Do right! and face any results therefrom. He
who is always forecasting possible issues will be so afraid of results that he will not
dare to move; and his creeping prudence will often turn out the truest imprudence.
But whilst many deductions must be made from the principle laid down, that the
consideration of circumstances is a good guide in life, yet there are regions in which
the question comes home with illuminating force. I believe that, in the long run,
condition is the result of character and of conduct, and, for the most part, men are
the architects of their own condition, and that they make the houses that they dwell
in to fit the convolutions of the body that dwells within them. That being so, there
can be nothing more ridiculous than that a man should refrain from marking the
issue of his conduct, and saying to himself, What am I to do in the end? If you
would only do that in regard of hosts of things in your daily life you could not be the
men and women that you are. If the lazy student would only bring clearly before his
mind the examination room, and the unanswerable paper, and the bitter
mortification when the pass list comes out and his name is not there, he would not
trifle as he does, but bind himself to his desk and his task. If the young man that
begins to tamper with purity could see, as the older of us have seen, men with their
bones full of the iniquity of their youth, do you think the temptations of the streets
and low places of amusement would not be stripped of their fascination? What will
you do in the end? Use that question as the Ithuriel spear which will touch the
squatting tempter at your ear, and there will start up, in its own shape, the fiend.
But the main application that I would ask you to make of the text is in reference to
the final end, the passing from life. Death, the end, is likewise death, the beginning.
Surely every wise man will take that into consideration. Surely, if it be true that we
all of us are silently drifting to that one little gateway through which we have to pass
one by one, and then find ourselves in a region all full of consequences of the
present, he has a good claim to be counted a prince of fools who jumps the life to
come, and, in all his calculations of consequences, which he applies wisely and
prudently to the trifles of the present, forgets to ask himself, And, after all that is
done, what shall I do then?

II. A QUESTION WHICH A GREAT MANY OF US NEVER THINK ABOUT. What will you do
in the end? Why! half of us put away that question with the thought in our minds, if
not expressed, at least most operative, There is not going to be any end; and it is
always going to be just like what it is today. Did you ever think that there is no good
ground for being sure that the sun will rise tomorrow; that it rose for the first time
once; that there will come a day when it will rise for the last time? The uniformity of
nature may be a postulate, but you cannot find any logical basis for it. Or, to come
down from heights of that sort, have you ever laid to heart, that the only
unchangeable thing in this world is change, and the only thing certain, that there is
no continuance of anything; and that, therefore, you and I are bound, if we are wise,
to look that fact in the face, and not to allow ourselves to be befooled by the
difficulty of imagining that things will ever be different from what they are? Another
reason why so many of us shirk this question is the lamentable want of the habit of
living by principle and reflection. They tell us that in nature there is such a thing as
protective mimicry, as it is called--animals having the power--some of them to a
much larger extent than others--of changing their hues in order to match the gravel
of the stream in which they swim or the leaves of the trees on which they feed. It is
like what a great many of us do. Put us into a place where certain forms of frivolity
or vice are common, and we go in for them. Take us away from these, and we change
our hue to something a little whiter. But all through we never know what it is to put
forth a good solid force of resistance, and to say, No! I will not! or, what is
sometimes quite as hard to say, Yes! though--as Luther said in his strong way--
there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the housetops, I will! If
people would live more by reflection and by the power of a resisting will, this
question of my text would come oftener to them. And there is another cause that I
must touch on for one moment, why so many people neglect this question, and that
is because they know they durst not face it. What would you think of a man that
never took stock because he knew he was insolvent, and yet did not want to know it?
And what do you think of yourselves if, knowing that the thought of passing into
that solemn eternity is anything but a cheering one, and that you have to pass into it,
you never turn your head to look at it?

III. A QUESTION ESPECIALLY DIRECTED TO YOU YOUNG FOLK. It is so because with

your buoyancy, with your necessarily limited experience, with the small
accumulation of results that you have already in your possession, and with the
tendencies of your age to live rather by impulse than by reflection, you are specially
tempted to forget the solemn significance of this interrogation. And it is a question
especially for you, because you have special advantages in the matter of putting it.
We older people are all fixed and fossils, as you are very fond of telling us. The iron
has cooled and gone into rigid shapes with us. It is all fluent with you. You may be
pretty nearly what you like. You have not yet acquired habits--that awful thing that
may be our worst foe or our best friend--you have not yet acquired habits that
almost smother the power of reform and change. You have perhaps years before you
in which you may practise the lessons of wisdom, the self-restraint which this
question fairly fronted would bring.

IV. A QUESTION WHICH JESUS CHRIST ALONE ENABLES A MAN TO ANSWER WITH
CALM CONFIDENCE. As I have said, the end is a beginning; the passage from life is the
entrance on a progressive and eternal state of retribution. And Jesus Christ tells us
two other things. He tells us that that state has two parts: that in one there is union
with Him, life, blessedness forever; and that in the other there is darkness,
separation from Him, death, and misery. These are the facts as revealed by the
incarnate Word of God on which answers to this question must be shaped. What
will you do in the end? If I am trusting to Him; if I have brought my poor, weak
nature and sinful soul to Him, and cast them upon His merciful sacrifice and mighty
intercession and life-giving Spirit, then I can say: As for me, I shall behold Thy face
in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness. (A. Maclaren,
D. D.)
What will ye do in the end thereof
This is the message of God to sinful men in all times; and its characteristics are
the same now as they were when it was first uttered.

I. AN UNWELCOME QUESTION. As the bankrupt does not dare investigate his affairs,
and the man who is contracting intemperate habits or tampering with his
employers property does not dare think of the ruin and disgrace to which he is
hastening, so the man whose conscience is not easy, who suspects there is
something wrong, dreads to look into the future, and counts that man his enemy
who ventures to insist on his doing so. The whisper of this question sometimes
comes into the heart of the procrastinator--the worldling--the trifler--the backslider;
and, with one horrified glance forward, he too often shrinks back and tries to forget
all about it.

II. AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION. The moment a man stands in thought in the

midst of the degradation, ruin, and misery he has brought on himself, all his excuses
fly; like the man without the wedding garment, he is speechless. How mad to
persevere in a course that has such an end!

III. An imperative question.

1. Because no forgetfulness of consequences will prevent them coming. A man
may put to sea in a leaky vessel and refuse to consider the remonstrances of
friends--he may even be ignorant of the facts; but that will not prevent his
foundering in the storm.
2. Because it furnishes the direct antidote to the seductions of sin. The burnt
child dreads the fire. The sailor avoids the sunken rock.
3. Because the end may be avoided. Now is the accepted time. (J Ogle.)

Think about the end

Lange translates as follows: What will they do when the end of the song comes?-
-I wonder if you are like some people whom I know: do you ever turn to the end of
the book in order that you may see how it finishes? It is not a good method of
reading, but this is what the prophet wished the Jews to do: he desired them to think
about the end of life. So many people forget all about the end until it actually comes
upon them. The farmer does not do so, for while he sows he thinks about the harvest
that will end his toil; it is good for us all to consider often what the future will be. In
the East there are men who have most wonderful power over serpents. They play
music and the snakes remain quite still and obedient all the time that the song lasts;
but what when the song is done? While people are well and prosperous in doing evil
they do not think much about God, but what will they do when the song is all over?
Then they will find that they have been deceived. There were some wicked men who
once induced a large number of people to come together. These people paid their
money to the men and they came into the hall; but the men ran away with the
money. The people found then that they had been deceived. Some people do worse,
for they deceive themselves; they hope that they are all right with God, they hope
that they shall reach heaven at last, and do no more. Others are deceived by the
opinions or books of those who seek to harm them. All sinners, we know, will one
day find that they have been deceived, unless they repent at once and believe on
Jesus. And then they will also learn that they are unhealed. What a dreadful thing it
will be, if, when we die, we find that our hearts are evil still! When people are in very
great pain the doctors sometimes give to them medicines that make the sick people
sleep. They are not cured because they sleep, but they do not feel the pain quite so
much. So business and other things deaden the feelings, but they do not cure the
soul, for only Jesus can do that. There is a fable that illustrates what I mean. A piper
once played such sweet music that all the children enjoyed it very much. While the
piper played upon his pipe the children were delighted. They followed him from
their homes until they were enticed into a cavern, and thus the song ended. This is
what Satan does: he entices us by his promises, but when the song is done we shall
find out that he has led us away from happiness and into suffering and pain. Think
about the end when you are tempted, and think also about the end when it appears
to be hard to do good. Ask yourselves, what will come after the end? (J. J. Ellis.)

JEREMIAH 6

JER 6:1-9
Arise, and let us go up at noon.

Christian effort
That spirit-stirring call of the text, so needful to arouse the Chaldeans on their
march to the ancient, is as needful for us on our pilgrimage to the new, Jerusalem.
1. In other passages, the early years of childhood and youth are pointed out as
the special time for Gods service. While the heart is warm and pliant. Ere
the hardening influence of a selfish world, having closed it to the Saviours
call, has swept and garnished it for tenantry of evil.
2. Arise, and let us go up at noon. It is midday with you, to whom the text is
speaking. It is the period for active endeavour. Now the calls of the world are
dinned most loudly into your ears. In the earlier hours, and at the close of
your passing day, you were and will be alike incapable of prolonged toil. Now
the requirement is made of you, and to what behests does it bid you attend?
Make the most of your time. Are you poor? Strive for independence. Are you
rich? Strive for place and power. Are you intellectual? Seek a sphere for
display, a stage for self-glorification. Thus speaks the world, and were some
of its directions pursued in moderation, pursued subordinate to higher and
nobler motive, there might be wisdom in our chastened regards. But, alas!
how many go to extreme in these observances, and become the slaves of time
and sense. Apply those misdirected energies to a nobler cause. The rewards
of time are not worth such care as this. In themselves, they are of scarce
more value than the withered leaves which crowned the victor in the ancient
games. Arise, and go up at noon to seek the incorruptible crown. Ye are
soldiers engaged in warfare. The sword is drawn. The banner is spread. Its
emblem is the Cross. Your weapons are not carnal. The din of military music
 shall not spur you to the dangerous assault; but strains of sweetest melody
shall speak to you of peace, peace on earth, goodwill to men; peace which the
world can neither give nor take away.
3. But have you passed that period of activity, and in your retrospect of its busy
hours do you feel how prodigally your energies have been wasted? Have
ungodly habits become so confirmed, that now at your journeys end, being
dead to the enticements of the present, you are not alive to the requirements
of the future? Shall an appeal, which might impress a heart yet warm and
flexible, fall coldly on the worn and weary conscience of the aged? The
gracious and long-suffering Master has still this call to summon you, Arise,
and let us go by night. Ye have heard and disregarded the call throughout
the day, and therefore may not be as those who, having never been hired
earlier, received every man a penny, but whatsoever is right, that shall ye
receive. Go by prayer and penitence, by sought and found spiritual guidance,
or soon the light of life will be extinguished in outer darkness.
4. But ye have been watchful and faithful. Ye arose, and went up at noon. It is
not woeful to you that the day goeth away. It is no cause of regret that the
shadows of evening are stretched out. Behold! I come quickly, the Saviour
says to you; and joyfully ready is your reply, Even so, come, Lord Jesus. All
things are yours: love and reverence from all without, peace unspeakable
from all within. Ye shall arise and go. The shadows stretched before you shall
be dispelled forever, and the brightness of that noon which shall fade no
more shall rest upon you. (F. Jackson.)

JER 6:4
Woe unto us! for the day goeth away.

Woe unto us!

The Babylonians are represented by the prophet as coming to plunder the Holy
City, like flocks being led to their feeding ground. They hurry to the work of
destruction, yet they are not speedy enough, for work takes time, and time flees fast
away. Prepare ye war against her: arise, and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! for
the day goeth away, etc. Arise, and let us go by night, and let us destroy her
palaces. We have no city to destroy, and it is morning; yet, standing, as we do,
almost on the threshold of another year, these words are worthy of consideration.
The day of opportunity that tills year contained is going away, the shadows of the
evening are stretched out. And with the departure of the day and the deepening of
the shadows of the night, some among the bravest hearts may well exclaim, Woe
unto us! For all who are Christs servants, as they grow in grace, more clearly come
to see the great issues of life, the vast importance of the days and months and years
which God has given them to spend to His glory. With this clearer sight comes the
consciousness of the awful waste of time for which men are answerable, a waste
which can never be repaired. True, that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all
sin; but only if there he true repentance. As you really understand the cleansing and
accept it, so you will grow most earnest in guarding the gift of time.
1. Save time in your work. Surely it is woe unto us that we have been so half-
 hearted often in our time of work; so ready to lay down the task that is
difficult, or so ready to do it lazily and badly. The great characters in history
are mostly the indefatigable, who, while they worked, worked hard.
2. Save time in your leisure. Do not spend it all in amusement, which excites, but
does not profit. If you have your evenings free, use some to the glory of God,
by helping children, by showing acts of kindness, by improving your own
knowledge.
3. Again, save time on Sundays. How can mens religion be real and true if they
spend Sunday mornings in bed? (W. R. Hutton, M. A.)

Opportunities for self-rescue

I. Heaven granted these men of Judah an opportunity FOR ESCAPING A GREAT EVIL;
so it has to all unconverted men. The evil to which the Jews were exposed was very
great: it was captivity, slavery, utter destruction of the country. But this was only a
shadow of the moral dangers to which every unconverted man is exposed. He is in
danger of losing his soul. To lose a soul is to lose all true liberty, pure sympathies,
harmonious affections, real friendships, self-approving conscience, true hopes, and
means of improvement. And when these are gone, the worth of existence is gone, for
it becomes an intolerable curse.

II. The opportunity which these men of Judah had for escaping their danger was
NOW DRAWING TO A CLOSE; so is the opportunity of all unconverted men. The whole
day of life scarcely opens before it begins to close.
1. This opportunity is constantly departing to return no more.
2. This opportunity is constantly departing though the work be not done.

III. The closing of the opportunity of these men of Judah was FRAUGHT WITH
TERRIBLE CALAMITY; so it will be with all unconverted men. Woo unto us, exclaims
the doomed Jew in bitter anguish. Woe unto us; we have not only lost our country
and become the slaves of a heathen despot, bug we have shamefully neglected the
merciful opportunities with which providence has favoured us. These words remind
us of the language of Christ (Luk 19:41-44). Conclusion--Now is the accepted time.
Today is the day of salvation. (Homilist.)

The old and the new year

The old year is dying, the new year is about to commence. And whether the past
has been wasted, or redeemed and used for God; whether the work of the past has
been done or left undone, still there is a work for all of us. Each day and each year
brings its own proper duties, and our conscience needs to be awakened and stirred
to the right performance of them. The day goeth away. And you feel that there is
something solemn about this passing from one year to another.
1. Some of you are anxious about your spiritual condition. Take the past year as
a whole, and perhaps you may be able to hope that some progress has been
made. But it has not been all progress. The picture has its dark side. You
have had your temptations, you have had your troubles and annoyances; and
you have been forced to see how weak your strength is, how poor your best
 resolutions, how much you have fallen short of what you had intended a year
ago. The day goeth away. But if the past has not been what you wished, must
you therefore give up in despair? Nay, you may be thankful if you have
advanced at all. You could have made no way whatever but for the grace of
God. Believe that He who has been with you hitherto will enable you to live
more and more to your Masters glory.
2. Again, the close of the year may suggest its thoughts to those who, as our
fellow labourers in the schools, or among the sick and destitute, are trying to
do the Lords work, and to be a blessing to their neighbours in their
generation. You look back over the year that is gone, and there are abundant
reasons for regret. Opportunities for good have been lost which never will
come back again. Some one was lying ill, and you knew of the illness, but you
delayed your visit. You would go tomorrow: you had other things to do today.
And tomorrow you went, but it was too late. Death had come before you. Or
again, you might have taken a bolder and firmer course, had your zeal for
God been stronger. You saw some evil done, and you did not protest against
it. You heard ill-natured words, and you did not try to check them. You might
have spoken for God, and you cowardly held your peace. Yet all has not been
failure. Feel as painfully as we may our weakness and want of faith, still we
may see and thankfully acknowledge the evident signs of Gods presence with
His people here. (Canon Nevill.)

A New Years sermon

I. THE FACT HERE INDICATED. The day glides imperceptibly away, from morning to
noon, from noon to eve. Does not this strikingly typify our life in this world? Do not
our years glide on like the minutes and hours of the natural day? And, ere ever we
are aware, do we not perceive that the shadows are lengthening? Are we not
reminded of the flight of time by many things which we see around us? The old men,
with whose slow step we were familiar, are disappearing from the scene; those
whom we knew in their prime now bear the marks of age. But does not this suggest
to us one particular in which the analogy between the natural day and our human
life signally fails? We know the very hour, we can ascertain the very minute, when
the sun will set. But how different is it with the life of man? Who can tell when, in
any individual case, that life shall end? Who but He who knows the end from the
beginning, and who is the God of our lives and the length of our days? But whether
the period of our sojourn upon earth be brief or protracted, it is quickly passing
away. Whether we are to be cut down when the shadows have stretched out far, or
while they are yet comparatively short, in the case of every one of us they are
lengthening; and in the case of not a few, it approaches eventide, and their sun
declines to its setting. But surely there arises here another question. When the day
declines and nightfall comes, what then? After death the judgment. Death does not
reduce us to nothingness, but detaches us from time to land us in eternity. It places
us before the tribunal of the Most High to receive the sentence which is to fix
unchangingly our final doom. We must all stand before the judgment seat of
Christ.

II. What effect the consideration of this fact should have upon us.
 1. It should have this effect, to impress us with the solemn and abiding
conviction that it is a fact. We are ever prone to take it for granted that
though the end of life is no doubt approaching, it is still distant from us; that
though the duration of life is very uncertain to men generally, and to our
friends and neighbours around us, we are much less likely to be suddenly
removed, and may reassuredly count upon a protracted span being afforded
to us is a strange and subtle delusion of the human heart, and sedulously
fostered by the enemy of souls, the father of lies. How needful to learn and
lay to heart the lesson here taught; how needful to be thoroughly persuaded
that it is a solemn fact that our life is a vapour which appears for a little time
and then vanishes away; that not with respect to our fellow men merely, but
with respect to ourselves also, the days of earth are drawing to a close, and
that to any one of us the end may come very soon and very suddenly!
2. But, further, it is of the last importance that we not only really believe this
fact, but that we give practical effect to the belief. What are your resolutions
for the future? Will you be stirred up to greater diligence and devotedness
ere your sun go down! And if you, if any of you, are still far from God, living
in carelessness and unbelief, will you not take warning by the lengthening
shadows to make your peace with God ere it be too late? (P. Hope, B. D.)

Difficulties of old age

I. THE APPOINTED PERIOD OF GRACE IS COMING RAPIDLY TO A CONCLUSION. The day

goeth away. It has been enjoyed in the fulness of its privileges. It has been for some,
far protracted. But while unimproved, it has tended only to increase the guilt and
danger of the soul. For fifty years the Redeemer has called upon some now aged
sinner to turn to Him and live. How difficult is it to arouse him to a consciousness,
or belief, of the privileges which are yet remaining, and of the duty which yet rests
upon him! The recollection of wasted opportunities drives him to despair.

II. THE SHORT PERIOD OF GRACE NOW REMAINING. He set out early in the morning
to go astray from God. Through the whole day, he has been pressing forward in his
course, with unabating rapidity. And now, when the shadows of the evening are
stretched out, and exhausted nature is asking for repose; alas, is this an hour in
which to commence the journey of a day? Death now stands at the door. The line
which separates him from eternity, has dwindled to a hair. And he is tempted to
yield to total despair of escaping at all from the ruin which is so close upon him. The
difficulty which his own heart presents as thus arising from his shortened remaining
period of probation, Satan employs as a temptation to him, to be quiet and careless
under his conscious load of sin.

III. THE INCREASED HARDNESS OF HIS OWN HEART. When young, conviction of sin
impressed his mind. His eyes could weep under the preaching of the Gospel. He
then often felt strongly excited towards a life of holiness and piety. But now he has
no such feelings. The rain which descends to refresh others, seems rather to hasten
his decay. The summer and the harvest have passed without advantage, and every
succeeding day of autumn seems only to dry, and harden, and seal up the earth
against the arrival of a frost-bound and cheerless winter.
 IV. THE PRIDE OF CHARACTER WHICH IS ALWAYS AN ATTENDANT UPON ADVANCED
PERIODS OF LIFE. The heart may be often moved, the conscience awakened, and the
emotions aroused, in the bosom of an aged transgressor, and a strong desire be felt,
to lay down his burden, and find peace in believing in Jesus. But an assumed dignity
and coolness of manner are drawn over a broken, bleeding spirit, because an
acknowledgment of these awakened feelings will be so humiliating to the age and
station of the individual concerned. But there remains no other course of safety. To
this humbling ground, sinful man must be brought, or he will assuredly perish. (S.
H. Tyng, D. D.)

Opportunities lost
The opportunity for success was lost; the day of action had been misspent, and the
result was, captivity and slavery. The day of action was going away; the shadows of
the evening which was to cover them with its darkness and sorrow, were already
stretched out. Just so it is with multitudes now in reference to the work of their
salvation. The Gospel of the Son of God has been preached in their ears, until it has
become stale and powerless. They listen to it, but take no heed to its requirements.
1. Look at the opportunities which the Church affords to all attendants on her
service, not only of learning their duty, but also of practising it to the glory of
God.
2. Then, again, look at the opportunities for repentance and faith which God has
given you in the daily providence of life. You have been rich, perhaps, and He
has made you poor--Why? That He may give you spiritual riches, which
moth and rust can not corrupt. You have been poor and He has made you
rich--Why? That you might remember the Lord thy God, for it is He that
giveth thee power to get wealth. You have been well, and He has laid you on
a bed of sickness--Why? That you might consider your latter end. You have
been sick and He has made you well--Why? That you should love your Divine
Healer, and seek for your spiritual healing. Your life is full of the echoes of
Gods voice speaking to you in His daily providence, as well as in the inspired
Word and through the ministry of His Church. Yet hour after hour has glided
away, and you have hesitated, procrastinated, put off to a more convenient
season. Shall lifes sun go wholly down, shall the night of death wrap you in
its starless mantle, without one honest effort on your part to secure your
souls salvation? (Bp. Stevens)

An inch of time
Millions of money for an inch of time, cried Elizabeth--the gifted but ambitious
Queen of England, upon her dying bed. Unhappy woman! reclining upon a couch--
with ten thousand dresses in her wardrobe--a kingdom on which the sun never sets,
at her feet--all now are valueless, and she shrieks in anguish, and she shrieks in vain,
for a single inch of time. She had enjoyed threescore and ten years. Like too many
among us, she had devoted them to wealth, to pleasure, to pride, and ambition, so
that her whole preparation for eternity was crowded into a few moments! and hence
she, who had wasted more than half a century, would barter millions for an inch of
time.
The shadows of the evening are stretched out.
The setting sun
There is something at once grand and solemn in a setting sun. It is the sinking to
rest of the great king of day; the withdrawing from the busy world the light that has
called out its activity, and the covering up with the veil of darkness the scenes that
glistened with the radiance of noon. There is, however, in the setting of the sun of
life, that which is equally grand, still more solemn, and surpassingly sublime.
1. The sun, when it sets, has run a whole days circuit; his pathway has
apparently traversed an entire are of the heavens, and slowly, patiently, but
surely, it has done its allotted work. And so the aged Christian, when he dies,
is described as having run his race, as having finished his course. He has
toiled a whole day of life, and has come to his grave in a good old age,
having finished the work which was given him to do; and though all his
labours have been imperfectly done, though he himself feels more deeply
than he can express his unprofitableness before God, yet he looks for
acceptance, not to any merit of his own, but only for Christ Jesus sake, who
of God and by faith is made unto him wisdom, and righteousness, and
sanctification, and redemption. We can contemplate with satisfaction, then,
the aged disciple, having borne the burden and heat of the day, patiently
waiting for the stretching out of the evening shadows and the hour of his own
sunset.
2. Another point to be considered is, the fact that the setting of the sun is not
always like the day which it closes. The morning may have been bright, and
the evening hour dark with tempests; or the rising may have been obscured
by clouds and mists, which gradually faded away and left a clear sky at
sunset. So the sunset hour of Christian life does not always correspond to his
previous day. We have seen the last hours of the believer shrouded in
impenetrable gloom, and we have seen them gilded with hope and radiant
with the forecast glories of the upper world. The way in which a Christian
dies is not always an index of his spiritual condition. He is to be judged by
his life, not by his death. Self-denial, the mortification of our passions, the
resisting of earthly temptations, the putting into active exercise, and amidst
opposing difficulties, the whole class of Christian affections which flow out
from the simple principle of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and the
manifestation of that life of faith, of prayer, of holiness, of zeal, which
necessarily results from the constraining love of Christ in the heart all these
qualities and tests of character scarcely find a place on a dying bed, so that
persons thus situated have few opportunities to develop the true evidences of
the work of grace. The varieties of Christian experience are literally
innumerable; but whatever their nature, we must not judge of the validity of
ones hope, or the genuineness of ones conversion, by his dying hour. Yet,
when that dying hour accords with a long life of piety, or a true profession
maintained in health and strength; when it is but a concentrating within
itself of the glories which have been more or less visible in the whole track of
his experience, then is it eloquent in its revelations of the riches, and peace,
and joy which God generally gives to those who are faithful unto death: and
though we cannot order when or how our lives shall close upon earth, yet it
should be our aim so to live as to secure, if God pleases, a serene, if not a
triumphant exit, that our setting sun may, like the sun in the firmament,
 grow larger and more resplendent as it declines, until passing away it shall
leave behind a trail of glory spread all over the place of our departure.
3. Another interesting thought connected with this subject is, that the sun is not
lost or extinguished when it sets. This may seem a very trite remark
concerning the natural sun, but it is not so trite when we speak of the soul set
in death. For are we not apt to grieve over the going down of our friends to
the grave, as if they were to be forever hidden in its dark chamber--as if the
bright spark of their immortality had been suddenly quenched?
4. And this leads us to make one final observation, namely, that when we see the
sun set, we know that it will rise again; and so when we see the body of our
friends borne to the voiceless dwelling of the tomb, we know that they also
shall rise again. (Bp. Stevens.)

JER 6:8
Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest My soul depart from thee.

The way to prevent the ruin of a sinful people

I. The infinite goodness and patience of God towards a sinful people and His
great unwillingness to bring ruin and destruction upon them. How loath is He that
things should come to this extremity?

II. THE ONLY PROPER AND EFFECTUAL MEANS TO PREVENT THE MISERY AND RUIN OF
A SINFUL PEOPLE. If they will be instructed, and take warning by the threatenings of
God, and will become wiser and better, then His soul will not depart from them, He
will not bring upon them the desolation which He hath threatened.

III. The miserable case and condition of a people, when God takes off His
affection from them and gives over all further care and concernment for them. Woe
unto them, when His soul departs from them! For when God once leaves them, then
all sorts of evil and calamities will break in upon them. (Archbishop Tillotson.)

A warning to the nation

I. The caution.
1. Whereby are we to be instructed? By the state of affairs, and by the reason of
things, or the right of cases.
(1) God is a being of all perfection, of infinitely vast comprehension and
understanding and power: and therefore He is able to attain those
effects, and to teach men by all things that fall under His government.
(2) Things managed by Divine wisdom are intensely expressive of notions,
because they do partake of the excellency and sufficiency of their cause.
(3) God doth nothing in vain, nor to fewer or lesser purposes than the things
are capable to promote, or be subservient unto.
 (4) Because the affairs of mankind are the choice piece of the administration
of providence: And God doth in a special manner charge Himself with
teaching the mind of man knowledge.
2. Wherein are we to be instructed?
(1) In matters of Gods offence. For we are highly concerned in Gods favour
or displeasure.
(2) In instances of our own duty: if we have departed from it, to return to it;
if we have done the contrary, to revoke it with self-condemnation and
humble deprecation.
3. What is it to be instructed?
(1) To search and examine.
(2) To weigh and consider.
(3) To understand and discern.
(4) To do and perform.

II. the enforcement.

1. An argument of love and goodwill, lest My soul depart from thee.
2. An argument from fear, lest I make thee desolate, A double argument is as a
double testimony, by which every word is established (2Co 13:1).
3. This double argument shows us two things.
(1) The stupidity and senselessness of those, who are made to the perfection
of reason and understanding, and yet act contrary to it.
(2) The impiety and unrighteousness of sinners, who are a real offence to
God, cause His displeasure, and bring upon persons and places, ruin and
destruction. Sin is a variation from the law and rule of Gods creation: it
is contrary to the order of reason: and when I say this, I say as bad as can
be spoken. In sin there is open and manifest neglect of God, to whom all
reverence and regard is most due. By sin there is a disturbance in Gods
family: it is an interruption of that intercourse and communication there
ought to be amongst creatures; for every sinner destroys much good. By
the practice of iniquity we mar our spirits, spoil our tempers, and acquire
unnatural principles and dispositions. (B. Whichcote, D. D.)

JER 6:10
They have no delight in it.

The impediments to the right celebration of religious ordinances

You will readily admit, that the feeling of delight accompanying the performance
of anything is, for the most part, a sign and measure of its profitable
accomplishment; that that is usually well done which is done cheerfully and with the
heart; and that nothing, on the contrary, is more commonly deteriorated in the
performance of it, than what is entered on with the apprehension of its being a piece
of drudgery, and gone through as a mere task. How true does this remark hold in the
department of religion! If we approach the exercises of religion, whether reading or
hearing the Word, or the sacraments, or prayer, as formalists come to them--if we
take no lively interest in them--if we are actuated merely by the force of custom, the
power of example and other motives of expediency, how can they ever profit us? Are
we not changing the sources of heavens blessings into empty and broken cisterns?

I. In attending to the circumstances that operate to take away from us delight in

Christian ordinances, we observe, that an unfavourable change in the frame of mind,
as persons are engaged In religious exorcises, often occurs, at least at times OCCURS,
UNAVOIDABLY, however our desires and endeavours may be set against it. At one
time we will be attending with deep earnestness, at another time listening with cold
indifference. There is now a great acuteness in receiving instruction, at another time
almost a deadness that blunts the edge of the best directed observations. Now, all
such changes as these are still, in so far as they are traceable to constitutional
temperament, to be ranked among the class of what the Bible calls our infirmities,
and when they are met by meditation on the Word of God, and by prayer, in order
that we may be cured, they are not charged as criminalities against us. At the same
time, take good heed lest you ascribe to those things over which you think you have
no control, what all the while springs from sinful negligence.

II. First, the state of mind I have described, shows THAT THERE HAS NOT BEEN
WITH US DUE CONSIDERATION BEFORE WE HAVE COME TO THE PUBLIC ORDINANCES OF
RELIGION. We do not consider that the services of the sanctuary relate to God in our
adoring, or praising, or supplicating Him whom the universe celebrates as its Maker,
whom angels, principalities and powers reverently worship--we do not consider that
the services of the sanctuary are the appointed means through which the soul is
called to discourse with its own original, with Him who is the source of bliss. We do
not consider that the services of the sanctuary present the sublimest objects for the
exercise of the understanding, the most splendid for attracting the imagination, the
most engaging for affecting the heart. Accordingly we do not in our petitions
implore that fixedness of heart which is required in the true and spiritual
worshipper; we do not enter the sanctuary cherishing the serious thought that we
come hither to seek the blessings which the mercy of the Saviour gives to every one
who feels his need of them, and asks them. On the contrary, we come to the
sanctuary altogether unconcerned; we sit down without offering in our minds one
preparatory petition; we possess a frame of mind that is akin to levity; we are
chargeable at least with indifference, which can only be excusable in our waiting on
an empty ceremonial. Even allowing that the individual still possesses some desire
to receive the benefits of religious ordinances in the sanctuary, they are rendered
quite impracticable to him, except where the devotional exercises of every day are
preparatory to those of the Sabbath. The want of serious consideration before we
come to engage in religious ordinances, leads directly to want of due reflection when
engaged in the performance of them; for such trains of thought as we have been
cherishing, are not easily broken down, and, in fact, we cannot authoritatively
dismiss them--they have fastened themselves by innumerable links to the mind, and
though many of these links may from time to time be detached by us, still numbers
are left which are quite sufficient to rivet the objects of our affectionate concern to
our memories and our hearts. Such objects, through long usage, become great
favourites with the mind, and hence, it not only attends to them in the season of
disengagement from other things, but strives to get back to them, even when
occupied in the ordinances of religion. Then when we think how base and degraded
our natural dispositions are, surely it is a most unreasonable expectation that we are
prepared for the spiritual exercises of the Sabbath, if we have had no preparatory
devotional exercises for such a day.

III. MOST SERIOUS AND GRIEVOUS IS THE EVIL OF WHICH I AM NOW SPEAKING.
Whatever degree of it adheres to us its tendency is to destroy utterly the capacity of
religious feeling, and to increase that searedness of conscience which is the
forerunner of open profligacy. Let us then be roused to consideration. Let us come
to religious ordinances with serious thoughts on their nature, their reasonableness,
their awful sanctions, and their inestimable utility; and, having especially in view the
example of the serious worshipper who prays for the spirit of prayer, and who is a
suppliant in private for the grace of supplication which is to be employed by him in
public, let us endeavour when we join in religious ordinances to preserve
seriousness of mind. Let us for this purpose devoutly consider the object we have in
view, whether engaged in the Word, in sacrament, or in prayer. Let us not give a
single moments encouragement to thoughts upon other subjects. Let us withstand
the inroads of such thoughts--let us cast them out as of Satan, when they enter, and
let us try to prevent them entering at all. Let there be prayer, consideration and
serious concern; and thus entering into the great truths, into the sweetness of
religion, there will be no longer felt the weariness with which we set out. The
satisfaction and delight, so conducive to our improvement, will then take the place
of the fatigue and irksomeness of the mere bodily worshipper. The Sabbath will be
the most acceptable of all refreshments, the Psalms of the sanctuary will be the
sentiments of gratitude and joy, the prayers offered will be as the flame which first
ascended in holy ardour to its origin, and the Word will be the principal vehicle of
calling into action every good resolution. Religion will then become that very
privilege it is intended to be; the elements, set upon the table, will appear as the
memorials of all that is dear and precious to our souls; the sentiments of holy love
will be awakened in commemorating the blessed Friend who gave His soul for us
sinners; and thus the sanctuary and its services will become the pledge to us of the
noblest benefits, the scene of the most glorious hopes, and an incitement to devoted
obedience. (W. Muir, D. D.)

The Gospel unappreciated

Alphonse Kerr heard a gardener ask his masters permission to sleep for the future
in the stable. For, said he, there is no possibility of sleeping in the chamber
behind the greenhouse, sir; there are nightingales there which do nothing but guggle
and keep up a noise all the night. The sweetest sounds are but an annoyance to
those who have no musical ear; doubtless the music of heaven would have no charm
to carnal minds, certainly the joyful sound of the Gospel is unappreciated so long as
mens ears remain uncircumcised.

JER 6:14
They have healed also the hurt . . . slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is
no peace.

Healing our wounds slightly

I. What need we all have of healing.

1. Asserted in Scripture.
2. Confirmed by experience.

II. Who they are that heal their wounds slightly.

1. They who rely on the uncovenanted mercy of God, fatally deceive their souls
by expecting mercy contrary to Gospel.
2. They who take refuge in a round of duties; no attainments can stand in place
of Christ.
3. They who rest in a faith that is unproductive of good works; but the faith that
apprehends Christ will work by love, purify the heart, overcome the
world.

III. How we may have them healed effectually.

1. The Lord Jesus has provided a remedy for sin (Isa 53:5).
2. That remedy applied by faith shall be effectual for all who trust in it.
Address--
1. Those who feel not their need of healing.
2. Those who, after having derived some benefits from Christ, have relapsed into
sin.
3. Those who are enjoying health in their souls. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

False teachers
How mischievous is that false kindness which is afraid of telling you honestly the
state of the case, if it happen to be dangerous or desperate! Now, in regard of their
eternal concerns, men have a willingness to be deceived, though in regard of their
temporal concerns, they are keenly alive to attempts at imposition, and eager to
resent them. They commonly prefer the moral physician who will make light of their
vices, and not startle them by faithfully exposing their danger, though, were they
similarly beguiled by one whom they consulted on a bodily malady, they would
denounce him as guilty of the most hateful perfidy. And it may be for your profit, if
we look into some of the more ordinary cases. First, we would remind you that, if
there be truth in the statements of Scripture, there is a distinction the very strongest
between the people of the world and the people of God. Yet, here is the respect in
which, perhaps, the danger is the greatest of the moral hurt being only slightly
healed, and peace prophesied when there is no peace. The worldly are well pleased
to have the differences between themselves and the religious made as few and
unimportant as possible, inasmuch as they are thus soothed into a persuasion that
after all they are in no great danger of the wrath of the Almighty. On the other hand,
those who profess a concern for the soul are often still so much inclined to the
pursuits and the pleasures of earth, that they have a ready ear for any doctrine
which seems to offer them the joys of the next life, without requiring continued self-
denial in this life. Thus it is an unpopular thing, opposed to the inclinations of the
majority of hearers, to insist upon the breadth of separation between the worldly
and the religious, to represent, without qualification or disguise, that the attempting
to serve two masters is the certain serving of only one, and that the master whose
wages is death. But if we would be faithful in the ministry, this is what we must do.
To do otherwise, would be to play with your souls--to lead you into delusion, which,
if continued, must leave you shipwrecked for eternity. Take another case, the case of
those in whom has been produced a conviction of sin, whose consciences after a long
slumber have been aroused to do their office and have done it with great energy. It is
no uncommon thing for conviction of sin not to be followed by conversion.
Hundreds who have been stirred for a time to a sense of guilt and danger, in place of
advancing to genuine penitence have lapsed back into former indifference. Ah, this
is amongst the most alarming of moral phenomena. The signs and earnest, as we
thought of life, give a melancholy and mysterious interest to death. Let the ministers
of religion take heed that they be not accessory to so disappointing an occurrence,
and they easily may be. The spiritual physician may be too hasty in applying to the
wounded conscience the balm of the Gospel; and thus he may arrest that process of
godly contrition which seemed so hopefully begun. It is no time to speak of free
forgiveness till the man exclaims in the agony of alarm and almost of despair, What
must I do to be saved? Then display the Cross. Then expatiate on the glorious truth,
that the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost. Then point to
the unsearchable riches of Christ, and meet every doubt, oppose every objection,
and combat every fear by exhibiting the mighty fact of an atonement for sin. But the
case suggested by our text is that of a too hasty appropriation of the consolations of
Christianity, and this case we cannot doubt is of frequent occurrence. Not, indeed,
that whenever conviction of sin is not followed by conversion, the cause is to be
found in the premature use of the mercies of the Gospel. We know too well that in
many instances the conscience which had been mysteriously aroused is as
mysteriously quieted; so that, without a solitary reason, men who had manifested
anxiety as to their souls, and apparently been earnest in seeking salvation, are soon
again found amongst the careless and indifferent, as busy as ever with chasing
shadows, as pleased as ever with things that perish in the using. For a moment they
have seemed conscious of their immortality and have risen to the dignity of
deathless beings, and then the pulse has ceased to beat, and they have again been
creatures of a day in place of heirs of eternity. Still, if there be many instances in
which we may not fairly ascribe to a too hasty appropriation of the mercies of the
Gospel, the failure of what seemed hopefully commenced, we may justly say that
such an exhibition is likely to produce so disappointing a result, and that the
probability is that it frequently does. We have further to remark, that the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity are strongly offensive to the great body of men, and that on
this account chiefly it is that there is so much reluctance to the bringing them
forward, and so much readiness to explain them away. You cannot fail to be aware
that the offence of the Cross has not ceased, you must be sufficiently aware that
these are not days when men are called to join the noble army of martyrs, yet there
is an opposition to the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel, an opposition which gives as
much cause now as there was in earlier days for the Saviour to exclaim, Blessed is
he whosoever shall not be offended in Me. So that here is a precise case in which
the known feelings of the generality of men place the teacher under a temptation to
keep back truth, or of stating it so equivocally that its full force shall not be felt, He
cannot be ignorant that if he set forth without reserve, or disguise the corruption
and helplessness of man, insist on the perfect gratuitousness of salvation, and refer
to Gods mercy and distinguishing grace as first exciting the desire for deliverance,
and then enabling us to lay hold upon the provided succours, he will have to
encounter the antipathies of perhaps a majority of his hearers; and he is
consequently and naturally moved to the concealing much, and the softening down
more; and if he yield to the temptation, then we have that mixed and diluted
theology which does not, indeed, exclude Christ, but assigns much to man, which
without denying the meritorious obedience and sufferings of the Mediator soothes
our pride with an assurance that by our good works we contribute something
towards the attainment of everlasting happiness. By encouraging the opinion that
men are not very far gone from original righteousness, that notwithstanding the fall,
they retain a moral power of doing what shall be acceptable to God, and that their
salvation is to result from the combination of their own efforts and the merits of
Christ, we maintain that by encouraging such opinions as these, the teacher flatters
his hearers with the most pernicious of all flattery, hiding from them their actual
condition, and instructing them, how to miss, at the same time that they think they
are securing deliverance. Probably enough has been advanced to certify you not only
of the possible occurrence but of the grievous peril which must lie in the substituting
in religion what is superficial for what ought to be radical. It is on this that we are
most anxious to fix your attention. We want to have you satisfied that there can be
no falser kindness than that which should hide from men their real condition, and
that it is the very extreme of danger when those who are tottering believe themselves
secure. It needs no small courage--we ought rather to say, it needs no small grace--
to be willing to know the worst; not to be afraid of finding out how bad we are, how
corrupt, how capable of the worst actions, if left to ourselves. This is a great point
gained in spiritual things, it is a great point gained to be able to pray with David,
Search me, O God, and try me, and see if there be any wicked way in me. We call it
a great point gained to be willing to know the worst; for so long as we stop short of
this, we shall always be trying half measures, healing the hurt slightly, and therefore
never reaching the root of the disease. We counsel you then to be honest with
yourselves, honest in observing the symptoms of spiritual sickness, honest in
applying the remedies prescribed by the Bible. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

False peace

I. A FALSE PEACE, WHAT IS IT? We do not mean, in describing a false peace, to

depict the state of those who are utterly indifferent to religious claims and
obligations. We are speaking of another class, in whose minds there has been at
some time an anxiety concerning their state in the sight of God. They have felt that
sin is within them, that sin is working out terrible results, and, unless some remedy
be applied, must work their ultimate ruin. This anxiety has increased upon them;
and at length they have found the anxiety soothed; its pressure has been alleviated,
and at length it has departed. But it has been soothed by unsuitable means. To be in
a state of false peace is to be in a state of composure--not of indifference, but of
composure and satisfaction, in a belief that all is well when all is not well. And this
may arise from various causes.
1. It may be that some are lulled into this false peace from the fact of never
having had clear and scriptural notions of the true nature of sin. They have
had their attention perhaps drawn rather more to sins and to sinning than to
 sin; and in their cases it may have happened that the course of sinning has
not been a very atrocious course--that the habitude has never manifested
itself in any very formidable way. Now, so long as our attention is fixed upon
sins, and so long as our minds are drawing distinctions between the greater
and the lesser amount of actual transgressions against God, we overlook the
scriptural view of sin, as that fatal principle in the nature of man which taints
every faculty, and which renders it utterly impossible that man should live in
the light of Gods countenance.
2. But suppose men do entertain scriptural views of sin, as a deadly principle
within them, still they may have very inadequate views of the justice of God
and of His perfect holiness. Many minds are very apt to measure God, as it
were, by a human standard, as if Gods mode of procedure would be
governed on the same principles on which mans mode of procedure is
usually governed; and the consequence is, that they invest God with a kind of
mercy which is altogether unscriptural. If the sinner views God merely as a
God of goodness and tenderness and mercy, and thinks His justice is not to
have its full and unrestricted exercise, then we ask, what are we to do with
those passages of Gods Word which exhibit all His attributes in their just
proportions, and their relations one to another?
3. False peace may also be produced by having obscure notions of the Gospel. If
we could sum up the whole Gospel message, the whole of the rich provision
of Gods mercy and justice in Christ Jesus, in one sentence, we should say, it
is a remedy for sin; but multitudes hear the Gospel, in all its simplicity and
fulness, and yet come to the conclusion that the Gospel system only calls us
into a greater familiarity of relation to God, that it sets before us a more
spiritual walk than the people who lived under the Jaw were accustomed to,
that it calls upon us for a higher moral bearing, and that if we do in the main
adhere to that, as if it were a second form of law exhibited to us, then all shall
be well; but they overlook the fact that there is in the Gospel a remedy for
sin--that it contains a provision for the healing, the true healing of the wound
which sin has made.
4. This false peace may arise, moreover, out of an imperfect reception of the true
Gospel. The doctrines may be received; the matters of fact upon which the
doctrines are based may be received; the economy of the Gospel may be
received, as far as the intellect goes; but there may be no surrender of the
soul to the Gospel--there may be no yielding up of all the perversity of the
natural man to the sweet and precious operations of the Spirit of God,
seeking to establish His truth in the heart as a remedy for sin. Now we
believe, that wherever these four, or any one of these four causes exist, the
result is a false peace. And let it be borne in mind, that most men are very
much disposed to be satisfied with a false peace. When the testimony of
conscience has been stirring, when the burden of sin has been felt to be a
heavy burden, there is a disposition to embrace the first offer of peace that
presents itself. And why is it so? Because the burden is heavy to be borne,
and the anxiety it occasions is a distressing anxiety, which is to be got rid of
in any way. Anything, therefore, that can silence conscience, or that can
lessen the severity of its testimony, will be resorted to, and will be regarded
as peace.
 II. THE REAL NATURE OF THAT ONLY PEACE WHICH CAN BE RELIED UPON. Let it be
remembered, that true peace has relation both to God and to man; that is, it must be
a peace on both sides--on the side of a just and holy God, and on the side of man
with his carnal mind which is enmity against God. There must be peace on both
sides; and the peace on Gods side must be a peace that shall be in the highest degree
honourable to Himself; and in order to be strictly honourable to Him, it must be a
peace that shall have magnified His justice, as well as given Him a just occasion for
the exercise of mercy. It is plain, therefore, that man himself cannot make and
establish such a peace, either by sacrifice or by service. Then the truth is, that God
has taken the whole matter into His own hands. He regards man as altogether
helpless in this respect; and God undertakes for the establishing a peace that shall
be in the highest degree honourable to Himself, and in the utmost degree suitable to
man. In graciously revealing Himself, then, in Christ, God has come forth from the
light and glory in which He has dwelt from all eternity, and in the person of Jesus,
the Eternal Word, has manifested Himself in an attitude of peace--is at peace. God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses
unto them. In that declaration we see the attitude of peace. God comes not forth,
in the Gospel of His dear Son, as an avenger, but He comes honourably forth as a
peacemaker. He comes forth, manifesting the strength and severity of His justice,
and magnifying the perfection of His justice. He spared not His own Son.

III. THE DANGER OF A FALSE PEACE. There is present danger, and there is future
danger. So long as a false peace is soothing our anxieties in regard to our state as
sinners before God, this helps to deaden conscience; it does not always satisfy, but it
subdues the activity of conscience, and opens a way for the subtle workings of Satan.
Moreover, this false peace disinclines the mind of the deluded one for the
definiteness of the Christian state and the Christian character--makes all the
peculiarity that marks the Christian and the Christians walk distasteful--makes it
regarded as too exact, as too minute, as going too far in its restraints upon the
natural freedom of man; and the consequence is, that it is said, as it is sometimes
said of some ministers of the Gospel, that their views are a great deal too high, that
they expect a great deal more of people than they ought, that they are always raising
a standard which makes religion appear so impracticable. Lastly, there is the danger
of indisposing us to study the depths of the written Word, and to listen to those
depths when they are brought out in the public ministry of the Word. So long as the
imagination is pleasantly exercised, and the ministry of the preacher is like the song
of one who hath a pleasant voice, and playeth well upon an instrument, there is
contentedness; but when the depths of Gods truth are brought forth, then it is
regarded as a dry matter--a matter in which they have but little concern; and whilst
this state of mind exists, the false peace makes the sinner to lie in a perilous abode,
like a man whose roof is on fire, and who is pressed down by the weight of slumber.
But the danger is also future. If we die in a false peace, then in the day of
resurrection and in the judgment we meet God as an avenger, and an avenger during
all eternity. (G. Fisk, LL. B.)

Foundation of peace
There is a very true sentence of Lord Macaulays, in which he says, It is difficult
to conceive any situation more painful than that of a great man condemned to watch
the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of
stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of
vitality disappear, one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and
corruption. It was just such a situation that the prophet Jeremiah was at this time
condemned to fill. We feel that there is real agony in the sentence of doom he is
compelled to utter. What aggravated his own personal grief was that he saw the
remedy that alone could save them, the thorough, searching, radical treatment of
their ease that contained their only hope, and they refused it, and with the very grip
of death upon them they turned for comfort to those who had the mildest treatment
to prescribe, and who cried, Peace, peace, when there was no peace.

I. The prophet here lays his finger on the essential error--THE FORMALIST HAS NO
ADEQUATE IDEA OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SIN. To suppose you have healed the
corruption of a mans nature by the sacrifice of a turtle dove is the merest folly. To
suppose that you remove the enmity of a mans heart against God by crying Peace,
peace is an incredible mockery. Peace with God is the will, and the heart, and the
conscience at one with Him.

II. This ignorance of the priests as to the very nature of the sin they professed to
cure reminds us of the truth of Lord Bacons saying, that THAT IS A FALSE PEACE
WHICH IS GROUNDED UPON AN IMPLICIT IGNORANCE, just as all colours agree in the
dark. You may cherish the ignominious ambition to have peace at any price. You
may escape the problems of thought by declining to think. You may avoid the
responsibility of freedom by voluntary slavery; you may escape the pain of
repentance by ignoring the reality of sin; yes, you may refuse to acknowledge the
obligations of the light by dwelling ever in the darkness; you may prefer to be the
victim of error and superstition to being their victor; you may prefer the cowardly
acquiescence of surrender to the glad triumph of conquest; but you will surely not
delude yourselves into the belief that you have settled anything, healed any hurt, or
that the peace you enjoy is a worthy one, with any elements of desirability at all. For
let us be quite sure that true peace--moral or mental--is based upon an honest facing
of the truth. It was old Matthew Paris, the last of the old monastic historians, who
complained somewhat pathetically that the case of historians was hard, because if
they told the truth they provoked men, while if they wrote what was false they
offended God. The historians art, it appears, must have in it something of the
photographers, whose bounden duty is well known to be to make men better
looking than they are. It has been urged, that if you can persuade a man that he is
better than be really is, he will try to live up to the new revelation. Overlook his
faults, and explain his errors away, and he will take heart and grow better. The
question comes back to an old one that has been asked and discussed again and
again, Can there ever be any moral uses in a lie? Do we believe in that religious
homoeopathy that proposes to cure one immorality by another, conceal corruption
by falsehood, and cover sinfulness by lying? Can any possible good come out of such
a practice? Can there ever be any moral uses in a lie? I think you will agree with me,
that even if it were possible to obtain a satisfactory peace by the suppression of
conviction on the one hand, or a misrepresentation of fact on the other, we are not
at liberty to take it on such terms. To obtain a worthy peace we must face the facts.
(C. S. Horne, M. A.)

A blast of the trumpet against false peace

 It is no uncommon thing to meet with people who say, Well, I am happy enough.
My conscience never troubles me. I believe if I were to die I should go to heaven as
well as anybody else. I know that these men are living in the commission of glaring
acts of sin, and I am sure they could not prove their innocence even before the bar of
man; yet will these men look you in the face and tell you that they are not at all
disturbed at the prospect of dying. Well, I will take you at your word, though I dont
believe you. I will suppose you have this peace, and I will endeavour to account for it
on certain grounds which may render it somewhat more difficult for you to remain
in it.
1. The first person I shall deal with is the man who has peace because he spends
his life in a ceaseless round of gaiety and frivolity. You have scarcely come
from one place of amusement before you enter another. You know that you
are never happy except you are in what you call gay society, where the
frivolous conversation will prevent you from hearing the voice of your
conscience. In the morning you will be asleep while Gods sun is shining, but
at night you will be spending precious time in some place of foolish, if not
lascivious, mirth. If the harp should fail you, then you call for Nabars feast.
There shall be a sheep shearing, and you shall be drunken with wine, until
your souls become as stolid as a stone. And then you wonder that you have
peace. What wonder! Surely any man would have peace when his heart has
become as hard as a stone. What weathers shall it feel? What tempests shall
move the stubborn bowels of a granite rock? You sear your consciences, and
then marvel that they feel not. Oh, that you would begin to live! What a price
you are paying for your mirth--eternal torment for an hour of jollity--
separation from God for a brief day or two of sin!
2. I turn to another class of men. Finding that amusement at last has lost all its
zest, having drained the cup of worldly pleasure till they find first satiety, and
then disgust lying at the bottom, they want some stronger stimulus, and
Satan, who has drugged them once, has stronger opiates than mere
merriment for the man who chooses to use them. If the frivolity of this world
will not suffice to rock a soul to sleep, he hath a yet more hellish cradle for
the soul. He will take you up to his own breast, and bid you suck therefrom
his own Satanic nature, that you may then be still and calm. I mean that he
will lead you to imbibe infidel notions, and when this is fully accomplished,
you can have Peace, peace, when there is no peace.
3. I shall come now to a third class of men. These are people not particularly
addicted to gaiety, nor especially given to infidel notions; but they are a sort
of folk who are careless, and determined to let well alone. Their motto, Let
tomorrow take care for the things of itself; let us live while we live; let us eat
and drink, for tomorrow we die. If their conscience cries out at all, they bid
it lie still. When the minister disturbs them, instead of listening to what he
says, and so being brought into a state of real peace, they cry, Hush I be
quiet I there is time enough yet; I will not disturb myself with these childish
fears: be still, sir, and lie down. Oh! up ye sleepers, ye gaggers of conscience,
what mean you? Why are you sleeping when death is hastening on, when
eternity is near, when the great white throne is even now coming on the
clouds of heaven, when the trumpet of the resurrection is now being set to
the mouth of the archangel?
4. A fourth set of men have a kind of peace that is the result of resolutions which
 they have made, but which they will never carry into effect. Oh, saith one,
I am quite easy enough in my mind, for when I have got a little more money
I shall retire from business, and then I shall begin to think about eternal
things. Ah, but I would remind you that when you were an apprentice, you
said you would reform when you became a journeyman; and when you were
a journeyman, you used to say you would give good heed when you became a
master. But hitherto these bills have never been paid when they became duo.
They have every one of them been dishonoured as yet; and take my word for
it, this new accommodation bill will be dishonoured too.
5. Now I turn to another class of men, in order that I may miss none who are
saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. I do not doubt but that many
of the people of London enjoy peace in their hearts, because they are
ignorant of the things of God. If you have a peace that is grounded on
ignorance, get rid of it; ignorance is a thing, remember, that you are
accountable for. You are not accountable for the exercise of your judgment to
man, but you are accountable for it to God.
6. I now pass to another and more dangerous form of this false peace. I may
have missed some of you; probably I shall come closer home to you now.
Alas, alas, let us weep and weep again, for there is a plague among us. It is
the part of candour to admit that with all the exercise of judgment, and the
most rigorous discipline, we cannot keep our churches free from hypocrisy.
Oh! I do not know of a more thoroughly damnable delusion than for a man
to get a conceit into his head, that he is a child of God, and yet live in sin--to
talk to you about sovereign grace, while he is living in sovereign lust--to
stand up and make himself the arbiter of what is truth, while he himself
contemns the precept of God, and tramples the commandment under foot.
7. There remains yet another class of beings who surpass all these in their utter
indifference to everything that might arouse them. They are men that are
given up by God, justly given up. They have passed the boundary of His long
suffering. He has said, My Spirit shall no more strive with them; Ephraim
is given unto idols, let him alone. As a judicial punishment for their
impenitence, God has given them up to pride and hardness of heart. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

False security

I. How is it persons reach this state of easy confidence?

1. There is a disposition to acknowledge in a general way that they are sinners,
though also to palliate the enormity of sin, and to gloss it over with the gentle
epithet of an infirmity.
2. Then, to make all right, secure, and comfortable, the sentiment is cherished
that God is merciful and will overlook our infirmities. But this mercy, so
vaguely trusted in, is not the mercy which has been made the subject of an
actual offer from God to man. He has stepped forth to relieve us from the
debt of sin.

II. The evils of such a false confidence.

1. It casts an aspersion on the character of God.
 2. It is hostile to the cause of practical righteousness, since it tends to obliterate
all restraints, on the specious plea of all-availing mercy, and leaves every
man to sin just as much as he likes. (T. Chalmers, D. D.)

Peace, when there is no peace

The value of these Old Testament prophecies for us is that they hold up the mirror
to nature. Under different guises we see men grappling with the same problems,
encountering the same fears, wrestling with the same difficulties, meeting the same
joys and the same disappointments. History is ever repeating itself.
1. The same oppression, the same sin, the same corruptions which are causing so
much anguish in our midst, were at work there, and from many a heart there
went up the cry, How long, O Lord, how long? The means they adopted
were not sufficient for the end, and that is just the point at which these
Israelites join hands with many reformers in our days. There are fashions in
these things as in everything else. With the crowd and with the priests in
these far-off days it was sacrifice and burnt offering. With us the favourite
nostrums are somewhat different. Let us look at some of them.
(1) There is what has been called the doctrine of culture. Educate, educate,
educate, some cry, and that will put all right. The exponents of this
school are enthusiastic, and talk of great things to be accomplished when
the refinement and culture which is fostered in the upper ten has
filtered down through university extension schemes and settlements to
the working classes.
(2) Others, of a more practical turn of mind, think that the world can be set
right by legislative means. Better laws and greater freedom are what is
wanted, they say, to elevate the people. Life to them consists in the
abundance of things which men possess. They laugh at the notion of a
happiness which has not plenty, and ridicule the very idea of comfort or
contentment in a one-roomed house.
(3) Another set think that if we could make the people sober all would be
well. They tell us that almost nine-tenths of the crime and mischief in the
country comes from drunkenness.
2. There is much truth in a great deal of what has been said by the advocates of
each of these different systems, and within certain limits they are right. That
they will ever reach the root of the matter is another thing. They are no new
doctrines. Long have men tried them. And what has been the result where
they have had freest play? A perfect cure? An approach to an ideal State?
Alas, no. In some cases one or other of them, or all of them together, may
have contributed to render life easier, or more comfortable to individuals
here and there; but none of them, nor all of them together, have been able to
heal the hurt of humanity. They are but the purple patches with which men
seek to hide the festering sores. The trouble is in the heart, in the blood, in
the innermost centre of our being, and till it is expelled from that citadel,
there can be no hope for us, or the world. They who cherish the supposition
that man at bottom is a lover of truth and light, of purity and goodness,
fondle a vain conceit. Is there no cruelty, is there no lust in upper circles of
society? Is there no impurity, no degradation, no oppression among the
learned? Is there no misery, no broken hearts in the homes of the wealthy?
 Are there no tears, no sighs, no wrinkled brows where intemperance is
unknown? (R. Leggat.)

Useless doctoring
In China they have some queer ways of doctoring sick people, and in Pekin, it is
said, they have a brass mule for a doctor! This mule stands in one of their temples
and sick people flock there by the thousands to be cured. How can a brass mule cure
anybody? do you ask. Sure enough, how can he? and yet these poor ignorant people
believe it. If you lived there, instead of in this country, it is likely that when you had
a toothache your father would take you--to a dentist? Oh no! That is what they do in
this country. In Pekin you would probably be taken to the temple where the brass
mule stands, and be lifted up so that you could rub his teeth, then rub your own, and
then think the pain ought to go away. If you fell down and hurt your knee, you would
go and rub the mules knee, and then your own, to make it well. They say so many
have rubbed the mule that they have rubbed the brass off in many places, so that
new patches had to be put on, and his eyes have been rubbed out altogether. But a
brand new mule stands waiting to take the place of the old one when that finally falls
to pieces. It seems a very simple way to cure pains and aches, but, I fear, the pain is
not very much better after the visit to the mule; and I am sure all boys and girls who
read of the brass doctor will be glad they live in this land, even if dentists do
sometimes pull out teeth that ache, and doctors often give medicine that is not
pleasant to take.
False peace
Your peace, sinner, is that terribly prophetic calm which the traveller occasionally
perceives upon the higher Alps. Everything is still. The birds suspend their notes, fly
low, and cower down with fear The hum of bees among the flowers is hushed. A
horrible stillness rules the hour, as if death had silenced all things by stretching over
them his awful sceptre. Perceive ye not what is surely at hand! The tempest is
preparing, the lightning will soon cast abroad its flames of fire. Earth will rock with
thunder blasts; granite peaks will be dissolved; all nature will tremble beneath the
fury of the storm. Yours is that solemn calm today, sinner. Rejoice not in it, for the
hurricane of wrath is coming, the whirlwind and the tribulation which shall sweep
you away and utterly destroy you. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 6:15
They were not at all ashamed.

Shamelessness in sin, the certain forerunner of destruction

He who has thus sinned himself past feeling, may be justly supposed to have
sinned himself past grace.
1. Extraordinary guilt. Committed abomination.
2. Deportment under guilt. Not at all ashamed, etc.
3. Gods high resentment of their monstrous shamelessness. Were they
ashamed?
 4. The consequent judgment. Therefore shall they fall, etc.

I. What shame is and what influence it has upon the government of mens
manners.
1. Shame is a grief of mind springing from the apprehension of some disgrace
brought upon a man. And disgrace consists properly in mens knowledge or
opinion of some defect, natural or moral, belonging to them. So that when a
man is sensible that anything defective or amiss, either in his person,
manners, or the circumstances of his condition, is known, or taken notice of,
by others; from this sense or apprehension of his, there naturally results
upon his mind a certain grief or displeasure, which grief properly constitutes
the passion of shame.
2. From this, that shame is grounded upon the dread man naturally has of the ill
opinion of others, and that chiefly with reference to the turpitude or
immorality of his actions, it is manifest that it is that great and powerful
instrument in the soul of man whereby Providence both preserves society
and supports government, forasmuch as it is the most effectual restraint
upon him from the doing of such things as more immediately tend to disturb
the one and destroy the other.
3. He whom shame has done its work upon, is, ipso facto, stripped of all the
common comforts of life. The light is to him the shadow of death; he has no
heart nor appetite for business; his very food is nauseous to him. In which
wretched condition having passed some years, first the vigour of his
intellectuals begins to flag and dwindle away, and then his health follows; the
hectic of the soul produces one in the body, the man from an inward falls
into an outward consumption, and death at length gives the finishing stroke,
and closes all with a sad catastrophe.

II. By what ways men come to cast off shame and grow impudent in sin.
1. By the commission of great sins. For these waste the conscience, and destroy
at once. They are, as it were, a course of wickedness abridged into one act,
and a custom of sinning by equivalence. They steel the forehead, and harden
the heart, and break those bars asunder which modesty had originally fenced
and enclosed it with.
2. Custom in sinning never fails in the issue to take away the sense and shame of
sin, were a person never so virtuous before. First, he begins to shake off the
natural horror and dread which he had of breaking any of Gods commands,
and so not to fear sin; next, finding his sinful appetites gratified by such
breaches of the Divine law, he comes to like his sin and be pleased with what
he has done; and then, from ordinary complacencies, heightened and
improved by custom, he comes passionately to delight in such ways. Finally,
having resolved to continue and persist in them, he frames himself to a
resolute contempt of what is thought or said of him.
3. The examples of great persons take away the shame of anything which they
are observed to practise, though never so foul and shameful in itself. Nothing
is more contagious than an iii action set off with a great example; for it is
natural for men to imitate those above them, and to endeavour to resemble,
at least, that which they cannot be.
 4. The observation of the general and common practice of anything takes away
the shame of that practice. A vice a la mode will look virtue itself out of
countenance, and it is well if it does not look it out of heart too. Men love not
to be found singular, especially where the singularity lies in the rugged and
severe paths of Virtue.
5. To have been once greatly and irrecoverably ashamed renders men shameless.
For shame is never of any force but where there is some stock of credit to be
preserved. When a man finds that to be lost, he is like an undone gamester,
who plays on safety, knowing he can lose no more.

III. The several degrees of shamelessness in sin.

1. A showing of the greatest respect, and making the most obsequious
applications and addresses to lewd and infamous persons; and that without
any pretence of duty requiring it, which yet alone can justify and excuse men
in it.
2. To extenuate or excuse a sin is bad enough, but to defend it is intolerable.
Such are properly the devils advocates.
3. Glorying in sin. Higher than this the corruption of mans nature cannot
possibly go. This is publicly to set up a standard on behalf of vice, to wear its
colours, and avowedly to assert and espouse the cause of it, in defiance of all
that is sacred or civil, moral or religious.

IV. Why it brings down judgment and destruction upon the sinner.
1. Because shamelessness in sin always presupposes those actions and courses
which God rarely suffers to go unpunished.
2. Because of the destructive influence which it has upon the government of the
world. It is manifest that the integrity of mens manners cannot be secured,
where there is not preserved upon mens minds a true estimate of vice and
virtue, that is, where vice is not looked upon as shameful and opprobrious,
and virtue valued as worthy and honourable. But now, where vice walks with
a daring front, and no shame attends the practice or the practisers of it, there
is an utter confusion of the first dividing and distinguishing properties of
mens actions; morality falls to the ground, and government must quickly
follow. And whenever it comes to fare thus with any civil State, virtue and
common honesty seem to make their appeal to the supreme Governor of all
things, to take the matter into His own hands, and to correct those
clamorous enormities which are grown too big and strong for law or shame,
or any human coercion.

V. What those judgments are.

1. A sudden and disastrous death; and, indeed, suddenness in this can hardly be
without disaster.
2. War and desolation.
3. Captivity. (R. South, D. D.)

The shamelessness of sinners

The legend says that, a sinner being at confession, the devil appeared, saying, that
he came to make restitution. Being asked what he would restore, he said, Shame;
for it is shame that I have stolen from this sinner to make him shameless in sinning;
and now I have come to restore it to him, to make him ashamed to confess his sins.
Neither could they blush.

Blushing
(with Ezr 9:6):--Just fancy, said Tom, who had been doing a bit of word study by
the aid of his newly-acquired Skeat, to blush is, in its origin, the same word as to
blaze, or to blast, and a blush in Danish means a torch. And a very good origin
too, said his sister, who got red in the face and hot all over on the slightest
provocation. Yes, youth is the blushing time of life. Said Diogenes to a youth whom
he saw blushing: Courage, my boy, that is the complexion of virtue.

I. THERE IS THE BLUSH OF GUILT. Who broke the window? All were silent; but one
boy looked uneasy. His blush was the blast of his red-hot conscience, condemning
the dumb tongue.

II. THERE IS THE BLUSH OF SHAME. It was such a mean thing to tell that lie to ones
own father. It was a shabby trick I played my chum. And that nasty word I spoke
yesterday to a girl, too, it makes me sick-ashamed of myself to think of it. Yes; you
ought to think shame. But the man that blushes is not quite a brute.

III. THERE IS THE BLUSH OF MODESTY. Tom said nothing about his splendid score
at the match, until his sister read aloud at breakfast next morning the flattering
report given in the newspaper, at which Tom blushed like a girl. He had his revenge,
however, when more than one letter came to Shena from Dr. Barnardo, and Tom
protested that he knew now why she had no money to spend on sweets, and poor
Shena got very red in the face and went out of the room.

IV. THERE IS THE BLUSH OF HONEST INDIGNATION at the meanness of the cheat, the
cruelty of the bully, the greed of the glutton, and the indifference of selfish souls.
This blush of virtuous anger must have come into the meek face of Christ, when He
rebuked the disciples for keeping the mothers from bringing their children to Him.

V. Just twice, I think, do we read of BLUSHING IN THE BIBLE, and the solemn thing
is that the blush in both cases is not before men, but under the eye of God.
1. One of the most remarkable prayers in the Bible is the prayer of Ezra, the
scribe--the brave, good, holy man who led a company of his Israelite
brethren from Babylon to Jerusalem. It rises hot and passionate out of his
very heart; for, like all priestly souls, he makes all the sins of the people his
own. O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to Thee, my
God. He loved his people so dearly that their faults seemed to be his own,
and he blushed before the Holy God for shame of them.
2. Quite at the opposite pole of feeling is the other place in the Bible where
blushing is spoken of. For Jeremiah, the broken-hearted prophet of the Lord,
uses it when he has to describe the utter callousness of the people, in spite of
all their sins and sorrows. They were not at all ashamed, neither could they
blush. That is surely the most hopeless state of all, when one has lost the
 very power to feel shame and sorrow before God. The Florentines used to
point to Dante in the street, whispering, Theres the man who has been in
hell. But hell has come into the heart of the man who cannot blush. Oh, it is
better, as Mahomet said in his old age, to blush in this world than in the
next. St. John of the eagle eye and loving heart tells us that in the great day
of judgment we shall either have the boldness or liberty and confidence of
children, or we shall shrink away with shame like a guilty thing surprised.
(A. N. Mackray, M. A.)

JER 6:16
Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way,
and walk therein.

The good old way

Were you called together to listen to the present preacher only, courtesy might
demand at your hands an attentive hearing for him; but if an apostle of our Lord
Jesus Christ were the preacher, he would have far higher claims; and if one of the
ancient prophets were the speaker, or at any rate, could an angel or an archangel be
permitted now to address you, we think you would all admit that to be inattentive to
his words would be highly unbecoming: how much more so to be inattentive if the
God of the whole earth were addressing you! And is He not? Thus saith the Lord,
Stand ye in the ways, and see, etc.

I. TO THE WAY RECOMMENDED IN THE TEXT. Ask for the old paths, where is the
good way. The words of the text are metaphorical, and represent true religion
under the aspect of a pilgrimage or a journey. If, then, you ask me, What is the way
to heaven? I refer to the words of the Lord Jesus when speaking to Thomas. I,
said He, am the way. No man cometh unto the Father but by Me. Christ is the
way. He is the way from sin to holiness,--from darkness to light,--from bondage to
liberty,--from misery to happiness,--from the gates of hell to the throne of heaven.
But how is He the way? By His example: for leaving us an example, we should
follow His steps. By His doctrine: for we know that He is true, and teaches the way
of God in truth. By His sacrificial death: for we have boldness to eater into the
holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated
for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh. By His Spirit: when He, the Spirit of
truth, is come, He will guide you into all the truth. How, then, are we to walk in the
way? By repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.
Except ye repent ye shall all perish. Believe m the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt
be saved. He that believeth shall not perish. But what are the epithets by which the
way is described in our text? The way is not the broad way that leadeth to
destruction; nor the hard way, pursued by transgressors; nor the way that only
seemeth right to a man, while the end thereof is death; but it is the good way, and
the old path.
1. It is an old way. True, there are persons who more than insinuate that the
way, as just described to you, is a new thing. They say the way to heaven is
not now what it formerly was, if our definition is correct. But what have we
 said? Have we not affirmed that salvation is by Christ, and through Him
only? Have we not said that repentance and faith are the conditions of
obtaining it from Him? And is this new doctrine? Why, this doctrine is as old
as the days of Wesley and Whitfield, for they proclaimed it in England,
Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and America. But go a step further back. What
were the leading doctrines of the illustrious Reformers? For what were they
traduced, slandered, excommunicated, and martyred, but for this? They
asserted that penance was a human prescription--that works of
supererogation were a delusion--that images, beads, holy water, crucifixes,
and relics were but sanctified nonsense--that Christ was the only mediator
between God and man. But we go further still. What did our Lord and the
apostles themselves teach? They preached repent and believe! Nor do we
stop here. What did the prophets--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Malachi,
and the rest--who flourished from seven hundred to a thousand years
anterior to the Christian era teach? Did not they speak of the promised seed,
the Messiah, the Redeemer, in whom men should believe, and by whom they
should be saved? Go to that splendid treasury of ecclesiastical biography--the
eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and look at the fourth verse:
By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by
which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts:
and by it he being dead, yet speaketh. Well, then, some three thousand
years elapsed between the time of Abels believing and that of Jeremiahs
preaching, and the way had been tried during the whole of that long period,
and was therefore properly called by the prophet the old path. Oh no; we
bring no new doctrine to your ears, no new way before your eyes. We grant
you that some of the circumstantials of religion have been changed since the
days of Abel; but the essentials have remained the same. A Saviour, a
mediator, a sacrifice, an atonement; repentance, faith, prayer, and holy
living--thane all abide ever. The way is called new by the apostle, in reference
to that fuller and clearer development of it furnished by the life and death of
the Lord Jesus; and even when contrasting it with those ritualistic
observances on which the Jews had long laid more than sufficient stress: but
in all ages Christ has been the Saviour of men, and faith in Him the prime
condition of salvation.
2. The text speaks of this way as a good one. Where is the good way? It is not
only a good way, but the good way--good emphatically; the only good way,
therefore, par excellence, the good way. God is the author of it, and He is
good. He is the good Being: His name God implies this, as it is a contraction
of the adjective good. Christ is the way, and He is good. Pilates question,
What evil hath He done? remains still unanswered. The Holy Spirit
recommends this way; and He would not recommend anything evil. The
Bible is a good book--all insinuations by scoffers to the contrary
notwithstanding,--and it strongly urges us to pursue this way. There have
been--and, thank God! still are--some good men in the world, bad as it is;
and they have travelled, or are travelling in this way. However vile they may
have been ere entering this way, they became virtuous and happy when they
began to travel on this path. Men have said the way of salvation by faith in
the merits of another is not good, for it will lead to licentiousness--to
latitudinarianism. But such men speak without experience. The faith that
 saves us is not a nominal thing--not merely speculative, but practical,
evangelical faith. Show me thy faith without thy works, O objector, and I
will show thee my faith by my works. Ah, there it is. This faith of ours
works, and has works; it works by love, and purifies the heart. While we
repose on the merits of the Saviour, we copy the example of the Saviour;
while we believe He died for us, we exhibit the genuineness of our belief by a
holy life.

II. THE DUTY THE TEXT ENJOINS. Stand ye in the ways, etc.
1. Stand in the ways, and see. These words seem to refer to the position of a
traveller on foot, who, in prosecuting his pilgrimage, has reached a point
where there is a junction of several roads; and who is perplexed by this
circumstance, and at a loss which way to pursue. What can he do in this
case? The text says, Stand, halt, ere you go astray, and try to ascertain the
proper direction, or you may lose time in losing your way, and perchance
may haw to retrace your steps, amid the jeers of witnesses, and under the
self-inflicted penalty of regretful reproach. He takes from his pocket a book
and a map, from which he learns that the road to the right goes to one place,
that to the left to another, but the one straight on to the place of his
destination. He then, after due examination, prosecutes his pilgrimage with
pleasurable satisfaction; having no tormenting doubts as to his course, but a
strong assurance of reaching, by and by, the desired end. Now, the traveller
to eternity--the man in search of the path of life--has been graciously
provided with an itinerary; that is, Gods own road book, the Bible. Hence,
says the Saviour, Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal
life, and they are they which testify of Me. Go, then, fellow traveller, to the
ever-blessed book; pore over its lessons; study its precepts; imitate its
examples; and realise its promises.
2. Ask for the way. See that man with his map and book; he is still perplexed
somewhat; he wants counsel; he needs a guide; let him ask advice of those
who know by experience what he has yet to learn. Ah! up comes a person
who knows the road intimately, who has travelled along it these many years,
and who loves to give his best practical advice to all inquirers. Well, ask him.
He is a Gospel minister, or some old weather-beaten pilgrim, who has borne
the heat of many a summer, and the stormy blasts of many a winter; he will
be right glad to tell thee the way thou shouldst go. And, if he fail, there is a
Guide who never will; for, when the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide
you into all the truth.
3. Walk therein. Yes, it avails not what we read, how much information we
acquire, with whomsoever we converse, or even how often we pray, unless we
walk in the way. John Bunyan tells us of a Mr. Talkative, who was very
ready and fluent in religious discussions and conversations; but who left the
practical part of religion to others. Alas! that the descendants of that
personage are not extinct. Remember that no man can get to heaven by
looking at maps of the road, or conversing with those who are journeying
thitherward; we must all walk in the way.

III. TO THE BLESSING PROMISED. Ye shall find rest for your souls. The word
rest is one of the sweetest monosyllables in our language. Robert Hall said he
could think of the word tear till he wept; I could think of the word rest till I smiled.
After a paroxysm of pain, how delicious is ease and rest after a hard days toil, how
delightful to retire to rest! And if rest of the body be sweet, sweeter still is rest for the
soul. The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmities, but a wounded spirit who can
bear? Rest for the soul we all long to find; we cannot help it. We must be in quest of
rest do what we may. Peace, happiness, mental quietude, rest, every man of all
things desiderates. But where may it be found? Secularists and quondam socialists
say in gratifying our animal passions; the miser--significant name, literally
miserable--hopes to find it among golden gains; the ambitious climbs up the rugged
heights of power and fame, and hopes to descry it there; but the Christian is the only
man who can exclaim with the exulting Greek, Eureka! Eureka! I have found it! (W.
Antliff, D. D.)

The ancient paths

Transition is easy from an outward physical path to a moral meaning: roads men
walk with their feet suggest the road mens thoughts habitually walk in, the path in
which their feelings are accustomed to move, the way in which their conduct
naturally flows. In this secondary sense, use text to point out the necessity, in all
who would go right, of keeping upon the old ways, the ascertained ways, which, in
the experience of mankind, have been proved beneficial.

I. Our boast of novelty, our glorying in our newness, as if we were in advance of

everybody and everything else, is a fanciful mistake. Our thoughts, and all the
channels of our thoughts, are the result of the thought and experience of thousands
of years that are gone by. Political habits and customs, knowledge of right and
equity, have been gradually unfolded from ages past. Combinations are new,
elements are old.

II. The present time is noticeable for an extraordinary outbreak of activity along
new lines of thought and belief.
1. Men are inclined to doubt generally the social and moral results of past
experience, to repudiate long-accepted social maxims and customs.
2. General distrust is being thrown upon religions teachings: not positive
unbelief, but uncertainty. And by having confidence in religion its real power
is destroyed. Thus thousands are abandoning old paths--old thoughts,
usages, customs, habits, convictions, virtues.

III. There are certain great permanencies of thought, character, and custom,
especially necessary in our time.
1. Moral and social progress can never be so rapid as physical developments.
Men cannot be changed in their principles, feelings, and inner life in the
same ratio as external changes go on.
2. There is danger in giving up any belief or custom which has been entwined in
our moral sense. Regard as sacred the first principles of truth.
3. In the transition from a lower to a higher form of belief there is peril. Hence,
we are not to think it our duty in a headlong way to change mens beliefs
simply because they are erroneous. As if changing from one mode of belief to
 another was going to change the conscience, reason, moral susceptibility,
and character.

IV. THE RELINQUISHMENT OF TRUST OR OF PRACTICE SHOULD ALWAYS BE FROM

WORSE TO BETTER. If you want a traveller to have a better road, make that better
road, and then he will need no argument to persuade him to walk in it. If you are
teaching that one intellectual system is better than another, and that one religious
organisation, church, or creed, is better, prove it by presenting better fruit than the
other, and men will need little argument beyond. If a Church breeds meekness,
fortitude, love, courage, disinterestedness; if it makes noble men--uncrowned but
undoubted princes,--then it is a Church, a living epistle which will convince men.

V. All new truths, like new wines, must have a period of fermentation.
1. All truths are at first on probation; must be scrutinised, ransacked, vindicated.
2. Guard against wild and unseasonable urgency in throwing off traditional
faiths and truths, for those you can discover for yourselves. Accept what
other men construct for you. We are so related, by the laws of God, one to
another, that no man can think out everything for himself.

VI. WE DO WELL TO LOOK CAUTIOUSLY AT NEW TRUTHS AND THOSE WHO ADVOCATE
THEM. There is a conceit, a dogmatism, a bigotry of science, as really as there is of
religion. Application--
1. All the tendencies which narrow the moral sense and enlarge the liberty of the
passions are dangerous.
2. All tendencies which increase self-conceit are to be suspected and disowned.
3. Those tendencies which extinguish in a man all spiritual elements, such as
arise from faith in God, in our spirituality and immortality, must inevitably
degrade our manhood.
4. All tendencies which take away your hope of and belief in another world, take
away your motive for striving to reach a higher life. Without this hope men
will have a weary pilgrimage in a world of unbelief. (H. W. Beecher.)

The old paths

I. THE OLD PATHS ARE TO BE DISTINGUISHED FROM THEOLOGICAL CREEDS AND

DOGMAS. Lifted upon the shoulders of many generations, with opportunities for
interpreting the Bible in the light of a developing Christianity, it would be strange if
our horizon had not increased. Think as those men thought--not necessarily what
they thought.

II. A RETURN TO THE OLD PATHS DOES NOT CALL US AWAY FROM VIGOROUS LIFE.
Wherever human thought, in obedience to its best nature, essays to got wherever
desire for higher and better things reaches out, there are the paths of the Lord. They
are as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. Treading
them, every power finds sweet employ.

III. Some of the characteristics of the old paths.

 1. They are plain. True, the fogs sometimes hang low upon them as upon worldly
ways; but we can always, in the darkest hour, see one step before us, and that
taken, we can see another. The engineer cannot see his track all the way from
New York to Albany, but in the heaviest night he trusts his headlight and
keeps on his way. So let the Christian do.
2. They are unchanging. Gods paths, like Himself, are the same yesterday,
today, and forever.
3. They are paths of righteousness (Psa 23:3). Old coins lose their royal stamp
by much handling. So with some of our grandest words. Righteousness is one
of them. It is not formalism, it is not morality. It is right living, with a pure
heart as its source.
4. They are paths of mercy (Psa 25:10).
5. They are paths of plenty (Psa 65:11). What a struggle men have for mere
existence! They rise early and sit up late and eat the bread of affliction. They
have left the paths of the Lord. They have chased phantoms. They must
endure for the time the fruit of their doings. Yet, notwithstanding these
seeming exceptions, the precious promise abides (Psa 37:3).
6. They are paths of life (Pro 2:19). What a path that where Christ is the support
of our steps, guide of our way, and the crown of our journeys end!
7. They are paths of peace (Pro 3:17; Isa 26:3). There is no peace but in the
narrow way where God gives pardon and reconciliation.
8. They are His paths (Isa 2:3). It is not possible, in a spiritual sense, that God
should give us anything and not give us Himself. Without Himself the graces
of the Spirit are only names.

IV. How to find these paths.

1. By standing. How hard it is to stop and stand still and think and search!
2. By seeing. With open eyes we may see whether the path be an old path,
whether it is macadamised with living truth, whether they who are upon it
wear the livery of the Great King.
3. By asking. Men are ever ready to ask counsel in worldly things. Why not of
God and His servants in regard to heavenly things? Ask, and ye shall
receive.
4. By walking. Having used sight and tongue and thoughts, we are then to act.
God has united faith and works, prayer and activity.

V. THE PROMISE TO THOSE WHO OBEY. Rest. (E. P. Ingersoll, D. D.)

Novelty in religion exploded

Novelty is a term which, when applied to man, always involves a degree of
previous ignorance. The astronomer finds out new stars, the botanist new plants,
the linguist new tongues, the geometrician new modes of proof and illustration, the
politician new laws, the geographer new islands, the navigator new creeks,
anchorages and havens, the tradesman new articles of commerce, the artificer and
mechanic new methods of accomplishing the work of their hands. Each successive
generation, in a civilised country especially, makes advancement on the experiments
of the former. In religious matters, however, it is different. We am to expect no new
Bible, no new ordinances, no new Messiah, no new discoveries in the substance of
truth and piety, any more than we look for a new sun, moon, and seasons, in the
institutions of nature. We allow, indeed, that in ourselves, as we pass from a state of
unregeneracy to that of renewal, old things pass away, and all things become new;
that in the progress of sanctification, there is a succession of discoveries, as we grow
in knowledge and grace; that in the pursuit of schemes of usefulness, new modes of
operation may be struck out; but as to all the rest, it is established by the Great Head
of the Church to be subjected to no alteration until the time of the restitution of all
things, when there shall be a new heaven and earth, etc.

I. Trace the good old way.

1. There is the way of theory. This will be found in its grand and essential
elements in the Word of truth; for this is the chart or map in which the path
is laid down in which the pious have walked from the beginning.
2. There is the way of experience, or the application of these truths to the mind
by such an influence and in such a way as to render them living principles of
activity and enjoyment. Repentance for sin, dependence, devotion, etc.
3. There is the way of practice; and this with regard to God and our fellow
creatures.

II. Show what is your duty with respect to the path which has been described.
1. Primarily, to institute a serious, a deliberate and cautious inquiry, that you
may ascertain whether you are in the right way. One grand reason why many
who profess to make the inquiry What is truth? do not succeed, is, that
they indulge in a light, trifling temper of mind, quite unsuited to the
character of their avowed engagement, and highly offensive to God.
2. Steadily pursue the path you have ascertained to be right. Aim to be
established, strengthened, settled on your most holy faith, and guard against
that versatility which will be an effective preventive to sanctification,
comfort, and usefulness. With walking we always connect the idea, not of
habit only, but of progress. Your knowledge, your sacred virtues, your
practical obedience should be always on the advance.
Conclusion--
1. The lamentable consequences of a refusal to walk in this way.
2. The inestimable advantages of walking in the good old way. (John Clayton.)

The old paths

Perhaps the chief danger attending modem progress is the neglect of antiquity.
This does not apply to literature and art, but to science and religion. A man who
aspires to excellence in letters or art must go on pilgrimage to the old paths, and
having found them must abide in them. Take the single example of sculpture. What
has been gained for this art in the advancement of later times? Nothing has been
gained, but much lost which can never be recovered. The most celebrated work of
recent artists in stone is little more than an imitation of the masterpieces of Athens
executed between two and three thousand years ago. The hope of the learner in this
profession is to stand in the old paths. With some qualifications the same is true of
literature. The Greek and Roman classics are still our teachers; and there is no
prospect of the immediate declension of their authority. No liberal education is
supposed to be possible without the languages of antiquity and the compositions
that adorn them. Scientific culture has been repaid by abundant fruit in recent
years: but the losses sustained by science through our ignorance of antiquity are
inconceivable. Students in science will be the first to acknowledge and deplore this
loss. But while literature cannot neglect the old paths, and science is devoutly
engaged in retracing her lost ways, religion is in imminent danger of drifting from
her ancient landmarks. The peril I desire to point out is not new in the history of the
Christian faith. There is something in his nature which makes a human being feel
after a God; and this act of search would be far more likely to touch the object
sought when the race was young, when the impressions received were new,
uncorrupted by speculation, unfettered by tradition, than at this time when the race
is old and our impressions of the self within us, and of surrounding nature, are
unconsciously weighted and often made false by hereditary influences, and by
misleading ideas that swarm about us in childhood and are the spring of errors
which it is the most difficult task of education to discover and correct. This
invariable tendency to look for truth and wisdom and goodness, not to the
possibilities of the present, not even to the lessons of the immediate past, but to the
records and traditions of a remote age, is a striking confirmation of the biblical
history of mankind. That wistful looking back on the part of the nations is a pathetic
sign that something is missing which once was ours when heaven and truth were
nearer to this earth than they are now. When I bring these problems to the ancient
ways of God that, setting out from the creation of man and following the race,
converge upon Christ, I discover the clue that leads to their interpretation. The old
paths ran into Christ. His attitude towards the men who flourished before Him was
neither hostile nor independent. He spoke of them with reverence; He quoted their
teaching in support of His own claims; He proved that that teaching when divided
from Himself was not only incomplete, but in some cases had no meaning; that He,
in fact, was the complement of the older wisdom. He dwelt not only with
contemporaries, but in the old paths as the Illuminating Presence of the past.
Before Abraham was, I am. He lighted up the parables of the sages; He
harmonised prediction with history, and type with the fulfilling event or person. And
as the old paths met in Christ--as He was the Way to which all other paths and
ways led the traveller, not only thoroughfares defined and laid down in systems of
law and belief, but irregular tracks made by earnest but wandering feet in search of
the Highway; as He was the Truth, in which all moral intimations, ideas, and
aspirations found their fulfilment and satisfaction; as He was the Life, in which all
the nobler elements of the heart attained their highest purity and their perfect
expression--so He is now the centre and resting place of all doctrine, of all inquiry,
and of all faith. What will be the result of the attempt to make the New Testament a
modern publication? We smooth a hardness here, we read in a meaning there, we
hide the significance of this doctrine behind the assumed importance of that, on the
plea of keeping the Book in touch with a scientific age. There will be no end to this
recasting until we end the Bible itself. We share the conquests of science, and
partake the renown of scientific men; but theirs is the truth of research, ours is the
truth of revelation. Their conclusions are necessarily subject to revision; many of
them perish outright; but the Word of our God abideth, and shall stand forever. (E.
E. Jenkins, LL. D.)
The old paths

I. EXCELLENT GENERAL ADVICE. Stand, and see, and ask. I take these words to be
a call to thought and consideration. Now, to set men thinking is one great object
which every teacher of religion should always keep before him. Serious thought, in
short, is one of the first steps towards heaven. There are but few, I suspect, who
deliberately and calmly choose evil, refuse good, turn their back on God, and resolve
to serve sin as sin. The most part are what they are because they began their present
course without thought. They would not take the trouble to look forward and
consider the consequences of their conduct. By thoughtless actions they created
habits which have become second nature to them. They have got into a groove now,
and nothing but a special miracle of grace will stop them. There are none, we must
all be aware, who bring themselves into so much trouble by want of thinking as the
young. Too often they choose in haste a wrong profession or business, and find after
two or three years, that they have made an irretrievable mistake, and, if I may
borrow a railway phrase, have got on the wrong line of rails. But the young are not
the only persons who need the exhortation of the text in this day. It is preeminently
advice for the times. Hurry is the characteristic of the age in which we live. On every
side you see the many driving furiously, like Jehu, after business or politics. They
seem unable to find time for calm, quiet, serious reflection about their souls and a
world to come. Men and brethren, consider your ways. Beware of the infection of the
times.

II. A PARTICULAR DIRECTION. Ask for the old paths. We want a return to the old
paths of our reformers. I grant they were rough workmen, and made some mistakes.
They worked under immense difficulties, and deserve tender judgment and fair
consideration. But they revived out of the dust grand foundation truths which had
been long buried and forgotten. By embalming those truths in our Articles and
Liturgy, by incessantly pressing them on the attention of our forefathers, they
changed the whole character of this nation, and raised a standard of true doctrine
and practice, which, after three centuries, is a power in the land, and has an
insensible influence on English character to this very day. Can we mend these old
paths? Novelty is the idol of the day. But I have yet to learn that all new views of
religion are necessarily better than the old. It is not so in the work of mens hands. I
doubt if this nineteenth century could produce an architect who could design better
buildings than the Parthenon or Coliseum, or a mason who could rear fabrics which
will last so long. It certainly is not so in the work of mens minds. Thucydides is not
superseded by Macaulay, nor Homer by Milton. Why, then, are we to suppose that
old theology is necessarily inferior to new? I ask boldly, What extensive good has
ever been done in the world, except by the theology of the old paths? and I
confidently challenge a reply. There never has been any spread of the Gospel, any
conversion of nations or countries, any successful evangelistic work, excepting by
the old-fashioned distinct doctrines of the early Christians and the reformers.

III. A PRECIOUS PROMISE. Ye shall find rest to your souls. Let it never be
forgotten that rest of conscience is the secret want of a vast portion of mankind. The
labouring and heavy laden are everywhere: they are a multitude that man can
scarcely number; they are to be found in every climate and in every country under
the sun. Everywhere you will find trouble, care, sorrow: anxiety, murmuring,
discontent, and unrest. Did God create man at the beginning to be unhappy? Most
certainly not. Are human governments to blame because men are not happy? At
most to a very slight extent. The fault lies far too deep to be reached by human laws.
Sin and departure from God are the true reasons why men are everywhere restless,
labouring, and heavy laden. Sin is the universal disease which infects the whole
earth. The rest that Christ gives in the old paths is an inward thing. It is rest of
heart, rest of conscience, rest of mind, rest of affection, rest of will. (Bishop J. C.
Ryle.)

Standing in the old paths

I. THE DANGERS OF JUDGING OF RELIGION, WITHOUT LONG AND DILIGENT

EXAMINATION. Happy would it be for the present age if men were distrustful of their
own abilities.

II. THE REASONABLENESS OF SEARCHING INTO ANTIQUITY, OR OF ASKING FOR THE

OLD PATHS. With regard to the order and government of the primitive Church, we
may doubtless follow their authority with perfect security; they could not possibly be
ignorant of laws executed, and customs practised, by themselves; nor would they,
even supposing them corrupt, serve any interests of their own, by handing down
false accounts to posterity. Nor is this the only, though perhaps the chief use of these
writers; for, in matters of faith, and points of doctrine, those, at least, who lived in
the ages nearest to the times of the apostles, undoubtedly deserve to be consulted.
The oral doctrines, and occasional explications of the apostles, must have been
treasured up in the memory of their audiences, and transmitted for some time from
father to son.

III. THE HAPPINESS WHICH ATTENDS A WELL-GROUNDED BELIEF AND STEADY

PRACTICE OF RELIGION. Suspense and uncertainty distract the soul, disturb its
motions, and retard its operations; while we doubt in what manner to worship God,
there is great danger lest we should neglect to worship Him at all. There is a much
closer connection between practice and speculation than is generally imagined. A
man disquieted with scruples concerning any important article of religion, will, for
the most part, find himself indifferent and cold, even to those duties which he
practised before with the most active diligence and ardent satisfaction. Let him then
ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and he shall find rest for his soul. (S.
Johnson, LL. D.)

On the appeal to antiquity in matters of religion

The appeal to antiquity is worth your closest observation, as one which may as
well be made in our own days as in those of the prophet Jeremiah. The paths which
are to be sought for are the old paths, and it is their age which seems represented
as giving them safety. Now it were quite idle to assert that this is in all cases a sound
view, or that it will necessarily hold good when applied to the businesses and
sciences of life. If we attempted, for example, to introduce into natural philosophy,
the principle that the old paths are the best, we should only be urging men to travel
back to a broad waste of ignorance, and to settle themselves once more in the
crudest and most erroneous of opinions. We are quite ready with the like admission,
in matters of civil polity. We hold unreservedly that nothing human can come to its
perfection at once; and that whilst there are certain fundamental principles which
can never be swerved from with safety, the determination of the best form of
government for a community demands many successive experiments; so that one
generation is not to hand down its institutions to the next, as not to be violated
because not to be improved. The legacy of the fathers should be their experience,
and that experience should be carried by the children as a new element into their
political competitions. But the principle which applies not to sciences or
governments may be applicable, without reservation, to religion. Religious truth is
matter of revelation, and not therefore left to be searched out and determined by
successive experiments; whereas truth of any other description is only to be come at
by painful investigation; and until that investigation has been carried to the farthest
possible limit, we have no right to claim such a fixedness for our positions, that
those who come after us must receive them as irreversible. Yet we would not have it
thought, that even in matters of religion, we yield unqualified submission to the
voice of antiquity. We hold that there is room for discovery, strictly and properly so
called in theology, as well as in astronomy or chemistry. We ourselves must
necessarily be more advantageously circumstanced than any of our fathers, when
the matter in question is the fulfilment of prophecy. Prophecy is of course nothing
but anticipated history; and the further on, therefore, we live, in the march of those
occurrences which are to make up the story of our globe and its tenants, the more
power have we to find the foretold in the fulfilled, and thus to lessen the amount of
unaccomplished prediction. Now when this exception has been made, we do not
hesitate to apply our text to the disclosures of revelation, and to assert that in all
disputes upon doctrines, and in all debates upon creeds, it is the part of wise men to
appeal to antiquity.
1. When we speak of antiquity, we refer to Christianity in its young days, whilst
the Church was still warm with her first love, and her teachers were but little
removed from those who had held intercourse with Christ and His apostles.
It is in this manner, for example, that we introduce the authority of antiquity
into the question of infant baptism. Unless apostles baptised infants, and
unless they taught that infants were to be received into the Church, it seems
well-nigh incredible that those who lived near their times, and must have
obtained instruction almost from their very lips, should have adopted the
custom of infant baptism. We would advance another illustration of the
worth of the witness of antiquity, and we fetch it from a fundamental matter
of doctrine. We believe, undoubtedly, that the Bible is adapted to all ages of
the world and all ranks of society; and that the Spirit which indited it, is as
ready now, as in the early days of Christianity, to act as its interpreter and
open up its truths. We are assured, therefore, that the sublime doctrine of
the Trinity, if it, indeed, be contained in the Word of inspiration, will be
made known to every prayerful and diligent student; and that there will need
no acquaintance with the creeds or the commentaries of primitive Christians,
in order to the apprehending of this grand discovery of the nature of
Godhead. But, at the same time, when all kinds of opinions are broached,
diametrically at variance with the doctrine of the Trinity, and men labour to
devise and support interpretations of Scripture which shall quite overthrow
this foundation stone of Christianity, we count it of no mean worth, that in
writings which have come down to us from days just succeeding the
 apostolic, we can find the Trinity in unity as broadly asserted, and as clearly
defined, as in any of the treatises which now professedly undertake its
defence. Now you will understand, from these instances, the exact use of
antiquity, in matters of religion; and the sense in which it may fairly be
expected that the old paths are the right. Where was your religion till Luther
arose? is the question broached in every dispute between the Romish
Church and the Reformed. The Romish Church prides itself on being the old
Church, and reproaches the Reformed with being the new. And we admit, in
all frankness, that if the Romish Church made good its pretensions--if it
could win for itself the praise of antiquity, and fix fairly on the Protestant
newness, Popery would gain an almost unassailable position; for we are
inclined to hold it as little less than an axiom in religion, that the oldest
Christianity is the best. But we are quite ready to meet the Roman Catholic
on the ground of antiquity; and to decide the goodness by deciding the
oldness of our paths. We contend, that whatever is held in common by the
two Churches may be proved from Scripture, and shown to have been
maintained by the earliest Christians; but that everything received by the
Romish and rejected by the Protestant, can neither be substantiated by the
Bible, nor sanctioned by the practice of the primitive Church.
2. There is not one amongst you, who ought not to know something of this
appeal to antiquity. We may make the like assertion in regard to the
Christian Sabbath. If asked for our authority for keeping holy the first day of
the week, in place of the seventh, you cannot produce a direct scriptural
command; but we are in possession of such clear proof, that the apostles and
their immediate successors made the first day their Sabbath, that we may
claim to the observance all the force of Divine institution. This, however, we
must all see, is employing the practice of antiquity where we have not a
distinct precept of Scripture; in other words, we prove the right paths by
proving the old paths. We are not, indeed, able to appeal to primitive
Christians, and to show you this union of Church or State as being
sanctioned by apostolical practice. Of course, until the rulers of the kingdom
embraced the faith of Christ (and this was not of early occurrence),
Christianity could not become established. But, as Milner observes, from the
earliest ages of patriarchal government, when holy men were favoured with a
Divine revelation, governors taught the true religion, and did not permit
their subjects to propagate atheism, idolatry, or false religion. There was, as
under the Jewish constitution, an unquestionable authority which the
magistrates possessed in ecclesiastical regulations: so that union between
Church and State, in place of being novel, can be traced up almost from the
beginning of the world. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

The old paths

I. The denomination.
1. Old paths. Way of--
(1) Obedience.
(2) Worship.
(3) Piety.
 2. Old, because--
(1) Ordained from eternity.
(2) Herein all the saints haw walked.
(3) Tried, and found pleasant and profitable.

II. THE DESPOT. Good way.

1. A path may be old, yet not good; this is both.
2. When may a path be called good?
(1) When safe.
(2) Direct.
(3) Frequented.
(4) Pleasant.
(5) Firm and passable.

III. THE DIRECTIONS. They who seek this path should bell.
1. Cautious in their observations.
2. Earnest in their inquiries.
3. Prompt in entering thereon.

IV. The destination.

1. In the journey many blessings of rest will be enjoyed, as contentment,
satisfaction, cheerfulness, security.
2. Afterwards there will be fulness of rest: the path leads to eternal repose,
happiness, glory. (Sermon Framework.)

The good old path

Men are travellers. No continuing city here; no rest. Days upon earth but a
shadow; none abiding. Must go on--from earth, with its cares and sorrows and
privileges and joys--either to heaven or hell.

I. A solemn exhortation.
1. We should ascertain what path we are walking in. Men do not think enough
about spiritual things. Many a poor misguided traveller would enter the right
path and obtain eternal life if he gave heed to the things which make for his
peace.
(1) This examination of the path should be made immediately. Not a
moment to be lost. Next step may plunge you in some deadly pit.
(2) This examination should be made faithfully. Not superficially. Our being
different from those around us is not enough, for we may still be wrong.
Must bring our conduct and habits of life to the standard of Gods Word,
and compare them with that.
(3) This examination should be made prayerfully. It is useless for us to make
it in our own strength or wisdom; but, influenced and guided by the
Spirit of Christ, we cannot err.
 2. We must not only ascertain if our way be wrong, but inquire for the right
path.
(1) It is here termed the old path. The way of patriarchs, prophets, apostles,
good and holy of every clime and age. The everlasting Gospel has existed
from eternity.
(2) It is to be sought out. Eternity depends on the issue.
3. Having found the right path, we are to walk in it. Knowledge alone is not
sufficient; there must be practical application of it.

II. A gracious promise.

1. The rest promised is of the highest kind. For the soul. The soul requires it.
Burdened with sin; filled with feverish anxiety; like a ship tossed on a
troubled sea.
2. This rest can be bestowed by God alone. It is the fruit of our union with Him,
the result of our being His dear children.
3. In what does it consist? In our being forgiven; in our being conscious of the
Divine favour; in our having the Spirit of Christ in our souls; in our
dependence upon the promises. (H. B. Ingrain.)

The good old way

I. The nature of the old way from which adam so fatally swerved, and all his
descendants with him.
1. The way of self-denial. As this principle involves resistance to temptation,
control of temper and overthrow of natural inclinations and habits, it is
necessarily an important ingredient of true religion; from the nature of the
case, from the bare fact of its being amenable to the superior will of the
Almighty, an indispensable requisite of finite perfection in all instances
whatsoever.
2. The way of implicit dependence upon God. Until the foul spirit of restless
discontent took possession of his breast Adam was sufficed to rest and rely
for everything upon the wisdom, power, love and benignity of Him who
created him content to know no more than what He taught him, and to
exercise his mental faculties and reasoning powers in entire subordination to
his Superiors wish, questioning nothing, but taking everything as perfect
that came from Him. The knowledge, service and worship of God were the
objects of all he thought, saw, or did. Beyond them there was nothing he
eared to desire or know.
3. The way of humility. Knowledge says St. Paul, puffeth up, but charity
edifieth. What knowledge? Not the chastened, subdued, heaven-taught and
heaven-tempered wisdom which guided the soul and enlarged the
understanding of Adam before he fell, but that meretricious counterfeit of it-
-that now delusive light, whose pride-awakening, man-flattering beams,
brought first to bear on his foolish heart by the arch destroyer at the fall,
allured him to his destruction.
 II. HOW WE MAY OBEY THE COMMAND OF THE TEXT IN RETURNING TO THIS WAY.
Whoever in earnest desires to recover his lost innocence, and the forfeited favour of
his Creator, and to return to that better land, that state of ineffable bliss and purity,
which was the original birthright of us all, are taught in the Gospel of the grace of
God that the first step in that direction is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour
of sinners; which is nothing else than that filial trust or confidence we have already
mentioned as displayed by Adam before he fell.

III. The necessity and advantage, as well as duty, of obeying the advice given in
the text. (S. H. Simpson.)

The respect due to antiquity

It has been well said by Lord Bacon, that the antiquity of past ages is the youth of
the world--and therefore it is an inversion of the right order, to look for greater
wisdom in some former generation than there should be in our present day. The
time in which we now live, says he, is properly the ancient time, because now the
world is ancient; and not that time which we call ancient, when we look in a
retrograde direction, and by a computation backward from ourselves. There must
be a delusion, then, in that homage which is given to the wisdom of antiquity, as d it
bore the same superiority over the wisdom of the present times, which the wisdom
of an old does over that of a young man. It is in vain to talk of Socrates, and Plato,
and Aristotle. Only grant that there may still be as many good individual specimens
of humanity as before; and a Socrates now, with all the additional lights which have
sprung up in the course of intervening centuries to shine upon his understanding,
would be a greatly wiser man than the Socrates of two thousand years ago. But
however important thus to reduce the deference that is paid to antiquity; and with
whatever grace and propriety it has been done by him who stands at the head of the
greatest revolution in philosophy.
we shall incur the danger of running into most licentious waywardness, if we
receive not the principle, to which I have now adverted, with two modifications. Our
first modification is, that though, in regard to all experimental truth, the world
should be wiser now than it was centuries ago, this is the fruit not of our contempt
or our heedlessness in regard to former ages, but the fruit of our most respectful
attention to the lessons which their history affords. We do right in not submitting to
the dictation of antiquity; but that is no cause why we should refuse to be informed
by her--for this were throwing us back again to the worlds infancy, like the second
childhood of him whom disease had bereft of all his recollections. And so, again, in
the language of Bacon, Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a
stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well
taken then to make progression. But there is a second modification, which, in the
case of a single individual of the species, it is easy to understand, and which we shall
presently apply to the whole species. We may conceive of a man, that, after many
years of vicious indulgence, he is at once visited by the lights of conscience and
memory; and is enabled to contrast the dislike, and the dissatisfaction, and the
dreariness of heart, which now prey on the decline of his earthly existence, with all
the comparative innocence which gladdened its hopeful and happy morning. As he
bethinks him of his early home, of the piety which flourished there, and that holy
atmosphere in which he was taught to breathe with kindred aspirations, he cannot
picture to himself the bliss and the beauty of such a scene, mellowed as it is by
distance, and mingled with the dearest recollections of parents, and sisters, and
other kindred now mouldering in the dust, he cannot recall for a moment this fond,
though faded imagery, without sighing in the bitterness of his heart, after the good
old way. Now, what applies to one individual may apply to the species. In a
prolonged course of waywardness, they may have wandered very far from the truth
of heaven. And after, perhaps, a whole dreary millennium of guilt and of darkness,
may some gifted individual arise, who can look athwart the gloom, and descry the
purer and the better age of Scripture light which lies beyond it. And as he compares
all the errors and the mazes of that vast labyrinth into which so many generations
had been led by the jugglery of deceivers, with that simple but shining path which
conducts the believer unto glory, let us wonder not that the aspiration of his pious
and patriotic heart should be for the good old way. We now see wherein it is that the
modern might excel the ancient. In regard to experimental truth, he can be as much
wiser than his predecessors, as the veteran and the observant sage is wiser than the
unpractised stripling, to whom the world is new, and who has yet all to learn of its
wonders and of its ways. The voice that is now emitted from the schools, whether of
physical or of political science, is the voice of the worlds antiquity. The voice
emitted from the same schools, in former ages, was the voice of the worlds
childhood, which then gave forth in lisping utterance the conceits and the crudities
of its young unchastened speculation. But in regard to things not experimental, in
regard even to taste, or to imagination, or to moral principle, as well as to the stable
and unchanging lessons of Divine truth, there is no such advancement. For the
perfecting of these, we have not to wait the slow processes of observation and
discovery, handed down from one generation to another. They address themselves
more immediately to the spirits eye; and just as in the solar light of day, our
forefathers saw the whole of visible creation as perfectly as we--so in the lights,
whether of fancy, or of conscience, or of faith, they may have had as just and vivid a
perception of natures beauties; or they may have had as ready a discrimination, and
as religious a sense of all the proprieties of life; or they may have had a veneration as
solemn, and an acquaintance as profound, with the mysteries of revelation, as the
men of our modern and enlightened day. And, accordingly, we have as sweet or
sublime an eloquence, and as transcendent a poetry, and as much both of the
exquisite and noble in all the fine arts, and a morality as delicate and dignified; and,
to crown the whole, as exulted and as informed a piety in the remoter periods of the
world, as among ourselves, to whom the latter ends of the world have come. In
respect of these, we are not on higher vantage-ground than many of the generations
that have gone by. But neither are we on lower vantage ground. We have access to
the same objects. We are in possession of the same faculties. And, if between the age
in which we live, and some bright and bygone era, there should have intervened the
deep and the long-protracted haze of many centuries, whether of barbarism in taste,
or of profligacy in morals, or of superstition in Christianity, it will only heighten, by
comparison, to our eyes, the glories of all that is excellent; and if again awakened to
light and to liberty, it will only endear the more to our hearts the good old way. (T.
Chalmers, D. D.)

Steadfastness in the old paths

In what respect should we follow old times? Now here there is this obvious
maxim--what God has given us from heaven cannot be improved, what man
discovers for himself does admit of improvement: we follow old times then so far as
God has spoken in them; but in those respects in which God has not spoken in them,
we are not bound to follow them. Now knowledge connected merely with this
present world, we have been left to acquire for ourselves. How we may till our lands
and increase our crops; how we may build our houses, and buy and sell and get gain;
how we may cross the sea in ships; how we may make fine linen for the merchant,
or, like Tubal-Cain, be artificers in brass and iron: as to these objects of this world,
necessary indeed for the time, not lastingly important, God has given us no clear
instruction. Here then we have no need to follow the old ways. Besides, in many of
these arts and pursuits, there is really neither right nor wrong at all; but the good
varies with times and places. Each country has its own way, which is best for itself,
and bad for others. Again, God has given us no authority in questions of science. If
we wish to boast ,bout little matters, we know more about the motions of the
heavenly bodies than Abraham, whose seed was in number as the stars; we can
measure the earth, and fathom the sea, and weigh the air, more accurately than
Moses, the inspired historian of the creation; and we can discuss the varied
inhabitants of this earth better than Solomon. But let us turn to that knowledge
which God has given, and which therefore does not admit of improvement by lapse
of time; this is religious knowledge. God taught Adam how to please Him, and Noah,
and Abraham, and Job. He has taught every nation all over the earth sufficiently for
the moral training of every individual. In all these cases, the worlds part of the work
has been to pervert the truth, not to disengage it from obscurity. The new ways are
the crooked ones. The nearer we mount up to the time of Adam, or Noah, or
Abraham, or Job, the purer light of truth we gain; as we recede from it we meet with
superstitions, fanatical excesses, idolatries, and immoralities. So again in the case of
the Jewish Church, since God expressly gave them a precise law, it is clear man
could not improve upon it; he could but add the traditions of men. Lastly, in the
Christian Church, we cannot add or take away, as regards the doctrines that are
contained in the inspired volume, as regards the faith once delivered to the saints.
Other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ (1Co 3:11).
But it may be said that, though the Word of God is an infallible rule of faith, yet it
requires interpreting, and why, as time goes on, should we not discover in it more
than we at present know on the subject of religion and morals? But this is hardly a
question of practical importance to us as individuals; for in truth a very little
knowledge is enough for teaching a man his duty: and, since Scripture is intended to
teach us our duty, surely it was never intended as a storehouse of mere knowledge.
Little knowledge is required for religious obedience. The poor and rich, the learned
and unlearned, are here on a level. We have all of us the means of doing our duty; we
have not the will, and this no knowledge can give. We have need to subdue our own
minds, and this no other person can do for us. Practical religious knowledge is a
personal gift, and, further, a gift from God; and, therefore, as experience has
hitherto shown, more likely to be obscured than advanced by the lapse of time. But
further, we know of the existence of an evil principle in the world, corrupting and
resisting the truth in its measure, according to the truths clearness and purity. Our
Saviour, who was the truth itself, was the most spitefully entreated of all by the
world. It has been the case with His followers too. The purer and more valuable the
gift which God bestows, far from this being a security for the truths abiding and
advancing, rather the more grievously has been the gift abused (1Jn 2:18; 2Ti 3:13).
Such is the case as regards the knowledge of our duty,--that kind of knowledge
which alone is really worth earnest seeking. And there is an important reason why
we should acquiesce in it;--because the conviction that things are so has no slight
influence in forming our minds into that perfection of the religious character at
which it is our duty ever to be aiming. While we think it possible to make some great
and important improvements in the subject of religion, we shall be unsettled,
restless, impatient; we shall be drawn from the consideration of improving
ourselves, and from using the day while it is given us, by the visions of a deceitful
hope, which promises to make rich but tendeth to penury. On the other hand, as we
cease to be theorists we shall become practical men; we shall have less of self-
confidence and arrogance, more of inward humility and diffidence; we shall be less
likely to despise others, and think of our own intellectual powers with less
complacency. It is one great peculiarity of the Christians character to be dependent;
to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission; to be able to view himself in a
subordinate place; to love to sit in the dust. To his ears the words of the text are as
sweet music: Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old
paths, etc. The history of the old dispensation affords us a remarkable confirmation
of what has been argued; for in the time of the law there was an increase of religious
knowledge by fresh revelations. From the time of Samuel especially to the time of
Malachi, the Church was bid look forward for a growing illumination, which, though
not necessary for religious obedience, subserved the establishment of religious
comfort. Now, observe how careful the inspired prophets of Israel are to prevent any
kind of disrespect being shown to the memory of former times, on account of that
increase of religious knowledge with which the later ages were favoured; and if such
reverence for the past were a duty among the Jews when the Saviour was still to
come, much more is it the duty of Christians. Now, as to the reverence enjoined and
taught the Jews towards persons and times past, we may notice first the
commandment given them to honour and obey their parents and elders. This,
indeed, is a natural law. But that very circumstance surely gives force to the express
and repeated injunctions given them to observe it, sanctioned too (as it was) with a
special promise. But, further, to bind them to the observance of this duty, the past
was made the pledge of the future, hope was grounded upon memory; all prayer for
favour sent them back to the old mercies of God. The Lord hath been mindful of us,
He will bless us; this was the form of their humble expectation. Lastly, as Moses
directed the eyes of his people towards the line of prophets which the Lord their God
was to raise up from among them, ending in the Messiah, they in turn dutifully exalt
Moses, whose system they were superseding. Samuel, David, Isaiah, Micah,
Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, each in succession, bear testimony to Moses. Oh,
that we had duly drunk into this spirit of reverence and godly fear. Doubtless we are
far above the Jews in our privileges; we are favoured with the news of redemption;
we know doctrines, which righteous men of old time earnestly desired to be told,
and were not. Yet our honours are our shame, when we contrast the glory given us
with our love of the world, our fear of men, our lightness of mind, our sensuality,
our gloomy tempers. What need have we to look with wonder and reverence at those
saints of the old covenant, who with less advantages yet so far surpassed us; and still
more at those of the Christian Church, who both had higher gifts of grace and
profited by them! (J. H. Newman, D. D.)

Religion an ancient path, and a good way

I. The instructive view given of religion.

1. It is an ancient path. The Gospel is coeval with the Fall. All the Mosaic rites
 and ceremonies were typical of the blessings of the Gospel dispensation, and
taught the faithful worshipper to look forward to the Saviour.
2. It is a good way.
(1) This is the way which God Himself, of His infinite wisdom and goodness,
hath marked out for us.
(2) Those who walk in it may expect all necessary guidance and direction.
(3) In wisdoms way we have the best of company.
(4) It will afford the purest pleasure, as we advance in it, and will infallibly
conduct us to perfect and endless happiness and glory.

II. The duty enjoined.

1. We are to use every endeavour to become acquainted with the ways of
religion.
(1) If we are accountable beings, what shall we think of those who seem to
have formed a resolution to banish serious reflection from their minds;
who plunge themselves into vice, dissipate themselves in pleasure, in
vanity, and in every trifle that strikes their imagination; and devote
themselves to those things, body and soul, without ever stopping to
consider what they are doing, whither they are going, and what the
consequences must be of their madness and folly!
(2) To self-reflection we add reflection on the Word of God.
(a) The way therein marked out is a way of holiness and purity.
(b) The superior excellence of the Scriptures, as a rule of life, will be still
further evident if we consider their high authority.
2. Our knowledge must be reduced to practice; when we have found the good
way, we must walk in it.
(1) We should immediately enter upon a religious course, after due
information concerning it.
(2) We should proceed in a religious course with the greatest care and
circumspection.
(3) We should endeavour to make continual progress in a religious course.
3. It is our duty to persevere in a religious course, it will not answer a travellers
purpose, who has a necessary journey before him, to proceed a little way in
it, and then give over, or take a different path that leads a contrary way. So,
in the ways of religion, he, and he only, who holds out to the end shall be
saved.

III. The import of the gracious promise, by which the duty here enjoined is
recommended and enforced. The rest here promised consists--
1. In our being delivered from those uneasy doubts and anxieties of mind which
arise from an uncertainty as to the way in which we ought to go.
2. Those who walk in the good way of religion find rest to their souls, as they are
thereby delivered from the great cause of inward uneasiness--the sense of
unpardoned guilt; or, in other words, from the terrors of an accusing
conscience.
 3. They who walk in the ways of religion find rest to their souls, as they are
thereby delivered from those sources of disquietude which spring from sinful
and unruly passions.
4. This good way infallibly conducts those who walk in it to uninterrupted and
everlasting happiness in the world to come. (James Ross, D. D.)

Reverence for the old things

Jeremiah was the most unpopular of the prophets. First because he was somewhat
of a pessimist, uttering predictions which the events proved true enough, but which
were painted in too gloomy colours to suit the tastes of the people. Secondly,
because he never flattered. And a third, and even greater, reason for the dislike, was
that they regarded him as old-fashioned, out of date, an antiquated, obsolete old
fogey, with his eyes behind. He was always harping on the old times when people
lived simple lives and feared God. And the people sneered at him as a sort of fossil,
as a man who had been born a century too late. The people had a disease upon them
which might be called Egyptomania. They wanted to form a close alliance with
Egypt, and to adopt all their modes of life, their dress, furniture, luxuries, self-
indulgences, political ideas, military system, laws, morals, and religion. There was to
be a clean sweep made of all that Israel had loved and believed in and by taking
heathen Egypt as a model they would speedily attain to Egypts greatness and
splendour. This was the craze against which the prophet set himself, and protested
in vain. For there are times when a people are determined to destroy themselves.
Are the old paths always Divine, and the new ways always as dangerous as this
prophet thought them? The answer has to be qualified, and there are more answers
than one. The Bible does not always speak in the same voice about it. If Jeremiah
looked back with lingering affection, St. Paul, who had seen the higher truth in
Christ, had his eyes in front, and advised us to forget the things which are behind.
And a greater than Paul has told us that every wise man will bring out of his treasury
things new and old. The man who sneers at everything which is old, and fancies that
wisdom always wears a brand new face, has precious little of the latter article
himself. The alphabet and the simple rules of arithmetic are as ancient as an
Egyptian mummy, but they are not out of date yet. We still need some of the things
which Noah and Abraham prized. On the other hand, the man who sets his face
against everything new is shutting his eyes to the light.

I. TO BIND OURSELVES TO THE OLD PATHS IS, FOR US AT LEAST, IN MANY THINGS
IMPOSSIBLE. We live in the midst of rapid movement and change, and we are carried
along by it in spite of ourselves. And if we could do it, it would be paralysing. It
would be the end of all healthy life and action. It is the distinguishing feature of
Christian nations to be forever casting off the old and putting on the new. It is a
dead religion which stands still and makes men stand still. The spirit of life in Christ
Jesus urges the world on, away from a dead past nearer to the golden age which is to
be. I hardly dare bring before you the things which are going on in China. And it all
comes from a blind, brutal, obstinate clinging to the old paths. The world moves on,
and the Chinese refuse to move. God in His mercy has brought us out of all that, and
given us eyes to see that through the ages one unceasing purpose runs, and the
minds of men are widened with the process of the suns. There are a hundred things
in nearly every department of life which we do and know and understand better
than our fathers. We should never dream of going back in science, machinery,
politics, government, freedom of thought and speech, or in religion.

II. TO FORSAKE ALL THE OLD PATHS IS A FOLLY QUITE AS BLIND AND SELF-
DESTRUCTIVE AS TO CLING TO THEM ALL. Wisdom was not born in the present century.
It dwelt with God before the foundation of the world, and He gave some of it to men
who lived thousands of years before our time. We are cleverer than the ancients in
some things, but not in all. The Greek thinkers were superior to the best thinkers of
today. We could not now produce such books as Plato wrote, and the Hebrew
prophets and psalmists put all our cleverest writers into the shade. We cannot build
temples as the men of old built. We cannot paint pictures or carve statues or create
things of beauty as they did. We have no Homers and Virgils, Dantes, Miltons,
Shakespeares, Bunyans. In moral and religious things many of those greatest men
were far in advance of our best, and we can only reach some of their excellence by
learning of them and treading in the old paths. In fact, in the greatest things of life
the old ways are the everlasting ways, and the only ways of safety. They have stood
the test of time. For the momentous questions of morality and righteousness,
worship and reverence, sin and human need, God and immortality, spiritual
mysteries and things unseen, we have still to sit like children at the feet of those
giants of faith, those great souls from Moses to St. Paul, who walked with God and
spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. We cannot dispense with the Ten
Commandments yet. And as for the Sermon on the Mount, its very perfection is our
despair. If you want to find the highest types of manhood, you will stand rather in
the old paths than the new; you will look back rather than around you. If we want to
know what sin is, we must go to the Bible and the Cross of Jesus Christ, and not to
the modem ideas, which often make light of sin and treat it as irresponsible disease.
If we want to learn the depth of penitence we must go to the soul-stricken David or
the weeping Peter. And if we would see light beyond the grave we must go all that
way back and stand with the women and the disciples before an open sepulchre. Yes,
and perhaps above all things, if we would learn how to live and love, to endure and
to hope, to suffer and to die, it is only in the old Bible paths that we can get the
lesson. The new lights will show us how to get money faster, and to make life
smoother and more comfortable, but they will not help us to be brave in difficulties,
patient in cross bearing, and fearless in the hour of death. (J. G. Greenhough, M. A.)

The Jesus way

You must not be discouraged, said a Kiowa Indian, if we Indians come slow. It
is a long road for us to leave our old Indian ways, and we have to think a great deal;
but I am sure that all the Indian people will come into the Jesus road for I see that
these white Jesus people are here to help us, and I thank them for coming. Tell the
Christian people to pray for us. We are ignorant, but we want to be led aright, that
we may come into the Jesus road. The quaint Indian expressions are very
suggestive. It is indeed a long road to leave our old ways; and when we feel that we
are safe in the Jesus road, we should take time to ask ourselves if we are sure we
are treading it as we should, if we are sure we are not walking in some path that
seems to run parallel with it, but which in reality is leading us farther and farther
away. (Christian Age.)

Ye shall find rest for your souls.--

Soul rest
It is the distinguishing mark of the good and old way that in it men find rest
for their souls. You may judge between the true Gospel and the false, between that
which is of God and that which is of man, by this one test. As by their fruits ye shall
know them, so by this one fruit among the rest: Does it bring rest into the soul? If
not, it is not of God; but if it brings a clear, sure, true, honest rest into the soul, then
it cometh of standing in the good way. Remember that rest was the promise of the
Saviour. Come unto Me--not to anything else, but unto Me, all ye that labour and
are heavy laden, and I--Myself personally--will give you rest But what next? Take
My yoke upon you and learn of Me, and ye shall find rest--that is another rest, still
deeper, which you find in service. Oh, what a blessed Saviour we follow, who
everywhere giveth us rest! Rest is enjoyed by believers now. But you will never find
it anywhere else; as in no other form of religion, so in no other form of pursuit. If
you follow wealth you will not find rest there. I spoke some time ago with a
gentleman whom I believed to own more than a million, and I ventured to say that I
should think after a man had got a million, it would not be worth while to have any
more, because he could not get through that lot. Ah, he said, I did not know; and,
truly, I did not know; but yet I knew enough to perceive that if a man had a million
millions he would not be content. And if you go in for health and pursue that with all
diligence, as you might readily do, yet even in the best health there is no rest. It is a
noble gift; they who lose it know how precious it is; but there is no rest in that. And
as in honour, or any earthly thing, of themselves they are the occasion of disquiet;
they often are a seed plot wherein thorns grow that pierce us. But there is rest in
Jesus, there is rest in a solid, simple faith in Him, but there is no rest anywhere else.

I. In thy good way we find rest, if we walk therein.

1. There is the way of pardon by an atonement. What a rest that brings to the
conscience! A crushed conscience is but an echo of a truth. There is that in
the nature of God and in the necessity of things, of which the conscience is
but a faint echo, and when your conscience tells you sin must be punished, it
tells you the truth; there is no escape from that necessity, and because Jesus
suffered in our room and stead here is a glorious gate of salvation, but there
is no other. So the way of pardon by an atonement gives rest to the
conscience.
2. The way of believing the Word of God as being inspired of God, and being our
authoritative guide, is a great rest to the understanding, But do you
understand it all? No, sir, I do not; I do not want to. I want to love a great
deal more, but I do not care so much about growing in that particular
direction of finding out riddles and being able to thread the spheres. But if I
could love my Lord better, and be more like Him, I would be happy. Well,
but you do not understand it, and yet you believe it. Yes, I do; I find it is
such a great thing to move my little bark side by side with a great rock, so
high that I cannot see the top of it, because then I know I shall be sweetly
sheltered there. Well, it is almost as good not to know as it is to know about a
great many things, and sometimes better not to know, because then you can
adore and consider that when faith bows before the majesty of an awful
mystery she pays to God such homage as cherubim and seraphim pay Him
before His throne.
3. There is a way which Christians learn of trusting their affairs with God which
 gives a general rest to their minds. You see, if you are truly a Christian you
have not got anything, you have given it all to the Lord. Cannot you therefore
trust Him with it? And pray which part of your business would you like to
manage yourself? Mark it off and then make a black mark against it, for you
will have no end of mischief and trouble there. Oh, happy is that man who
leaves everything, soul and body, entirely in the hands of God, and is content
with His Divine will.
4. The way of obedience to the Lord gives rest to the soul. He that believes in
Jesus obeys Jesus. Oh, if you do right and stand fast in your integrity you
shall wear that little herb called heart-ease, and he that weareth that is
more happy than a king! and if you can go home at night, and that little bird
in your bosom, called conscience, can sweetly sing to you that you have done
a right thing, you shall rest in peace. And, mark you, even as to temporal
things in the long run you shall be no loser; but if you should be, you will
count it an honour to lose for Christs sake and for the right, and in the end,
if you lose silver you shall gain gold. The way of obedience to Divine
command gives rest to the soul.
5. The way of close communion with Christ is a way of profound rest unto the
soul. Once get to be in Him, and to abide in Him, let your communion with
Him be unbroken day after day, month after month, and year after year, and
ye shall find rest unto your soul.

II. The rest which is found by walking in the good way is good for the soul.
1. There is a rest which rusts and injures the soul; but Gospel rest is of a very
peculiar kind; it brings satisfaction, but it never verges on self-satisfaction.
Oh, to be satisfied in Christ Jesus! Full, and therefore craving to be fuller;
fed, and therefore hungering to have more.
2. Next, the rest that comes with Christ is a sense of safety, but it is not a sense
of presumption. The man that is most safe in Christ is just the man that
would not run any risks whatever. Secure, but not carnally secure; in safety,
but not presumptuous.
3. This blessed rest creates content, but it also excites a desire of progress. The
man that is perfectly content to be saved in Christ Jesus is also very anxious
to grow in grace.
4. He that rests in God is also delivered from all legal fears, but he is supplied
with superior motives for holiness. The fear of hell and the hope of heaven
are poor motives to effort; but to feel I cannot be lost; the blood of Christ is
between me and the everlasting fire; I am bound for the everlasting
kingdom, and by the certainties of the Divine promise as a believer I shall
never be ashamed.

III. REST OF THIS KIND OUGHT TO BE ENJOYED NOW BY EVERY CHRISTIAN. It is

enjoyed by many of us, and it is a grievous error when it is not the case with all real
Christians. Some of you say: I trust I am a Christian, but I do not get much of this
rest. It is your own fault. I will tell you one thing, though--you would find more rest
if you walked in the middle of the way. The best walking to heaven is in the middle
of the road; on either side where the hedges are there is a ditch as well. I do not care
to go to heaven along the ditch, on the outside of the road. Have you never heard the
American story of a gentleman who invited a friend up to his orchard to come and
eat some of his apples--he had such exquisite apples? But though he invited his
friend several times, he never came. At last he said: I wish you would come and
taste my fruit--it is wonderful, just in perfection now. He said: Well, to tell you the
truth! have tasted it, and I was ill after it. Well, said he, how came that about?
Well, as I was riding along I picked up an apple that fell over into the road. Oh,
dear, he said, you do not understand it. I went miles to buy that peculiar sort of
apple to put round the edge of the orchard; that was for the boys, so that after they
had once tasted that particular apple they might not think of coming any farther.
But if you will go into the orchard you will find I have a very different sort of fruit
inside. Now, do you know that round the margin of religion the trees of repentance
and so forth grow--that fruit not over sweet to some palates. Oh, but if you would
come inside, but if you would come into the very centre, what joy you would have!
Surely, Christians, you have reason enough for delight. What a happy religion that is
in which pleasure is a precept! Rejoice in the Lord always is as much a command
as Thou shalt keep the Sabbath day. Remember that, and do pray God that you
may get into the very middle of the road, know you are there, and keep there year
after year by Divine grace, for then you shall find rest unto your souls. Well, then,
this rest ought to be enjoyed now. We ought to throw aside these anxious cares of
ours; if we do not, in what respect are we better than worldlings? An excursion to
heaven is the best relief from the cares of earth, and you may soon be there. Last
night a friend living in Colombo, Ceylon, said, Oh, it is a beautiful place to live in.
Although it is very hot where we live, yet in a few hours we get up in the eternal
snows where we shall be as cool as we wish. That is just what we are here. It is very
hot: the cares and trials of life often parch us, but in five minutes we can be up there
in the hill country, and behold the face of Him we love. Why do we not oftener go
there? (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The bugle call to rest

In nothing has God consulted economy less than in the provision He has made to
guard us from danger; and the Divine solicitude to rescue us from ruin is strongly
contrasted with our perpetual propensity to rush into it. In the moral constitution of
the mind, also, the safeguards against danger are no less remarkable than the
provisions for enjoyment. Why is conscience made so acutely wakeful and sensitive,
but with a view to guard us against the first approaches of sin? Why is memory
made so tenaciously to treasure up the results of past experience and failure, but to
repress that inconsiderate eagerness which would hurry us on to ruin? In the Bible
God has preeminently placed the strongest guards on the side of danger.

I. THE ATTRACTIVE VIEW OF RELIGION FURNISHED IN THIS ONE WORD REST. God
might have made religion a state of penance and bondage, and it would still have
been such had we been suffered to escape so as by fire. Instead of this, tie clothes
His religion with attractiveness and tenderness.
1. It brings rest to the understanding by the truths it reveals.
2. It brings rest to the conscience by the pardon it imparts.
3. It brings rest by revealing an adequate object on which the affections can
repose. The tendency of irreligion is to dishonour and degrade our nature, by
confining us to the world and to time; that of real religion is to exalt and
 ennoble the mind by connecting us with God and eternity. The one leaves us
to mourn, with orphaned heart; the other brings God before us as the object
most worthy of our affections, and able to meet and satisfy the vast capacities
of happiness which His own kindness has originated.

II. Causes of the rejection of religion by the worldly and inconsiderate.

1. A false estimate of themselves and of the evil and danger to which, in
consequence of sin, they are exposed.
2. The unsuspected influence of evil habits, and the progressive and hardening
tendency of uurepented sin. As Jeremy Taylor puts it: Vice first is pleasing,
then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man
is impenitent, then he is obstinate, then he resolves never to repent, and then
he dies.
3. The injurious and delusive results of a false and formal profession of religion.
Despair is a near neighbour of presumption. The system which is founded in
fraud must end in delusion. It fails to satisfy, as it fails to sanctify.
4. Because the period is extremely short in which the voice of God, as a Saviour,
can be heard at all. Mercy is like the rainbow which God set in the clouds to
remember mankind. It shines here as long as it is not hindered; but we must
never look for it after it is night. (Homiletic Magazine.)

JER 6:20
Your burnt offerings are not acceptable.

Waste worship

I. The manifest failure of these Jewish offerings.

1. By these their consecration was to be furthered. But they were foul.
2. By these their repentance was to be awakened. But they sinned shamefully.
3. By these their minds were to be directed to the Messiah. But, in their
arrogance and care for mere externals, they lost sight of spiritual lessons.
4. By these God was to be pleased and propitiated. The text indicates their
complete miscarriage in this respect.

II. The indignant question and repudiation.

1. God thrusts from Himself the offensive temple offerings. He demands the
heart. Nothing is sweet to God without love.
2. God stigmatises them as purposeless and waste.
3. Worship that offends God is waste, but also something more. Heart
hardening. Judgment. Punishment.
Lessons--
1. The most important matter about our spiritual things is their acceptableness
with God.
 2. Our best energies are needed, not for externals, but internals. (W. B. Haynes.)

Ostentatiousness of hypocrisy
Drones make more noise than bees, though they make neither honey nor wax. (J.
Trapp.)

JER 6:29-30
The bellows are burnt.

The bellows burnt

Apply to--

I. THE PROPHET HIMSELF. The prophet was exhausted before the people were
impressed. So also with Noah, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Jesus Himself. Nor since, by
apostles, confessors, zeal-consuming preachers, has the iron-hearted world become
melted; but they themselves have suffered and perished amid their work.
1. It is the preachers business to continue labouring till he is worn out.
2. The Gospel he preaches is the infallible test between the precious and the vile.

II. THE AFFLICTIONS WHICH GOD SENDS UPON UNGODLY MEN. Sent to see if they will
melt in the furnace or not. But where there is no grace in affliction the afflictions are
sooner exhausted than the sinners heart is made to melt under the heat caused
thereby--e.g., Pharaoh, not softened by all the plagues. Ahaz, when he was afflicted,
he sinned yet more and more. Jerusalem, often chastised, yet incorrigible. Sinners,
upon whom Gods judgments exert no melting power.

III. THE CHASTISEMENTS WHICH GOD SENDS UPON HIS OWN PEOPLE. The great
Refiner will have His gold pure, and will utterly remove our tin. Do not let it be said
that the bellows are used till they are worn out before our afflictions melt us to
repentance and cause us to let go our sins.

IV. The time is coming when the excitement of ungodly men will fail them. Many
activities are kept up by outward energies inciting men.
1. Excitement in pursuit of wealth. Yet how little will the joys of wealth stimulate
you in your last moments!
2. Excitement in pursuing fame. Alas! men burn away their lives for the
approbation of fellow creatures; and these fires will die down into darkness.
3. Living for pleasure; but satiety follows, and the flame of joy goes out.
4. Hypocrisy is with some their bellows; but this feigned zeal and pretended
piety will end in black despair.

V. THOSE EXCITEMENTS WHICH KEEP ALIVE THE CHRISTIANS ZEAL. In certain

Churches we have seen great blazings of enthusiasm, misnamed revivals, mere
agitations. Genuine revivals I love, but these spurious things are fanaticism. Why
was it the fire soon went out? The man who blew the bellows left the scene of
excitement, and darkness ensued. Our earnestness is worthless which depends on
such special ministrations. Is the fire in our soul burning less vehemently than in
years past? Our obligations to live for Christ are the same; our Masters claims on
our love are as strong; the objects for which we served God in the past are as
important. Should we grow less heavenly the nearer we come to the New Jerusalem?
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

The prophets consuming zeal and the peoples unresponsiveness

He likens the people of Israel to a mass of metal. This mass of metal claimed to be
precious ore, such as gold or silver. It was put into the furnace, the object being to
fuse it, so that the pure metal should be extracted from the dross. Lead was put in
with the ore to act as a flux (that being relied upon by the ancient smelters, as
quicksilver now is in these more instructed days); a fire was kindled, and then the
bellows were used to create an intense heat, the bellows being the prophet himself.
He complains that he spake with such pathos, such energy, such force of heart, that
he exhausted himself without being able to melt the peoples hearts; so hard was the
ore, that the bellows were burned before the metal was melted--the prophet was
exhausted before the people were impressed; he had worn out his lungs, his powers
of utterance; he had exhausted his mind, his powers of thought; he had broken his
heart, his powers of emotion; but he could not divide the people from their sins, and
separate the precious from the vile. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The lead is consumed of the fire.

Refining fire
We mean precisely the same thing as the Hebrew prophet meant when we say, as
nowadays we are so apt to say, that life is a school. People still are puzzled by the
punishments of life. The discipline is strict. The rules are rigid. Oftentimes we suffer.
It is not by any means all play. But there are lessons to be learned, and forbearance
to be used, and suffering to be borne. It seems to us narrow and foolish of Jeremiah
to have fancied that the Lord raised up those great Assyrian and Babylonian nations
simply for the purpose of trying and testing the Jewish people. It was narrow also of
the Jews to fancy themselves the chosen people, whom God particularly loved and
wished to save. Yet all of us today are similarly narrow in one sense, and we have to
be. We cannot free ourselves, you and I and others like us, from the conviction that
we, as men and women, by virtue of the very life that is in us, are the centre and
meaning of this entire universe. Believe this in some degree we must. Doubt it, and
the very heavens are bleak and bare. Every system in philosophy, every article of
religious faith, every discovery in science, is based, more or less directly, upon the
supposition of this distinct relationship between the outer universe and the life of
man. Let us use, for convenience sake, the analogy of the prophet. We will suppose
that we are placed here as the crude ore is thrown into the furnace, in order to be
refined. Along what lines should the process of refinement work? Nothing is more
familiar than the claim that sorrow chastens us, and hardships strengthen, and trials
test. As Goethe said, Talent is perfected in retirement, but character only in the
stream of life. They tell this concerning Wendell Phillips. Whenever the great orator
tended to become a little prosy in his speeches, and to lose some of his customary
fire, certain young Abolitionists used to get together near the door and start a hiss.
The note of disapproval never failed to arouse the lion in the speaker, and he was
electrified at once into matchless eloquence. The worlds agencies of trial and toil
and difficulty are indeed in vain, the bellows of life are consumed most uselessly, if
you and I are not made more courageous and calm and self-reliant by the process.
And yet the hard things of this world ought not to be the only ones to have this
refining influence. We are weak and ungrateful, and made of anything but precious
metal, if we are not purified by the privileges of life, hallowed by its happiness,
humbled by success. In everyday life most of us are not deficient in gratitude. We
appreciate the kindness and generosity of our friends. But how few of us in
comparison fall to our knees in an hour of newborn joy, or reverently think of lifes
higher meaning, and resolve on a rigider performance of our duties, when success
has bathed us in its golden sunshine! There is no much surer test of character than
this: What effect has good fortune had? If the person is innately weak to whom some
power or privilege has come, he answers it by pride and selfishness and vain
indulgence. He feels himself exalted; and, instead of looking up in reverence and
humility to his God, he looks down with coldness on his fellow men. Shall I tell you
what is to me one of the most inspiring, beautiful sights in all the wide range of
human activity and character? It is to see and know of anyone truly great who has
been humbled by success, and touched into infinite modesty by the consciousness of
superlative ability. It is to find people refined into simplicity and gentle devoutness
by the worlds blandishments and distinctions and honours. And this has been the
refining influence to which the noblest and the truest ones have answered. You all
know, too, the saying of the distinguished, world-honoured discoverer, Sir Isaac
Newton,--that he was nothing but a helpless child gathering pebbles on a boundless
shore, with the great ocean of undiscovered truth stretching away beyond him. I
have spoken of sorrow and of joy--the two extremes of existence--as having properly
this purifying influence on life. Let, me now speak broadly of certain phases of
refinement which ought to appear as the result of the worlds great processes.
1. First, there is the refining fire of glory, which is so abundant in the outward
world. It is for us to answer it by what is known as reverence. We have not
the pure metal which is sought, if we are not so refined by the wonders of the
world as to kneel in worship, and uplift our souls in awe. This world is not
for him who does not worship, said an ancient Persian sage; and our
kindred souls give back the truth across the centuries, This world is not for
him who does not worship.
2. Again, there is the burning fact of law. All things around us are done with
persistency. Everything is regular. The smallest function is precise. Surely
the knowledge of such constancy should have its influence on us. It should
take what is pure within us. It should appeal to the clear metal of our better
selves, and make us trust.
3. Finally, the fire of utter impartiality surrounds us. The world is laid at each
ones feet. The Divine bounty is not given to this person, and denied to that
one; but all of us receive. And the answering refinement which should come
from receptive human beings, who may doubt its nature or its need? A
suggestive legend comes to us from Mohammedan writings. Abraham, it is
said, once received an old man in his tent, who, in sitting down to eat,
neglected to repeat a grace. My custom, he said, in explanation, is that of
the fire worshipper.--Whereupon the Jewish patriarch in wrath undertook
 to drive him from his door. But suddenly God appeared to him, and,
restraining the churlish impulse, cried: Abraham, for one hundred years the
Divine bounty has flowed out to you in sunshine and in rain; and is it for you
to deny shelter to this man because his worship is not thine? Even thus does
nature speak a silent yet severe rebuke to our narrowness, our lack of
sympathy, our petty distinctions and rivalries in social life. Be broad, she
cries. Let love control your acts; to those who need, extend a helping hand.
(P. R. Frothingham.)

JEREMIAH 7

JER 7:1-7
Stand in the gate . . . and proclaim.

Boldness in preaching
Some preachers are traders from port to port, following the customary and
approved course; others adventure over the whole ocean of human concerns. The
former are hailed by the common voice of the multitude, whose cause they hold, the
latter blamed as idle, often suspected of hiding deep designs, always derided as
having lost all guess of the proper course. Yet, of the latter class of preachers was
Paul the apostle. Such adventurers, under God, this age of the world seems to us
especially to want. There are ministers now to hold the flock in pasture and in safety,
but where are they to make inroads upon the alien, to bring in the votaries of
fashion, of literature, of sentiment, of policy, and of rank? Truly, it is not stagers
who take on the customary form of their office and go the beaten round of duty, and
then lie down content; but it is daring adventurers, who shall eye from the grand
eminence of a holy and heavenly mind all the grievances which religion underlies,
and all the obstacles which stay her course, and then descend with the self-denial
and faith of an apostle to set the battle in array against them. (Edward Irving.)

Enter in at these gates to worship the Lord.--

The character required in those the would worship God
The heathen had a notion that the gods would not like the service and sacrifice of
any but such as were like themselves, and therefore to the sacrifice of Hercules none
were to be admitted that were dwarfs; and to the sacrifice of Bacchus, a merry god,
none that were sad and pensive, as not suiting their genius. An excellent truth may
be drawn from their folly: he that would like to please God must be like God. (H. G.
Salter.)

Amend your ways and your doings.--

Religion, the best security to Church and State

I. Religion, and the general practice of it in a nation, is the surest establishment of

states and kingdoms.
 1. This is true in a natural way; because the duties of religion have a natural
tendency to those things which are the foundations of that establishment,
namely, peace, unity, and order.
2. But besides a natural tendency in virtue and goodness to the establishment of
states and kingdoms, as many as believe religion must likewise believe that
the general practice of it in a nation will be always attended with a
supernatural blessing from God. For this is the result of all the declarations
of God, as to the manner and rule of His dealings with mankind, whether
persons or nations, that as many as faithfully serve and obey Him, shall be
assuredly intituled to His favour and protection.

II. IN EVERY NATION IT IS THE PROPER BUSINESS OF THE CIVIL MAGISTRATES, AS

SUCH, TO VINDICATE AND MAINTAIN THE HONOUR OF RELIGION. And when I am
speaking of authority, and the vigorous application thereof by the magistrate, I
cannot omit one thing, which is a mighty enforcement of it, a good example; which,
in its nature, is the most forcible way of teaching and correcting, and without which,
neither the instructions of ministers, nor the authority of magistrates, can avail, to
the effectual discouragement and suppression of vice.

III. Without a serious regard to the moral and spiritual duties of religion, the
greatest zeal in other matters, even though it be for the established worship of God,
will not secure the Divine favour and protection, either to persons or nations. The
external rites of religion are good helps to devotion, and proper means of
maintaining order and decency in the public worship; and a zeal to preserve them,
with a serious regard to those pious and wise ends, is very laudable: but to believe
that zeal for them will atone for a neglect of the moral and spiritual duties of religion
is a dangerous error. (E. Gibson, D. D.)

The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,
are these.

The folly of trusting in external privileges

I. We are to show THE EXTREME FOLLY OF TRUSTING TO ANY RELIGIOUS PRIVILEGES,

WHILE OUR HEARTS REMAIN UNRENEWED AND OUR LIVES UNHOLY. On what ground can
we rely on the continuance of Gods favour under such circumstances? Should we,
because a friend had conferred many benefits upon us, and forgiven us many
offences, be justified in supposing that there would be no limit to his endurance? Yet
the Jews--and their case is not singular--seemed to claim a special right to the
continued favour of God, in virtue of their religious privileges; not considering that
those privileges were a free gift; that they might at any time be withdrawn, without a
shadow of injustice; and that while they lasted they were intended to operate, not as
inducements to presumption, but as motives to love and thankfulness and
obedience. They had in themselves no spiritual efficacy. Neither the character of
God, nor His promises, held out any ground of hope on which to build such a
conclusion. It would not have been consistent with His holiness, or wisdom, or
justice, that the sinner should escape under the plea of any national or personal
privileges, however great. And His promises, both temporal and spiritual, were all
made in accordance with the same principle. If ye walk in My statutes, and keep My
commandments and do them . . . then I will walk among you, and I will be your
God;. . .but if ye will not hearken unto Me, and will not do all these commandments,.
. .I will set My face against you. The whole tenor of Gods providential
dispensations is likewise to the same effect. And accordingly, the Jews, great as were
their national mercies, found on numerous occasions that they were not exempt
from the just displeasure of their Divine Governor. Yet, with all these proofs of Gods
righteous judgments, their constant cry was, The temple of the Lord, the temple of
the Lord: they caught hold, as it were, of the horns of the altar with unhallowed
hands; and, notwithstanding the threatenings of the Almighty, were ever prone to
trust in those external privileges. At the very time when they were committing the
grievous enormities of which the prophet Jeremiah convicts them, they were zealous
for the outward worship of God, and boasted highly of their religious profession. But
could any folly be greater than that of supposing that this insincere worship could
satisfy Him who searcheth the heart and trieth the reins? The prophet forcibly
points out the extreme folly and delusiveness of such expectations: Go, he says,
unto My place which was in Shiloh, where I set My name at the first; and see what I
did to it for the wickedness of My people Israel. And now, because ye have done all
these works, saith the Lord, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but
ye heard not; and I called unto you, but ye answered not; therefore will I do unto
this house, which is called by My name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I
gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. Having thus considered
the extreme folly of trusting to external privileges, while the heart is unrenewed and
the life unholy, we are--

II. TO SHOW THAT THIS FOLLY IS TOO COMMON IN ALL AGES; AND THAT WE
OURSELVES, PERHAPS, ARE GUILTY OF IT. How many pride themselves in being zealous
Protestants, or strict members of the Established Church, or regular attendants on
public worship, while they live in the spirit of the world, and without any scriptural
evidence of being in a state of favour with God! How many trust to the supposed
orthodoxy of their faith; or to their zeal against infidelity, enthusiasm; while they are
ignorant of the scriptural way of salvation, and indifferent to the great concern of
making their calling and election sure! How many cherish a secret hope from the
prayers of religious parents, the zeal and piety of their ministers. In short,
innumerable are the ways in which persons deceive themselves on these subjects;
fancying that the temple of the Lord is among them; and on this vain surmise
remaining content and careless in their sins, and ignorant of all true religion. Now
let us ask ourselves, in conclusion, whether such is our own case. On what are we
placing our hopes for eternity? Are we resting upon anything superficial or external;
upon anything short of genuine conversion of heart to God? True piety is not
anything that can be done for us; it must be engrafted in us; it must dwell in our
hearts, and show its blessed effects in our conduct. (Christian Observer.)

JER 7:5
If ye thoroughly amend.
Thorough amendment
1. Religion has to do with character and conduct. Religion is that which binds,
and it has a tremendous grip. It has to do not only with creeds, and forms,
and rites, but with character and conduct.
2. Religion makes little of mere emotion. Some persons delight in the excitation
of the sensibilities. The Masters word is, If ye love Me, keep My
commandments. This is the proof of genuine love. The mother takes her
boys kiss as a sign of emotion, but sees in his obedience the proof of
principle, which is more than mere feeling.
(1) The first characteristic of true religion is a right view of sin. Our prayer
should be, Wash me thoroughly, even as the spotted robe was in
Davids day cleansed in a vat with strong acid and alkali, mauled and
bruised with mallet, till the stain was gone. God uses powerful methods
to purify. Some dread to be born again, because they know that they will
be required to thoroughly amend their ways, i.e., throughly, as the
word was formerly spelled. True amendment goes through and through
to the uttermost end--clear to the furthest limit.
(2) There must be not only right views, but a clean sweep of sin. The people
of Israel found that those they spared of idolatrous nations were thorns
in their sides and pricks in their eyes. If we do not drive sin out, sin will
drive us out. What we call little sins accumulate, as do the snowflakes
which stop a locomotive. We shall arrest the power and blessing of God
by tolerating small transgressions.
(3) Thorough amendment comprehends character and conduct--what we
are and what we do. It were useless to throw our prayers into a malarious
swamp and leave the source, the well head, unclean. Pray that Gods
Spirit may create a clean heart. Then follow conscience. The
amendment enjoined in the text is a new life. Christ and the soul are
firmly united, and He is the model. A little fibre, just enough to cling to
the sacrament, is not enough. That Hamburg grapevine would not have
yielded you those rich clusters if the branches had not been closely united
to the vine. You are Christs. You will hate sin because He abhors it. You
will also heed Christs demands on your time, your income, and your
strength.
3. The text promises permanency; not merely a visit, but an abode where one
can root and grow, work and worship, till transplanted to heaven. (T. L.
Cuyler, D. D.)

Reformation must be thorough

Some men, when they attempt to reform their lives, reform those things for which
they do not much care. They take the torch of Gods Word, and enter some
indifferent chamber and the light blazes in, and they see that they are very sinful
there; and then they look into another room, where they do not often stay, and are
willing to admit that they are very sinful there; but they leave unexplored some
cupboards and secret apartments where their life really is, and where they have
stored up the things which are dearest to them, and which they will neither part with
nor suffer rebuke for. (H. W. Beecher.)
 JER 7:9-10
Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely . . . and say, We
are delivered to do all these abominations?

Fate
It is my fate, is the excuse for many a career of shame and sin. I do not think
that most persons who practically rest satisfied with this explanation of the evil of
their lives put it actually into words. They are content with a vague undefined feeling
that some excuse or explanation of the sort is possible. Perhaps we should all escape
many perils and evils if we more frequently took care to formulate our undefined
thoughts into language, and carefully examine their nature.
1. Our idea of Gods dealings with us is very largely influenced by the condition
of the age in which we live. The language of inspiration will be interpreted by
us according to the meaning which, in other directions, we already attach to
the words which it must employ; and thus the government of communities
by laws has so modified our thought of the Divine government that we no
longer have the rude conception of a Divine Ruler acting from caprice; we
have now rather the idea of a Being who acts through the operation of great
universal laws. That conception of God is so far true, and that interpretation
of the words of revelation so far accurate; but there has grown up with it the
thought that God acts only thus, which is false. We attribute to the action of
the All-wise God the imperfections--the necessary imperfections which
belong to human institutions. Now, we must not transfer to God our own
finality and failure. Gods laws are universal and general; Gods dealings with
men are particular and individual As, in the physical world, we find that
equilibrium is produced by the action of two equal and opposite forces, so in
the moral world we have universal irresistible laws, and we have tender
loving individualisation, and the resultant of the two is Gods calm and
equable government of men. Everywhere we see man demanding, and by his
conduct showing that he possesses that liberty of action and power of control
in the material world which, to palliate his sin, he denies to belong to him in
the moral world. You know that the application of heat to certain substances
will generate a powerful destructive force. You know such to be a physical
law, and what do you do? Do you sit down and say, It is a law of nature, and I
cannot resist it? No. You say, I find it to be a law, and I shall take care either
that it shall not come into operation, or if it does come into operation, I shall
construct machinery to direct its force, and so make it operate only in the
direction which I choose. You ascertain certain laws of health, that infection
will spread a certain disease, and do you say, The disease must spread, I
cannot fight against a law? No. You take care to keep the infection away from
you, to disinfect, and so prevent the operation of that law; and yet that same
man when he finds that there are places which will taint his moral nature
with disease, that there are scenes or pleasures which will generate in his
soul a destructive force, says, I cannot help it, these things will act so; I have
no liberty. You have no liberty to prevent their acting so on you, I admit, no
more than you have power to prevent fire igniting powder; but you have
power to keep away from them; you have power to prevent those conditions
 arising under which alone the law will operate. Oh! when we know and feel
the evil in the physical world, we take every precaution against its
recurrence. How much less zeal and determination do we display concerning
our souls!
2. To say that you have a peculiar kind of nature which cannot resist a particular
class of sin is to offer to God an excuse which you would never accept from
your fellow man. You treat every one of your fellow men as having power to
resist the inclination of his natural disposition, so far as its indulgence would
be injurious to you. If a man rob you or assault you, no explanation of a
natural desire for acquisition or for aggression would be listened to by you as
a reasonable excuse. To admit the truth of such principles of uncontrollable
natural impulse would at once shake society and destroy all human
government. And do you think that such excuses as you would not admit are
to be accepted as excuses for, or even explanations of those sins which do not
happen to fall within the category of legal crimes, but which, much more
than those crimes for which the law imprisons and hangs, are destroying the
moral order of Gods universe, and outraging the highest and noblest
principles of truth, and purity, and love? But it cannot be denied that we
have strong natural dispositions and passions which we have been given
independently of ourselves, and for the possession of which we cannot with
justice be held responsible? Certainly--and you never find fault with a man
for any faculty or temper which he may have--but you do hold him
responsible for the direction and control of it. We can point to countless
noble careers to show how the strong impulses of individual natures are
indeed irresistible, but their action is controllable. The great heroes whom
we justly reverence, who rise above us as some snow-capped mountain
towers above the dead level of a low-lying plain, are not those who have
destroyed, but those who have preserved and used aright the natural
impulses and passions which had been given them. That is the true meaning
of such lives as those of St. Paul, or Martin Luther--St. Augustine, or John
Bunyan. Ay, and there are many still amongst us who use their natural
dispositions and their natural affections, their natural passions--even their
natural beauty, which might have been used to lure souls to hell--to win
many a one to a nobler and purer life. What a solemn responsibility, then, is
the right use of our natural disposition and talents, for others as well as for
ourselves. To you, my young friends, especially, I would say, Do try and
begin early to recognise the solemnity of life. Do not be downhearted or
dismayed if, after you have felt the power of Christs death, and when you
would do good, evil is present with you. Do not let such moments harden
you. Try and realise then all the love and mercy and tenderness with which
the crucified Lord looks upon you, as He once looked on the fallen apostle,
and, like him, go forth and weep bitterly. Then it will be well with you. Sin
shall not reign in you, though for the moment it seems to have conquered
you. (T. T. Shore, M. A.)

On necessity

I. MEN ARE VERY FOND OF ASCRIBING THEIR SINS TO THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE DEVIL,
and in such a way as, in the main, to put the responsibility upon him. It is surely
taught in the Word of God that evil spirits do foment wickedness; that they suggest
it; that they persuade men to it. It is not taught that they infuse it, and perform it in
men. It is taught that Satan persuades men to sin; but the men do the sinning--not
he. The power of temptation depends upon two elements: first, the power of
presenting inducement or motive on the part of the tempter; and, secondly and
mainly, the strength in the victim of the passion to which this motive is presented.
No one could tempt to pride a man that had not already a powerful tendency to
pride. The chord must be there before the hand of the harper can bring out the tone.
No one could be tempted to avarice that had not a predisposition to the love of
property. No man could be tempted to hatred, or to cruelty, or to appetites, one or
many, unless there pre-existed a tendency in that direction. Hence, the simple fact
of temptation is, that you do wrong, while Satan merely asks you to do it. It is your
act. It may be his suggestion, it may be his thought; but it is your performance. And
you do it with plenary freedom, urged, fevered, it may be, by him.

II. Men relieve themselves, or seek to do so, from the sense of guilt and
responsibility, by attributing their sins to their fellow men. They admit the wrong,
but they put in the plea that the circumstances were such that they could not help
committing it. The example and impunity of other men in transgression are pleaded,
the persuasions and influences of other men are pleaded, certain relations to other
men are pleaded, as if these things were compulsory. Men attribute their sins to
public sentiment, to the customs of the times, to the habits of the community. Are
they intemperate? Intemperance is customary in the circle in which they walk. Are
they unscrupulous in their dealings? Unscrupulousness is the law of the profession
which they follow. And when they have been charged with continuous sinning--with
the violation of conscience, with the violation of purity, with the violation of
temperance, with the violation of honesty or honour--they have still pleaded, Yes,
we have sinned; but we are not exceptional; we do not stand alone; we are nouns of
multitude; all men do these things--as if the inference was, Because all men do
them, they are not so culpable in us. Men may sin by wholesale; but they are
punished by retail. There were never such dividends in any bank on earth as are
apportioned in the court of conscience. There every man not only is particeps
criminis in the transgression which he joins others in committing, but he is
responsible for the whole sin, though thousands and millions participate with him in
it. It is an exceedingly fashionable habit at present to put upon society the guilt of
the transgressions of men. Are men idle, and is there deduced from idleness the
accustomed fruit? Society has not made the suitable provisions for these men, or
they would not have been idle! Are men insubordinate, and do they violate the laws?
Society has not made proper laws for such men! They have not by society been
rightly educated, or they would not have been insubordinate! Are men full of vices
and crimes that spring from fertile ignorance? Society, as a schoolmaster, ought not
to have let them be ignorant! Do men murder? Society is to blame! Do men steal?
Society is the responsible scapegoat for thieves! You shall find philosophers on every
side that wag their heads and say, Now you see that society does not fulfil its duties
and functions: society ought to have stepped these things. I will admit that in
society there are many things that men ought to do which are left undone, and many
things that they ought to leave undone which are done; but to say that upon society
is to be put the responsibilities of the individual characters of all its citizens, is to
imply that you give to society power to enforce those responsibilities; and if you give
to society that power, you give it a power such as was never contemplated even by
the extremest despotic theory of government. Society may in some instances be the
tempter, and may in some instances have its individual part in the wrong-doing of
its citizens; but it does not take away from any man that does wrong, the whole,
undivided, personal responsibility of that wrong.

III. THE LAST CLASS OF THE CATEGORY OF EXCUSES IS THAT OF FATALITY. We are
delivered to commit sin; we are bound over to do it; we cannot help doing it--so say
some men. On the one hand, men are apt to be jealous of their liberty; but to avoid
responsibility for transgression they disclaim their liberties, and plead a want of
power to choose; a want of power to do that which they have chosen; or a want of
power to reject that which they have determined to reject.
1. One class of men regard thought and volition as the inevitable effect of natural
causes. They are no more avoidable, they say, than are the phenomena of
nature. Effect follows cause as irresistibly in the one case as in the other. And
so man is just as helpless as a mill wheel, which is made to turn over, and
over, and over, by a power that is not under its control. Against this theory,
we oppose the universal consciousness of men in the earlier stages of their
moral character. Men know perfectly well that they have no plenary liberty;
that they have only limited liberty. It is certainly true that, if blue is
presented to my eye, I cannot prevent the impression of blue being made on
my mind. It is true that, if light is presented to my eye, I cannot prevent the
inevitable effect that light produces. But if, for any reason I prefer not to
have light, although when it shines I cannot hinder the happening of its
actual effects, I can prevent my eyes from coming where the light falls. There
is profound Divine wisdom in that part of the Lords Prayer which seems
strange to our youth--Lead us not into temptation. Well might powder
pray, Deliver me from the fire; for if the fire touches it, there is no help for
it--there must be an explosion. And there are many circumstances in which,
if inflamed passions, inflamed tempers, in the souls warfare in life, subject
themselves to certain causes, they will lead a man to sin. Therefore the plea
is, Lead me not into temptation: let it not come upon me. Men are
responsible for their volitions, and for those conditions which produce
volitions--and this is the opinion of men generally.
2. A more frequent and more subtle plea of irresponsibility is founded on the
modern doctrine of organisation. One man says, I may lie; but I was
delivered to do it when I was created with such an inordinate development of
secretiveness. Another man says, I may be harsh and cruel; but I was
delivered to be so from my mothers womb; there is such immense
destructiveness in my organisation. Another man says, You that have largo
intellectual developments, and are able to see and foresee, may be
responsible for falling into sin; but I have no such development; I cannot
foresee anything; I have to take things as they find me, and I am not
responsible. At first it would look as though this was very rational; but it is
not. It is not phrenological. It is not philosophical. And that is not all; the
men that use these pleas do not themselves believe in them. There are
abundant proofs of the falsity of the claim which they set up; but for my
present purpose it is quite sufficient to say that, when men sin and plead
fatalism or organisation as a justification of their wrong-doing, they do not
 believe the doctrine that they themselves advance. No man will accept an
insult from another on the plea that that other man cannot help giving it. If a
man deals you a blow in the street, not accidentally, but because, as he says,
he is naturally irritable, having large combativeness, and cannot help it, you
do not listen calmly to the explanation, and say, All right, sir; all right. No
man admits for one single moment any such thing as that men are to be
excused for all sorts of misdemeanours, because they happen to be peculiarly
organised. The whole intercourse of man with man would be destroyed; the
community would be dissolved; society would rush, like turbulent streams in
the midst of spring rains, down to destruction, if you were to take away the
doctrine that a man can control his conduct, his thought, his will. It does not
follow that, because a man follows his strongest faculty, he must follow it to
do wrong with it. Here is the fallacy--or one of the fallacies--which men run
into. If a man has large secretiveness, it does not follow that he should lie. A
man may be secretive, and not transgress. Secretiveness may leaven every
faculty of the mind, and that without making one of them commit sin. It has
a broad sphere, and a wholesome sphere; and if you say, I must follow my
strongest faculty, I reply that it does not follow that you must follow it
contrary to moral law--contrary to what is right. Then another thing to be
considered is the determining influence. A man is either sane or insane; and
the distinction is this: If a man can no longer control his action by the
antagonism of faculties; if, for instance, by the antagonism of reason and the
affections he cannot control the passions; if the antagonism among
themselves of the balanced faculties is so weak that the individual is
incapable of governing himself, then he is insane. But if a man is not insane,
there is in him a power proceeding from the balance of faculties, by which
the erring one or ones may be controlled. So that every man, up to the point
of insanity, has latent in him, if he pleases to educate it and exercise it, the
power of controlling by other forces in his mind those which incline him to
go wrong. Well, now, if there be this antagonistic power, it becomes a
question of dynamics. Men say, I have such a powerful tendency to go
wrong that you ought not to punish me. It is not to punish you, so much as
it is to stimulate the dormant faculty from whose inactivity that tendency
proceeds, that you are made to suffer. If when my child is convicted of
wrong, he having been tempted by vanity to break down into lies, I severely
chastise him, and put him to shame, I inflict pain upon him not only as a
punishment, but as a restorative. For I say to myself, if that childs
conscience is so feeble, I must give him some stimulus. If his fear is so
influential in the wrong way, I must spring it in the other direction. In other
words, just the opposite of the popular pleading is true. The weaker the child
is to resist evil, the more powerful must be the motive that is brought to bear
upon him to do well. I remark, in view of these statements and reasonings--
1. Sin is bad enough ordinarily. I do not refer to its influence upon others, but to
its reactionary influence upon our own moral state. Not only is it bad
enough, but ordinarily it is made worse by the mode in which men treat it. If
men stopped, whenever they did wrong, and measured it, and called it by its
proper name, and turned away from it, although the process of recovery
would be slow, it would in many respects be salutary, by way of
strengthening and educating the mind; but when men commit sin, and
 institute a special plea, and defend their wrong-doing, and conceal it, and
equivocate concerning it, they are corrupted even more by the defence than
by the wrong-doing itself. How sad is that condition in which the compass
will not point to the polar star! If there be fatal attractions on the ship, and if
the shipmaster has steered by a compass that is not true in its directions, it
would be better if he had thrown it overboard; because he has perfect
confidence in it, and it has been lying all the time. And if the conscience, that
is the compass of the soul, is perverted, and does not point to truth and right,
and men are guiding themselves by it, how fatally are they going down to
destruction!
2. What is the reason of the stress that is laid in the Word of God on the subject
of confessing and forsaking sin? Let him that stole steal no more, etc.
Confess your faults one to another. This doctrine was the great
recuperative element. It was the preaching of John. It was the initial
preaching of Christ. It was the preaching of the apostles. It is the
annunciation of the Gospel. Confess and forsake your sin. Own that it is sin.
Be honest with yourself. Make at last to yourself a full and clear
acknowledgment that wrong is wrong. All men fail, and come short of their
duty; but some justify, and palliate, and excuse, and deny, while others
confess, and repent, and forsake--and these last are the true men. (H. W.
Beecher.)

Organisation and responsibility

That men are variously constituted is a fact not merely profoundly interesting to
the speculative philosopher, but of the greatest practical consequence to the
Christian philanthropist. While the genus, man, is founded on a common basis, the
individual is marked by characteristics singular to himself. Let us look at some
special instances of peculiar organisation, and then consider them in relation to
personal responsibility. For example, take the man whose dominating characteristic
is acquisitiveness. That mans creed is a word, and that word is but a syllable: his
creed is Get; nothing less, nothing more,--simply Get! With him benevolence is a
matter of weights and scales; with him buying and selling and getting gain are the
highest triumphs of mortal genius. Ask him why. Instantly he recurs to his
organisation. He says, God made me as I am; He did not consult me as to the
constitution of my being; He made me acquisitive, and I must be faithful to my
organisation; and I will go forward to meet Him at the day of judgment, and tell Him
to His face that He has me as He made me, and I disclaim all responsibility. The
organisation of another man predominates in the direction of combativeness. The
man is litigious, quarrelsome, cantankerous, violent: Ask him why. He says, I must
be faithful to my constitution; my whole manhood is intensely combative; I did not
make myself; God has made me as He made me, and I disown all laws of obligation.
Here is a man with little hope. He sees a lion on every way; he dreads that ruin will
be the end of every enterprise; he knows not the sweetness of contentment or the
repose of an intelligent hope; he is always mourning, always repining; his voice is an
unceasing threnody, his face a perpetual winter. Ask him why. He says, God so
made me; if He had put within me the angel of hope, I should have been sharer of
your gladness; I should have been your companion in the choir; I should have been a
happier man: He covered me with night that owns no star; He gave my fingers no
cunning art of music; He meant me to look at Him through tears and to offer my
poor worship in sighs. We cannot enter into all the questions which may lie
between God and man on the subject of organisation. Let us take one or two such
cases as have just been outlined. We found the acquisitive man getting gold, getting
at all risks; getting till his conscience was seared and his understanding darkened. In
that case ought we to sympathise with the man, saying, We are sorry for you; we
lament that your organisation compels you to be avaricious: we know you cannot
help it, so we exempt you from all responsibility? No! we would say as in thunder;
No! we do not find fault with the organisation of the acquisitive man; but if he
pleads the excuse already cited, we openly charge him with having degraded and
diabolised that constitution; he has not used it, but abused it; he has not been
faithful, but faithless, and must be branded as a criminal. The mans organisation is
acquisitive; be it so: that circumstance in itself does not necessitate crime. There are
two courses open to the acquisitive man. To him we say, Do be faithful to your
organisation, do get, get money by right means, get exaltation by legitimate
processes; but with all thy getting, get understanding, for the merchandise of it is
better than the merchandise of silver, etc. The combative man; what of him? Do we
sympathise with him? Sir, your case demands commiseration, inasmuch as you
must be faithful to your organisation, and that organisation happens to be a dreadful
one? No! to the combative man we say, There are two courses open to you: you can
fight with muscle, and steel, and gunpowder; you may train yourself to be pitiless as
a tiger; you may be petulant, resentful, hard-hearted: the choice is before you to
pronounce the elective word! Or, there is another course open: you may choose
weapons that are not carnal; you may resist the devil; you may wrestle not against
flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. The argument
which the fatalist bases upon organisation is self-annihilating when applied to the
common relations of life. All human legislation assumes mans power of self-
regulation, and grounds itself on the grand doctrine of mans responsibility to man.
At this point, then, Divine revelation meets human reason, and insists upon the
same principle in relation to God. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 7:13
I spake unto you, rising up early.

Gods call to sinners

I. A GRACIOUS CALL. We are utterly undeserving of it. Though we are

transgressors, guilty, corrupt, depraved,--yet God calls upon us--to escape--to live--
to be saved--to turn unto Him, and be forever blest and happy.

II. AN AFFECTIONATE CALL. The call of a merciful Creator who hath no pleasure in
the death and destruction of His fallen creatures: and would rather they should
repent and live; the call of a tender Father, who looks with compassion upon the
prodigal wanderer, invites and urges him to abandon his wretchedness and want,
and come back to his home of plenty, and his Fathers bosom again, and assures him
of a joyous welcome if he will; the call of a Friend--that Friend that sticketh closer
than a brother--even of Jesus our best friend, our elder brother.

III. A VARIED CALL. From every part of the outspread volume of creation, there
issues a voice calling upon us, to know, fear, adore, worship, the great Creator. And
as well as by His works, we are called upon by His ways--by His dealings with the
children of men. The misfortunes and calamities that occur to others; and the
bereavements, afflictions, and trials that happen to ourselves--the constant
experience we have of the uncertainty of our present existence, and of the instability
of all earthly good, by these and many similar things we are addressed and
admonished to seek a more enduring substance, a more incorruptible and unfading
inheritance. From every page, also, of the book of God there proceedeth a call,
exhorting us to depart from iniquity, and follow after holiness,--to supplicate for
pardoning mercy and for assisting grace.

IV. AN OFT-REPEATED--A REITERATED CALL. We are not appealed to once or twice,

and then abandoned to our folly. Forbearance is exercised towards us from year to
year; line is given upon line, and precept upon precept,--here a little and there a
little; so that we may have the last possible opportunity of being saved, and may not
be left in despair until the last moment of the day of grace hath expired, and our
souls be beyond the region of impression and awakening.

V. AN EARNEST CALL. Men may be light and trifling. God is always serious--always
in earnest. He is in earnest in what He does, and in what He speaks. All the appeals
and persuasions by which the Almighty follows you, as children hastening madly on
to destruction, are embodied in the very terms, and wear the very air of the utmost
earnestness; yea, so serious and earnest are they, that, when it is considered from
whom they come, and to what they relate, the wonder is, that men are not at once
startled by them, and arrested in their downward course, and constrained to hasten
to the only safe Refuge from the gathering and impending storm.

VI. AN URGENT CALL. Its reference is to the present: it demands immediate

attention and instant compliance. (C. Cook.)

JER 7:16
Pray not thou for this people.

Intercessory prayer forbidden

1. Gods prophets are praying men.
2. Gods praying prophets have a great interest in heaven, how little soever they
have on earth.
3. It is an ill omen to a people when God restrains the spirits of His ministers
and people from praying for those condemned.
4. Those that will not regard good ministers preaching cannot expect any
benefit by their praying. If you will not hear us when we speak from God to
you, God will not hear us when we speak to Him for you. (M. Henry, D. D.)
 JER 7:17-18
Seest thou not what they do in the streets of Jerusalem?

The streets of the city

I. As an index to character.
1. The streets are the pulse of commercial prosperity. The man who goes from a
dull, sluggish place to a city of great business activity must quicken his pace,
or get run over.
2. The street on which a man lives is no index to his character. It does not even
indicate the amount of money he has. Not a few proud families stint their
table to pay their rent on a costly street, in order to make or keep up
appearances. Their fine street, to those who know the facts, is an index of
their pretensions. Another man who has plenty of money lives on a cheap
street, because he is too niggardly to pay rent for more comfortable quarters.
To those who know him the street is an index of his meanness. A Christian
man may choose to live on a cheap street, because he prefers to save money
with which to do good. His street indicates self-denying liberality.
3. What can be seen on the streets of a city, however, is to a great extent an
index of the character of its people. Dirty streets suggest dirty morals. If
indecent handbills pollute the streets of a city, it indicates either sinful
apathy, or a very low moral tone.

II. AS A TEST OF CHARACTER. To walk down one of our streets is to some men like
going into a furnace. Their moral courage is tested at nearly every step. There is
within them a demon of drink that can be waked from his sleep by the smell of a
beer barrel. A deep-sea diver laid his hand on something soft, and curious to know
what it was, he took hold of it to examine it. Fatal curiosity! The long tentacles of an
octopus reached out and grasped him in its deadly embrace. The friends above,
feeling the struggle, drew him to the surface, to find only a corpse still in the
clutches of the monster. Many a young man has come from his pure country home
to the great city, and, prompted by a curiosity excited by the signs on the streets, has
entered one of these homes of the devil fish. Soon its slimy tentacles are wrapped
around him, soul and body. (A. C. Dixon, D. D.)

The streets and their story

The prophet evidently knew what was going on in the city. He had gone up and
down the streets by night and by day, and had seen the sins and iniquities of the
people. The great city of Jerusalem lay like a putrid sore, filled with all manner of
pollution and corruption. The time had come for a warning. Hiding no detail of its
iniquity, he catalogued before the sin-laden people the awful record of their sin, and
launched against their filthiness and impenitence the sentence of the condemnation
of God. It was no pleasant task. To sing in sweeter strains the adoration of God and
the beauties of holiness had been a far more gladsome work--but to sing of holiness
in such a city had been like singing of springs amid the sands of the arid desert.
Moreover, the Word of God had commanded, again and again, Cry aloud, spare not
lift up thy voice like a trumpet, etc. I suppose an over-cautious but easy-going city
cried out against the prophet who left his harp to throttle sin. I suppose its wicked
inhabitants had a great many sneers and scoffs for the preacher who ventured to
look in upon their wickedness; but he heard Gods Word and he did it; he called
things by their right names, and shook above them the thunderstorm of Divine
wrath and the penalties of the broken law. Sin must be assailed in the name of God.
Its colours must he shown, clear of the prism tints by which it dazzles and deceives.
Its wages, hidden too often behind the screens of shame and misery, must be
brought to light, and men warned in the name of facts, in the name of experience, in
the name of God, against the man traps of hell. I want to show you sin as it is and it
always must be, and from its actual facts of awful misery I want to read a warning.
The old legends ten of a dual life that walks the earth; how in the shades of night,
when all else is slumber bound and still, another life comes out and fills the night
with weird events. The elf folk, hidden all day in earth caves and crannies, now come
out and fill the sleeping earth with a weird, unnatural life. The old legend has a sort
of awful reality here in our darkened streets, for when the day is spent, and the life
of business sinks to rest, and the great buildings darken into shadow, another life
comes out and passes to and fro in the darkened streets and plies its concerns in the
silent shadows. It is a life of sin and of shame. We pause a moment, and watch and
listen. Now and then a belated passer-by hastens with hurried step, but it is almost
noiseless--this night life on these silent streets. Here and there, there are figures
standing within the shadows. A young man emerges from the building, where late
accounts have kept him long after the hours of accustomed toil. A dozen steps, and
he is accosted; there is a rustle and a voice, and then maybe a womans laugh ringing
out with strange echo in the darkness. They loiter along with slow step, and together
are lost to our view, and the night covers up this silent trap of hell, whose snares are
spread for unwary feet. A little further and we drive hurriedly across the glare,
where the crowds flow along the great night arteries of the city--a motley crowd,
vastly differing from the daylight throng. There are hundreds of young men, scores
of young women, whose days are spent in shops and behind counters, and whose
nights court ruin in the streets. The air is noisy and the lights are dazzling; here and
yonder are those brilliantly lighted stairs that lead up into apparent gloom, for all
the curtained windows show by their darkness. It is the old story: The idle brain is
the devils workshop. The life that simply works to live, and that only six hours, if
six hours will keep the body, courts the devil for his master. And yet, go out among
the thousands of young men in this city tonight, and let us question them as to the
object of life, and you may well wonder at the multitudes who only live to live. No
thought of anything above the body, no glimpse of anything beyond the sky--an
animal life, serving only appetite and seeking only pleasure. Oh, is that all of life? To
spend the day in toil, the night in empty pleasure; our days for nothing, and our
future in eternal poverty of soul. Oh, hear me preach the gospel of yourself, your
better self; its possibilities, its powers, its future. Think what you may be, and then
be it, by Gods grace, and cheat the devil as you save your soul. I marked most of all
in these streets the presence of death. They were full of dead men, of dead women,
of corpses, walking, talking, jesting in loathsome death. Do you remember Valjeans
dream in Les Miserables? How, conscious of his crime, he slept, and sleep revealed
to him the death of sin. He dreamed he was at Romainville, a little garden park near
Paris, full of flowers and music and pleasure. But as he in his dream comes to this
domain of revelry, the flowers, and the trees, and the very sky, all are of the colour of
ashes. Leaning against a wall he finds a man at the corner where two streets meet.
Why is all so still? The man seems to hear not and makes no reply. In amazement
Valjean wanders on through vacant rooms and courts and through the gardens, all
the colour of ashes, and finds everywhere silence by the fountains, in the pavilions,
everywhere these silent men and women, who have no answer to his questions. In
horror he endeavours to fly from the ashen abode of terror, when, looking back, he
finds all the inhabitants of the lifeless town suddenly clustering about him, and their
ashen lips open, they cry to him, Do you not know that you have been dead for a
long time? And with a cry Valjean wakens and feels his sin. So I saw in these ways
of sin dead men all about me. Beneath that silken robe and sparkling necklace,
loathsome death; behind that laugh and empty jest, a dead man; walking, talking,
drinking, feasting, and yet dead. Dead in sin, helpless in habits chains, snared in the
man traps of hell. (T. E. Green, D. D.)

Home missions
First, glance at the circumstances and conduct of the Jewish people, which gave
rise to the language of the text. During the days of Jeremiah, and of all the later
prophets, they appear to have sunk into the very depths of national degeneracy. The
sanctions of the Divine authority, and the terrors of Divine indignation, were equally
disregarded with the promises and protection of the Most High. The prophet would
have awakened them to a sense of their criminality and danger; but in vain. He
interceded in secret for the reversal of that righteous sentence by which they were
doomed to prove the folly and misery of their own ways; but this also was without
effect. While his voice was still tremulously pleading for their forgiveness, and the
saint and patriot blended in every gushing tear, and every irrepressible emotion,--
the mandate of almighty justice, tempted too far and wearied of forbearance,
imposed an awful interdict--Pray not thou for this people, etc. How happy that no
such solemn prohibition rests upon ourselves; but that we may pour forth our
utmost fervour in supplicating for mercy upon those who are ready to perish! How
unspeakable the happiness of reflecting, too, that we have an Advocate on high,
whose plea can never be thus silenced. What was the particular nature of their
idolatry at this season we know not,--or by what offerings they sought to propitiate
and honour that mysterious divinity which they worshipped as the queen of
heaven; but that it was a service accompanied with whatever was fitted to inflame
the jealousy and provoke the retribution of the God of Israel, the tenor of this book
and of their subsequent calamities suffers us not to question. But there is one
reflection forced upon our minds by the mention of this subject, which is perpetually
arising in the perusal of these sacred documents,--how inveterate and how
wonderful is the depravity of the human intellect, as well as the corruption of the
human heart! How great, too, is the compassion, of God!--how impressive and
encouraging the illustration of His long-suffering! He remembered that they were
but dust, etc. This is the compassion and long-suffering which we are called every
day to recognise, amidst provocations and unfaithfulness which would have wearied
out all other grace but the grace of Omnipotence, and which no might could restrain
itself from punishing but that which upholds the mountains and which grasps the
thunderbolt. Its very power alone is our security. We cannot meditate upon these
facts without one other suggestion,--how great is the necessity for continued zeal
and diligence, on the part of good men, to counteract to the uttermost the evils, not
only of their own hearts and conduct, but of those among whom they dwell The
condition of men at large forces itself on our notice, as one of universal calamity and
peril,--Seest thou not what they do? Let us suppose the spectator one from a
distant region, an inhabitant of one of the remoter provinces of intellectual being,--
acquainted with the character, and reposing with joyful confidence in the presiding
power, of the Creator,--but unread in the history of man. He has heard of
redemption, and is desirous to explore it; but he knows not yet the state of those for
whom it was designed. And he is permitted this momentary inspection of the human
system, that he may gather from it the elements of heavenly truth, and the manifold
wisdom of God. Alas! how perplexed and intricate would all appear! What
numberless anomalies, difficulties, and causes of shame and wonder, would
everywhere astonish and overwhelm him! For what end would such a system seem
to have been constructed, or wherefore still upheld, or tending to what result, or
interpretative of what purposes, or susceptible of resolution into its contradictory
phenomena by what reconciling and all-commanding principles, or calculated to
excite what other sentiment except the melancholy apostrophe, Wherefore hast
Thou made all men in vain! Descending from the contemplation of the whole, he
would consider each several particular with the intensity of interest which that
stupendous but appalling spectacle had summoned into being. And first, he would
probably be arrested with the secular condition of mankind, and their extreme
differences in the nature and degrees of social happiness. The effect would be as
painful as the scene was intricate. He would shrink and tremble, as if within the
boundaries of chaos, or the empire of darkness and of blind misrule. He would next
consider their religious state. And now, what would be the agitation of his feelings,
or in what explanation of such strange appearances could he find or seek relief?
Here, he would sicken at the sight of gross and grovelling idolatries; there, at the
bewildering glare of cruel yet invincible delusions; and elsewhere, at the reveries
and dreamy visions of a spurious philosophy, neutralising at once every claim of
human duty, and every attribute of God. Nothing would seem to him so terrible as
our exposure to the jealousy and wrath of our Creator; nor anything so
unfathomable as the mystery of His compassion. Outraged, defied, forgotten; His
being denied by some, His noblest characters mocked, falsified, contemned by
others; His best gifts perverted to the vilest purposes, His gentle inflictions
misinterpreted or impiously repelled, His forbearance converted into an argument
to set aside His veracity, His glorious mad terrible name, eve where it is not
unknown, employed only to add force to blasphemy, or emphasis to imprecation
and falsehood:--what could the stranger anticipate but the kindling up of His fury,
while its flame should burn unto the lowest hell! Thus prepared--how would he dart
his eager eye toward the scenes of mens future and everlasting habitation! To what,
he would ask himself, can all be hastening onwards? Where must this pilgrimage of
sin and folly end? Conceive now of the surprise and the delight with which he would
hear of the means provided for the restoration of men. That astonished spectator is
no creation merely of the fancy. Many a watcher, and many a holy one, looks
down upon the scene, and wonders. All that environs us is revealed, in a light of
which we are strangely unconscious, to innumerable witnesses. We walk ourselves,
at every step, beneath their gaze. And it is their judgment, not ours, respecting the
dependencies and results of moral action, which shall be confirmed in the decisions
of the last day. (R. S. MAll, LL. D.)
 JER 7:18
The children gather wood.

What can children do for God?

I. GOD IS SETTING UP A KINGDOM IN THIS WORLD. A very glorious and gracious

kingdom.
1. Righteousness. Teaches us to do justice.
2. Peace--to love and pursue it.
3. Joy. God makes all happy who come into His kingdom.

II. GOD EXPECTS US ALL TO WORK TO SET UP THIS KINGDOM. Christ came to set it up;
ministers preach and labour for it; missionaries go to heathen; all Gods people aid.

III. Children can do something to set up this kingdom.

1. You can pray; that God would make you willing subjects of this kingdom.
2. You can talk; speak to others about Jesus, pardon, God, heaven.
3. You can work; give to missionary society, etc.

IV. CHILDREN ARE ALWAYS HAPPY WHEN TRYING TO SET UP THIS KINGDOM. Why?
Because make others happy. Angels are happy, because employed making others
happy. God is happy, for He blesses every one. And, when we act like God, we
ourselves are happy.

V. GOD WILL NEVER FORGET THE LABOURS OF LITTLE CHILDREN FOR HIM. When
children wanted to come to Jesus, He noticed their disposition, and said, Never
prevent a child from coming to Me; then took in arms and blessed. When they sang
in temple He noticed their song, and said, Hearest thou what these say? God
loves,everything done by children, because it is a proof of their obedience and love.
(J. Sherman)

Childrens service
Queen of Heaven, i.e., Ashtaroth, or the Moon. The Israelites fell into this
idolatry in the time of the Judges. Solomon was carried away by it. Josiah
suppressed it. We may learn a useful lesson from these young idolaters.

I. They wished to be useful in religion.

II. They did what they could.

III. WHAT THEY DID WAS OF SERVICE. What can you do? For example, in--
1. Money.
2. Word.
3. Effort.
 4. Prayer.

IV. GOD DOES NOT DESPISE CHILDRENS WORK. This fact is one which should be
seriously pondered by children, parents, teachers. (Lay Preacher.)

Christians contrasted with heathens

It is said that Matthew Wilks, one of the founders of the London Missionary
Society, chose this text when he preached the anniversary sermon; and in those days
when trite and commonplace remarks from the pulpit were considered orthodox,
and anything that was a little fresh and novel was looked upon with suspicion, every
eye in the large assembly expressed astonishment at the preachers selection. He had
not proceeded far, however, when the feeling of astonishment gave way to pure
delight, when all seemed convinced that the text, though uncommon, was by no
means inappropriate. I have not seen the sermon; I only know that he dealt with it
in the following manner. He said, I will contrast your objects with those of the
worshippers of the queen of heaven. I will compare your ardour with theirs. I will
muster your agents. And it was this part of the subject, in which he referred to the
agents, namely, men, women, and children, which gave rise to the system of
auxiliary institutions which now pervade the whole country, and combine in its
support young and old, rich and poor. (Eccentric Preachers.)

To make cakes to the queen of heaven.

On making cakes
(A talk with Children):--The people who lived in Jerusalem at this time, alas!
worshipped the sun, and called it Baal, also the moon, and called it Ashtoreth,--just
as our ancestors did at one time in this country, calling the day upon which they
worshipped the sun Sunday, and the day upon which they worshipped the moon
Monday. In Jerusalem, at the time referred to in our text, the people used to offer
cakes to the moon. These cakes were always made round to resemble the moon. This
offering was considered to be a very important one, and all wanted to have a share in
making the cakes and presenting them. Now the first thing that had to be done was
to get plenty of firewood. You cannot make a cake without fire, and you cannot get
fire without fuel. Thus I think I can hear a Jewish mother say, Now, my children, I
want you to get some good firewood for tomorrow--wood that will burn brightly; I
am going to make some cakes for the queen of heaven, and--who knows?--perhaps
there may be a few tit-bits left! Off the children go. Thats just the work they like;
they can stoop easily, or jump over the hedge or fence, and tear their clothes without
having much scolding, as they are gathering wood for their mother. Little Hannah
gathers her apron full, and Dan or Benjamin as much as he can carry in his arms,
and they return home full of glee. They have done their part. But the following
morning the fire had to be kindled. It required strong arms to kindle a fire by
rubbing two pieces of wood vigorously together. The fathers could do that best; for
they had muscular arms, and they gladly did their part. Then there was need of clean
and gentle hands to knead the dough, and there were none who could do that as well
as the mothers, aunts, and the elder sisters. It was their turn now, and the children
would look earnestly on and wonder whether the dough would go far enough to
make the necessary number of cakes for the queen of heaven, or the moon, and
one or two over. They little knew that the mother or sister had put in an extra
handful of meal for that purpose. Then there was the baking and the consumption of
the odd cake or two by the little wood gatherers. But beyond all this, there was a
great pleasure reserved for them all--the privilege of presenting to the moon the
cakes in the making of which they had all had a part, and which were as round and
as perfect as a womans hand could make them. Children have their part to do still.
Often, as in this case, the work begins with children. They cannot do much; they
cannot kindle a fire, or make a cake or a loaf; but they can gather wood, supply the
fuel, and others will kindle the fire and provide an offering fit for the altar of God.
You cannot as yet, at least, go forth to distant lands as missionaries and Zenana
workers, and take the bread of life--not as a gift to God, but as a gift from God--to
the heathen; but you can enable others who are older than you to do all this. You can
contribute your pence to the missionary society, etc. (D. Davies.)

JER 7:24
Went backward, and not forward.

Backward

I. Illustrations of going backward in regard to religion.

1. From Jewish history. Compare best days of Solomon, when temple was
dedicated, with these when jeremiah preached at gate. National mind
darkened, conscience enfeebled, heart hardened.
2. Churches. Galatia (Gal 3:1-3; Gal 5:7-8), Ephesus (Rev 2:4), Sardis (Rev 3:1).
3. Individual life.
(1) Brought up in Christian home; back into thoughtlessness, dissipation,
infidelity.
(2) Awakened by power of truth, and gained a place in household of faith; go
backward and make shipwreck of faith and a good conscience.
(3) Trod noblest heights of Christian service; back to stagnation and ease.

II. Causes of this going backward.

1. Negatively.
(1) God never causes a human being to go backward from what is pure and
good and true.
(2) Nor must the charge be laid at the door of men or of Satan.
2. Positively.
(1) The primary cause must be sought in man himself, his inclination to the
things which are behind. Spiritual feebleness.
(2) The secondary causes are temptations; the lusts, pleasures, and gains he
desires to enjoy.
(3) His weakness in yielding results from neglect of the means of strength,
the Word of God, prayer, means of instruction and grace.
 III. Consequences of going backward.
1. Displeasure of God.
2. Such as turn back are liable to sink into lowest depths of irreligion.
3. Experience of deepest remorse and reproach of conscience.
Conclusion--
1. Stand fast in the Lord.
2. Despair not, but return. (R. Ann.)

The backslider defenceless

When Christian, in the Pilgrims Progress, thought about going back, he
recollected that he had no armour for his back. He had a breastplate, he was covered
from head to foot by his shield, but there was nothing to protect his back, and
therefore, if he retreated, the adversary could spit him with his javelin in a moment.
So he thought that bad as it was to go forward, it would be worse to go backward,
and therefore he bravely cut a path for himself straight onward for glory. Look at
that fact whenever you are tempted: do not endure the idea of turning tail in the day
of battle. May retreat be impossible to you! God makes it Impossible by His grace.
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 7:27
They will not hearken to thee.

Gods foreknowledge of the sinners refusal of His Word

I. Instances illustrative of the text.

1. The original transgression of first parents.
2. The old world.
3. Pharaoh.
4. Jews as a nation.

II. How can this be explained and defended?

1. Unless God did know results such as described He would be imperfect.
2. He is not the cause of the rebellion He foretells.
3. He never influences men to do wrong.
4. There are many ends to be attained by God.
By speaking, though He knows men will not hearken.
(1) God exhibits His true desire for their salvation.
(2) He treats men as reasonable and responsible beings.
(3) He leaves them without excuse.
Conclusion--
 1. Mans free agency is his glory.
2. Gods infinite goodness is undoubted.
3. Our duty is manifest--to hear, obey, believe.
4. Thus men will be finally inexcusable, having had means employed for their
restoration to holiness and God. (J. Burns, D. D.)

Preaching without effect

God has been putting into the mouth of His servant Jeremiah a varied message of
reproof and counsel, of promise and blessing. The message contains equal
encouragement to those who should repent, and denunciations of wrath on all who,
rashly confident in external privileges, should continue to insult by the impiety of
their lives. Thus, there is a close resemblance between the sermon which the
prophet was instructed to deliver and those which, in our days, the ministers of God
must utter. We know it to be our business, in dealing with a mixed assembly of those
who make profession of religion and those who make none, to use language very
similar to that which Jeremiah here employs; conjuring men that they trust not in
lying words which, cannot profit, but that they amend their ways and their doings,
lest Gods anger and Gods fury be poured out and burn, and there be none to
quench it. Here, then, it is, that our text comes in upon us with all its startling and
perplexing assertion; that losing sight of the peculiar circumstances of the Jews, we
may regard the ministers of the Gospel as commanded to preach, even if beforehand
assured that their preaching would be fruitless. We cannot but think, that,
determining by human computation what course would be the most fraught with
advantage to their hearers, preachers would reckon it best to keep silence if they
were certain none would be converted by their message. It admits not of question,
that men, who hear the Gospel, and give no heed to its announcements, are
disadvantaged by the very circumstance of having been its auditors. Now there was
actually given to Jeremiah that information, which, for the sake of argument, we
have supposed imparted to ourselves. Yet he was not on this account to abstain from
delivering his message. The certainty of rejection was in no degree to interfere with
the duty of proclamation. Now if ineffectiveness of preaching in bringing round
conversion, supposing it previously ascertained, would be no sufficient reason for
abstaining from preaching, there must be ends answered by the publication of the
Gospel over and above that of the gathering in of the elect people of God. The way
which shall be made by the preached Word in each separate case is necessarily
already known to the Omniscient, so that with God it is previously a thing of as
much certainty as it afterwards can be with ourselves, who will receive and who
reject the proffered salvation. The foreknowledge has no influence on the reception;
it lays no constraint on the will, and it gives no bias to the will. And now, allowing
only that Gods foreknowledge, and not Gods predestination, enters as a
prerequisite into such a declaration as that made in our text, the question still
remains to be examined, why God should enjoin the preaching of the Gospel in cases
where He is assured that this preaching will be ineffective? We think that the grand
answer to this question is to be found in the demands of that high moral
government which God undoubtedly exercises over the creatures of this earth. Let it
be remembered, that each amongst us lives under the moral government of God,
which takes its character from the interference of Christ; that we are to be tried
before the assembled universe as beings to whom was offered deliverance through a
Surety; and is it not clear that, if this our last trial be conducted with that rigid
justice which must characterise every procedure of God, it shall be made evident to
every rank of intelligence that those that perish might have been saved; and
forasmuch as they are condemned for having rejected salvation, salvation had been
literally placed within their reach! (H. Melvill, B. D.)

JEREMIAH 8

JER 8:4-7
Why then is this people of Jerusalem slidden back by a perpetual backsliding.

A great evil and an urgent question

I. A GREAT EVIL. Backsliding.

1. It is an evil in its nature; it is a great sin against God, involving the basest
ingratitude, the abuse of the greatest mercies, and the violation of the most
solemn vows.
2. It is an evil in its influence.
(1) Upon self. It arrests the progress of the soul, darkens its prospects,
curtails its liberty, and destroys its usefulness.
(2) Upon others. It encourages the religious sceptic, it staggers the anxious
inquirer, it embarrasses the friends of truth.

II. An urgent question. Why?

1. Not by the force of circumstances over which they have no control. No power
in the universe drives them back against their will.
2. Not by the withdrawal of heavens helping agency.
3. The causes are in themselves. Neglect of the means of spiritual improvement,
the study of the Scriptures, and the ministry of the Word; the cherishing of
some secret sin; engrossment in worldly pursuits; fellowship with sceptical
and ungodly men. (Homilist.)

Backsliding tendencies
The tendency to the lukewarmness of spiritual life is in us all. Take a bar of iron
out of the furnace on a winter day, and lay it down in the air, and there is nothing
more wanted. Leave it there, and very soon the white heat will change into livid
dulness, and then there will come a scale over it, and in a short time it will be as cold
as the frosty atmosphere around it. And so there is always a refrigerating process
acting upon us which needs to be counteracted by continual contact with the fiery
furnace of spiritual warmth, or else we are cooled down to the degree of cold around
us. (A. Maclaren.)

To the backslider
 I. The causes of backsliding.
1. The fear of man.
2. Inter course with worldly society.
3. Presumption.
4. Secret sin.
5. Neglect of prayer.

II. The symptoms of backsliding.

1. The absence of pleasure in attending to the secret exercises of religion.
2. Irregular and unprofitable attendance on public ordinances.
3. Unwillingness to act or suffer for the honour of Christ.
4. Uncharitable feelings toward fellow Christians.
5. Indulgence in sins once abandoned.

III. The forms of backsliding.

1. Declension into error.
2. Declension into unbelief.
3. Declension into lukewarmness, or want of love.
4. Declension into prayerlessness.
5. Declension into immorality.
6. Declension into open rejection of a Christian profession.

IV. The evils of backsliding.

V. The cure of backsliding.

1. Let the backslider remember from whence he has fallen.
2. Let the backslider reflect on his guilt and danger.
3. Let the backslider return to God, from whom he has wandered.
4. Let the backslider live near to Christ.
5. Let the backslider forsake the sin into which he has fallen.
6. Let the backslider learn to depend on the promised aid of the Holy Spirit. (G.
Brooks.)

National degeneracy

I. WHAT DENOMINATES A RELIGIOUS PEOPLE. The Jews were a religious people in

distinction from all other nations who were given to superstition and idolatry. They
professed to believe the existence of the only living and true God. All the nations at
this day, who profess to believe the truth of Christianity, and who observe the public
worship of God and the ordinances of the Gospel, are called religious nations,
though the great majority may be totally destitute of vital piety. It is the explicit
profession and external conduct of a people that give them their religious character.
 II. WHEN A RELIGIOUS PEOPLE MAY BE SAID TO BE A BACKSLIDING CLUE. Grace, in the
present state, does not entirely destroy nature. Large measures of moral corruption
remain in the hearts of the best of men in the most religious nations. So, every
people, who profess to believe the Gospel and live under its influence, have
something in them that dislikes the character, the laws, and the government of God.
On this account they are bent to backsliding from Him. Among every religious
people there is a great, if not the greatest part of them, who are under only the
restraining, and not the sanctifying, influence of the Gospel. It is when they break
over such restraints as ought to keep them from backsliding from Him; and they are
perpetually backsliding, while they are constantly breaking over one restraint after
another.
1. They break over the restraints of His goodness. He promised to make them
the most numerous, the most wealthy, and the most respectable nation on
earth.
2. A religious people who are perpetually backsliding grow worse and worse
under the restraint of Divine authority. He gave His peculiar people His
judgments, His statutes, and His laws, which were far superior to those of
any other nation. There was another way by which God often laid a restraint
upon His backsliding people, and that was by His rod of correction; but they
often broke over this restraint, and persisted in their wicked ways.
3. A perpetually backsliding people will hold fast deceit, and refuse to return to
God from whom they have revolted, even under the severest tokens of His
wrath.

III. Why a backsliding people will persist in backsliding. This is owing to some
great delusion.
1. They delude themselves by backsliding very gradually. They first forget the
goodness of God in one smaller favour, and then in another; and this leads
them to forget God in greater and greater favours, until Divine goodness
loses all its restraining influence over them. In the same imperceptible
manner they break over all the restraints of Divine authority and of Divine
corrections. Such a gradual backsliding becomes more and more habitual,
and, of course, more and more insensible. Every backslider always feels self-
condemned for the first instances of his deviation from the path of duty. But
one deviation naturally leads to another, and serves to palliate it, till self-
regret and self-reproach cease to operate, and men feel as easy and innocent
in their gradual declensions as they did before they began to backslide; and,
like Ephraim, while they have grey hairs here and there upon them, they
know it not.
2. All backsliding consists in mens walking in the ways of their hearts, instead
of walking in the ways of Gods commandments. They backslide because they
love to backslide; and what they love, they endeavour to persuade themselves
is right. If they are reproved, they will justify rather than condemn their
backsliding.
3. Backsliders are more or less under the blinding and deluding influence of the
great adversary of souls. He is now deluding all the heathen world, and
insensibly involving them in fatal darkness, and leading them blindly to
 destruction. And he is more or less concerned in spreading errors and
delusions in all the Christian world, who love and hold fast deceit.
Improvement--
1. It appears from the description of a religious people which has been given in
this discourse, that we in this country deserve that character.
2. If we have given a just description of a perpetually backsliding people, that
character justly belongs to us.
3. It appears from what has been said, that our national sins are very great and
aggravated. They are of the nature of backsliding, which greatly enhances
their criminality. Backsliding is not a sin of ignorance, but a sin of
knowledge. Our national vices, immoralities, and errors, have been
commited against greater light and stronger restraints than those of any
other nation.
4. It appears from what has been said, that no external means nor motives will
reform a backsliding people. They backslide so gradually and insensibly, and
are so fond of their backslidings, and are under such a powerful influence of
the great deceiver, that they will hold fast deceit, and refuse to repent,
return, and reform. Their perpetual backsliding is perpetually stupefying
their hearts and consciences; for they feel no guilt and fear no danger. They
are certainly out of the reach of men and means to save them from ruin.
Hence,
5. This people have abundant occasion for fasting, humiliation, and prayer.
Their situation is extremely critical and dangerous, and every way adapted to
affect every benevolent heart. It is the imperious duty of all the Noahs, Jobs,
and Daniels to arise and plead with God to take His own work into His own
hands, and bow the hearts of this people to Himself. (N. Emmons, D. D.)

They refused to return.--

Mans backwardness to repent
1. God reasons with us from what we do in other cases. Shall they fall, etc. (Jer
8:4). He makes us judges in our own cause. If a man slips and gets a fall,
does he lie where he fell, without making any attempt to get up again? Why,
then, God saith, doth this people what no others do? Why do they fall, and
rise not? stray, and return not? Despair of pardon leads many to continue in
sin. But is there cause for this despair? Is it God that is unwilling? No; they
refused to return. The Lord, as it were, saith, How often would I have
gathered them together, and they would not! My outward calling you by the
Word, My inward moving by me Spirit, My many benefits, My gentle
chastisements, My long-suffering--all show, that I was willing for your
return.
2. God reasons with us from His own anxious desire. He represents Himself to
us as hearkening with patient, attentive ear, if He may catch from us the
words of repentance. And what does God expect to hear from us? What have
I done? These words, said not with the lips only, but from the deep feelings
of the heart, may lead to better things. How vile was the act of sin in itself!
how full is it of shame and remorse! What have I done, as in the sight of God,
so fearful in power, so glorious in majesty? What have I done as for any
 profit derived, any passing, empty pleasure? How have I injured my body
and my soul!
3. God sends us to the birds of the sky; to creatures without reason, that we,
reasonable beings, may learn our duty from them. Yea, the stork, etc. These
birds have an appointed time for coming back; they know and observe it.
There is an accepted time, if we would know it; if, like the birds, we would
observe, and take it; and the Scripture tells us, that that time is now. (E.
Blencowe, M. A.)

JER 8:5
They hold fast deceit.

On the deceitfulness of the heart in stifling convictions

These words, as immediately referring to the people of Judah, might denote their
preposterous confidence in the assistance of neighbouring nations, or in the
testimony of their false prophets, who assured them of peace and prosperity,
notwithstanding all Gods declarations to the contrary; and their refusal to return to
Him in that way which He had enjoined, by faith in His pardoning mercy through
the blood of the covenant, and genuine repentance. In general, they express the
conduct of sinners under the power of deceit, who reject all the calls, invitations, and
expostulations of God, turn a deaf ear to all the warnings of conscience, and resist all
the common operations of the Spirit.

I. Some of the proofs that the heart affords of its deceitfulness, in the methods
which it takes for stifling convictions of sin.
1. Many drown their convictions in the mire of their lusts. When conscience is,
in some measure, awakened because of former sins, they endeavour to
overpower it, by making its load the heavier, that, if possible, it may sink
under it altogether, and trouble them no more.
2. Many extinguish convictions by flying to the world, multitudes are in this
manner ruined for eternity. Even the innocent enioyments of life prove the
destruction of myriads.
3. The hearers of the Gospel often quench their convictions by doubting the
truth of the doctrine. In this way did sin make its entrance into the world;
and all along, it has proved a great support of it. The unbelief of the heart
comes in to the assistance of the love of sin.
4. Many stifle their convictions by turning them into ridicule. They try to laugh
themselves out of convictions just as a coward endeavours to get rid of his
fear, by inward ridicule: not that they really disbelieve the things that give
them trouble, but they wish to do so. And by habituating themselves to laugh
at the shaking of the spear, like the coward at heart, they may acquire a
fictitious courage, and really get the mastery over them.
5. Men overpower their convictions by extenuating sin, or apprehending that
they are not guilty in the eye of the law, because free of grosser immoralities.
But this is as great folly, in a spiritual sense, as it would be for a thief or
 robber to imagine that he was in no danger of the sentence of the law of his
country, because he had not yet committed murder; or, for a man indulging
himself in strong drink, to apprehend that he run no risk of intoxication,
because he could still hold the cup to his head.
6. The heart often stifles convictions by representing eternal concerns as of little
importance. By far the greatest part of men, although they see a dying world
around them, live as if themselves alone were to be immortal. Or, one might
be apt to imagine from their conduct, that they altogether denied the
immortality of their souls, and believed that they would perish with their
bodies.
7. Many endeavour to fly from a wounded conscience, and so hold fast deceit by
flying from the means of grace. The only condition on which such persons
will submit to the sound of the Gospel, is that they have nothing but smooth
things prophesied to them.
8. Others extinguish convictions by magnifying the difficulties of religion. It
seems to them a great hardship to perform so many duties, to be instant in
season and out of season. They reckon Gods commandments grievous, and
the reward scarcely an equivalent for the labour.
9. Convictions are often stifled by the hope of abundance of time, and the
promise of a future consideration. Thousands and ten thousands fall the
miserable victims of a false hope. When the concerns of their precious souls
intrude themselves on their thoughts, they endeavour to banish them, from
the expectation of length of days, and of a continued enjoyment of a merciful
dispensation.

II. The great danger of stifling convictions.

1. This conduct is of the most hardening nature. All sin is so. He who sins today
makes the commission of sin easier to conscience tomorrow. There is a
progress in sin as well as in holiness. And there is no sin of a more heart-
hardening nature than this of quenching convictions. When men make their
neck an iron sinew, the brow becomes brass. Obduracy in resisting God is
always succeeded by effrontery in sin.
2. He who stifles convictions willingly continues under the sentence of
condemnation, consents to it, and seals himself up under it. Convictions are
the messengers of incensed justice, sent forth against the transgressor,
warning him of the necessity of fleeing into the city or refuge. He who refuses
to listen, scorns the refuge provided, and runs his risk of meeting with the
avenger.
3. The expected time of consideration may never arrive. Cain went out from the
presence of the Lord, and we have not the least reason to think that he ever
returned.
4. God may justly deny heartmollifying grace. They rebelled and vexed His holy
Spirit, and He was turned to be their enemy.
5. He may cease to be a reprover. This is often the case. When the sinner
continues to stifle convictions, God takes away His messengers. Or, the
means may be continued, and yet be altogether blasted to them. The Bible
becomes a book that is sealed. The Word is a dead letter. The most
 awakening sermons leave them as fast asleep in sin as they found them. For
the Lord hath said, My Spirit will not always strive with man.
6. He may contend with them in the course of His providence. He hath long
fought against them, as He threatens the Church of Sardis, with the sword of
His mouth. Now He will fight against them with the sword of His hand.
7. God gives them up to their own lusts. A man needs no other devil to possess
him than these. The name of such a possession is legion. Thus he becomes
exceeding fierce in sin, and hurries on headlong to destruction, as if it
advanced of itself, with too slow a pace.
8. In judgment He may lay occasions of sin in their way. God can tempt no man.
He forces no man to sin, because He infinitely hates it. But when He sees
sinners determined on iniquity, He sometimes chooses their delusions, as He
threatens in His Word: I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their
fears upon them.
9. God may judicially harden their hearts. It is one of the inconceivable
mysteries of Divine operation, that God should in righteous judgment give
up a sinner to obduracy, and yet be at an infinite distance from the sin. But
so it is.
10. God may refuse to hear, although they should call. He laughs at the sinner
when trying to break His bands. But His holy scorn will be far more awful in
the end. (J. J. Jameson, M. A.)

JER 8:6-7
I hearkened and heard, but they spake not aright: no man repented him of his
wickedness, saying, What have I done?

Gods inquisition
1. That God hath an ear and an eye to our carriage and dispositions, to our
speeches and courses. If we had one always at our backs that would inform
such a man what we say, one that should book our words, and after lay them
to our charge, it would make us careful of our words. Now, though we be
never so much alone, there are two always that hear us. God hears, and Gods
deputy in us, conscience, hearkens and hears. God books it, and conscience
books it. This doth impose upon us the duty of careful and reverent walking
with God. Would we speak carelessly or ill of any man if He heard us? When
we slight a man, we say we care not if he heard us himself. But shall we slight
God so? Shall we swear, and lie, and blaspheme, and say we care not though
God hear us, that will lay everything to our charge, not only words but
thoughts? No man spake aright. But what evidence doth He give upon this
inquisition? They spake not aright, which is amplified from the generality
of this sin When God had threatened judgments, He hearkened and heard
what use they made of them, but they spake not aright. In how many
respects do we not speak aright in regard of the judgments of God?
1. In regard of God, men speak not aright when they do not see Him in the
judgment, but look to the creature, to the second causes.
 2. We talk amiss in regard of others, when we begin to slight them in our
thoughts and speeches. Oh, they were careless people; they adventured into
company, and it was the carelessness of the magistrates; they were not well
looked to; they were unmerciful persons, etc. Is it not Gods hand?
3. We talk amiss of Gods judgments in regard of ourselves.
(1) When we murmur and fret any way against God, and do not submit
ourselves under His mighty hand as we should.
(2) When we take liberty to inquire of the judgments of God abroad, and
never make use of them. So much for the evidence. Come we now to
Gods complaint upon this evidence. No man repented him of his
wickedness. They did not repent of their wickedness, and the fault was
general: No man repented. The first yields this instruction. That it is a
state much offending God, not to repent when His judgments are
threatened. The longer we live in any sin unrepented of, the more our
hearts will be hardened; the more Satan takes advantage against us, the
more hardly he is driven out of his old possession, the more just it may
be with God to give us up from one sin to another. The understanding
will be more dark upon every repetition of sin, and conscience will be
more dulled. Those that are young, therefore, let them take the advantage
of the youth, and strength, and freshness of their years to serve God. That
which is blasted in the bud, what fruit may we look for from it
afterwards? Again, what welcome shall we expect, when we have
sacrificed the marrow of our years to our lusts, to bring our old age to
God? Can this be any other than self-love? Such late repentance is
seldom sound. Our hearts are so false and so dull, we have need to take
all advantages of withdrawing ourselves from our sinful courses.
And to encourage us to do it, let us consider, if we do this, and do it in time, we
shall have the sweetness of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts. You will say,
We shall lose the sweetness of sin; ay, but--
1. You shall have a most sweet communion with God.
2. It is the way to prevent Gods judgments, as we see in Nineveh and others.
3. Should we be stricken, if we have made our peace with God, if we have
repented, all shall be welcome, all shall be turned to our good. We know the
sting is pulled out. No man repented of his evil ways. We see, then, that
generality is no plea. We must not follow a multitude to do evil (Ex 23:2).
We must not follow the stream, to do as the world doth. It hath been the
commendation of Gods children, that they have striven against the stream
and been good in evil times. If there be but one Lot in Sodom, one Noah and
his family in the old world, he shall be looked to as a jewel among much
dross. God will single him out as a man doth his jewels, when the rubbish is
burnt. God will have a special care to gather His jewels. It shows sincerity
and strength of grace, when a man is not tainted with the common
corruptions. No man repented. They did not say in their hearts and
tongues, What have I done?
They were inconsiderate, they did not examine their ways.
1. A man can return upon himself; he can try his own ways, and arrest, and
arraign himself. What have I done? This shows the dignity of man; and
 considering that God hath set up a throne and seat of judgment in the heart,
we should labour to exercise this judgment.
2. God having given man this excellent prerogative to cite himself and to judge
his own courses, when man doth not this, it is the cause of all mischief, of all
sin and misery.
3. The exercising of this judgment, it makes a mans life lightsome. He knows
who he is and whither he goes.
4. Whatsoever we do without this consideration, it is not put upon our account
for comfort. When we do things upon judgment, it is with examination
whether it be according to the rule or no. Our service of God is especially in
our affections, when we joy, and fear, and delight aright. Now how can a man
do this without consideration? For the affections, wheresoever they are
ordinate and good, they are raised up by judgment. Now if we would practise
this duty, we must labour to avoid the hindrances. The main hindrances of
this consideration are--
(1) The rage of lusts, that will not give the judgment leave to consider of a
mans ways; but they are impetuous and tyrannous, carrying men, as we
shall see in the next clause, as the horse rusheth into the battle.
(2) Too much business, when men are distracted with the things of this life.
(3) It is a secret and hard action; because it is to work upon a mans self. The
world doth not applaud a man for speaking of his own faults. Men are not
given to retired actions. They care not for them, unless they have sound
hearts.
(4) This returning upon a mans self, presents to a man a spectacle that is
unwelcome. If a man consider his own ways, it will present to him a
terrible object. Therefore as the elephant troubles the waters, that he may
not see his own visage, so men trouble their souls, that they may not see
what they are. Every one turns to his course, as the horse rusheth into
the battle. Every one hath his course, his way, whether good or evil. The
course of a wicked man is a smooth way perhaps, but it is a going from
God; it leads from Him. And where doth it end? for every way hath its
end. It is a going from God to hell. There all the courses of wicked men
end. As the horse rusheth into the battle. Here it is comparatively set
down. If you would see how the horse rusheth into the battle, it is lively
and Divinely expressed (Job 39:19).
The horse rusheth into the battle--
(1) Eagerly, as in the place of Job.
(2) Desperately, he will not be pulled away by any means.
(3) Dangerously, for he rusheth upon the pikes, and ofttimes falls down
suddenly dead.
Herein wicked men are like unto the horse, going on in their course eagerly,
desperately, dangerously.
1. They go on eagerly. It is meat and drink unto them. They cannot sleep until
they have done wickedness.
2. As they go eagerly, so desperately and irreclaimably too; nothing will restrain
them. Though God hedge in their ways with thorns, they break through all
 (Hos 2:6).
3. As they go eagerly and desperately, so dangerously too; for is it not dangerous
to provoke God? to rush upon the pikes? to run against thorns? Do you
provoke Me to jealousy, saith God, and not yourselves to destruction?
(1Co 10:22.) No. They go both together. Yea, the stork in the heavens
knoweth her appointed times, etc. God confounds the proud dispositions of
wicked men by poor, silly creatures--the crane, the turtle, the swallow, and
the like. What their wisdom is we see by experience. They have an instinct
put in them by God to preserve their being by removing from place to place,
and to use that which may keep life. Now, man is made for a better life; and
there be dangers concerning the soul in another world, yet he is not so wise
for his soul and his best being as the poor creatures are to preserve their
being by the instinct of nature. When sharp weather comes they avoid it, and
go where a better season is, and a better temper of the air; but man, when
Gods judgments are threatened and sent on him, and God would have him
part with his sinful courses, and is ready to fire him, and to force him out of
them, yet he is not so careful as the creatures. He will rather perish and die,
and rot in his sins, and settle upon his dregs, than alter his course. So he is
more sottish than the silly creatures. He will not go into a better estate, to the
heat, to the sunbeams to warm him. He will not seek for the favour of God, to
be cherished with the assurance of His love, as the poor creature goeth to the
sun to warm it till it be over hot for it. The thing most material, is this: That
God, after long patience, hath judgments to come on people; and it should be
the part of people to know when the judgment is coming.
But how shall we know when a judgment is near hand?
1. By comparing the sins with the judgments. If there be such sins that such
judgments are threatened for, then as the thread followeth the needle, and
the shadow the body, so those judgments follow such and such courses. For
God hath knit and linked these together.
2. There is a nearer way to know a judgment, when it hath seized on us in part
already. He that is not brutish and sottish, and drunk with cares and
sensuality, must needs know a judgment when it is already inflicted, when
part of the house is on fire.
3. We may know it by the example of others. God keeps His old walks. What
ground have we to hope for immunity more than others? We may rather
expect it less, because we have their examples; and so they wanted those
examples to teach them which we have.
4. General security is a great sign of some judgment coming. There is never
more cause of fear, than when there is least fear. The reason is, want of fear
springs from infidelity, for faith stirs up fearfulness and care to please God.
5. We may know that some judgment is coming, by the universality and
generality of sin, when it spreads over all. As the deluge of sin made way for
the deluge of water, so the overflow of sin will make way for a flood of fire.
God will one day purge the world with fire. But now for particular sins,
whereby we may know when judgment is coming.
(1) Injustice. Is not innocency trodden down ofttimes?
(2) And so for religion. It is generally neglected. Indifferency and formality.
 (3) Persecution of religion and religious men.
(4) When men will go on incorrigibly in sin, as these here, they rush as the
horse rote the battle; when they will not be reclaimed, it is a forerunner
of destruction.
(5) Another particular sin whereby we may discern a judgment coming is,
unfruitfulness under the means; as the fig tree, when it was digged and
dunged, and yet was unfruitful, then it was near a curse.
(6) Nay more, decay in our first love is a forerunner of judgment, when we
love not God as we were wont (Rev 2:5).
Well, but what shall we do when judgments are coming?
1. First, In the interim between the threatening and the execution. Oh improve
it, make use of this little time; get into covenant with God; hide yourselves in
the providence and promises of God; make your peace, defer it no longer.
2. Mourn for the sins of the time, that when any judgment shall come, you may
be marked with those that mourn.
3. Be watchful. Let us shake off security, and do everything we do sincerely to
God. We may come to God to make our account, we know not how soon. Let
us do everything as in His presence, and to Him. In our particular callings,
let us be conscionable, and careful, and fruitful. (R. Sibbes.)

Man on earth

I. As thy. Special object of Divine attention. Why? We may imagine that--

1. Mans spiritual infirmities on earth would draw towards him the special notice
of his Maker.
2. Mans critical position.
3. Mans social influence.

II. AS THE PROBATIONARY SUBJECT OF REDEMPTIVE DISCIPLINE. Under this system

three things are required of him--
1. Rectitude of language. In conformity with moral truth.
2. Contrition of heart.
3. Self-searching thought.

III. As the wicked abuser of the system under which he lives.

1. Reckless obstinacy.
2. Unnatural ignorance. Yea, the stork, etc.
(1) These creatures have remarkable instincts, suitable to the external
circumstances of their nature. So have you. They have the instinct of
perceiving coming changes, and the instinct of adjusting themselves to
those changes.
(2) These creatures invariably render obedience to their instincts. You do
not. How unnatural! (Homilist.)
Interrogating our conduct
How attentive God is to us and our actions! He sees His prodigals when yet a great
way off; to Him there is music in our sigh, and beauty in a tear. Never do we have a
desire towards God, or breathe a prayer to heaven, but God has been watching and
hearkening for it: it was but one tear on the cheek, yet the Father noticed it as a
hopeful sign; but one throb went through the heart, yet He heeded it as an omen
that not quite hardened by sin.

I. Words of EARNEST PERSUASION, urging all, and especially the unconverted, to

ask this question, each for himself, and solemnly answer it.
1. Searching yourself can do you no hurt. Little can be lost by taking stock.
2. You may be a great deal better for the process: for, if your affairs are all right
with God, you may cheer and comfort yourself; but there are many
probabilities that they are wrong; so many are deceived and anything rather
than self-delusion.
3. The time for self-examination is short: soon you will know the secret, death
will rend off the mask.
4. Though you may deceive yourself, you cannot God.

II. Words of ASSISTANCE in trying to answer the question.

1. To Christians: What hast thou done? You reply, Nothing to save myself;
that was done for me. Nothing to make a righteousness for myself; Christ
said, It is finished! Nothing to merit heaven; Jesus did that for me before I
was born! Yes; but say, What hast thou done for Him? for His Church? for
the salvation of the world? to promote thine own spiritual growth in grace?
2. To moralists: What hast thou done? You answer, All I ought to have done!
You may tell me of sins, but I have done my duty: observed Sabbath, said
prayers, given to poor, etc.; and if good works have any merit, I have done a
great deal! True, if any merit; but very unfortunate that they have not, for
our good works, if we do them to save ourselves by them, are no better than
our sins.
3. To the worldly. What done? It is very little I do amiss; now and then just a
little mirth. Stop; let us have the right name for that mirth. What do you call
it in anyone else? Drunkenness. I have been a little loose in talk
sometimes! Write it down, Lascivious conversation. Sometimes you have
been out on the Sabbath? Sabbath breaking. You may have quoted texts of
Scripture to make jokes of them, and used Gods name in foolish talk?
Swearing. Did you ever adulterate in your trade? Stealing. Wished you
could get your neighbours prosperity? Covetousness, which is idolatry. Ever
really prayed? Prayerlessness. Neglected God and Bible? Despising Him.
May the Spirit touch your consciences, and convince you of your sins!
4. To the unconverted: What done? By your sins you have destroyed your soul,
resisted the Gospel, spurned Christ. Yes; and think what you have done to
your children: taught them the ways of spiritual ruin. To your companions:
tempted some to take the first stray step into folly, indulgence, iniquity. Doth
not your heart quaff within you because of self-ruin and ruin of others?
 III. Words of AFFECTIONATE ADMONITION to those who have had to answer the
question against themselves.
1. Solemn that the years roll on and yet you are unsaved. You, not altogether
hardened, yet done nothing to determine for Christ, and lay hold on
eternity.
2. There will be a time when you will ask the question, but it will be too late. If
you only knew what they feel, and could see what they endure, who have lost
opportunity and lost themselves, you would, ere too late, pause and ask,
what have I done? As immortal spirits, bound for endless weal or woe, fly
ye to Christ, seek for mercy at His hand, trust in Him, and be saved. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

God listening
The figure is a graphic and vivid one; it is that of the Divine Being stooping from
heaven, and with inclined ear listening critically yet hopefully to human speech, if
mayhap there be but one bright word, one tone of music, one sigh of contrition. The
Lord did not listen generally, promiscuously, as if listening to a confused noise of
sound; but He listened specifically, He tried every word, He detained every syllable,
if haply He could detect in it one sound or sign that He might construe hopefully.
But it was in vain. Even Divinest kindness could make nothing but black ingratitude
of all the energetic speech: it was a torrent of iniquity; it was a river black, foul; it
was a rain of poison. God does not bring these charges against the human family
lightly. God can see flowers if there are any. He can see them before they open their
mystery, and proclaim in fragrance their gospel; He knows where they are sown and
planted. But He looked, and there was none; He expected, and was struck to the
heart with disappointment. No man repented him of his wickedness, saying, What
have I done? There was no self-cross-examination. When men cease to soliloquise
they cease to pray. The hardest witness man undertakes to interrogate is his own
soul. Yet philosophy has found out the advantages of self-inquest. The Pythagoreans
asked themselves once a day, What have I done? The inquiry creates a space in the
day for itself, makes one inch of praying ground in the desert of the days life. How
few men dare probe themselves with that inquiry! It is a question double-edged. It is
recorded of Cicero, in pressing one of his accusations against an adversary, that he
told that adversary that if he had but put two words to himself he might have cooled
his passion, controlled his desires, and turned his impulses to high utility. Said the
orator, If thou hadst said to thyself, Quid ego? thou mightest have stopped thyself
in this tremendous assault. That is, What have I done? What do I? What is my
course? What are the facts of the case? (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 8:7-8
The stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times.

Instinct contrasted with reason in its discernment of times

I. The birds of passage show in their periodic migrations, their discernment of

seasons, and this both as regards the time of their visiting and the time of their
leaving us. Probably some peculiarity in the material structure of migratory birds
renders them extremely sensitive to changes of temperature--and as these changes
always recur at certain seasons of the year, they observe seasons, and make a
corresponding change in their places of abode. So great is their sagacity, so true
their instinct.

II. Consider the operation of unsanctified reason in discerning times.

1. Consider the invitations of this season of grace.
(1) The Saviours voice issuing forth from the pages of the written Word,
addresses sinners in such soothing accents, and holds forth to them
promises so refreshing, that one would think it could hardly fail of
winning an entrance into their hearts, and finding a response there!
(2) But we believe that in every case in which the sinner has made a nominal
profession of Christs religion, and been formally admitted to the
participation of Christian privileges, the Holy Spirit seconds, by an
inward action upon the conscience, this external call of the Saviour. In
the abysmal depths of the consciousness He strives with the reluctant
soul, and whispers in accents, which even the giddy whirl of vanity and
frivolity cannot entirely drown or shut out, Come.
(3) God employs subordinate human agents to herald in the ears of His
people His invitations of grace. The bride, that is the Church, says
Come. She says so by her ministers, who are her commissioned
representatives.
(4) God invites us to return in penitence and faith to His bosom by the
dispensations of His providence, no less than by more immediate and
direct summons (Hos 5:15; Mic 6:9).
2. But if the majority of sinners be not gently won by the invitations of grace,
they will haply be driven by terror to take refuge in those offers. Let growing
age and infirmity bring death and judgment very near--the prospect will
surely urge the wanderer to return with hurried steps to the sheepfold! When
hoar hairs are here and there upon him, he will lay to heart the cheerless
desolate prospect which lies before him in the vista of futurity, and fly before
the approaching winter of Gods wrath! (Dean Goulburn.)

Migration heavenward
When God would set fast a beautiful thought, He plants it in a tree. When He
would put it afloat, He fashions it into a fish. When He would have it glide the air,
He moulds it into a bird. The prophet was out of doors, thinking of the impenitences
of the people of his day, when he heard a great cry overhead. He looks up, and there
are flocks of storks, and turtledoves, and cranes, and swallows, drawn out in long
line for flight southwards. As is their habit, the cranes had arranged themselves into
two lines, making an angle--a wedge--splitting the air with wild velocity; the old
crane, with commanding call, bidding them onward, until the towns, and the cities,
and the continents slid under them. The prophet, almost blinded from looking into
the dazzling heavens, stoops down and begins to think how much superior the birds
are in sagacity about their safety than men.
 I. THEY MINGLE MUSIC WITH THEIR WORK. The most serious undertaking of a birds
life is this annual travel. Naturalists tell us that they arrive weary and plumage
ruffled, and yet they go singing all the way, the ground the lower line of the music,
the sky the upper line of the music, themselves the notes scattered up and down
between. I suppose their song gives elasticity to their wings, and helps on the
journey. Would God that we were as wise as they, mingling Christian song with our
everyday work. A violin, chorded and strung, if something accidentally strike it,
makes music; and I suppose there is such a thing as having our hearts so attuned by
Divine glory that even the rough collisions of life will make heavenly vibration. Some
one asked Haydn why he always composed such cheerful music. Why, he said, I
cannot do otherwise. When I think of God, my soul is so full of joy that the notes
leap and dance from my pen. I wish we might all exult melodiously before the Lord.
The Church of God will never become a triumphal Church until it becomes a singing
Church.

II. THEY FLY VERY HIGH. During the summer, when they are in the fields, they
often come within reach of the gun; but when they start for their annual flight
southward they take their places mid-heaven, and go straight as a mark. The longest
rifle that was ever brought to shoulder cannot reach them. We fly so low that we are
within range of the world, the flesh, and the devil. So poor is the type of piety in the
Church of God at this day that men actually caricature the idea that there is any such
thing as a higher life. Moles never did believe in eagles. But because we have not
reached these heights ourselves, shall we deride the fact that there are any such
heights? I do not believe that God exhausted all His grace in Paul, and Latimer, and
Edward Payson. I believe there are higher points of Christian attainment to be
reached in the future ages of the Christian world.

III. THEY KNOW WHEN TO START. If you should go out now, and shout, Stop,
storks and cranes, dont be in a hurry, they would say, No, we cannot stop. Last
night we heard the roaring of the woods bidding us away, and the shrill flute of the
north wind has sounded the retreat. We must go. So they gather themselves into
companies, and turning not aside for storm or mountain top, or shock of musketry,
over land and sea, straight as an arrow to the mark, they go. And if you come out
this morning with a sack of corn, and throw it in the fields, and try to get them to
stop, they are so far up that they would hardly see it. They are on their way south.
You could not stop them. Oh! that we were as wise about the best time to start for
God and heaven. I was reading of an entertainment given in a kings court, and there
were musicians there with elaborate pieces of music. After a while Mozart came and
began to play, and he had a blank piece of paper before him, and the king familiarly
looked over his shoulder and said, What are you playing? I see no music before
you. And Mozart put his hand on his brow, as much as to say, I am making it up as
I go along. It was very well for him; but, oh! we cannot extemporise heaven. If we
do not get prepared in this world, we will never take part in the orchestral
harmonies of the saved. Oh! that we were as wise as the crane and the stork, flying
away, flying away from the tempest. Some of you have felt the pinching frost of sin.
You feel it today. You are not happy. There are voices within your soul that will not
be silenced, telling you that you are sinners, and that without the pardon of God you
are undone forever. Oh! that you would go away into the warm heart of Gods mercy.
The southern grove, redolent with the magnolia and cactus, never waited for
northern flocks as God has waited for you. Another frost is bidding you away: it is
the frost of trouble. Where do you live now? Oh, you say, I have moved. Why did
you move? You say, I dont want as large a house now as I used to want. Why do
you not want as large a house? You say, My family is not so large. Where have they
gone to? Eternity! (T. De Witt Talmage.)

Migratory birds
(childrens address):--It is very remarkable that in the whole globe there is no
place suitable all the year round for birds of this order; and that these untaught and
unthinking creatures should shift their habitation, and make long voyages through
the vast empire of the air. God has imprinted upon their nature that wonderful
instinct which enables them to determine when to go and which way to take. The
prophet, with the deep instinct of a poet, sees, and declares to Israel, the inner
meaning and lessons of the laws and habits of these aerial voyagers.

I. WE MUST OBEY THE CALL OF GOD. At the appointed time the birds feel an
impulse or moving within them that they must be going, they congregate together,
like swallows in autumn, all ready for their long journey. So in the same way, by the
movements of conscience and the voice of Divine truth, God is calling us. Abraham
obeyed that call, and left his idolatrous surroundings, and so did the fishers of
Galilee, they left their nets and followed Christ. In the second part of Bunyans
Pilgrims Progress, you see how the children left the city of destruction and went on
the heavenly journey.

II. DO NOT DELAY TO START. You have noticed the birds preparing: the trees and
hedgerows are covered with them, and there is such a chattering! Stragglers are
coming in, one after the other, and, at last, the signal is given, wings flutter, and
then, like a moving dark cloud, the birds begin their wonderful passage across the
pathless seas. But some swallows are too late, they are left behind, and perish in the
cold. We read in the Bible that Lots wife lingered and was overtaken by death: the
five foolish virgins were all unprepared and too late; but the Psalmist was of a
different character; he said, I made haste, I delayed not to keep Thy
commandments.

III. BEWARE OF TEMPTATIONS. What is it that makes some of the birds late, so that
they cannot start with the others? Perhaps, the sunshine! Everything looked so
beautiful, the trees were decked in splendour, like Josephs coat of many colours,
and the fat red berries glowed like little balls of fire, and so the birds were tempted
to delay their journey until it was too late. It was so with the Jews in Babylon. God
called them out of the land of captivity, and opened a way for them through the
desert, back to the temple and city of their fathers, but many of them were tempted
to remain behind; they had nice houses in Babylon, and there were many pleasant
things there, from which it was hard to break away. So the world today will seek to
keep you back from God, and prevent you beginning the heavenward journey.
Beware of its temptations, and pray God to make you strong to overcome.

IV. LIKE BIRDS, FLY HIGH, THAT IS, LIVE NEAR TO GOD. There are two advantages
the birds have when they fly high up in the air, they can see farther, and they are a
greater distance from the guns and snares of the earth, and the weapon of the
enemy. In churches, the lectern, on which rests the Bible, is generally a burnished
eagle, as if to say, that just as the eagle soars upward and upward towards the sun,
so the Bible, if we daily and prayerfully read it, will bring us into the light of Gods
own presence. Then shall we see the way of life more clearly, and escape the fiery
darts of the evil one. God, too, will fit us for our long journey just as He strengthens
the birds for theirs, giving to the swallow long and powerful wings, and to the quail
and other birds of shorter pinions marvellous strength of body. Cullen Bryant
beautifully says of the waterfowl--
He who from zone to zone,
Guides thro the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way which I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
(A. Hampden Lee.)

Duty of repentance illustrated

I. Respecting THE NATURE OF THE DUTY; the similitude in the text directs us to
consider it as a return, a treading back our steps, as birds of passage return to the
country from which they departed. We may then define repentance to be, A change
of mind, operating in a change of conduct.
1. The leading step in the process must of necessity be conviction. No man will
think of returning into the right way, unless he be made sensible that he has
wandered out of it. Conviction is produced gradually. Upon some hint given
to a man, either from within or from without, he begins to suspect himself in
the wrong; and then, if he be honest enough to prosecute the inquiry,
discovers at length that he actually is so. Sometimes it is flashed upon the
mind at once--he awakes, and the dream is at an end. It is produced by
various means, by disappointments, by crosses, by losses, by sickness, by the
death of a friend, by a passage in Scripture, or a discourse upon one, by the
incidents of common life, or the changes that happen in the natural world; in
short, there is hardly a circumstance of so trivial a nature, but that
providence, in some instance or other, has been pleased to make it
instrumental to this salutary purpose.
2. The next step to conviction, in the process of repentance, is sorrow. The man
who has offended his Maker, and is become thoroughly sensible that he has
done so, and of the consequences of his having done so, cannot but be
grieved to find himself in such a situation. The degree of this sorrow is varied
almost infinitely by the different temperaments of mind and body in the
penitents, and the different views under which sin presents itself to their
several imaginations. And, therefore, the same degree is not to be exacted of
all. By enthusiasm it has been, not unfrequently, aggravated even to frenzy
and madness. In Scripture it is drawn with an aspect perfectly sober, but yet
described, in many instances, as very intense, like that occasioned by the
languors of sickness in its last stage, or the pain arising from dislocated or
broken bones, and venting itself in complaints and lamentations, in sighs
and tears. There are temporal ealamities, which can draw tears plentifully
 from most persons; nay, a fictitious representation of them can produce the
effect. Spiritual ones, perhaps, would do the same, if we felt them as we
ought to feel them; as due retirement and meditation would cause us to feel
them; and as we shall one day feel them, when death shall be seen levelling
his dart at our pillow, and the throne of judgment rising to the view, beyond
him.
3. A third step is confession. One of an ingenuous mind, who is heartily sorry for
his offences, will not be ashamed or backward to own that sorrow.
4. A fourth step is resolution to amend.
5. One step more remains, and only one, but that very steep and difficult of
ascent, which is, to carry what we have resolved into execution. It is this
which finishes and crowns all the rest.

II. THE MOTIVES TO IT. Evil to be avoided, and good to be obtained, are the
motives, which influence and produce all human actions. To escape from the rigours
and storms of winter, and to enjoy the sweets of a milder and more gracious season,
is the instinctive cause, why the heaven-taught monitors, to whom we are referred,
migrate from one country to another. It is to avoid the judgments of God, and
partake of His mercies, that man is called to repent.
1. The evil, then, to be avoided, is the judgment of God, consequent upon sin,
and sure to overtake it, if unrepented of Sin, which is the transgression of the
law, cannot but be noticed by Him who gave that law; and if noticed, must be
punished, either in this life, or that which is to come. Sin is often punished in
this life; much oftener than we are aware; indeed so often, that we may say to
you as Moses to Israel (Num 32:23). It would be in vain, however, to
dissemble, that in the present state, as is the offence, such is not always the
punishment. Notorious sinners often partake not, to appearance, the
common evils of life, but pass their days in prosperity and health, and die
without any visible tokens of the Divine displeasure. To take off, in some
measure, the force of the objection, it must be remarked, that, besides those
judgments of God, which lie open to the observation of mankind, there are
others, even in the present life, of a secret and invisible kind, known only to
the party by whom they are felt. In the brilliant scenes of splendor, of luxury
and dissipation, surrounded by the companions of his pleasures, and the
flatterers of his vices, amidst the flashes of wit and merriment, when all
wears the face of gaiety and festivity, the profligate often reads his doom,
written by the hand whose characters are indelible. Should he turn away his
eyes from beholding it, and succeed in the great work, during the course of
his revels, yet the time will come, when from scenes like these he must retire,
and be alone: and then, as Dr. South says, What is all that a man can enjoy
in this way for a week, a month, or a year, compared with what he feels for
one hour, when his conscience shall take him aside, and rate him by
himself? There is likewise another hour which will come, and that soon--the
hour when life must end; when the accumulated wealth of the east and the
west, with all the assistance it is able to procure, will not be competent to
obtain the respite of a moment. It will still be alleged, perhaps, that instances
are not wanting of the worst of men, in principle and practice, going out of
life with no less composure than the best. I believe these instances to be very
rare indeed. But however, by habits either of sensuality or infidelity, the
 conscience may be drugged, and laid asleep in this world, let it not be
forgotten that there is another world beyond this, in which it must awake, to
sleep no more. And if in this world some sins are punished, as we have
assurance they are, while others of far greater magnitude and more atrocious
guilt are permitted to go unpunished, it will follow, by a consequence which
the wit of man cannot gainsay, should he study for a thousand years to do it,
that such sins, not being punished here, will most inevitably be punished
there.
2. The good to be obtained needeth few words.
(1) The light of heaven shining upon our tabernacle, the Divine favour
attending us and ours, through every stage of our existence, sanctifying
prosperity, and turning adversity itself into a blessing, while it becomes
an instrument to rectify the disorders of our minds, to soften the few
hard places remaining in our hearts, to smooth and lay even the little
roughnesses in our tempers; thus gradually and gently preparing us for
our departure hence, and fitting us for the company of the spirits of just
men made perfect.
(2) The answer of a good conscience, diffusing peace and serenity over all
the powers and faculties of the soul, refreshing like the dew falling on the
top of Hermon, exhilarating as the flagrance of the holy oil descending
from the head of Aaron; sweetening the converse of society, and the
charities of active life, and affording, in retirement and solitude,
pleasures concealed from the world around us, joys in which a stranger
intermeddleth not.
(3) The reward in heaven, the glory that shall be revealed, to be known only
when it shall be revealed; the bliss without alloy, and without end, which
he cannot conceive who has not experienced, and which he who has
experienced can find no human language able to express.

III. Some short RULES for the conduct of our repentance.

1. Stifle not convictions. Attend to every suggestion of this salutary kind, from
what quarter soever it may proceed: attend and slight it not. It is the voice of
God calling you to repentance. Listen, and obey.
2. Be serious. The subject will cause any man to become so, who considers it as
he ought to do; who reflects, what sin is in the sight of God, what sorrow it
occasioned to the Son of God, what destruction it hath brought upon the
world, and is about to bring upon himself, unless prevented by a timely
repentance. (Bp. Borne.)

JER 8:7
But My people know not the Judgment of the Lord.

A set time for judgment

The judgment of God is either directive, corrective, or destructive. This last is
meant here. It is spoken of the judgment of utter ruin and desolation upon whom
the former judgment has not taken due effect. In the count of the Holy Ghost in
Scripture, a man knows no more than he believes, and is affected with, and makes
use of: they knew not, they considered not, believed not, were not affected with,
neither did they make use of it, either the judgment itself, nor the time of the
judgment, either to fear it, or to fly from it: so that they were more unwise for
themselves, and for their temporal and eternal safety, than the unreasonable
creatures; they knew not the judgment of the Lord.

I. There is unto a sinful nation a set and appointed time of judgment.

1. There is a time of sinning, a set and an appointed time.
(1) A fulness of sin, appointed by God that it shall have its period (Gen 15:16;
Zec 5:6).
(2) A measure of wrath, which every vessel of wrath shall treasure up (Rom
2:4-5).
2. There is a time of patience, when the Lord holds His peace and reproves not
(Psa 50:21; Psa 50:23). There is a time of repentance, when God defers the
judgment after sinning, on purpose that man may return and come in (Rev
2:21).
3. The times of patience and repentance have their periods; indeed these times
are not of the same length to all: to some God shows but a little patience, and
to others a great deal, riches of patience and forbearance. But the longest day
hath its evening.
4. When the time of patience is expired, there is then a time for judgment, a day
of recompense, a year of vengeance, a time for the expending of those
treasures of wrath that have been so long laying in; because there was by
sinning a time of treasuring: and so there shall also come a time of spending
(Rom 2:4-5); a time for the wall that is swelled out to hang, but there will
come a time also when it will fall (Isa 30:13).
5. When this time doth come, the Lord will forbear a people no longer: this
determinating of judgment in the time of it is exceedingly set before us in the
Word, and that under divers expressions.
(1) The Lord doth express it by a full and a peremptory resolution that He
will do it (Eze 21:27).
(2) It is called a decree, or the bringing forth the decree (Zep 2:2). Decrees
are acts of authority. They are established and firm.
(3) It is called swearing in His wrath (Psa 9:11).
(4) Those means that usually prevail with God, and turn away threatened
judgment, prevail nothing in the time of judgment. Repentance, prayer,
fasting, intercession of the godly. When once the set time for judgment is
come, the Lord will forbear a people no longer.

II. THIS TIME OF JUDGMENT MAY AND MOST BE KNOWN. Otherwise they could not be
blamed. What, then, are the signs preceding judgment?
1. A fulness of sin (Joe 3:16; Jer 1:11-12). An almond tree hath the first ripe fruit
of any tree, and it notes the hastening of them to ripen their sins; and the
Lord saith, as they did hasten their sins to a ripeness, so He would hasten to
ripen His judgments, so that this is a certain sign foregoing judgment. But
 when is sin full? When is it ripe in a nation?
(1) When a people seeks to make void the law.
(2) Corrupting the worship of God by human inventions.
(3) Confederacy with idolaters.
(4) Abusing the messengers of God.
(5) Not laying to heart the afflictions of our brethren.
2. The beginnings of judgment are an evident token that the time of judgment
draws near (Luk 2:30-31). By a lesser judgment God makes way for His
anger, for a perfect and an utter ruin (Psa 78:50).
(1) All nations about them were against them (Jer 12:9).
(2) The general corruption and decay of truth and wisdom of men in places
of greatest trust (Isa 1:22).
(3) The subversion of fundamental laws (Psa 82:5).
(4) Private and intestine divisions.
Use--
1. Not to know the time is misery enough; therefore men are taken suddenly and
unawares (Ecc 9:12).
2. That you may know the time to improve this promise (Ecc 8:5).
3. A wise man foresees the evil, and hides himself, but fools pass on and are
punished (Pro 22:3).
(1) By a work of humiliation (Hab 3:16).
(2) A work of reformation (Zep 2:3).
(3) Improve all the promises.
(4) Be much in prayer.
(5) Betake thyself to the mediation of Christ. (W. Strong.)

Seek safety before the storm comes

Merchants take care to insure their goods before the ship clears the dock. It would
be useless, when the news of a terrible sea storm came, to run to the office, and then
expect to make all safe and right. O living but dying man, at once, today, prepare for
the coming storm. (E. Foster.)

JER 8:11
They have healed the hurt of the daughter of My people slightly, saying, Peace,
peace; when there is no peace.

Healed or deluded? Which?

The people among whom Jeremiah dwelt had received a grievous hurt, and they
felt it, for they were invaded by cruel enemies, their goods were plundered, their
children were slain, and their cities burned. Jeremiah, with true love to his nation,
warned them that the cause of all their trouble was that they had forsaken their God.
Today Gods servants have a task before them sterner even than that of the ancient
seers. It is not ours to point to smoking ruins and the carcases of the unburied dead-
-plain evidences of a grievous hurt; but our work is to deal with spiritual sickness,
and to come among a people who confess no hurt. Great multitudes of our hearers
do not welcome the news of a heavenly remedy, because they are not aware that they
are sick. A physician who has to commence his practice by convincing his
neighbours that they are sick has not a very hopeful sphere before him. Such is our
work: we have first of all to declare in the name of the God of truth that man is
fallen, that his heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, that he is a
sinner doomed to die, and such a sinner that there is no reclaiming him unless the
Ethiopian can change his skin and the leopard his spots. Truths so humiliating to
human pride are by no means popular; men prefer to hear the smooth periods of
those who parade the dignity of human nature. Many there are who confess their
disease, but the disease of sin has wrought in them a spiritual lethargy, so that they
find a horrible rest in their lost estate, and have no longing to rise to spiritual health,
of which, indeed, they know nothing. They are guilty, and willing to remain guilty;
inclined to evil, and content with the inclination. Ah, me! but we must bring them
out of this. They will perish unless they are quickened out of this indifference: they
will sleep themselves into hell unless we can find an antidote to the opiates of sin.
After these things are done, we have but stormed the outworks of the castle, for
there still remains another difficulty. Convinced that they want healing, and made in
a measure anxious to find it, the danger with the awakened is lest they should rest
content with an apparent cure, and miss the real work of grace.

I. It is very easy for us to be the subjects of a false healing.

1. We might infer this from the fact that no doubt a large number of persons are
so deceived. If a large number of persons are so, then why should not we be?
The tendency of other men is probably in us also. Why not? Are there not
many persons who consider that all is well with them because they have been
observant of church ordinances from their youth up, and their parents were
observant for them before they actually came upon the stage of
responsibility? Too many are reliant entirely upon external religion. If that
be attended to carefully they conclude that all is right. I am afraid, too, that
many who do not rely upon religious forms yet confide in doctrinal beliefs.
They are sound in the faith--orthodox, evangelical. They heartily detest any
doctrine that is not scriptural. I am glad to find that it is so with them; but let
them not rest in this. To cover a wound with a royal garment is not to heal it,
and to conceal a sinful disposition beneath a sound creed is not salvation.
2. Depend upon this, that if there is a chance of our being deceived at all we are
always ready to aid in the deception. We are almost all of us on the side of
that which is most easy and comfortable to ourselves: the exceptions to this
rule are a few morbid spirits who habitually write bitter things against
themselves, and a few gracious souls whom the Holy Spirit has convinced of
sin, who would comfort themselves if they could, but dare not do so. Take
this, then, for granted, that there are many ways of being slightly healed, and
we are most of us likely to be pleased with one or other of them.
3. Besides, flatterers are not yet an extinct race. False prophets abounded in
Jeremiahs day, and they may be met with still.
4. Slight healing is sure to be fashionable among a great many, because it
 requires so little thought. People will do anything but think according to the
Word of God. How few sit down and answer the question, How much owest
thou unto my Lord? They would sooner hear a thunder clap than be asked
to consider their ways.
5. Superficial religion also will always be fashionable, because it does not require
self-denial. Do you wonder that vital godliness is at a discount when it
proclaims war to the knife against a lifelong indulgence?
6. Slight healing, also, is sought by men, because it does not require spirituality.
7. But let me warn you with all the energy I possess against ever being satisfied
with any of the slight healings that are cried up nowadays, because they will
all end in disappointment, as sure as you are living men. Remember that if
you pass through this life deceived there will await you an awful undeceiving
in the next world.

II. BE IT OURS TO SEEK TRUE HEALING. But then, as we have already said, this true
healing must be radical. Oh, pray to have it so! Oh that we might each one now lie at
Christs feet as dead till He shall touch us and say, Live. Truly, I desire no life but
that which He gives. I would be quickened by His Spirit, and find in Him my life, my
all. Now go a step further. The healing we want must be a healing from the guilt of
sin. Every offence you have ever committed must be washed right out, even the least
stain of it must vanish, and it must be as though it had never been, and you must be
as though you never had offended at all How can that be? say you. It is clear it
cannot be by anything that you can do; and this again drives you to the prayer of my
text, Heal me, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved. How can it be?
Only by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Saviour. But you must not only be
free from sin, you must be freed from sinfulness: a work must be wrought in you,
and in me, by which we shall be clean rid of every tendency to do evil. Does not this
make you cry, Heal me, O God, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be
healed; save me, and I shall be saved? It ought to do so, and in so doing it will work
your safety. In answer to your cry the eternal Spirit shall come upon you, creating
you anew in Christ Jesus: He shall come and dwell in you, and shall break down the
reigning power of sin, putting it beneath your feet. It is most desirable to be so
healed in soul as to stand the test of this present life. I have known friends
discharged from the hospital as healed of disease who were bitterly disappointed
when they came into everyday life: a little exertion made them as ill as ever. A
person had a piece of diseased bone in the wrist; it was taken out by the hospital
surgeon, and the arm seemed perfectly healed, but when she began to work the old
pain returned, and it was evident that the old mischief was there still, and that a part
of the decayed bone remained. Thus some are saved, so they think; but it is only in
seeming, for when they get into the world, and are tried with temptation, they are
just the same as they used to be. They have not received a practical salvation; and
nothing but practical salvation is worth having. A sham cure is worse than none.

III. LET US GO WHERE TRUE HEALING IS TO BE HAD. It is quite certain that God is
able to heal us of all our sins: for He who created can restore. Whatever our
diseases, nothing can surpass the power of omnipotent love. Blessed be the name of
the Lord, no work of grace can be beyond His will, for He delighteth in mercy. The
Lord is so fond of healing sin-sick souls, that He had but one Son, and He made a
physician of Him that He might come and heal mankind of their deadly wound: and
He being made a physician came down among us, and sought out for His patients,
not the good and excellent, but the most guilty, for He said, The whole have no
need of a physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but
sinners to repentance. Jesus, then, the beloved Physician is able and willing to meet
the case of every one of us. His wounds are an unfailing remedy. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Two kinds of peace; the false and the true

It was the fault of the Jews, on whom Jeremiah denounced the judgment of God
for their sins, that, instead of repenting, they comforted themselves with false hopes
of mercy, and cried, Peace, peace, when there was no peace. I hearkened, and
heard, saith the prophet, that they spake not right: no man repented him of his
wickedness, saying, What have I done! They did not amend their doings; they did
not execute judgment between a man and his neighbour; but they still oppressed the
stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. And the alarm which might be caused by
the awful declarations of the prophet they soon forgot: they healed the hurt slightly;
they believed the false prophets, who spake smooth things to them. Too often do we
meet with cases exactly similar amongst ourselves. God has denounced judgments
upon sinners; the ministers of God proclaim these judgments, and, if possible, to
alarm the consciences of sinners. There would scarcely be anything more surprising,
were we not so accustomed to it, than the general indifference and fearlessness
which is shown in respect to the judgments of God. Is it true that God has actually
appointed a judgment seat, at which we must all appear? Is it certain, that a
punishment which is eternal awaits transgressors? Still, however, it sometimes
happens, where the Word of God is faithfully preached, that an uneasy suspicion of
danger will arise, and an alarm be produced in the mind, respecting the judgment to
come. Inquiry will then, perhaps, be made as to the way of safety. I wish them to
consider the uneasiness they feel, however painful, as a great blessing, for which
they have more reason to offer up thanksgivings to God than perhaps for any mercy
they ever before experienced. A state of careless ease is the state of danger. Let us
not, therefore, stifle such convictions; let us not look upon them as an evil; let us not
lament that our quiet has been interrupted; but rather cherish them, as the means
used by Providence for our good. Let such persons, however, beware of laying too
great a stress upon present peace. It should ever be laid down as a rule, that grace is
to be sought in the first place; then peace. But many reverse this. Comfort should
never be made our principal or direct end; though it too often happens that
doctrines are valued, ministers chosen, and means used, only on account of the
degree of comfort which they excite. The bad effects of thus unduly valuing present
peace are very serious. That uneasiness of mind which is the parent of humility and
the nurse of repentance; that uneasiness, which, if cultivated, would produce a spirit
of holy jealousy and watchfulness over ourselves, a just and extensive view of our
duty, and a tenderness of conscience, is stifled in its very birth; and the consequence
is obvious: superficial convictions produce superficial peace and superficial practice.

I. THE FALSE WAYS BY WHICH MEN ENDEAVOUR TO OBTAIN PEACE. Here I must begin
with remarking, that the strength of a persons peace is no proof of the soundness of
it. It is not unusual to see even notorious sinners dying in peace, and to meet with
enthusiasts of various and opposite kinds rejoicing in a peace of mind which is not
clouded by a single doubt. For let a person be only firmly convinced that he is right,
and peace will follow naturally. Hence it will vary according to a persons natural
temper, his modesty or his arrogance, his knowledge or his ignorance, as well as
according to the doctrines he imbibes. We may learn from this view of the subject
the great importance of sound scriptural knowledge and true religious principles. A
false peace must be built on error or ignorance, and these are removed by a
thorough knowledge of the truths of Scripture. We must examine whether our views
are just concerning the terms of salvation, and the necessary evidence of the safety
of our state.
1. It is far from being uncommon to hear a person declare his religious creed in
such terms as these: Whatever bigots may affirm, or enthusiasts believe, I
am certain that God is our merciful Father, and will make allowance for the
frailties of His creatures, He knows what passions He gave us, and will surely
consider their strength and our weakness. It is dishouourable to Him to
indulge any fear of His goodness. Such cases as those, to which human laws
do not extend, Divine justice may reach; but as for those whose lives,
allowing for human infirmity, are on the whole respectable, surely they need
entertain no uneasy apprehensions. Let a person receive these sentiments,
it matters not upon how slight evidence--it matters not that the Word of God
contradicts them--and he will have peace; and this peace he will enjoy so
long as he continues firm in these sentiments. It is only some uneasy fear
that sin may not be so easily forgiven; some secret suggestion of conscience
that all is not right within, which can shake this mans peace. Such a peace as
this can only be the result of gross ignorance, and neglect of serious inquiry.
Where the conscience is enlightened by some degree of scriptural knowledge,
there must be something much more than this to serve as a foundation for
the peace of the soul. There are persons, therefore who seek peace by the
adoption of a new religious system, perhaps a true one. They read the
Scriptures, and they attend to religious conversation with much curiosity and
desire to know the truth: a complete change perhaps takes place in their
religious opinions: their imagination is alive to religion; their thoughts are
occupied with it. Now, supposing the system of religion which they have
adopted to be the true one, still it may be asked, does the mere belief even of
the truth save the soul? Can a mere speculative faith, however true, save a
man? Does our Saviour, or do His apostles tell us to depend on our opinions,
on the fancies of our minds, or the clearness of our conceptions?
2. Another class of persons build their peace, not upon the declarations of
Scripture respecting the character of those who shall be accepted, but upon
some secret suggestions, some impression made on the mind, some vision or
rome, some uncommon feeling by which they imagine they are assured of the
favour of God towards them. God does not give one revelation to supersede
another: He does not point out a hope in His Word upon which we may and
ought to rely, and then, rejecting that as imperfect, communicate one in a
different way. We are saved, saith the apostle, by faith; in another place,
by hope. They both imply the same thing, and both prove that it is not by
sight, by feeling, by impressions: for these are not faith; these have not the
truth revealed in Scripture for their object, but the truth revealed to
ourselves. What a door is here opened for delusion and enthusiasm! How is
the attention thus drawn from the Word of God, to follow an unknown guide!
How do we leave the promises, to build upon the phantoms of fancy! It must
 be allowed, indeed, that the Holy Spirit is the great Author of light and
peace: but He communicates them, as we learn from Scripture, by
impressing the truths revealed in the Bible on our hearts; by removing our
prejudices against them; by disposing our hearts to attend to them; by
exciting holy affections in consequence of the view we have of them. Thus the
Spirit testifies of Christ, not of us; fills us with joy in believing the old, not in
receiving a new, revelation; makes known the truths of Scripture, not truths
with which Scripture is unconcerned.

II. What is the true foundation of Christian peace?

1. It is not to be denied, that some good Persons have built their peace on those
evidences which I have just laid down as unsatisfactory; but in this case, it
has been their error that they have neglected what was truly a good evidence,
and dwelt upon what was imperfect and unsound. We are apt to lay too
much stress upon what is peculiar to ourselves and to our party, and too little
upon what is really important, and what is held to be so in Scripture.
2. We may lay it down as a maxim, that grace in the heart is far more important
than light in the understanding, or than comfort and Peace, however
founded. The peace of the Gospel has a close connection with sanctification,
as well as a manifest influence upon it. And one great evil which arises from
all false ways of obtaining Peace is this, that they have no necessary
connection with sanctification. Whatever peace, or whatever feelings we
have, let us mark their practical influence: if they tend to produce, not a
partial, but an universal respect to all Gods will, so far they are right, and all
true Christian peace will tend to produce that effect. It remains now to
explain what is the just and proper foundation on which a solid Peace may be
built. Here it is hardly necessary to premise that Scripture is our only
unerring guide in such inquiries. Now, in his Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul
treats of this subject, not indirectly or briefly, but expressly and fully. In the
fifth chapter he states the way in which a Christian obtains peace with God,
and is enabled to rejoice in hope of His glory. This foundation appears to be
faith. Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God. Peace, I
have said, is at first to be obtained by believing. But suppose a person, who
fancies himself a believer, still lives in the practice of sin; is he, nevertheless,
to maintain peace, to stifle the alarms of conscience, and to look only to his
faith in the revelation of Christ? God forbid. His conduct proves that his faith
is insincere. He must humble himself before God as a sinner, and pray for
true faith; for an influential, purifying view of the Gospel. Thus, then, faith
must be the foundation of our peace, but uprightness the guard of it. Faith
and peace will then go hand in hand, attending the true Christian in his
journey to heaven. Does he fall into sin? His peace will decay. Would he have
it renewed? It must be by renewed repentance, and renewed application to
the Saviour, who takes away sin and communicates pardon and sanctifying
grace. Thus his faith will be strengthened, and his peace restored. Let us
examine on what our peace towards God is founded. Is it on our own good
life? If so, it is false. Is it on our faith? If so, is our faith sincere? Does it teach
us reliance on Christ, and lead us to continual applications to Him for grace?
Does the love of Christ constrain us to live to Him rather than to ourselves?
Does it produce in us a uniform and sincere obedience to His holy will? If
 not, we may justly fear that our faith is vain, and that we are yet in our sins.
Lastly, let us ever bear in mind, that to Christ alone must we be indebted for
salvation. Though the Scriptures speak of our being saved by faith, yet,
properly speaking, it is Christ alone who can save us. He has made a full and
sufficient atonement for sin. (Christian Observer.)

JER 8:17
I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you.

Penalty
There are countries that are desolated by animals; there have been harvests eaten
by locusts; there have been vineyards stripped by insects; there is, therefore, no
violence in the figure, and there is nothing of the nature of exaggeration. The
animals have one keeper. God can make them live where tie likes. The sight of that
cockatrice might make a man almost pray. It would turn many a blustering, blatant
sinner in the city into a coward if he could but once catch sight of it on the counting
house floor; then any prophet would be welcome who could charm the evil thing.
But this cockatrice will not be charmed. It will look with proud disdain upon your
traps and snares and all your offered flatteries, and all your bribes to its cruel
dignity; it has come to do Gods judgment work and it will not accept the
compromise the sinner proposes. These words are full of sadness, full of
horribleness: but we must be horrible before we can be gracious; we must know
what the law is before we can know what the Gospel is; we must preach--oh, sad
confession, and hurtful to a dainty and irrational sentimentality!--we must preach
hell, if haply men may, by the terror of the Lord, be brought to know the meaning of
His grace. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 8:19-20
Is not the Lord in Zion?

A discourse for a revival season

These words, as they stand in the Book of Jeremiah, were probably meant to set
forth the sin of Israel. The prophets heart is very full of sadness; he can hear the
cries of the people in the streets of Jerusalem. They are moaning for sorrow, because
of the oppression of the Chaldeans--the nation that dwelt afar off; and in the midst
of their bitterness they remember the God whom they had forgotten in their
prosperity: but this remembrance is not a gracious one; they do not remember Him
to humble themselves, but to bring accusations against Him. They inquire, Is not
the Lord in Zion? is not her King in her? As if they felt, The people of the Lord, the
people of the Lord are we, and therefore He is bound to send us a deliverance. They
accuse the faithfulness of Jehovah, because He greatly suitors them to be
downtrodden for their sins. Then the Lord, speaking by the prophet, tells them the
reason why, although present among them, he did not help them: Why have they
provoked Me to anger with their graven images, and with strange vanities? If they
believed Him to be present, why did they set up false gods?

I. We have in the text A CRY.

1. Observe the word Behold. The behold here is the mark of astonishment.
We are to Behold the voice of the cry of the daughter of My people as an
unusual thing. So seldom does Israel cry unto the Lord, she is so negligent of
prayer, she is so silent when she ought to be incessant in her petitions, that
when at last she does cry, her voice is a wonder in Gods ears. And yet it
ought not to be a wonder, it ought not to be a strange thing for Gods people
to be in earnest, or for sinners to feel brokenness of heart. If prayer be the
Christians breath, why then, to see a multitude breathing, should never be a
spectacle. If to pray unto God be the Christians daffy privilege, then to
approach the throne of God with prevalent earnestness, should never be
looked upon with astonishment.
2. Notice how this prayer is described. It is a cry: Behold the cry. A cry is the
most natural form of utterance. It is a natural expression made up of pain
and desire for relief. When a brother merely prays what we call prayer, he
stands up and utters very proper words, very edifying, very suitable, no
doubt, and then he has done. Another brother comes forward; he wants a
blessing, he tells the Lord what he desires; he takes the promises, he wrestles
with God, and then he seems to say, I will not let Thee go except Thou bless
me. He cannot be satisfied till, with the cry of Abba, Father, he has come
before the throne and really obtained an audience with the Most High.
3. Note again, for every word of our text is suggestive, it is Behold the voice of
the cry of the daughter of My people. It is not enough to be earnest, you must
know what you are earnest about; the cry must have a voice which is as far as
possible understood by yourself, and a voice which has a meaning in it before
God. I must direct my prayer unto God, as David says, pull my bow, direct
the arrow, take aim at the centre of the target, and then when the arrow flies
it is likely to reach its place.
4. Further, study the matter of the voice--it was for them that dwell in a far
country. In what a far country does every sinner dwell! Now, the prayers, I
hope, of Gods people, have been going up for all the far-off ones, that
infinite mercy would make them nigh by the blood of Christ.
5. Remark another word in the text--for those that dwell in a far country: there
are some of you who make a long abode in a far country. The fact is, you have
taken up your dwellings; you have made a settlement in one of the parishes
of the city of destruction; you are making out a claim to be enrolled in the
devils register; you dwell in the far-off land. If you were uneasy and felt
yourselves to be strangers and foreigners in the land of destruction, how
would I clap my hands for joy; for you would soon be rid of your old master if
you once felt sick of him.
6. The cry is The cry of the daughter of My people. Oh, it is so sweet to think
that our prayers, poor as they are, are the prayers of Gods own people, and
therefore they must be heard. You are the Lords children, therefore He will
hear you. Would you let your child constantly cry to you and not answer
Him?
 II. We will now turn to the QUESTION: Is not the Lord in Zion? is not her King in
her? I will answer that question at once in the affirmative. The Lord is in Zion: her
King is in the midst of her. Having answered this question, it suggests many more.
1. If the Lord be indeed in Zion, and the King he in the midst of her, why do we
pray as if He were not? He is with you, ready to answer by fire, if, like Elias,
you have but faith with which to challenge His promise and His power.
2. Why do you despond because of your own weakness? We have not a
sufficient number of ministers; we have little wealth; we have few places of
public worship; we have few gifted members, and so on. So some
unbelievingly talk. Is not the Lord in Zion? is not her King in her? What
more do you want? Oh! we would like to be strong. Why would you be
strong? That you must be disqualified to be used by God? Why, any fool can
kill the enemy with a cannon, but it takes a Samson to smite them with the
jawbone of an ass. And so, when God has the choice of weapons, and He
always has, He chooses the weaker weapon, that He may get to Himself the
greater renown.
3. If God be with us, why these great fears about the prosperity of the Church?
The God of Zion is here, the King of Zion is here. I grant you, we do not
sufficiently recognise His presence; we are not, as we should be, obedient to
His commands but I charge you, O ye soldiers of the Cross, believe in the
presence of your Captain, and press where ye see His helmet amidst the din
of war. His Cross is the great emblazoned banner which leads you on to
glory. Press forward! to suffer, to deny yourselves, to bear witness for Christ;
for the battle is the Lords, and the King Himself fights in the van.

III. ANOTHER QUESTION. Why have they provoked Me to anger with their graven
images and with strange vanities?
1. Here is a question for the Lords people. It becomes a very solemn thing when
God is in His Church how that Church behaves herself. Suppose that Church
to set up false principles: if her King were not there she might take the kings
of the earth to be her head. But dare she do that when her King Himself is
there?
2. This text has a particular voice to sinners. You have been saying, God is in
the midst of His people--how is it I have not had a blessing? I will ask you
this question, Why have they provoked Me to anger with their graven
images and with strange vanities? Do not ask why the Word is not blessed to
you; do not ask why you do not enjoy the prayer meeting: answer my
question first. Why hast thou provoked Me to anger with thy tricks in trade,
with thy Sabbathbreaking, with thy lying, with thy loose songs, with thy
miring up with worldly company, with thy profanity?

IV. ANOTHER CRY. I wish I might hear this cry this morning, for then I should not
hear it in the world to come, The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are
not saved. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Manifestations of the presence of God

 The ancient polity of the Jewish nation was a pure and splendid theocracy.
Jehovah was their King. He gave them their laws, selected their judges, appointed
their prophets, and He reigned the Lord supreme, having chosen them to be His
peculiar people, and special possession.

I. It is possible for the members of a professing Church to be deceived concerning

the presence of God, and conclude that he is with them, when in reality he is far
from them.
1. Deceived on this important point are those who conclude God is with them
because they have imposing forms and splendid places of worship. If
pompous forms of worship and gorgeous temples marked the presence of
God with men, the evidence would go to show that God was more with the
ancient heathen than with the ancient Jews. It would exalt Mahomet and
Mohammedanism over Christ and Christianity.
2. Deceived on this important point are those professing churches who conclude
God is with them, because they have creeds and councils in their favour.
Were, however, this conclusion correct, it would prove that the presence of
God might be found with the mere letter of truth, or even error.
3. Deceived on this important point are those professing churches who conclude
God is with them because they have extensive knowledge and numerous
gifts. In danger of this error were many who were members of the Church of
God at Corinth. An error St. Paul fully exposed, showing that those things
which they so highly valued were worthless in comparison with sacred
charity, true love to God, and pure love to man.
4. Deceived also on this important point are those churches and individuals who
conclude God is with them because He was once with them. Who will
question the truth, that He was with the Jews as a people, when Moses sang
(Ex 15:13)? But is He with them now as a nation, as the rod of His
inheritance, the Zion wherein He delighteth to dwell? Has not the evil He
warned them against come upon them (Jer 6:8)? Then in reference unto
individuals, having once been with them, is no certainty that He abides with
them. Was He not with Saul when chosen of God to be the King of Israel (1Sa
10:7)? Was He not with Solomon when he devoutly dedicated the temple to
the Lord, and prayed (2Ch 6:41)? Was He not with Judas when called to the
apostleship? Now to say nothing concerning the hour of death, was His
presence perpetually with these through life? Then let us net, neither as
churches nor as individual members, depend on the past, nor be satisfied
with anything short of having God indisputably with us now; bearing in
remembrance that His presence is conditional (2Ch 15:2).

II. It is possible for the members of a professing Church to be fully assured of the
presence of God among them--King in Zion.
1. God is where the Word of truth is faithfully preached and believingly received.
2. God is where the ministry of the Gospel is effectual to accomplish the
purposes for which it is proclaimed.
3. God is where the members of the Church grow in sacred knowledge, and
increase in holiness of heart and life.
4. God is where the discipline of Christ is scripturally observed and maintained.
 5. God is where a professing people dwell together in the bonds of Christian
charity. To this Christians are called by their name, their profession, and
hope of eternal life.

III. It behoves the members of a professing Christian Church frequently and

faithfully to press on themselves the solemn, weighty inquiry, is the Lord in our
Zion, is her King with us? Have we the marks of the Divine presence already stated?
Let us examine ourselves as a Christian community on this subject, and that with
the sincerity of those who would not be deceived.
1. Is the Word of truth faithfully preached by us as ministers?
2. Is the ministry of the Gospel among us successful to accomplish its gracious
designs?
3. Are we as people wise in sacred knowledge and intent on full conformity of
the will and image of God?
4. Have we a wholesome scriptural discipline?
5. Are we as a professing Church united in the bonds of Christian charity?

IV. It becomes a Christian Church, sensible of the Divine presence but desirous of
a more special manifestation of God with them and to them, to employ those means
which are calculated to promote His more glorious abode in Zion.
1. This they should do by a full and constant acknowledgment of the sovereign
authority and rule of Christ (Eph 1:22). His kingship in Zion is not a
supposed character, but a positive possessed office; and weighty must be the
guilt and condemnation of these who deny His claim, and reject His rule.
2. This they should do by diligently seeking an increase of personal holiness (Psa
132:14; Psa 132:16).
3. The more glorious presence of God should also be sought by the members of
the Church, in the exercise of fervent, persevering prayer. (W. Naylor.)

The royal presence

The great thing is to ascertain the fact of the Lords presence with His people.
Now, where the Lords presence is, there are tokens special, peculiar, and infallible,
by which it is evidenced. Where the Lord is, everything will go well: the Gospel will
triumph, and the righteous will be glad. On the contrary, the Lords absence is
marked by wickedness, carnality, darkness, and dissolution.
1. An indispensable evidence that God is in the churches, we think to be a
united, loving people. The Spirit is the source of love; and it is His first fruit.
2. Where this love is present, and in powerful operation, it will produce another
evidence--a consistent, holy deportment. Love and purity are inseparable;
but purity of heart will be indicated by purity of life.
3. The Lords presence is always accompanied by special zeal for His glory: a
desire to promote His honour, and to extend His kingdom.
4. An invariable accompaniment of the Kings presence is liberality in the
disposition of worldly substance. His people realise the fact that they are not
proprietors, but stewards, to whom is committed treasure, which is
exclusively His own.
 5. The spirit of humble wailing at His footstool, for the lessons of His wisdom, is
another indication of His presence. The churches will be teachable, devout,
and obedient in all things.
6. A further evidence of the royal presence is, the possession of high attainments
in spiritual things: the citizens of Zion will largely enjoy the comfort of love,
the patience of hope, and every blessing provided for them.
7. As a rule, another token of the Lords presence will be, that while His people
walk in His fear, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, they will be
multiplied. The message of love, spoken in love, will operate with melting
power on the hearts of men. (The Christian Witness.)

JER 8:20
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Harvest past, summer ended, and men unsaved

The passage is full of lamentation and woe, and yet it is somewhat singular that
the chief mourner here is not one who needed chiefly to be in trouble. Jeremiah was
under the special protection of God, and he escaped in the evil day. Even when
Nebuchadnezzar was exercising his utmost rage, Jeremiah was in no danger, for the
heart of the fierce monarch was kindly towards him. Now Nebuchadnezzar king of
Babylon gave charge concerning Jeremiah to Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard,
saying, Take him, and look well to him, and do him no harm; but do unto him even
as he shall say unto thee. The man of God, who personally had least cause to
mourn, was filled with heavy grief, while the people who were about to lose their all,
and to lose their lives, still remained but half awakened; complaining, but not
repenting; afraid, but yet not humbled before God. A preacher whom God sends will
often feel more care for the souls of men than men feel for themselves or their own
salvation. Is it not sad that there should be an anxious pain in the heart of one who
is himself saved, while those who are unsaved, and are obliged to own it, feel little or
no concern? See yonder man about to be condemned to die, standing at the bar, the
judge putting on the black cap is scarcely able to pronounce the sentence for
emotion, and all around him in the court break down with distress on his account,
while he himself is brazen faced, and feels no more than the floor he stands upon I
How hardened has he become! Pity is lost upon him, if pity ever can be lost.

I. The language of COMPLAINT. These Jews said, The seasons are going by, the
year is spending itself, the harvest is past, the vintage also is ended, and yet we are
not saved. In effect they complained of God that He had not saved them, as if He
was under some obligation to have done so, as if they had a kind of claim upon Him
to interpose: and so they spoke as if they were an ill-used people, a nation that had
been neglected by their Protector. This complaint was a very unjust one, for there
were many reasons why they were not saved, and why God had not delivered them.
1. They had looked to the wrong quarter: they expected that the Egyptians would
deliver them. The same folly dwells in multitudes of men. They are not
saved, and they never will be while they continue to look where they do look.
All dependence upon ourselves is looking to Egypt for help, and leaning our
 weight upon a broken reed. Whether that dependence upon self takes the
form of relying upon ceremonies, or depending upon prayers, or trusting in
our own attempts to improve ourselves morally, it is still the same proud
folly of self-dependence. All trust but that which is found in Jesus is a
delusion and a falsehood. No man can help you. Eternal barrenness is the
portion of those who trust in man and make flesh their arm.
2. Those people had prided themselves upon their outward privileges; they had
presumed upon their favoured position, for they say in the nineteenth verse,
Is not the Lord in Zion? is not her King in her? Faith in Jesus is the one
thing needful; vain is the fact that you were born of Christian parents, ye
must be born again; vain is your sitting as Gods people sit in the solemn
service of the sanctuary, your heart must be changed; vain is your
observance of the Lords day, and vain your Bible reading and your form of
prayer night and morning, unless you are washed in Jesus blood; vain are all
things without living faith in the living Jesus.
3. Them was another and very powerful reason why these people were not
saved, for, with all their religiousness and their national boast as to Gods
being among them, they had continued in provoking the Lord. Thou must
have done with the indulgence of sin if thou wouldst be clansed from the
guilt of it. There is no going on in transgression, and yet obtaining salvation:
it is a licentious supposition. Christ comes to save us from our sins, not to
make it safe to do evil.
4. Another reason why they were not saved was because they made being saved
from trouble the principal matter. Was there ever a murderer yet who did
not wish to be saved from the gallows? When a man is tied up to be flogged
for a deed of brutal violence, and his back is bared for the lash, depend upon
it he repents of what he did; that is to say, he repents that he has to suffer for
it; but that is all, and a sorry all too. He has no sorrow for the agony which he
inflicted on his innocent victim; no regret for maiming him for life. What is
the value of such a repentance?
5. There was another reason why these people were not saved and could not be.
Lo, they have rejected the Word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?
Do you read your Bible privately? Did you ever read it with an earnest prayer
that God would teach you what you really are, and make you to be a true
believer in Christ? Have you read it with regard to yourself, asking God to
teach you its meaning, and to make the sense of it press upon your
conscience? Do you reply, I have not done that? Why then do you wonder
that you are not saved? To put a slighter test than the former: when you hear
the Gospel, do you always inquire, What has this to do with me? or do you
listen to it as a general truth with which you have no peculiar concern?
6. There is a further reason why some men are not saved, and that is because
they have a great preference for slight measures. They love to hear the
flattering voice whispering, Peace, peace, where there is no peace and they
choose those for leaders who will heal their hurt slightly. He who is wise will
go where the Word has most power, both to kill and to make alive. Do you
want a physician when you call upon him to please you with a flattering
opinion? Must he needs say, My dear friend, it is a very small matter; you
want nothing but pleasant diet, and you will soon be all right? If he talks
 thus smoothly when he knows that a deadly disease is commencing its work
upon you, is he not a deceiver? Do you not think you are very foolish if you
pay such a man your guinea, and denounce his neighbour who tells you the
plain truth? Do you want to be deluded? Are you eager to be duped? Do you
want to dream of heaven, and then wake up in hell?
7. All this while these people have wondered that they were not saved, and yet
they never repented of their sin. Repentance was a jest with them, they had
not grace enough even to feel shame, and yet they made a complaint against
God, saying, The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not
saved. What monstrous folly was this!

II. Now, may the Spirit of God help us while we would lead unconverted persons
into the CONSIDERATION of this matter.
1. First consideration, We are not saved. I do not want to talk, I want you to
think. We are not saved. Put it in the personal, first person singular.
2. Furthermore, not only am I not saved, but I have been a long time not saved.
What opportunities I had! I have been through revivals, but the sacred power
passed over me; I remember several wonderful occasions when the Spirit of
God was poured out, and yet I am not saved.
3. Worse still, habits harden. Harvests have dried me, summers have parched
me, age has shrivelled my soul: my moisture is turned into the drought of
summer, I am getting to be old hay, or as withered weeds fit for the burning.
4. The last summer will soon come, and the last harvest will soon be reaped, and
you, dear friend, must go to your long home. I will apply it mainly to myself:
I must go upstairs for the last time, and I must lay me down upon the bed
from which I shall never rise again; if I am unsaved my room will be a prison
chamber to me, and the bed will be hard as a plank, if I have to lie there and
know that I must die,--that a few more days or hours must end this struggle
for existence, and I am bound to stand before God. O my God, save me from
an unready deathbed! Souls, I charge you by everything that is rational
within you, escape for your lives, and seek to find eternal salvation for your
undying spirits. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The prophets lament

There is no much sadder and heavier burden than that borne by him who is
profoundly conscious of evils, and of threatened disaster, in some popular policy--
some policy with which all around him are content and pleased, and of the happy
issue of which they are confident who, while his friends and fellows are entirely
satisfied with things as they are, and flatter themselves that the course pursued will
be surely productive of or conducive to good, carries about with him daily a deep
conviction of existing serious defects, and of involved mischief and woe. No hope, no
hope! That was the peculiar burden of Jeremiah, that was the vision forced upon
him, the message he was constrained to deliver, while the people and their leaders
were nursing the assurance that all was going well, that a work was being prosecuted
which would secure salvation. Few things are more unpalatable and painful, than to
feel it incumbent on you to say to any for whom you entertain sentiments of
friendship and affection, what is calculated to damp and dishearten, to spoil the
dreams of those who are dreaming pleasantly, deliciously, to destroy or disturb fond
hopes; than to feel it incumbent upon you, instead of sympathising with the joy of
such hopes,--as you fain would, were it possible,--to shake your head and contradict
them. There are cases in which upon the whole it may be best to refrain from
meddling with hopes, the baselessness of which we perceive with pity, to let the
possessors go on indulging them without any interference from us, until they shall
awaken at length, in the course of events, to the chill of the disappointing reality.
Unfounded and fallacious as their hopes are, and certain ere long to be painfully
shattered, they may be less harmful, less fraught with mischief, than our present
interruption of them might be. But eases there are, on the other hand, in which the
right thing, the wisest and the kindest thing, will be at once to attack and scatter, or
endeavour to scatter them, however unwelcome the task, and whatever suffering we
may cause. The sooner the subjects of them can be shaken out of their hold, can be
made to recognise their falsity, and be set face to face with the severity of the actual,
the better. It was thus with the people of Judah in Jeremiahs time. Their hope that
the reforms in progress were securing them against the rod that had been
threatened, was not only a delusion but a snare; it was creating and fostering within
them a false spirit, was preventing any true discernment on their part of what was
really wanting in them, of their real unwholesomeness and corruption, and was
unfitting them to bear the rod when it should fall, with the meek resignation, the
humble submission, requisite to render it a purifying and chastening discipline. But
this cry of his over his country in the streets of Jerusalem,--by how many has
something like it been breathed inwardly, with sorrow and bitterness, concerning
themselves, as they have stood contemplating what they have, and what they are,
after seasons in their history, seasons that had enfolded golden opportunity or
shone bright with promise. Who is there, beyond the boundaries of youth at all, who
has not had his seasons of promise, that have left him sighing forlornly over broken
hopes? Infinite, in this respect, is the pathos of human life, crying dumbly evermore
for the infinite pity of God. Or again, is it not frequently the case that bygone
circumstances and situations are recalled with a sorrowful, humiliating sense of our
not being the men in moral stature, in moral fibre and feature, which they should
have contributed to make us, which they gave us in vain the opportunity of
becoming--that remembering them, we feel with a pang of grief and shame, the good
thing they might have wrought in us which they have not wrought; how we might
have been disciplined by them, or stimulated to larger growth, to culturing action
and endurance,--and were not? Oh, could we weep, some are saying to themselves.
Oh, could we weep as once we wept, when similar situations and circumstances
returned. If the recurrence now and again, of former scenes, of former contacts and
conjunctures, could but stir in us the transient hopeful emotion which they used to
excite, could but set us temporarily sighing, aspiring, resolving, as they used to do,
when they always brought with them the promise at least, of our going on to better
things; but the promise, alas! was never fulfilled, the transient hopeful emotion
faded without producing aught; and now, the recurrence of the former scenes, the
former contacts and conjunctures, ceases to awaken the emotion. The birthdays, the
anniversaries, the quiet Sunday mornings, the hours of silence and solitude, that
once agitated us with rushes of unwonted tenderness, with little wavelets of earnest
thought, and higher impulse, which might have led to something further, to
something of permanent effect,--they no longer touch us thus as they come and go;
they have no longer the slightly quickening influence that they had: our harvest in
them is past, our summer in them is ended, and we are not saved. Is not such the
secret cry of some, who yet, however, are not unsalveable by any means, since they
are still able to weep that they cannot weep? What is it, in conclusion, with the best
of us, but failure? Let the pity of the Lord our God be upon us! And yet may we not
believe, do we not feel to our solace, that at the least, something has always been
reaped?--reaped for sowing, albeit with tears, in fields beyond; nay, that even in the
mere lowly and penitent sense of shortcoming, which seems perhaps almost all that
has been gained, we shall be carrying away with us from hence, a gathered seed
grain, to be for fruit, perchance for the fruit we have hitherto missed, behind the
veil. (S. A. Tipple.)

The course of time

What different emotions prevail in the mind, through different periods of human
life! In our early hours, when health is high, and the heart warm, hope is the feeling
that takes the lead; and who, that calls to mind the events of his youth, can fail to
remember his train of lively and sanguine opinions. The boy views everything
through the magic telescope of an eager fancy. He longs for the future: every day
seems to him to go on tardy pinions; keeping him from he knows not what, but still
from something which strongly impresses his mind with imaginary beauties, and
which he is sure is to make him happier at some approaching period. But as time
advances, the spirit of the dream is changed; manhood begins to find out what the
world is really made of. When we come to mingle, as interested actors, in its
schemes and tumults, its winding and turnings; when we come to perceive its
selfishness and its rigour; to mix up in the everyday exertions of its dull routine; and
to suffer the various disappointments of its fickle favours,--we then conclude that
hope and reality are two different things; and that like the clouds about the evening
sun, though at first they are brightly coloured, yet that they are but clouds after all,
and that when the light is gone, the tempest often remains. Then it is that another
feeling arises in the mind: we fly from hope to memory. It is with these reflections I
would desire you to consider the text. What is hope, if it enter not within the veil,
sure and steadfast, an anchor of the soul? And what is memory, if it look back on
worldly pleasures only, and be not accompanied by that looking forward, and that
pressing towards the mark, which will induce us rather to forget the things which
are behind in the anticipations of that blessed hope, and that glorious appearing
of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ? It often happens to us to walk over
those scenes of nature in winter which we had visited in summer; and the contrast is
sometimes peculiarly striking. Is this the spot that gave us such pleasure? are these
all the remains of our former entertainment? Alas! the same reasoning often comes
upon us in the strange realities of a chequered life. Nature in her revolutions is but a
model of the existence of man. We, too, have our summer of pleasure, and our
winter of sorrows. Let it teach us this--not to value the world at more than it is
worth; to use it without abusing it; and to find out a surer refuge for our hearts to fix
on. This brings me to another way, less allegorical, of considering the text. The
earth bringing forth grass; the herb yielding seed; and the fruit tree yielding fruit
after his kind, whose seed is in itself, all bespeak a design from the great Designer,
and the workmanship of a Divine hand. No art can imitate the nicety of nature. The
brightest robe of Solomon in all his glory must yield to the lily of the field. The
meanest insect that preys upon a fruit tree is the workmanship of Him who made
the universe. Shall He not take care, then, of you, O ye of little faith? The summer
is ended, and we are not saved. We have not looked from nature up to natures God.
We are not led by gratitude and affection to love the Author of all this assemblage of
mercies. We cannot yet say to Him with filial truth, Abba, Father. This is what
every summer should teach us, and the state it should bring us to. This is what the
bounty of God should encourage in our hearts, namely, to love Him, because He
has first loved us. This is taking, like Moses, a distant view of the heavenly Canaan,
and making the wilderness of earth, while it leads us towards the promised land, to
rejoice, and be glad, and blossom as the rose. But we come now to a still more
personal sense in which the words of the text may be applied. The harvest is past,
the summer is ended: you have had your spring time of youth, with all its hopes;
your summer of manhood, with all its bloom; and the autumn of enjoyment, with all
its maturities. These seasons have passed from you, and the winter of age is arrived,-
-that gloomy time which we once shrunk back from even in idea, and which we
always determined, whenever it did come, should find us servants of God, and
sincere candidates for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Let me
ask you, first, how it has found you Has it found you with lamps trimmed, and with
oil to burn in the night of the grave? Are you in a state of salvation? As earth retires
from before you, does heaven arise the more to your sight? As you grow older, do
you grow wiser?--wiser, not in art, or science, or human philosophy, but in the
wisdom of the heart, in a knowledge of yourselves, of your own insufficiency, of the
power and riches of Christ, of the vanity of the world and its vexation of spirit, of the
necessity of resting your all in the ark of a covenant God? But the words of the text
by no means apply exclusively to the aged. Their sound is gone out unto all ages; and
they utter intelligible language to the young. The winter of age, or the winter of
another year, may never arrive to you. Why do you not put on that armour of your
Saviour which will carry you unharmed through every change and chance of this
mortal warfare? You are as much answerable to God for the talents committed to
you, as the oldest man alive. Employ them in the service of Him who gave them, and
who gave them also for this very purpose--to redound to His glory, and to work out
your own salvation. If pleasure be your aim, Jesus Christ will interfere with no real
pleasure, and will give you new ones of the choicest kind. Is tranquillity your object?
Christianity has a peace which passeth understanding! Are sublime and noble
contemplations the employment of your mind? What facts are so noble as the
eternal truths of the Gospel? Is fancy your delight? what field for imagination can be
so brilliant as those bright visions which human eye hath never seen, where the
future destinies of the faithful in the Lamb are mysteriously but gloriously pointed
out; where every present faculty of the soul shall be expanded and perfected; and
new ones and better ones added an hundredfold? And all this accompanied, in the
united testimony of Gods Spirit with our spirit, by a happiness which every
converted man must feel in the sacred consciousness that he is justified through
Christ, and reconciled in the sight of God. (E. Scobell, M. A.)

The harvest past

There is scarcely a more painful reflection to the mind of man, than that the
season of avoiding great calamities, and of securing great blessings, has been
neglected, and is irrecoverably gone. The distress will be heightened in proportion to
the magnitude of the evil which might have been avoided, and of the blessings which
might have been secured.
1. The season of youth passed in impenitence, is to multitudes such a season.
The sensibilities of the soul are more easily touched, conscience is more
susceptible and faithful, the affections are more easily moved, the soul is
 capable of receiving more permanent impressions--the whole inner man is
peculiarly accessible to the influence of eternal things.
2. The same precious season is often terminated by some single acts of
wickedness, or by yielding in some single instance to temptation. Could we
draw aside the veil that conceals the providence of God, we should doubtless
see, in the history of every soul that is lost, some act, some purpose, some
state of heart, some violence done to conscience, which was the fatal step
away from the grace of God--the commencement of that downward career, in
which mercy was never to reach him--the turning point of life and death
eternal--the hour in which his day of grace terminated, and from which the
only result of his protracted life, was the accumulation of wrath--the hour
when the harvest was past, when the summer ended.
3. The same precious season is often terminated by the abuse and perversion of
distinguishing grace. It is related that in a place where Mr. Whitefield
preached, and was greatly opposed by many, that not me of his opposers was
known afterward to give evidence of piety, and that nothing like a revival of
religion was known there, until every such opposer was dead. When, in
addition to the more ordinary means of grace, opportunities of hearing the
Gospel preached, are multiplied--when religion and the concerns of the soul
become extensively the topics of conversation in families and among
neighbours--when the professed followers of Christ awake to a faithful
discharge of these duties and converse with sinners, solemnly and pungently,
about the neglected concerns of the soul--and when these extra opportunities
and means are resolutely shunned and neglected, or when, in any way, their
influence is resisted, then it is that multitudes put themselves beyond the
influence of the most powerful means that will ever be used for their
salvation, and live only to treasure up wrath against the day of wrath.
4. This season of mercy often terminates with a season of peculiar Divine
influence. There are periods in the life of almost every one when the truths of
religion have peculiar efficacy. The Spirit of God carries those truths to the
conscience with a power which cannot be wholly resisted. Such intervals of
conviction may be longer or shorter, the conviction itself may be more or less
pungent, but let the subject resist and grieve away the Spirit of God, and the
last state of that man is worse than the first. At such a season, God seems to
make His last, highest efforts to save; and those unhappy men who resist
them, and still persevere in impenitence, of all others run the most fearful
risk of final abandonment of that God who has done so much to save them. It
is of such that God says, Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.
5. Death ends the day of grace to all. It ushers the soul that is unprepared into
the presence of its Judge to receive its unchangeable doom. It is appointed
unto men once to die, and after that the judgment. The end of probation
must come. The mighty angel standing on the earth and the sea shall lift his
hand to heaven, and swear that time shall be no longer. Then all will be
eternal, unchangeable retribution. (N. W. Taylor.)

The harvest past

I. LIFE IS MADE UP OF A SERIES OF PROBATIONS. Its various parts are favourable

periods for affecting the future. The present may be so used as to be of advantage to
us hereafter.
1. Life is a probation in regard to the friendship and favour of our fellow men.
We do not at once step into their confidence without a trial. Many a man
toils through a long and weary life to secure by his good conduct something
which his fellow men have to bestow in the shape of honour or office, content
at last, if even when grey hairs are thick upon him, he may lay his hand on
the prize which has glittered before him in all the journey of life.
2. Especially is this true of the young. Of no young man is it presumed that he is
qualified for office, or business, or friendship, until he has given evidence of
such qualification.
3. The study of a profession, or apprenticeship, is such a probation. It is just a
trial to determine whether the young man will be worthy of the confidence
which he desires, and it will decide the amount of honour or success which
the world will give him. There is an eye of public vigilance on every young
man from which he cannot escape. The world watches his movements; learns
his character; marks his defects; records and remembers his virtues.
4. The whole of this probation for the future often depends on some single
action that shall determine the character, and that shall send an influence
ever onward. Everything seems to be concentrated on a single point. A right
or a wrong decision then settles everything. The moment when in the battle
at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington could say, This will do, decided the
fate of the battle, and of kingdoms. A wrong movement just at that point
might have changed the condition of the world for centuries. In every mans
life there are such periods; and probably in the lives of most men their future
course is more certainly determined by one such far-reaching and central
decision, than by many actions in other circumstances. They are those
moments when honour, wealth, usefulness, health, and salvation seem all to
depend on a single resolution. Everything is concentrated on that point--like
one of Napoleons movements at the bridge of Lodi, or at Austerlitz. If that
one point is carried, the whole field may soon be won. In the decision which
a young man often makes at that point, there is such a breach made on his
virtuous principles; there is such an array of temptations pouring into the
breach--like an army pouring into a city when a breach is made in a wall--
that henceforward there is almost no resistance, and the citadel is taken.

II. WHEN A TIME OF PROBATION IS PASSED, IT CANNOT BE RECALLED. If it has been

improved aright, the advantages which it conferred in shaping the future life, will
abide; if it has been misimproved or abused, it will be too late to repair the evil. A
young man is fitting for a profession, or for commercial life. If he suffers the time
usually allotted to such a preparation to pass away in idleness or vice, it will soon be
too late to recall his neglected or wasted opportunities. There are advantages in
preparing for a profession in youth, which cannot be secured at a subsequent period
of life. A young man is professedly acquiring an education. If he suffers the time of
youth to be spent in indolence, the period will soon arrive when it will be too late for
him to repair the evil. In the acquisition of languages; in the formation of
industrious habits; in cultivating an acquaintance with past events, he has
opportunities then which can be secured at no other time of life. At no future period
can he do what he was fitted to do then, and what ought to have been done then.
Whatever opportunities there were then to prepare for the future, are now lost, and
it is too late to recall them. The period has passed away, and all that follows must be
unavailing regret. I need not pause here to remark on the painful emotions which
visit the bosom in the few cases of those who are reformed after a wasted and
dissipated youth. Cases of such reformation sometimes occur. A man after the errors
and follies of a dissipated early life; after he has wasted the opportunities which he
had to obtain an education; after all the abused care and anxiety of a parent to
prepare him for future usefulness and happiness, sometimes is aroused to see the
error and folly of his course. What would he not give to be able to retrace that
course, and to live over again that abused and wasted life! But it is too late. The die
is east for this life--whatever may be the case in regard to the life to come.

III. There are favourable seasons for securing the salvation of the soul, which, if
suffered to pass away unimproved, cannot be recalled. The grand purpose for which
God has placed us on earth, is not to obtain wealth, or to acquire honour, or to enjoy
pleasure here; it is to prepare for the world beyond. On the same principle,
therefore, on which He has made future character and happiness in this life
dependent on our conduct in those seasons which are times of probation, has He
made all the eternity of our existence dependent on the conduct of life regarded as a
season of probation. And on the same principle on which He has appointed
favourable seasons for sowing and reaping, He has appointed favourable seasons to
secure our salvation. For it is no more to be presumed of any man without trial that
he is prepared for heaven, than it is that a young man will be a good merchant,
lawyer, or physician, without trial. There are periods, therefore, which God has
appointed as favourable seasons for salvation; times when there are peculiar
advantages for securing religion, and which will not occur again.
1. Foremost among them is youth--the most favourable time always for
becoming a Christian. Then the heart is tender, and the conscience is easily
impressed, and the mind is more free from cares than at a future period, and
there is less difficulty in breaking away from the world, and usually less
dread of the ridicule of others. The time of youth compared with old age has
about the same relation to salvation, which spring time and summer
compared with winter have with reference to a harvest. The chills and frosts
of age are about as unfavourable to conversion to God as the frosts and
snows of December are to the cultivation of the earth. But suppose that
youth is to be all of your life, and you were to die before you reached middle
life, what then will be your doom?
2. A season when your mind is awakened to the subject of religion, is such a
favourable time for salvation. All persons experience such seasons; times
when there is an unusual impression of the vanity of the world, of the evil of
sin, of the need of a Saviour, and of the importance of being prepared for
heaven. These are times of mercy, when God is speaking to the soul.
Compared with the agitations and strifes of public life, they are with
reference to salvation what gentle summer suns are to the husbandman,
compared with the storm and tempest when the lightnings flash, and the hail
beats down the harvest which he had hoped to reap. And the farmer may as
well expect to till his soil, and sow and reap his harvest, when the black cloud
rolls up the sky, and the pelting storm drives on, as a man expect to prepare
for heaven in the din of business, in political conflicts, and in the struggles of
 gain and ambition. But all--all that is favourable for salvation, in such
serious moments, will soon pass away, and when gone they cannot be
recalled.
3. A revival of religion, in like manner, is a favourable time for securing
salvation. It is a time when there is all the power of the appeal from
sympathy; all the force of the fact that your companions and friends are
leaving you four heaven; when the strong ties of love for them draw your
mind towards religion; when all the confidence which you had in them
becomes an argument for religion; and when, most of all, the Holy Spirit
makes your heart tender, and speaks with any unusual power to the soul. But
such a time, with all its advantages, usually soon passes away; and those
advantages for salvation you cannot again create, or recall--any more than
you can call up the bloom of spring in the snows of December.

IV. Various classes who will utter this unavailing lamentation, and the reflections
of the soul, as it goes unforgiven up to God.
1. Such words will be uttered by the aged man who has suffered his long life to
pass away without preparation to meet his Judge.
2. The language of the text will be uttered at last by the man who often resolved
to attend to the subject of religion, but who deferred it until it was too late.
3. These words will be uttered by the thoughtless and the gay. Life to them has
been a summer scene in more senses than one. It has been--or they have
tried to make it so--just what a summer day is to the gaudy insects that you
see playing in the rays of the setting sun. It has been just as volatile, as
frivolous, as useless. But the time has come at last when all this gaiety and
vanity is to be left. The beautiful summer, that seemed so full of flowers and
sweet odours, passes away. The sun of life hastens to its setting. The circle of
fashion has been visited for the last time; the theatre has been entered for
the last time; the pleasures of the ball-room have been enjoyed for the last
time; music has poured its last notes on the ear, and the last silvery tones of
flattery are dying away, and now has come the serious hour to die. (A.
Barnes, D. D.)

The goodness of God a motive to gratitude, and an incentive to

spiritual activity

I. The feelings that ought to be suggested to our minds by the literal harvest.
1. The recollection of Gods faithfulness. We ask for the corn, and the wine, and
the oil; we cry to the earth, by which they can be produced; the earth calls to
the heavens, by whose genial influences alone the earth can yield them; the
heavens look up to God, and God hears the heavens, and the earth receives,
and the earth gives us all that we need; and thus we receive it directly from
the hands of God Himself.
2. To feel our dependence. All the science and ingenuity of mankind united
together, cannot produce one drop of water, or a single blade of grass.
3. The exercise of gratitude. Fears we may have had on account of the apparent
unfavourableness of the season, but we have reason to rejoice that these
 fears have, in a great measure, been disappointed; that God has fulfilled His
promise, and given us plenty in our borders for man and beast.
4. Gods forbearance. Only reflect upon it, that while men are never thinking of
God, while they are blaspheming His holy name, putting away His Gospel,
finding reasons in this very world He has made in order to deny His
existence and providence, while men are doing this, He is pitying them and
giving them of His fulness, opening His hand and supplying liberally their
wants!
5. We should regard the end that God must be supposed to have in view in all
this. Every putting forth of His beneficence, every ray of light that comes on
our world, while they furnish us with a beautiful manifestation of the Divine
character, are designed as invitations to come to be reconciled to that God
who has been giving us all things richly to enjoy.
6. A recollection of the flight of time. What do we mean by the harvest? That
the seasons have again rolled around--that we are so much nearer death, and
eternity, and the final destiny of our immortal spirits. It is a solemnising
thought!

II. Notice some of those uses which are made of the season by the sacred writers,
for the purpose of illustrating and conveying religious truth.
1. The completion of religion in the soul. Contemplating an individual as the
subject of Gods grace, we have an illustration in the figure before us of the
rise, progress, and completion of religion in the soul. We find this very
beautifully described by our Lord Himself (Mar 4:26).
2. Another idea is suggested--the secret and mysterious origin and operation of
religion in the heart. To this our Lord has Himself beautifully alluded in the
parable I have read, The seed springs and groweth up, he knoweth not
how.
3. Another thing that is beautifully taught us in this parable is the progressive
nature of the advancement of religion in the character. For the earth
bringeth forth fruit in itself, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full
corn in the ear.
4. The last idea is the termination of all the anxiety which was necessarily
connected with the watching of this progress, and the bringing forth of this
fruit. The end of the present dispensation of things in the world and in the
Church. There will be an end of the preaching of the Gospel, of prayer, of the
Saviours intercession. All these things are to come to an end. Be ye
therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.
5. The appearances of things at that time will be connected with all that is
passing now. All the results of the present dispensation of things will be
observed. Everything will appear as it really is.

III. The figure seems, in this passage, to refer, not so much literally to the harvest
itself, as the result of agencies, but rather to the enjoyment of these agencies--the
enjoyment of the summer and autumn, when opportunity was given, and
improvement might have been made. The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and
we are not saved. We might take up the property of sufficiency as expressing the
particular feature of the harvest to which I wish to advert.
1. What a sufficiency of knowledge you have! God hath spoken once, yea, twice;
He hath given you line upon line, precept upon precept; He hath taught you
to conceive rightly of Himself, of His nature, His designs, His will, in regard
to us; He has revealed man to himself, as well as revealed Himself to man.
2. There is a sufficiency of provision.
3. You have abundance of motives and inducements. Think of Gods exceeding
great and precious promises--think of their freeness, their universality, their
adaptation to your rotate and circumstances--think of God actually waiting
to be gracious, inviting you to come to Him.
4. Do you lack opportunity! Have you no cessation from labour, no hours for
retirement? Have you not time--have you really not time to reflect, to reason,
to read Gods Word, to offer prayer to God, to scrutinise and examine the
real state of your own character?
5. You have a sufficiency of capacity. God does not require of you to do that by
your own efforts of which you are incapable; He does not require you to find
a Holy Spirit for the purification of your hearts; but He does require that
when He has found these, when He has found this Saviour, when He has
provided this Holy Spirit, He does require you to receive His truth, to come
to that Saviour, to accept His salvation, to ask for the influences of that
Sanctifier. So that if ye have not, says our Saviour, it is for this reason,
because ye ask not. (T. Binney.)

Seasons of grace

I. To promote our salvation from the dominion and consequences of sin, we are
graciously favoured of God with an abundance of spiritual blessings.
1. The teaching of His Gospel. By it we are instructed concerning--
(1) The necessity of salvation.
(2) The provision of salvation.
(3) The method of salvation.
2. Warnings of His providence.
(1) Jehovah warns by dreadful calamities.
(2) By prevailing sickness and disease.
(3) By sudden death.
3. Influence of His Spirit.
(1) Convincing men of the evil of sin.
(2) Drawing men from sin.
(3) Reproving men for sin.
4. Labours of faithful ministers.

II. To promote our salvation, we are not only favoured of God with an abundance
of spiritual blessings, but also with numerous gracious seasons and favourable
opportunities.
1. A summer season of youth.
 2. Summer seasons of affliction. They afford opportunities for solemn thought,
holy meditation, serious inquiry, important reflection, and faithful self-
examination.
3. Summer season of special visitations of grace.

III. It is possible for spiritual blessings and favourable opportunities to pass

away, and leave man a stranger to salvation.
1. The Word of God asserts the truth.
2. Numerous facts establish the truth.

IV. The state of those who are not saved by grace is most deplorable and perilous.
1. unsaved state is a state of guilt.
2. An unsaved state is a state of misery.
3. An unsaved state is a state of danger.

V. APPLY THESE IMPORTANT TRUTHS. In doing so, we would consider the language
of this Scripture as the language of--
1. Penitential regret--for having abused such precious blessings, and neglected
such favourable opportunities.
2. Awakened fear--the fear of a person who discovers his danger, and is
concerned about it.
3. Serious inquiry. Can I, after abusing so much goodness--after placing myself
in such circumstances of jeopardy, yet obtain salvation? Thanks to the long-
suffering grace of God, it is possible.
4. Affectionate warning. Your privileges are passing away--your time is
consuming--your careless conduct is inexcusable--and your eternal destiny
will soon be fixed. (W. Naylor.)

Lost opportunity
To understand fully the import of these words it would be useful to consider the
state of the people in whose name they were uttered by the prophet, namely, the
Jews, who were at this period on the eve of destruction. But there are many
situations in the life of every man to which this lamentation may be applied with the
utmost propriety and force.

I. Every person who still remains in sin may, at the close of a year, or the
recurrence of any other marked interval of time, usefully adopt this lamentation.
Every passing hour removes the sinner farther from eternal life. Mankind are never
stationary in their moral condition, any more than in their being. He who does not
become better, becomes worse. Nor is this all. The declension is more rapid than we
ever imagine. Blindness is a common name for sin in the Scriptures, and is strongly
descriptive of one important part of its nature. Nor is it blindness to Divine things
only, to God and Christ, to its duty and to its salvation; but it is also blindness with
respect to itself. Hence his state is in every respect more dangerous than he does or
will believe, and his declension more rapid than with these views he can possibly
imagine. This is true of every period of his life. Of consequence, the loss of a year, a
day, an hour, is a greater loss than he can be induced even to suspect. He ought to
remember, that he has not only lost that period, but converted it into the means of
sin and ruin; that he is more sinful, more guilty, and more odious to God, than at the
beginning of it; that all the difficulties which lie between him and salvation are
increased beyond his imagination; his evil habits strengthened, and his hopes of
returning lessened, far more than he is aware. He ought also to cast his eyes around
him, and see that all, or almost all, others, who have, like himself, trusted to a future
repentance, have from year to year become more hardened in sin by these very
means; have thought less and less of turning back, and taking hold of the paths of
life. Such as they are, will he be. Their thoughts, their conclusions, their conduct
have been the same; their end, therefore, will be his. God has, with infinite patience,
and mercy, prolonged your lives; and, in spite of all your sins, has renewed His
blessings to you every morning. The gate of salvation is still open. The Sabbath still
smiles with peace and hope. The sceptre of forgiveness is still held out for you to
touch and live. In what manner have you lived in the midst of these blessings? Have
you solemnly, often, and effectually, thought on the great subject of religion? Are
you nearer to heaven, or nearer to hell? To what good purpose have you lived? Is not
the harvest, in one important sense, past to you?

II. Another situation, to which this melancholy reflection is peculiarly applicable,

IS THAT OF A DYING SINNER. Human life is one continued scene of delusion. Present
objects too often gain all our attention, and all our care. To them alone we attach
importance, and that, an importance far beyond what their value will warrant. They
engage, they engross, our labours, our anxiety, our hopes, our fears, our joys, and
our sorrows. By such men the health and well-being of the soul are contemned and
forgotten; and the soul itself is scarcely remembered amid the vehement pursuit of
wealth, honour, and pleasure. But do these things accord with truth and wisdom?
The blessings of this world are necessary to the life, support, and comfort of man,
while he is here; and they are also means of enabling him to do good to his fellow
men, and in this way to benefit his soul. In this view I acknowledge their value. But
for what else can they be valuable? They are means, not ends. As means, they are
useful; as ends, they are but dross. Future things, on the contrary, have far less value
in our eyes than they really possess, especially eternal things. We think them
distant, but they are near; we think them uncertain, but they are sure; we think
them trifles unconnected with our happiness, whereas they are things of infinite
moment and of infinite concern to us. This delusion not uncommonly travels with us
through life, and is not shaken off till we appear before the bar of God. On a dying
bed, however, it often vanishes; and, if sickness and patience leave us in the
possession of our reason, juster views prevail, with respect both to things present
and things future, things temporal and things spiritual. Under the influence of this
clear discernment, in this new state of the mind, the following observations will
show with how much propriety he may take up this despairing lamentation. Among
the objects which may be supposed most naturally to arise to the view of a sinner on
his dying bed, his youth would undoubtedly occupy a place of primary importance.
In what colours will his various conduct during this period appear? He is now on the
verge of eternity, and just bidding his last adieu to the present world and all its
cares, and hopes, and pleasures. Where are now his high hopes of sublunary good?
Where his lively, brilliant spirits, his ardent thirst for worldly enjoyment, for gay
amusement, for sportive companions, and for the haunts of festivity, mirth, and joy?
These once engrossed all his thoughts, wishes, and labours. Where are they now?
They have vanished with the gaiety of the morning cloud, they have fled with the
glitter of the early dew. In this precious, golden season God called to him from
heaven, and proclaimed aloud, I love them that love Me, and those who seek Me
early shall find Me. Receive My instruction, and not silver; and knowledge, rather
than fine gold. For wisdom is better than rubies, and all things that may be desired
are not to be compared to it. I will cause those that love Me to inherit substance, and
I will fill their treasures. His face was then clothed in smiles, and His voice only
tenderness and compassion. Christ also, with the benignity of redeeming love,
invited him to come and take the water of life freely. The Spirit of grace, with the
same boundless affection, whispered to him to turn from every evil way, and every
unrighteous thought, to the Lord his God, who was ready to have mercy on him, and
abundantly to pardon him. With what amazement will he now look back, and see
that he refused these infinite blessings; that he turned his back on a forgiving God;
closed his ears to the calls of a crucified Redeemer; and hardened his heart against
the whispers of salvation, communicated by the Spirit of truth and life! Riper years
will naturally next offer themselves to his view. The bustle of this period seemed at
the time to be of real importance; and, although not devoted to godliness, yet to he
occupied by business serious and solid. But now, how suddenly will this specious
garb drop, and leave, in all their nakedness, his avarice, his ambition and his graver
sensuality! Of what value now are the treasures which he struggled to heap up? On
what mere wind did he labour to satisfy the hunger of his soul! How will his boasted
reason appear to have been busied! Instead of being employed in discovering truth,
and performing duty, he will see it, throughout this most discreet period of life,
labouring to flatter, to justify, to perpetrate iniquity; to persuade himself that safety
might be found in sin Blind to heaven, it had eyes only for this world. Deaf to the
calls of salvation, it listened solely to those of pride. Insensible to the eternal love of
God, it opened its feelings only to the solicitations of time and sense. Behind
manhood, we behold age next advancing; age, to him the melancholy evening of a
dark and distressing day. Here he stood upon the verge of the grave, and advanced
daily to see it open and receive him. How will he now be amazed, that, as death drew
nigh, he was still in no degree aware of its approach. In all these periods with what
emotion will he regard his innumerable sins! How many will he see to have been
committed in a single day, a month, a year, of omission, of commission, of childhood
and of riper years Among the sins which will most affectingly oppress his heart, his
negligence and abuse of the means of grace will especially overwhelm him. How will
he now exclaim, Oh, that my lost and squandered days might once more return, that
I might again go up to the house of God. Oh, that one year, one month, one
Sabbath, might be added to my wretched forfeited life! But, ah! the day of grace is
past; my wishes, nay, my prayers, are in vain. Such will be the natural retrospect of
a dying sinner. What will be his prospects? Before him, robed in all his terrors,
stands Death, the messenger of God, now come to summon him away. To what, to
whom, is he summoned? To that final judgment, into which every work of his hands
will be speedily brought, with every secret thing. To the judgment succeeds the
boundless extent of eternity. Live he must: die he cannot. But where, how, with
whom, is he to live? The world of darkness, sorrow, and despair is his final
habitation. Sin, endless and increasing sin, is his dreadful character; and sinners like
himself are his miserable and eternal companions. (Christian Observer.)
At the dose of the year

I. THE OCCASION. Jeremiah represents this as the cry of the captive Jews in
Babylon. He contemplates them as already in captivity, although it had not yet
actually taken place. He forewarns them that it would take place. At the time he
wrote, the Jews did not believe his warning of a Chaldean expedition against them.
They were filled with vain confidence, boasting that God was their defender and
their city impregnable. It is when this doom has overtaken them that they are
represented as taking up the language of the text. In the preceding verse the prophet
records the tenor of their language in exile, and also Gods reply: Hark the voice of
the cry of the daughter of My people from distant land, Was not God in Zion? Was
not her King in her? This would be their complaint against God on finding
themselves deprived of their country and overtaken with calamity. They would begin
to expostulate as if they had been unfairly dealt with. Why, then, did not God defend
the city and protect His people? The Divine reply shows how groundless this charge
was. I have not forsaken you, but ye have forsaken Me. Why have ye provoked Me
with your graven images and your strange vanities! God had, indeed, promised to
dwell in Zion, and to cast His protecting shield over the descendants of Abraham, on
condition that they faithfully worshipped and served Him. But they, by their
carvings and foreign vanities, had polluted the holy temple, trusting more to the
temple than to the God of the temple. Thus they forfeited their right to Divine
protection, and are now left to take the consequences of their choice. They see their
mistake when too late. The text implies an acknowledgment that their calamities
were the just reward of their disobedience, and they accept their doom in desperate
agony.

II. The meaning.

1. Opportunity acknowledged. As a nation we have received privileges greater
than ever the Jews enjoyed, but with all these privileges comes a
corresponding responsibility. To whom much is given, of them also shall
much be required. The temple did not save the Jews, so neither will the
mere institution of a religion in our midst save us from national decline
without the righteousness which exalteth a nation. But our opportunities as
individuals are not less conspicuous than our privileges as a nation, and a
mere profession of religion will not save us. To every man on earth there
comes, at some time or other, an opportunity sufficient to make him an heir
of a better portion if he embraces it; sufficient also to condemn him if he
rejects it.
2. Neglect confessed. How apt are we to throw the blame of our wrong-doing on
others, to plead the force of circumstances, the pressure of business, and so
forth, as reasons for neglect. Such reasons may obscure for a time the real
issues, but when memory lights her flaming fires and concentrates thought
on the actions of a misspent life, everything will then be seen in its due
propertions. Forgotten acts of iniquity, secret sins, will come to light and
cluster round the memory.
3. Doom incurred. We are not saved. This is the result of neglected
opportunities, the necessary consequence of continued transgression. The
Jews, in putting their trust in human allies, neglected the moral defence, and
 therefore fell before the invader. Carnal weapons cannot be used with
impunity by spiritual men.

III. THE APPLICATION. The sentiment of the text may be appropriately adopted--
1. By those who have been the subjects of deep religious impressions without
being led to repentance. There is no greater danger than that of playing fast
and loose with ones feelings. The original impression may return, but it will
return with diminished force. Act while the Godward impressions are strong.
2. By an impenitent sinner at the close of life. This is the saddest application that
the words can possibly have.
3. At the close of the year, by every one who continues in sin. Begin the New
Year with God. When Christopher Columbus, four hundred years ago, landed
on the shores of America, the first thing he did was to plant the Cross on the
newly-discovered land. What Columbus did in the New World let us do in the
New Year. Let us enter upon it in the name of heavens King, and whatever
may be before us, joy or sorrow, prosperity or disaster, life or death, all will
be well, for God is with us. (D. Merson.)

Soul-restoring seasons neglected

I. HEAVEN VOUCHSAFES TO MEN HERE SEASONS FOR SOUL RESTORATION. Whole of

life a season; day of grace. But periods and moods specially favourable; youth,
leisure, association with godly men. Moods of mind too. Soul has its seasons as well
as nature--pensive, thoughtful, susceptible, and impressed with moral
considerations. All such specially favourable to soul restoration. Hours dawn in a
mans life specially favourable for the effectuation of certain purposes.

II. The departure of these seasons, leaving the soul unrestored, is LAMENTABLE
BEYOND EXPRESSION. The harvest is past. Awful wail in this language. (Homilist.)

Harvest time

I. God has special seasons for conveying special gifts.

1. In nature. Must sow in spring, or season lost. Must gather in harvest time, or
fruit spoilt.
2. In the spiritual kingdom. Youth. Sabbath. Days of affliction and bereavement.

II. These special seasons ought to be improved.

1. Men improve the natural seasons.
2. Spiritual realm. God has done His part: Atonement made; Spirit given. We
must repent, believe, abandon evil, fight the good fight, etc.

III. THESE SPECIAL SEASONS SPEEDILY PASS. Life short. Health uncertain. Refusal
of mercy today may be irreparable ruin.

IV. SPECIAL SEASONS OF GRACE MISUSED END IN UNSPEAKABLE RUIN. Past feeling.
Conscience seared. (J. D. Davies, M. A.)

Harvest home
Then there are measured opportunities in life, times of limitation, times of
beginning and ending. Even now there are little circles not complete. The universe is
a circle, eternity is a circle, infinity is a circle; these can never be completed; they live
in continual progress towards self-completion: but there are little circles, small as
wedding rings, that can be quite finished,--the day is one, the year is one, the
seasons constitute four little circles, each of which can be completed, turned off, sent
forward with its gospel or its cry and confession of penitence and failure. The
harvest is past; the barn door is shut, the granary is supplied: it is either full or
empty; one or the other, there it is. We cannot get rid of these views of doom. There
are those who would try to persuade the young that after all the sun is but a
momentary blessing, and when he is gone there will be as good as he come up again.
Them is no authority for saying so; experience has nothing to say in corroboration of
that wild suggestion. Scripture bases its appeals on a totally different view, saying,
Work while it is called day, the night cometh wherein no man can work. The whole
biblical appeal is towards immediacy of action: Buy up the opportunity is the
Gospel appeal to the common sense of the world. The harvest is past. Then we are
or we are not provided for the winter. It is of no use repining now. Harvest finds the
food, winter finds the hunger. We know this in nature: we have no difficulty about
this in all practical matters, as we call them,--as if spiritual matters were not
practical, whereas they are the most practical and urgent of all. Why not reason from
nature to spirit, and say, If it be so in things natural, that there is a seed time, and
that the harvest depends upon it, there may also be a corresponding truth in the
spiritual universe: hear it: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap. It is his own harvest; he must put into it his
own sickle. The harvest may be very plentiful, and yet very much may depend upon
the way in which it is gathered. Some people do not know when to gather the harvest
in any department of life; they have their opportunities and never see them. Others
spend so much time in whetting their sickle that the corn is never cut at all. Others
spend so much time in contemplating the golden fields that they forget that the
fields were intended to be cut down and the fruits thereof garnered for the winter.
God has given us everything we need, and all we want; but we must find the sagacity
that discerns the situation, we must find the common sense that notes the
beginning, continuance, and culmination of the opportunity. A meditation of this
kind brings several points before us that may be applied usefully to our whole life.
For example, there is brought before us the time of vain regrets--The harvest is
past. The coach has gone on, and we have missed it; the tide flowed, and we might
have caught it, but we have waited so long that it has ebbed. We neglected our
opportunities at home, we were disobedient, unfilial, hard-hearted, and now we
stand at the gate post and cry our hearts out, because we had not a chance of doing
something for the father and the mother whom we neglected in their lifetime. Oh,
the time of vain regrets that we should have spoken that cruel word; that we should
have been guilty of that base neglect; that we should have been lured away from
paths of loveliness and peace by some urgent temptation; that we should have done
a thousand things which now rise up against us as criminal memories! They are vain
regrets. You can never repair a shattered crystal, so that it shall be as it was at first;
you can never take the metal, the iron, out of the pierced wood, and really obliterate
the wound. A nail cut is never cured. The old may hear these words with dismay, the
young should hear them as voices of warning. Such points bring before us also the
times of honest satisfaction. Blessed be God, there are times when we may be really
moved to tears and to joy by contemplating the results of a lifetime. The hard
working author says, I have written all this; God gave me strength and guided my
hand, and now when I look back upon these pages it is like reading my own life over
again; I do not know how it was done, God taught my fingers this mystery of labour.
And the honest merchantman has a right to say in his old age, God has been good to
me, He has enabled me to lay up for what is called a rainy day, He has prospered my
industry, He has blessed me in basket and in store,--praise God from whom all
blessings flow! How are we going to treat our own harvests? We can treat them in
three different ways. There are men who treat everything as a mere matter of course.
They are not men to be trusted or reverenced: keep no company with them; they will
never elevate your thought, or expand and illuminate your mind, or give a richer
bloom to your life. There is another way of receiving the harvest which our Lord
Himself condenmed parabolically (Luk 12:16-20). What about the barns? what
about the stored granaries? The man never said what he would do for the poor, the
famishing, and the sad-hearted; he never said, God has given me all these things,
and to His glory I will consecrate them. We may receive our harvests gratefully,
claiming no property in them beyond the right of honest labour. See the harvest-
man: he says, I sowed for this; thank God I have got it; I meant my fields to be
plentiful, I spent myself upon them, I did not work in them as a hireling, but I
worked in them as a man who loved them, and here are the fruits, blessed be God:
here, Lord, is Thy tithe, Thy half, here is Gods dole; He shall have a handful of this
wheat, anyhow; He wont take it, but the poor shall have it; the harvest is only mine
to use in Gods interest. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The harvest past

I remember once passing by a bleak hillside in Scotland, when winter was already
far advanced, and seeing a field of oats still green, though harvest had long since
been closed. There was something most melancholy and almost weird in the aspect
of that ill-starred crop, There it stood in the cold hillside, seeming as if nature and
man had alike over looked and forgotten it. You could almost have thought you
heard those green ears, shrivelled with the early frost, but still unripe, sighing, as
they swayed to and fro in the wintry gusts--The harvest is past, the summer is
ended, and we are not saved. I wonder what became of that crop? Perhaps it may
have been given to the dunghill; perhaps it may have been eaten down and trampled
under foot by the cattle where it stood; but very sure I am the shout of harvest home
was never heard in that field that season, as the laden cart passed to the granary
with its golden freight. It had failed, for some reason or other, to answer its proper
purpose; it had missed its season; and there it was, rubbish rather than treasure.
Each of us has a season allotted to us in which we may bring forth the peaceable
fruits of righteousness, and with each of us this season is a period necessarily
limited in extent, a period which it is possible to trifle away, so that when the time
for the harvest comes there shall be nothing for God to gather, nothing that can be
saved into the eternal garner and treasured among the precious things of heaven.
Heavens resources have been taxed to the uttermost to make earth spiritually
fruitful; no expense has been spared, and He who is the Lord of the soil has a right
to expect some adequate return. How is this living harvest to be produced, and from
whence shall it spring? Christ Himself shall give us an answer, as we hear Him say,
Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit. He was the spiritual corn of wheat from which the
spiritual harvest is ordained to spring, and He fell to the ground and died in order
that from Him, as from the true seed, we might spring up into newness of life, and
grow up as the harvest crop of living souls in a world which He hath redeemed. And
He shall see His seed. In every age of the worlds history the harvest will continue
to be produced, until at last the great harvest day comes. Then, when a multitude
that no man can number stands before the throne, with joyful acclamations
ascribing salvation unto our God and unto the Lamb, it will be seen at last how
vast a product has sprung from that solitary corn of wheat which fell to the ground
and died eighteen hundred years ago. What and if any of you should be found left
behind in that great harvest day, like the bundles of tares that lie there waiting for
the burning, while the wheat is carried into the barn? There is something strangely
sad in these familiar words of our text, in whatever sense they are employed, but
surely this will be the saddest sense of all. Oh, think of that moment, that terrible
and tragic moment, when the gates of the heavenly granary shut, as the last sheaf
passes in, and some of you, perhaps, find yourselves left behind l With what
unspeakable anguish, with what dire despair, must this cry then be wrung from your
sinking hearts, The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!
And then to have to thank yourselves for it all! For think how inevitable, how
righteously inevitable, is this doom of exclusion! You have not answered the end of
your existence; you have failed of the proper purpose and object of life. How can you
hope to be stored amongst the precious things of eternity, and to add in your own
persons to the treasures of heaven! You might as reasonably expect to see a sane
farmer crowding his barn with thistles and darnel as to see Almighty God filling
heaven with those who have never been born again, not of corruptible seed, but of
incorruptible, by the Word of God. But now I want to point out to you further, that
with us, as with the Israelites of old, the harvest is a thing of the present as well as of
the future. It is possible even now to be garnered in safety, by being brought into our
proper relations with the Saviour. And just as from time to time God was pleased of
old to give special seasons of visitation to His ancient people--times of religious
revival, when many no doubt were gathered in, and when the nation as a whole
might have been--even so now He sends from time to time a special call, and moves
upon localities and individuals with special power. But, remember, no mission, no
season of special visitation, can leave you as it found you. With each fresh
opportunity wasted the heart necessarily becomes harder, and thus the harvest
season of your life must needs at length be lost. The time in which God might have
reaped a harvest in you will at last have passed away, and then,--What then? What
then! Surely such a curse as fell upon the barren fig tree of old: No man eat fruit of
thee henceforth and forever. What then l Then the terrible sentence: Ephraim is
joined to his idols, let him alone. But why should this be so? Is not the Lord in
Zion? is not her King in her? Here in our very midst He is today, willing to enter
your heart, and bring His own salvation with Him. You need not be left behind; you
need not continue unsaved. Is there no balm in Gilead? is there no Physician
there? There is! There is! A thousand joyous voices can attest it--voices of those
who once were wounded and stricken and dying. It seemed as if they were once like
a blighted crop, too sorely diseased to be capable of any satisfactory harvest; but in
their barrenness they found a Healer, and now they are themselves the harvest of
the Lord. Why should not you be healed too? Ah, think of what it has cost Him to
obtain the right and the power to heal such sin-stricken souls as we! Some
physicians amongst ourselves risk their lives in attending their plague-stricken
patients, and who can deny to such their meed of praise; but our good Physician
actually laid down His life as the preliminary condition of His being able to exercise
His healing skill. Only because He has taken our diseases upon Himself, was it
possible for Him to cure them. Only because He died our death, is it possible for
Him to bring life and immortality to light by His Gospel. But He has borne our
sicknesses, and died our death, and now He has the right to heal and to save, and He
is in our midst to do it today. I saw an interesting inscription on the wall of a country
church, not long ago, on a stone erected in memory of Gods preserving mercy
shown to a man wile fell from half-way up the steeple in the year 1718, and yet
escaped with his life, and actually lived to be seventy-three. But the inscription went
on to state that he died in the year 1761, some forty-three years after the accident. As
I stood there reading it, more than a hundred years after the mans death, what a
small acquisition after all did it seem, those forty years added to the life that had
been so nearly cut short--what were they now? Passed as a watch in the night. Yet
we do not wonder at his being grateful for even such a prolongation. But here is a
good Physician who offers to heal your dying soul and to impart the blessing of life
for evermore--to do it freely, and to do it now. Why, then, oh why, in the name of
reason, is not your health recovered? (W. Hay Aitken, M. A.)

The two harvests

The text sets nature in solemn contrast with human life,--suggesting to us for
serious thought, not merely that a certain length of time has elapsed and we have
been spiritually listless, not simply that an opportunity has gone by which we have
not filled with duty, but that something beneficent and sacred has been going on in
the outward world with which we have not been in harmony; that the elements have
been doing their work while we have been misdoing ours; and that, measured
against nature, at the close of one of its fruitful seasons, we seem out of order,
discordant, away from God, unserviceable, and unprofitable: in a word, we are not
saved. The harvest is past. Not a spear of wheat has grown, not a kernel of corn has
hardened, not a beet has reddened in the ground, not an apple or a plum has nursed
sweet juices through the tree out of the ground, that has not revealed or illustrated,
in the process of its growth, a principle which ought to be carried out in nobler ways
by human souls. Our dependence on God, our reception of His light and His
spiritual rain, our fidelity to the duty of the circumstances in which we are set, our
success in bending chilly days and gusts of adversity to usefulness in strengthening
character, ought to fulfil the lessons which every vine and every tree publish in their
use of sunshine and soil and dew and storm. And the bounty of the harvest is for this
purpose. Think what that bounty has been. If the whole bounty of Providence during
the creative season of the year should be massed by the Almighty, and our people
should be obliged to go, person by person or family by family, to such a monstrous
bin to receive their share of the lands exuberance, how poetic and how impressive
would the munificence of God through the harvest seem, how vividly would our
dependence be revealed to us, how unnatural would the taking of the heavenly gifts
without gratitude appear! And if now we take the fruit of the earth, which is only the
varied expression of the punctuality of Providence in the weaving of the seasons and
the alternations of sunshine and shower, and if we renew our strength from it day
after day with no reverence in our thought and no thankfulness in our heart to the
unsparing and unwearied Giver, then the truth of the text is directly revealed in our
state; the harvest stands as the background to show off the truth that we are not
saved,--that we are out of harmony, through the coldness of our sentiment, with the
boundless beneficence,--since, while every loaded ear of grain bends as if in
adoration of creative liberality, we, for whom it was designed and nourished by the
Infinite, receive from it no motive to reverent thanksgiving, no impulse to joyous
prayer! Suppose that the human race should be turned by miracle into portions of
the natural world,--should be transformed into a part of the vegetable domain, and
should express there the same qualities that they exhibit now in human ways, the
same passions, the same bitterness, the same impurity, the same selfishness, the
same hatred, instead of the beauty and bounty that now adorn and load the valleys
and the hills, what a scanty, shrivelled, sour, and ugly harvest would appear!
Suppose that you, leading a life unregulated and alien from God, should be turned,
just as you are, into a tree, and should act, as a tree, precisely as you now act as a
man. Your disobedience of spiritual laws would be shown in the refusal of the tree to
throw out its roots to be rightly balanced in nature. Your lack of spiritual growth
would be exhibited in the neglect of the tree to widen its rings, and stretch its bark,
and rear its trunk, and push out its boughs every year, in order to reach its intended
stature. The poverty of your spiritual sensibilities would appear in wan and
shrivelled leaves; your denial of heavenly grace in the opposition of the tree to
quickening sunshine, and its resistance to mellowing rains; the wrong thoughts you
cherish, in foul insect webs and broods that would net the branches with their vile
and deadening threads; your lack of service, in the refusal of the tree to bear any
fruit, although it was the intention of God that it should glorify His providence in
branches laden with sweet benefactions to the race; your vices, in the rust, the
mould, or the canker on the bark, telling of corrupt juices within. The wealth of the
harvest, you know, is, in large measure, from the seed scattered or planted in the
spring. And see how, in this aspect of it, the faithfulness of nature supplies a serious
background to set off the poverty, the unsaved and unsafe condition, of human life.
What a terrible calamity it would be to society if the readiness of the earth to receive
and welcome the seeds dropped into her bosom, and protected by human
watchfulness, should be broken! What a dreadful judgment upon us all, if the soil
should have the power and the tendency to cast them out from its furrows, to refuse
them shelter and nutriment, and, instead, to take down into its mellowed substance
the germs of briers and weeds! And yet, would such a change in the disposition and
forces of the soil do anything more than bring nature, which we live in, into accord
with the tendencies and habits of our inward life? God is showering seed upon your
soul continually. He does not leave you a day without sending a quickening lesson or
a noble thought or a conviction of sinfulness or a pure motive into your soul.
Another truth which the contemplation of nature in contrast with humanity
suggests, and especially of the harvest in comparison with human fruitfulness in
virtue, is the openness of the external world to the inflowing of as much of the
Divine life aa it can hold. Here we touch the deepest lesson which our subject can
yield. All goodness comes from reception of the Divine Spirit. All increase of
goodness comes from enlarging or multiplying the channels for the reception and
absorption of the Divine life. All evil is from the shutting out of God, or the
perversion of His bounty and vitality by disease or sin, in the forms which He has
fashioned to receive it. We are nothing of ourselves. Neither is he that planteth
anything, neither he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase. Our
sufficiency is of God. Now nature is always open to God. The harvest is the
beneficent transmutation of Gods quickening vitality through vegetable veins into
palpable sustenance for the children of men, the annual proof that there is no sin in
the arteries of nature. But we are not in accord with it. We are not saved in this
supreme sense. God is ever striving to pour Himself through humanity as freely as
He does through nature. We resist Him. We beat back the infinite truth and love. We
close the valves through which He must enter. Do you ever ask why there is so much
evil, wretchedness, wrong, in the social world?--why God does not stay it or cripple
it or annihilate it, why He suffers it under His pure and loving eye? I tell you, my
troubled friend, God is trying to reach it. He can reach it only through human
affection, human labour, human organisation. When He makes a perfect apple it is
not by dropping one from the skies, but by effusing His Spirit through the substance
of a tree made as the form for His life, and until the tree is ready the fruit must be
delayed. And so God does not, perhaps we may say cannot, come immediately into
society, into history, to grapple with evil. He must move against it by His charity
through human hearts, the form of charity; by His justice, through human
consciences; by His truth, through human intellects; by His energy, through human
wills. Behold I stand at the door and knock is the keynote of His relations to
humanity. In nature there is no sinful choice or will to stop Him. In us there is. That
we have such a will is our glory, the stamp of our heavenly birth, the possibility of
our sonship. That we use it so is our shame, guilt, and peril. (T. Starr King.)

The summer is ended

Nature is a school,--primary school, grammar school, high school, university, all
in one. She teaches little children their alphabets, while they are at play; teaches
them elementary lessons of the qualities of things, of hard and soft, heavy and light,
resistance, momentum, ductile, malleable, and elastic. These are her object lessons.
Then she takes those a little older, and shows them the grammar of the world, the
laws of language in sea and sky. The men who dig and plant and mine and
manufacture, who make shoos and hats, who spin and weave, manufacture glass,
make watches, print books,--learn necessarily the qualities of things and the laws of
nature. Children playing are in the primary school; man working is in the grammar
school. But we only enter the high school and university when we go further, and
take up that greatest work of life, of which the elements are conscience, liberty, and
love. To this all things lead, all invite. Summer and winter, nature and society,
success and failure, life and death,--all point to this highest aim of all--spiritual
growth, religious progress, the salvation of the soul. If the summer has brought you
only passive pleasure, only selfish indulgence, then it has been wasted. Rest is good,
and joy is good, but as they lead to something higher and better. For man is so made
that he can never rest contented in any merely passive joy. He can only be contented
when he is making progress. There are no landing places on the stairway of human
ascent. You may give a man or woman every wish of their heart. You may give them
the purse of Fortunatus, never empty; the miraculous carpet, on which they can
journey through the air, from place to place, over sea and land, by a mere wish. They
may have St. Leons gift of renewed youth; they may go to the tropics, and have a
perpetual summer. But all this is not heaven. All this, by itself, will not satisfy them
for more than a few weeks. The soul is not made to be satisfied so. The only thing
which satisfies it, and makes a perfect rest, which turns all things to gold, and earth
to heaven, is a heavenly life; that is, a life in which we have plenty to know, plenty to
love, and plenty to do, and are making progress to more knowledge, love, and use,
all the time. It was to teach us this that Christ came; to teach us this that the Holy
Spirit comes daily to our soul; that God knocks at the door of our hearts. This
teaches us that we only have plenty to know, when we see God in all things; only
plenty to love, when we love God in all His creatures; only plenty to do, when we
serve Him by making ourselves useful to all. I have taken my text from the passage
in Jeremiah which says, The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are
not saved. I also would ask, Are we saved? Summer rest and joy will not save us.
All the joy in the universe heaped on us would not save us. Put us into heaven, put
us by the right hand of God,--that will not save us. It is to drink of the cup which
Christ drinks of, and to be baptized with His baptism, that saves us. We are safe,
then,--safe from the perils which belong to the great power of freedom which is in all
of us,--only when we are doing what Christ did; seeing God in all things, loving God
in all things, and serving God by serving all His children. He who is living in this
spirit, even though he has a thousand faults, though he is stumbling and falling day
by day, though he seems to himself a poor creature, and does not seem much better
to anyone else, is safe--safe here, safe hereafter. All things will work for his good,
and he will not be afraid of any evil tidings. Evil tidings are always arriving. Danger
is always near. We seem to have been living, even in this peaceful summer, in the
midst of terrible dangers and fearful crimes. The sweetness of nature has not saved
us. Fiends in the form of men commit awful crimes in the midst of our peaceful
villages, and pollute serene nature with their brutal deeds. What shall make us safe?
Not summer days, not the shield of devoted love, not all the bulwarks which
civilisation and fortune place around us: nothing can make us safe but a life hid with
Christ in God. And by this I mean nothing mystical, nothing extraordinary: I mean
the simple purpose and habit of living with our heavenly Father wherever we are,--
being in His presence; seeing Him in nature, history, life; and going, as Christ went,
about His business, while we do our own. Then we are safe. Then, if we fall, struck
dead by sudden accident, we fall, through death, into the arms of God outspread to
receive us. We fall from love into larger love; from knowledge into deeper
knowledge; from usefulness here into the uses, whatever they may be, of the great
world yonder. The sun, which makes summer, seems the natural type of Deity.
Astronomers tell us, indeed, that in winter the earth is nearer the sun than in
summer. So sometimes we are nearer God in the chill and loneliness of our heart,
than in our joy. We feel that we are wandering away into outer darkness; but God
holds us near Himself, waiting till our hearts turn towards Him, and so receive their
summer affluence and influence out of His radiance. Summer comes, not because
the sun is any nearer to us, but because our part of the earth is turned up to it. Turn
up your hearts to God. Sursum corda. Lift them up towards God,--the God of peace
and love,--who images Himself in nature, in this magnificent orb of day. All life,
movement, activity, it is well said, come from the sun. It hides itself from us, like
God, in an excess of light. The most brilliant light which man can produce, even the
electric light, makes only a black spot on the surface of the sun, and so our brightest
wisdom is only folly before God. As the sun marches through his twelve houses he
creates the seasons--spring, summer, autumn, winter; and so God creates evermore
in human life the revolving seasons of childhood, youth, manhood, and age. As the
sun reaches out into the farthest depths of space with irresistible force, and yet
moves all things according to a great unchanging order, so God governs the
universe, not by pure will, but by will and law. Even the spots on the solar surface
are now found to have their law of periodic return, and come and go in cycles of
years. So the darkness which seems to hide the face of God, the total eclipse of faith
which chills the heart and mind, and the doubts which pass across our belief like
spots on the sun, have also their laws, which we shall one day understand, as we
now understand the laws of the solar eclipse, which once terrified impious nations
with fear of an eternal night. So, as we never tire of sunlight, let us rejoice in the
sunshine of God. The final question is, Are we saved with a Christian salvation? Are
we living with or without God in the world? Have we, with this human peace which
makes our land rejoice, also the peace of God which passes all understanding? So,
though summer he ended, the better part of summer need not be ended. We shall
take it with us into winter. Whatever we have seen of God in nature, felt of God in
our hearts, and done for God with our hands, makes a perpetual summer within.
The outward summer comes and goes: the summer of the heart shall abide for
evermore. (J. Freeman Clarke.)

Autumn thoughts
Just now all nature is saying to us, The summer is ended. The plashing rain and
fierce winds proclaim it, the lightning writes, it in fiery letters on the sky. The dying
leaves lie like monuments bearing the epitaph, The summer is ended. And now
that the harvest is past, and the summer ended, and the fruit gathered, will you not
think a little of yourselves, about the time that is past, about the harvest for which
God looks, about the future of your souls? There are various classes among us to
which the text applies.
1. The summer is ended. This is true of the old and feeble. The winter of age
has sprinkled snow on the hair, and sent a chill frost into the bones, and
frozen the current of the blood. For the old the summer is ended. But though
the summer be ended for the body and the mind, though it be winter with
the limbs, and the eyes, and the ears, and the brain, it need not be winter for
the soul.
2. For those, too, who have endured severe affliction the summer is ended. For
those whose house is left unto them desolate, whose fireside shall never
more be bright with happy faces, or merry with the music of childrens
voices, and who know that on earth they shall see their dear ones no more,
except in memory, for such as these the summer is ended. And for those
who have lost their worldly property, whose savings have been swallowed up
in bankruptcy when they are too old and infirm to retrieve their fortunes; for
those families left destitute by the death of the bread winner, and reduced
from ease and comfort to poverty and dependence, for such as these, also,
the summer is ended. But every one of these cases is but the type and
parable of the deepest meaning of all. The wise man tells us that there is a
time to get and a time to lose. You know that this is true of worldly matters.
It is thus with the things of daily life, it is thus with the things of life eternal.
There is a time to get a chance of repentance and amendment, a time to
escape from the clutches of some bad habit or besetting sin; a time to get,
and a time to lose. Shall not the gathered harvest remind you of Gods
goodness to you and to all men, and warn you that the Lord of the harvest is
looking for fruit from you, the fruit of a holy life and the flowers of purity and
meekness? You who live in the summer time of pleasure, sitting down to eat
and rising up to play, flitting through life as a summer butterfly flits from
flower to flower, will you not be serious when you remember that the
summer is ended, and that your gay, useless life must likewise end one day?
 And you who are living in the summer dream of careless indifference, who
say, Tomorrow shall be as today, how long will you sleep before the
awakening comes? Think of the death bed of the worldling, of the indifferent,
of the careless. It is related that a certain Eastern slave was once bidden by
his master to go and sow barley in a certain field. The slave sowed oats
instead, and when his master reproached him, he answered that he had sown
oats in the hope that barley might spring from them. The master reproved
the servant for his folly, but the man answered, You yourself are ever sowing
the seeds of evil in the field of the world, and yet expect to reap in the
resurrection day the fruits of virtue. You have doubtless heard of the great
painter who, when asked by a brother artist why he produced so few
pictures, answered, You paint for time; I paint for eternity. We must sow
for eternity, if we expect to reap the harvest of eternal joy. (The Literary
Churchman.)

The arrival of autumn

The soul of the intelligent Christian reflects the natural world from all sides. The
year is to him a great temple of praise, on whose altar, as an offering, spring puts its
blossoms, and summer its sheaf of grain, and autumn its branch of fruits, while
winter, like a white-bearded priest, stands at the altar praising God with psalm of
snow, and hail, and tempest. The summer season is the perfection of the year. The
trees are in full foliage. The rose--Gods favourite flower, for He has made nearly five
hundred varieties of it--flames with Divine beauty. Summer is the season of beauty.
The world itself is only one drop from the overflowing cup of Gods joy. All the sweet
sounds ever heard are but one tone from the harp of Gods infinite melody. But that
summer wave of beauty is receding. The sap of the tree is halting in its upward
current. The night is fast conquering the day. Summer, with fever heats, has
perished, and tonight we twist a wreath of scarlet sage and China asters for her
brow, and bury her under the scattered rose leaves, while we beat amid the woods
and by the water courses this solemn dirge, The summer is ended! There are three
or four classes of persons of whom the words of my text are descriptive.
1. They are appropriate to the aged. They stop at the top of the stairs, all out of
breath, and say, I cant walk upstairs as well as I used to. They hold the
book off on the other side of the light when they read. Their eye is not so
quick to catch a sight, nor their ear a sound. The bloom and verdure of their
life have drooped--June has melted into July. July has fallen back into
August. August has cooled into September. The summer is ended. I
congratulate those who have come to the Indian summer of their life. On
sunny afternoons grandfather goes out in the churchyard, and sees on the
tombstones the names--the very names--that sixty years ago he wrote on his
slate at school. He looks down where his children sleep their last sleep, and
before the tears have fallen, says, So much more in heaven! Patiently he
awaits his appointed time, until his life goes out gently as a tide, and the bell
tolls him to his last home under the shadow of the church that he loved so
long and loved so well. Blessed old age, if it be found in the way of
righteousness!
2. My text is appropriate for all those whose fortunes have perished. In 1857 it
was estimated that, for many years previous to that time, annually there had
been 30,000 failures in the United States. Many of those persons never
 recovered from the misfortune. The leaves of worldly prosperity all scattered.
The day book, and the ledger, and the money safe, and the package of broken
securities, cried out, The summer is ended. But let me give a word of
comfort in passing. The sheriff may sell you out of many things, but there are
some things of which he cannot sell you out. He cannot sell out your health.
He cannot sell out your family. He cannot sell out your Bible. He cannot sell
out your God. He cannot sell out your heaven! You have got more than you
have lost. Instead of complaining how hard you have it, go home tonight,
take up your Bible full of promises, get down on your knees before God, and
thank Him for what you have, instead of spending so much time in
complaining about what you have not.
3. The words of the text are appropriate to all those who have passed through
luxuriant seasons of grace without improvement. You remember the time--
many of you do, at any rate--when the engine houses were turned into prayer
meetings; when in one day, to one of our ports, there came five vessels with
sea captains, who had been brought to God in the last voyage. Religion broke
out of church into places of business and amusement. Christian songs floated
into the temple of mammon, while the devotees were counting their golden
beads. A company of merchants in Chambers Street, New York, at their own
expense, hired Burtons old theatre, and every day, at twelve oclock, the
place was filled with men crying after God. Some of you went through all
that, and are not saved. It required more resolution and determination for
you not to be saved than, under God, would have made you a Christian. But
all that process has hardened your soul. Through all these seasons of revival
you have come, and you are tonight living without God, on the way to a death
without hope. The summer is ended!
4. The text is appropriate to all those who expire after a wasted life. There are
two things that I do not want to bother me in my last hour. The one is, my
worldly affairs. I want all those affairs so plain and disentangled that the
most ignorant administrator could see what was right at a glance, and there
should be no standing around about the office of the surrogate, devouring
widows houses. The other thing I do not want to be bothered about in my
last hour is the safety of my soul God forbid that I should crowd into that
last, feeble, languishing, delirious hour questions momentous enough to
swamp an archangel! If you have ever slept in a house on the prairie, where
in the morning, without rising from your pillow, you could look off on the
prairie, you could see the prairie miles away, clear to the horizon: it is a very
bewildering scene. But how much more intense the prospect when from the
last pillow a soul looks back on life, and sees one vast reach of mercies,
mercies, mercies unimproved, and then gets upon one elbow, and puts the
head on the hand to see beyond all that, but seeing nothing beyond but
mercies, mercies, mercies unimproved. The bells of sorrow will toll through
all the past, and the years of early life and mid life wail with a great
lamentation. A dying woman, after a life of frivolity, says to me, Mr.
Talmage, do you think that I can be pardoned? I say, Oh, yes. Then,
gathering herself up in the concentrated dismay of a departing spirit, she
looks at me, and says, Sir, I know I shall not! Then she looks up as though
she hears the click of the hoofs of the pale horse, and her long locks toss on
the pillow as she whispers, The summer is ended.
 5. The text is appropriate to all those who wake up in a discomfited eternity. I
know there are those who say, It dont make any difference how we live or
what we believe. We will come out at the golden gate. No! No! The good
must go up, and the bad must go down. I want no Bible to tell me that truth.
There is something within my heart that says it is not possible that a man
whose life has been all rotten can, in the future world without repentance, be
associated with men who have been consecrated to Christ. What does the
Bible say? It says that as we sow we shall reap. It says, These shall go away
into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal. Does that
look as though they were coming out at the same place? And there was a
great gulf fixed. And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and
ever. Now, suppose a man goes out from Brooklyn--a city in which there are
as many religious advantages as in any city under the sun--and suppose he
wakes up in a discomfited eternity--how will he feel? Having become a serf of
darkness, how will he feel when he thinks that he might have been a prince of
light! There are no words of lamentation sufficient to express that sorrow.
You can take the whole group of sad words--pain, pang, convulsion,
excruciation, torment, agony, woe--and they come short of the reality. (T. De
Witt Talmage.)

Lost opportunities deplored

I. The import of the lamentation.

1. It implies a full conviction that those who use it are not in a state of salvation.
Once the aged sinner imagined his state was safe, that he was rich and
increased with goods, and stood in need of nothing; yet now he sees that he
is poor and miserable, wretched, blind, and naked. How immaterial does it
seem to him in such a state of mind what he is in a worldly point of view. The
sad reflection, I am not saved, makes him cry out, in the bitterness of his
spirit, Yet all this availeth me nothing.
2. It implies the recollection of the various opportunities of salvation with which
they have been favoured, and their regret for the loss of these. Loathsome
insects rioting on the blossoms of the tree are an emblem of the blasting
influences of the vices of youth.
3. It implies a conviction of their folly and guilt in suffering those opportunities
to pass away unimproved. The sinner uttering the lamentation in the text is
like one who has gone to a rock far within the course of the sea. In vain is he
reminded before he goes, that the way to it is open only while the tide has
retired, and that when it swells, the rock and the surrounding sand will be
covered. He despises these cautions, and amuses himself on the rock till the
gathering of the waters forces him to remain and to perish; he then
condemns the objects which absorbed his attention, the security which made
him deaf to warning, and the presumption which rendered him insensible to
the voice of passing time, and to the advance of the devouring sea.
4. There is in this lamentation a dreadful apprehension of utter perdition. I am
not saved, and never may be, is the fear which the expression suggests.

II. The circumstances which, in the case of the aged sinner, give to this
lamentation peculiar bitterness.
1. The length of time during which he has enjoyed these opportunities. Had
there been but one offer of mercy, the disregard of it would have been felt as
highly criminal; but most aggravated is the guilt and inexcusable the folly of
rejecting offers of mercy without number.
2. The idea that others haw been saved under these opportunities aggravates
this regret. He calls to remembrance the young who remembered their
Creator in the days of their youth, and laments that the kindness of his youth
was devoted to objects which he ought to have abhorred and shunned; and
the sick, who rose from beds of distress, to show, by their wisdom and
sobriety, that the discipline of affliction had reclaimed them completely from
folly, while he returned like the dog to his vomit, etc.
3. Despair of their renewal. With regard to the season of youth, it is as
impossible to restore its simplicity, its docility, its pliableness, its ardent
feeling, its detachment from engrossing cares, as it is to bring back its fresh
bloom to the wrinkled face of age, and its brisk movements to its palsied
limbs. And with regard to other seasons of mercy, we have reason to think
that God will not still vouchsafe them to those who, after His long patience
with them, remain foolish and disobedient.
Conclusion--
1. Let the young be admonished by this text.
2. Let me address some exhortations to those who are in the situation which I
have been describing. Your state is indeed awful, but do not conceive it to be
desperate.
3. Let true Christians be thankful to Him who hath made them to differ. Pity the
wretched sinner described in the text, and pray that he may obtain mercy.
4. Let me call on the aged, who feel no regret at the loss of religious
opportunities, to consider their ways and to be wise. Amidst the words of
eternal life you are dying in your sins, and amidst the dispensation of the
Spirit you are ending in the flesh. (H. Belfrage, D. D.)

Promising seasons of salvation lost

I. Some favourable seasons for the salvation of the soul, which if lost, must be the
subject of bitter regret.
1. The season of youth. Young prayers, young vows, and young services, are most
acceptable in the sight of heaven--most useful to the subject of them; and
most beneficial in the way of example to others.
2. The season of health. When it is not till sickness overtakes us that an
attention is paid to religion, it will be regarded as forced on us and it will be
regarded with pity rather than admiration. The consequences of deferring
religion to a death bed, are equally unhappy as respects the individual
himself.
3. The period of the present life. Imagination itself cannot picture the horror felt
by the impenitent disembodied spirit when the dread realities of an eternal
world burst upon the view. What earthly condition so dreadful, that it would
not give ten thousand worlds to regain, might there be but another
 opportunity of listening to the Divinely commissioned messengers of mercy,
and of escaping from a miserable hereafter?

II. The causes why these hopeful seasons are lost.

1. Inconsideration and unbelief. It is the insensibility of the victim filleted for the
sacrifice, of the mariner sleeping on the mast, or of the patient in the
delirium of fever.
2. The spirit of procrastination. To defer our religious concerns while the truth
of the Divine threatening is admitted, argues an aversion to that temper and
conduct which form a meetness for heaven which is strong and permanent.
(R. Brodie, M. A.)

Not saved

I. NOT SAVED, AND SALVATION PROVIDED SO DEARLY! Do you ask How dearly?
Inquire of the Son of God, who, though He was the heir of all things, the outshining
of the Fathers glory, the equal of God, and rich--transcendently rich--in all the
honours, treasures, splendours, and resources of eternity, for your sakes became
poor, ignoble, despised, and distressed, that you, through His poverty, might be
rich. Follow Him in all His travels of mercy, in all His errands of good, in all His
miracles of love, in all His sayings of truth. Track Him on His walks from Jordan to
Golgotha,--in His sorrows, His sighs, His sufferings, His tears, His anguish, His
reproach, His persecutions, His agonies, His terrible, terrible death, and you may
form some faint idea of the cost price of that salvation for you provided, but by you
despised.

II. NOT SAVED, AND SALVATION OFFERED SO FREELY! I could understand the
reason of your delay if the conditions of salvation were difficult, complex, and
severely exacting; if so much intelligence, or so much suffering, or so much money
were demanded. Such conditions might suit the philosophic, the superstitious, or
the millionaire, but not the poor, the simple-minded, and the illiterate. Whereas the
terms laid down are such as admirably suit all classes, all ranks, all parties, ranging
from the rustic with narrow brains and shallow mind bordering on the fool, to the
giant in letters and lore, and from the beggar in his rags to the king in his robes of
state and splendour. Your delay, therefore, cannot be excused on the ground of
impracticable conditions; yet, perhaps, some of you may feel your paltry pride
mortified by the simplicity of the means and the cheapness of the blessing; so that
the conditions are a hindrance and a stone of stumbling to you. Like Naaman, the
Syrian nobleman and leper, you feel proudly indignant because the terms and
method of the cure are so simple. But I reply to you tonight, in words analogous to
those of Naamans servants, If you had been bidden to do some great thing, would
you not have done it? How much rather, then, when you are commanded to wash
and be clean, believe and be saved? Would you despise the dew which gems the
hedgerows, refreshes the flowers, and mirrors the sun, because it comes silent and
free? Would you disdain the cooling, teeming, beautiful rain which fills the pools
and wells, quickens the drooping, freshens the withering, stirs the decaying life in
vegetation, and falls indiscriminately on mountain and dell, on desert waste and
meadow bloom, on garden and graveyard, on cottage growths and palace rarities,
because it is free? Would you refuse and despise the sunlight because it is free for all
and to all? Emphatically, No. Then will you dare reject, madly refuse and despise
salvation, Gods greatest gift to man, because it is free to all without distinction, and
for all without money and without price?

III. NOT SAVED, AND SALVATION SO NECESSARY AND IMPORTANT! Perishing amid
the foaming frenzied breakers of sin, you refuse to get into the lifeboat of mercy,
which hastens to your rescue. Blinded by the god of this world, you stumble in the
dangerous dark, and refuse the eyesalve and anointing of grace that you might see.
Dying from the gnawings of soul-hunger, you refuse the Bread of Life. Trembling
in nakedness of spirit, and cramped by the awful chills of moral winter, you refuse
the garment of praise, and the mantle of righteousness, and the fire baptism of the
Holy Ghost. Full of wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores, afflicted, stricken
with the leprosy of evil, of necessity perishing, and it may be speedily and it must be
forever; yet, you refuse the Balm of Gilead and the Physician there; you wont have
the healing touch, the restoring word, the saving remedy!

IV. NOT SAVED, AND TIME PASSING SO SWIFTLY! The orbs are slow in their
motions, the cataract is tardy in its rush, compared with the swift on-rushing of
time. What you do, then, you must do quickly. Your opportunities are fast hurrying
by, your heartbeats are growing less, your circle is hourly contracting; the road
behind is lengthening, but the path before is shortening; grim death is stealing
marches on you, and eternity is on tramp to meet you! Soon! soon! will its heavy
footfalls send a shudder through the chambers of your being, if not saved quickly.
Time! it is either fitting you for a throne or for a dungeon; either preparing you as
jewels for the diadem of Immanuel, or preparing you for perdition, according to
your use or abuse of it. Time! it is increasing the volume and value of your being, or
shrivelling you into a despicable dwarfism of soul; it is building for you a fortune, a
mansion, a kingdom forever and ever, or hurling you in swiftest speed to beggary,
bankruptcy, and servitude to all eternity!

V. NOT SAVED, AND LIFE PENDENT ON SO GREAT UNCERTAINTY! Nothing, perhaps,

is so precarious as human life, and yet nothing do men trifle more with. We are
ignorant of the issues of the next hour; still we plan, and plod, and purpose for
future days; or like the wealthy fool of sacred story, say, Soul, thou hast much goods
laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry; not thinking that
the years are Gods property, and that at any moment the awful decree may ring
like a death knell in our ears, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of
thee! If you value your life, if you respect Christ, if you love heaven, if you dread
hell, if you desire an immortality of brightness, and beauty, and bliss, then trifle not
with salvation, live not without forgiveness, wait not for a more convenient season,
lest it never come. Procrastination is a wholesale destructionist. It has swung into
the dark and woeful abysses multitudes of souls. Be careful! lest it allure you too far,
and then recompense you by adjusting the fatal rope, and giving the fatal swing; by
branding too late on your coffin lid, and not saved on your soul. (J. O. Keen, D.
D.)

The unavailing lamentation

 I. God has given you the gracious seasons of summer and harvest.
1. The summer of--
(1) Life.
(2) Reason.
(3) Opportunities.
2. The harvest of--
(1) Knowledge.
(2) Privileges.
(3) Blessings.

II. These may pass away unimproved. Many--

1. Do not think.
2. Will not forsake their sins.
3. Will not believe.
4. Will procrastinate.

III. The regrets of such will be awful and unavailing.

1. Sometimes their regrets are expressed in this world.
2. They will surely be uttered in eternity.
(1) Regrets of intense agony, of recollection, of self-condemnation.
(2) Regrets will be unavailing.
(3) Regrets of black despair.
Conclusion--
1. None would choose this portion.
2. Who would risk it?
3. Who will flee from it? (J. Burns, D. D.)

Lifes solemn opportunity

I. What considerations involved.

1. The object. Harvest.
2. The opportunity. Summer.
3. The limitation. Past. Ended.
4. The neglect irreparable. We are not saved.

II. To what circumstances applicable.

1. Neglect of decision for God.
2. Neglect of spiritual culture.
3. Neglect of Christian service.

III. LESSONS. Importance of--

1. Present opportunity.
 2. Present dedication. (J. Farren.)

Cautions and consolations

I. LANGUAGE OF FINAL AND ABSOLUTE DESPAIR. That, having neglected means,

wasted opportunity, resisted Spirit, now no longer hope of mercy: nothing to expect
but judgment and misery.

II. LANGUAGE OF DEEP AND HUMBLING CONVICTION. That, having abused their only
opportunity for seeking salvation, for fulfilling the solemn object of life, it is gone
forever. Awakened at last to interests of souls, but too late.

III. LANGUAGE OF DISTRESSING AND GLOOMY DESPONDENCY. Such despondency as

the afflicted and tempted servants of Christ sometimes experience: their minds
clouded, peace gone, hope perished, they take up cry of text. (E. Cooper, M. A.)

Too late
William III made proclamation, when there was a revolution in the north of
Scotland, that all who came and took the oath of allegiance by the 31st of December
should be pardoned. Mac Ian, a chieftain of a prominent clan, resolved to return
with the rest of the rebels, but had some pride in being the very last one that should
take the oath. He consequently postponed starting for this purpose until two days
before the expiration of the term. A snowstorm impeded his way, and before he got
up to take the oath and receive a pardon from the throne the time was up and past.
While the others were set free Mac Ian was miserably put to death. In like manner,
some of you are in prospect of losing forever the amnesty of the Gospel. He started
too late and arrived too late. Many of you are going to be forever too late. Remember
the mistake of Mac Inn, and decide for God and heaven today.
The twelfth hour
Mr. Moody used to tell of a man who raised his hand in one of the meetings. The
evangelist went to him and said, I am glad you have decided to be a Christian.
No, said the man, I have not decided, but will later on. His address was taken,
and Mr. Moody visited the man when ill, and said, Now decide. He replied, No. If
I decide now, people will say I was frightened into being a Christian. The man
recovered and went into the country and again had a severe relapse, Moody again
visited him, and urged him to decide. The sick man said, It is too late now. But,
said Mr. Moody, there is mercy at the eleventh hour. He replied, It is too late for
me; this is my twelfth hour. A few hours afterwards he died. Mr Moody said, We
wrapped him in a Christless shroud, we put him in a Christless coffin, buried him in
a Christless grave, and he went to spend a Christless eternity, outside the kingdom
of God. To profess anxiety for your souls welfare, and stop short of real conversion
to God, will end in going right back into sin, and final loss.
An aged mans remorse
An old man took a little child into his arms and put his fingers into the abundant
curls of his sunny hair, and he said, Oh, dear child, while your mother sings to you,
and tells you about Jesus, think of Him and trust Him. Grandpa, said the little
boy, dont you trust Him? No, dear, he said, I might have done so years ago, but
my heart has got so hard now, nothing ever touches me now. And the old man
dropped a tear as he said it. I wish, said he, that I had a curly head like yours, and
was beginning life like you.

JER 8:22
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of My
people recovered?
Physic from heaven

I. The BALSAM TREE is a little shrub, never growing past the height of two cubits,
and spreading like a vine. The tree is of an ash colour, the boughs small and tender,
the leaves are like to rue. Pliny saith the tree is all medicinable: the chief virtue is in
the juice, the second in the seed, the third in the rind, the last and weakest in the
stock. It comforts both by tasting and smelling. This Holy Word is here called balm:
and, if we may compare spiritual with natural things, they agree in many
resemblances. We may call Gods Word that balm tree whereon the fruit of life
grows; a tree that heals, a tree that helps; a tree of both medicament and nutriment;
like the tree of life (Rev 22:2). Neither is the fruit only nourishing, but even the
leaves of the tree were for healing of the nations. Now though the balm here,
whereunto the Word is compared, is more generally taken for the juice, now fitted
and ready for application; yet, I see not why it may not so be likened, both for
general and particular properties. The tree itself is the Word. We find the eternal
Word so compared (Joh 15:1). He is a tree, but the root of this tree is in heaven at
was once made flesh, and dwelt among us, etc. (Joh 1:14). Now He is in heaven.
Only this Word still speaks unto us by His Word: the Word incarnate by the Word
written; made sounding in the mouth of His ministers. This Word of His is
compared and expressed by many metaphors, to leaven, for seasoning; to honey, for
sweetening; to the hammer, for breaking the stony heart (Jer 23:29). It is here a
tree, a balm tree, a salving, a saving tree. Albumasar saith that the more medicinable
a plant is, the less it nourisheth. But this tree makes a sick soul sound, and a whole
one sounder. It is not only physic when men be sick, but meat when they be whole.
It carries a seed with it, an immortal and incorruptible seed (1Pe 1:13), which
concurs to the begetting of a new man, the old dying away: for it hath power of both,
to mortify the flesh, to revive the spirit (Mat 13:3). Happy is the good ground of the
heart that receives it! The juice is no less powerful to mollify the stony heart, and
make it tender and soft, as a heart of flesh. The seed convinceth the
understanding; the juice mollifieth the affections. All is excellent; but still, the root
that yields this seed, this juice, is the power of God. A tree hath manifest to the eye,
leaves, and flowers, and fruits; but the root, most precious, lies hidden. In all things
we see the accidents, not the form, not the substance. There are but few that rightly
taste the seed and the juice; but who hath comprehended the root of this balm?
1. It spreads. No sharp frosts, nor nipping blasts, nor chilling airs, nor drizzling
sleet can mar the beauty or enervate the virtue of this spiritual tree. The
more it is stopped, the further it groweth. The Jews would have cut down this
tree at the root; the Gentiles would have lopped off the branches. They struck
 at Christ, these at His ministers; both struck short. If they killed the
messenger, they could not reach the message. The blood of the martyrs, spilt
at the root of this tree, did make it spread more largely.
2. As it gives boughs spaciously, so fruit pregnantly, plentifully. The graces of
God hang upon this tree in clusters (Song 1:14). No hungry soul shall go away
from this tree unsatisfied. It is an effectual Word, never failing of the
intended success What Gods Word affirms His truth performs, whether it be
judgment or mercy.
3. As this balm spreads patently for shadow, potently for fruit, so all this ariseth
from a little seed. Gods smallest springs prove at length main oceans. His
least beginnings grow into great works, great wonders. Now, there is no
action without motion, no motion without will, no will without knowledge,
no knowledge without hearing (Rom 10:14).
God must then, by this Word, call us to Himself. Let us come when and whiles He
calls us, leaving our former evil loves and evil lives.
1. The leaves of the balsam are white; the Word of God is pure and spotless.
Peter saith there is sincerity in it (1Pe 2:2). It is white, immaculate, and so
unblemishable that the very mouth of the devil could not sully it.
2. The balsam, say the physicians, is sharp and biting in the taste, but
wholesome in digestion. The Holy Word is no otherwise to the unregenerate
palate, but to the sanctified soul it is sweeter than the honeycomb. The Word
may relish bitter to many, but is wholesome. There cannot be sharper pills
given to the usurer than to cast up his unjust gains.
3. They write of the balsamum, that the manner of getting out the juice is by
wounding the tree.
1. The balsam tree weeps out a kind of gum, like tears; the Word of God doth
compassionately bemoan our sins. Christ wept not only tears for Jerusalem,
but blood for the world.
2. The way to get out the juice of balm from Gods Word is by cutting it, skilful
division of it, rightly dividing the Word of truth (2Ti 2:15). It is true that
Gods Word is the bread of life; but whiles it is in the whole loaf, many
cannot help themselves: it is needful for children to have it cut to them in
pieces. Though the spice unbroken be sweet and excellent, yet doth it then
treble the savour in delicacy when it is pounded in a mortar. There must be
wisdom both in the dispensers and hearers of Gods mysteries; in the former
to distribute, in the other to apportion their due and fit share of this balm.
3. The balsam tree being wounded too deep, dies; the Word of God cannot be
marred, it may be martyred, and forced to suffer injurious interpretations.
4. When the balsam is cut, they use to set vials in the dens, to receive the juice or
sap; when the Word is divided by preaching, the people should bring vials
with them, to gather this saving balm. How many sermons are lost whiles
you bring not with you the vessels of attention! Philosophy saith that there is
no vacuity, no vessel is empty; if of water or other such liquid and material
substances, yet not of air. So perhaps you bring hither vials to receive this
balm of grace, and carry them away full, but only full of wind; a vast,
incircumscribed, and swimming knowledge, a notion, a mere implicit and
confused tendency of many things, which lie like corn, loose on the floor of
 their brains. How rare is it to see a vial carried from the Church full of balm,
a conscience of grace!
5. The balsam tree was granted sometimes to one only people--Judea, as Pliny
(Lib. 12. cap. 17) testifies. It was thence derived to other nations. Who that is
a Christian doth not confess the appropriation of this spiritual balm once to
that only nation? (Psa 147:19-20.) Now, as their earthly balm was by their
civil merchants transported to other nations; so when this heavenly balm
was given to any Gentile, a merchant of their own, a prophet of Israel,
carried it. Nineveh could not have it without a Jonah; nor Babylon without
some Daniels; and though Paul and the apostles had a commission from
Christ to preach the Gospel to all nations, yet observe how they take their
leave of the Jews (Act 13:46).
6. Pliny affirms, that even when the balsam tree grew only in Jewry, yet it was
not growing commonly in the land, as other trees, either for timber, fruit, or
medicine; but only in the kings garden. There is but one truth, one Lord,
one faith, one baptism, etc. (Eph 4:5). Even they that have held the greatest
falsehoods, hold that there is but one truth. Nay, most will confess that this
balsam tree is only in Gods garden; but they presume to temper the balm at
their own pleasure, and will not minister it to the world except their own
fancy hath compounded it, confounded it with their impure mixtures.
7. They write of the balsam tree, that though it spread spaciously as a vine, yet
the boughs bear up themselves; and as you heard before that they must not
be pruned, so now here, that they need not be supported: Gods Word needs
no undersetting. It is firmly rooted in heaven, and all the cold storms of
human reluctancy and opposition cannot shake it. Nay, the more it is shaken,
the faster it grows.
8. Physicians write of balsamum, that it is easy and excellent to be prepared.
This spiritual balm is prepared to our hands: it is but the administration that
is required of us, and the application of you.
9. Balm is good against all diseases. Catholicon is a drug, a drudge to it. It
purifieth our hearts from all defilings and obstructions in them. A better
cornucopia than ever nature, had she been true to their desires and wants,
could have produced: the bread of heaven, by which a man lives forever. A
very supernatural stone, more precious than the Indies, if they were
consolidate into one quarry; that turns all into purer gold than ever the land
of Havilah boasted. A stronger armour than was Vulcans, to shield us from a
more strange and savage enemy than ever Anak begot, the devil (Eph 6:11). It
is a pantry of wholesome food, against fenowed traditions; a physicians shop
of antidotes, against the poisons of heresies and the plague of iniquities; a
pandect of profitable laws, against rebellious spirits; a treasure of costly
jewels, against beggarly rudiments. You have here the similitudes.
Hear one or two discrepancies of these natural and supernatural balms.
1. This earthly balm cannot preserve the body of itself, but by the accession of
the spiritual balm. Nature itself declines her ordinary working, when Gods
revocation hath chidden it. The Word without balm can cure; not the best
balm without the Word.
2. So this natural balm, when the blessing of the Word is even added to it, can at
utmost but keep the body living till the lifes taper be burnt out; or after
 death, give a short and insensible preservation to it in the sareophagal grave.
But this balm gives life after death, life against death, life without death.

II. THE PHYSICIANS. Is there no balm at Gilead? is there no physician there? The
prophets are allegorically called physicians, as the Word is balm. So are the
ministers of the Gospel in due measure, in their place. To speak properly and fully,
Christ is our only physician, and we are but His ministers, bound to apply His saving
physic to the sickly souls of His people.
It is He only that cures the carcass, the conscience.
1. No physician can heal the body without Him.
2. No minister can heal the conscience where Christ hath not given a blessing to
it.
1. We must administer the means of your redress which our God hath taught us,
doing it with love, with alacrity.
2. The physician that lives among many patients, if he would have them tenderly
and carefully preserve their healths, must himself keep a good diet among
them. It is a strong argument to persuade the goodness of that he
administers.
This for ourselves. For you, I will contract all into these three uses, which
necessarily arise from the present or precedent consideration--
1. Despise not your physicians.
2. If your physician be worthy blame, yet sport not, with cursed Ham, at your
fathers nakedness.
3. Lastly, let this teach you to get yourselves familiar acquaintance with the
Scriptures, that if you be put to it, in the absence of your physician, you may
yet help yourselves. (T. Adams.)

The balm of Gilead

Through fifty generations Gilead was famed for its plantations of aromatic and
medicinal herbs. The balsam was a lowly tree--little better than a shrub, with scanty
foliage and inconspicuous flower. Looking at it, you would scarcely have thought it
profitable for any purpose,--for shade, for beauty, or for fruit. But on wounding its
stem there flowed a pellucid gum, which was carefully collected, and was considered
of all the substances known to pharmacy the most sovereign and wonderful. So early
as the days of Joseph, this balm was an object of commerce, and was carried down
from Gilead to Egypt. In the days of Solomon, the gardens where it grew were
annexed to the crown, and become an item in the royal revenue. So precious were
they deemed, that in the days of the Roman invasion a battle was fought for their
possession; and among the other symbols of victory which Vespasian carried to
Rome,--a balsam tree was borne through the streets in triumphal procession. But
being an exotic, and being from that period entirely neglected, it has perished from
the face of Palestine, and there is no balm in Gilead now. (J. Hamilton.)

Spiritual disease and its remedy

I. THE MELANCHOLY FACT THAT SIN PREVAILS. Sin is here, as in other places of
Scripture, represented under the figurative character of a disease. And the
representation is appropriate; for sin affects the soul much in the same way as
disease affects the body. It is a derangement of the spiritual frame, by which its
functions are impeded, its strength enfeebled, its comfort impaired, its proper ends
counteracted, and its very existence, as a creature destined to immortal felicity,
endangered or destroyed.
1. It is a hereditary disease--not induced by outward or accidental
circumstances, but entailed upon us as an attribute of our fallen nature, and
cleaving to us with as much tenacity as if it were a part of our original being.
2. It is a pervading disease--not limited to any one portion of our constitution,
but dwelling in every department of it--influencing its intellectual powers, its
moral dispositions, its sensitive organs: the whole head is sick, and the
whole heart faint.
3. It is a vital and inveterate disease--not touching merely the extreme or
superficial parts of our system, and resisted in its progress by any inherent
energies--but corrupting and preying upon our inmost soul, and so congenial
to all that is within, and to all that is around us, as to grow with our growth,
and strengthen with our strength.
4. It is a deceitful disease--not always accompanied with those violent and
decided symptoms which forbid us to mistake the nature or disregard the
perils of our condition--but often assuming that gentle form which allays our
apprehensions, and flatters us with the hopes of recovery.
5. It is often withal a pailful and harassing disease--filling us with dissatisfaction
and fear and trembling--rendering our days gloomy and our nights restless--
or piercing us with agonies to which we can find neither utterance nor relief.
6. It is a mortal disease--not inflicting upon us a momentary pang, and then
giving place to renovated vigour--but mocking at all human attempts to
throw it off--sooner or later subduing us by its resistless, power--and
consigning us to the pains and the terrors of the second death.

II. IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD, no remedy by which the disease of sin may be
cured? Is there no physician there, no physician qualified to apply the remedy and
able to make it effectual? Christ is set forth as the great Physician of souls. He has
wisdom to devise whatever method may be necessary for rescuing the victims whom
He has been sent to deliver. He has tenderness and compassion to induce Him to do,
and bestow, and suffer all, whatever it may be, which their circumstances require.
He has power to conquer every obstacle that would frustrate His exertions in their
behalf, and to render effectual every means that may be employed for their recovery.
And He has all these attributes in an indefinite degree; so that He is competent to
heal those in whose instance the disease has assumed its most inveterate form, and
even to call them back from the very gates of the grave. In the annals of Christianity
we read of many who, though sin was preying on their very vitals as a deep seated
and mortal distemper, and though they were ready to perish, because they had no
ability to stay or to withstand its progress, yet escaped from its destroying power--
felt that it had departed from them, manifested all the symptoms of renovated
ragout, and rejoiced in the active exertion of those faculties which had been
paralysed, and in the return of those comforts and those hopes which seemed to
have fled from them forever. And they have testified that this happy change was
wrought in their condition--because there is balm in Gilead, and because there is a
Physician there.

III. Some of the causes of such a melancholy phenomenon in the history of sinful
men.
1. Many sinners are insensible to their need of a spiritual physician. They shut
their eyes against all the light by which they might be made aware of the
perils and the horrors of their condition. They palliate or explain away all the
circumstances by which we would prove that guilt does attach to them.
2. There are many who, though aware in some measure of the disease of sin, of
its inveteracy and of its danger, and not unconvinced of the necessity of
applying to Him who alone can save them from its power and consequences,
are yet indisposed from doing so, by carelessness, or procrastination, or
dislike to the remedies which they know will be prescribed.
3. Sinners are not saved, or have not their spiritual health recovered, because
they will not take the remedy simply and submissively as it is administered
by Christ. They put their own ignorance on a level with His wisdom--their
own weakness with His power--their own depravity with His merit. And thus
they defeat the purpose of all that He offers to do for them. They counteract
His saving work. They render fruitless the remedies that He prescribes. (A.
Thomson, D. D.)

Treacle, or like cures like

The word treacle is derived from the Greek word therion, which meant primarily a
wild beast of any kind, but was afterwards more especially applied to animals which
had a venomous bite. By many Greek writers the term was used to denote a serpent
or viper specifically. But what connection, it may well be asked, can there be
between a viper and treacle? How came such a sweet substance to have such a
venomous origin? It was a popular belief at one time, that the bite of the viper could
only be cured by the application to the wound of a piece of the vipers flesh, or a
decoction called vipers wine, or Venice treacle made by boiling the flesh in some
fluid or other. Galen, the celebrated Greek physician of Pergamos, who lived in the
second century, describes the custom as very prevalent in his time. At Aquileia,
under the patronage of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he prepared a system of
pharmacy, which he published under the name of Theriaca, in allusion to this
superstition. The name given to the extraordinary electuary of vipers flesh was
theriake, from therion, a viper. By the usual process of alteration which takes place
in the course of a few generations in words that are commonly used, theriake
became theriac. Then it was transformed into the diminutive theriacle, afterwards
triacle, in which form it was used by Chaucer; and, finally, it assumed its present
mode of spelling as early as the time of Milton and Waller. It changed its meaning
and application with its various changes of form, signifying first the confection of
the vipers flesh applied to the wound inflicted by the vipers sting; then any
antidote, whatever might be its nature, or whatever might be the origin of the evil it
was intended to cure. The fundamental principle that gave origin to treacle was one
that was extensively adopted and acted upon in ancient times. Similia similibus
curantur--Like cures like--was the motto of nearly all the medical practitioners
from Galen downwards. There are traces in the Bible of the principle of treacle as
applied in the cure of disease, which are exceedingly interesting and instructive.
Some of the most remarkable of our Lords miracles were based upon it. We are told
by St. Mark of the healing of a man deaf and dumb in Galilee, by our Saviour putting
His fingers to his ears and touching his tongue with His own spittle. Saliva jejuna
was supposed by the ancients to possess general curative properties, and to be
especially efficacious in ophthalmia and other inflammatory diseases of the eyes. We
are not, however, to suppose for a moment that our Lord was misled by this popular
notion and that He was here acting merely as an ordinary physician acquainted with
certain remedies in use among men. It was not for its medicinal virtue that He made
use of the spittle. The application of it was entirely a symbolical action, indicating
that as it was the mans tongue that was bound, so the moisture of the tongue was to
be the sign of its unloosing, and the means by which it would be enabled to move
freely in the mouth, and to articulate words. And the use of Christs own saliva in the
cure showed that the healing virtue resided in and came forth from Christs own
body alone, and was imparted through loss of His substance. All Christs miracles,
without exception, were in one sense illustrations of the principle. The effects of the
curse in the diseases and disabilities of mankind were removed by Christ bearing the
curse while performing the miracles. Himself took our infirmities and bare our
sicknesses. The evil that He cured He suffered in His own soul. The sorrow that He
alleviated cost Himself an equal degree of sorrow. Virtue went out of Him in
proportion to the amount of healing virtue imparted. Gain to others was loss to Him.
By fasting and prayer He cast out unclean spirits; by groaning in spirit and weeping
He raised the dead Lazarus to life. The curse that He removed He came under
Himself. In the economy of redemption we find many remarkable examples of the
principle of treacle. The rule that like cures like is engraved on the very forefront
of our salvation. It is shadowed forth in type and symbol; it is foretold in prophecy;
it is clearly seen in realised fact. The brazen serpent was lifted up by Moses in the
wilderness to heal those who were bitten by the fiery serpents, as a prophetic symbol
that the Son of Man would be lifted up on the Cross to heal those who had been
deceived into sin by the old serpent, the devil. And in this type there was a
significant fitness. It was not an actual dead serpent that was exhibited; for that
would have implied that Christ was really sinful. It was a brazen serpent, formed of
the brass of which the brazen altar and the brazen laver were made, in token that
though Christ was our substitute, He was yet holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate
from sinners. Throughout the whole of our Saviours propitiatory work, we can trace
this similarity between the evil and the cure; a similarity indicated very plainly and
emphatically in the first announcement of the scheme of redemption to our fallen
first parents. The serpents head could only be bruised through the heel of the
womans seed being wounded by the serpents fang. By faithlessness and pride, man
sinned and fell; by treachery, false witness, and a cross, man is redeemed. It was not
as God that Christ wrought out mans salvation, but as man. It was in the likeness of
sinful flesh that He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law
might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. So, also, in
order that we may realise personally and individually the benefits of Christs
redemption, we must be identified with Him by faith; there must be mutual
sympathy, partnership, and reciprocity of feeling--I in you, and ye in Me. We must
be partakers of His nature as He was partaker of ours. We must take up our cross
and follow Him. We must know the fellowship of His sufferings. If we be planted
together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His
resurrection; if we suffer with Him, we shall reign with Him. In medicine, also, the
same principle may be found. Homoeopathy was anticipated by the ancient use of
treacle. The essential character of Hahnemanns famous system is that such
remedies should be employed against any disease, as in a healthy person would
produce a similar, though not precisely the same disease. The method of
administering remedies in infinitesimal doses is not necessarily a part of the system,
and it was not originally practised, although in the end it was adopted as a vital
article of the creed. The fundamental principle of homoeopathy is that like cures
like; and, to find suitable medicines against any disease, experiments are made on
healthy persons, in order to determine the effect upon them. Thus whooping cough
and certain eruptions of the skin of a chronic nature are supposed to be cured by an
attack of measles; inflammation of the eyes, asthma, and dysentery, are
homoeopathically cured by smallpox; arnica heals bruises because it produces the
nervous symptoms which accompany bruises; camphor cures typhus fever because
in a poisonous dose it lowers the vitality of the system; wine is a good remedy for
inflammation because it inflames the constitution; quinine or Peruvian bark is the
best remedy against intermittent fever or ague because, when taken in considerable
quantity by a healthy person, it produces feverishness and furred tongue; and so on
over a long list of medicines. There is a profound philosophy in this principle of
treacle that applies to all the relations and interest of life. In the sweat of a mans
face does he take away the curse that causes his face to sweat. Not by ease and
idleness and self-indulgence does a man remove the remediable evils of the world;
but by the evils of toil and trouble and care. It is the tear of sympathy that dries the
tear of sorrow; the salt of the grief that springs from fellow feeling that heals the salt
spring of the grief that flows from human bereavement. We all know the relief to
imprisoned feeling with which the heart is bursting--when we can find one whose
susceptibilities can take it in as we outpour it all, Who can understand our emotions
and take interest in our disclosures. There is no earthly solace like that; and it is only
a higher degree of it that we experience when we feel that we have a brother born
for adversity, who is afflicted in all our afflictions. That Jesus wept,--that He still
sheds tears as salt and as round as ours--when He sees us sorrowing; this is the
blessed homeopathy of suffering--this is the balm, the treacle to every heart wound.
Then, too, why is repentance bitter? Is it not because sin is bitter? Conviction and
conversion, whether on the lower levels of ordinary moral conduct and worldly well-
being, or on the higher heights of spiritual life and Gospel experience, must always
be attended with acute sorrow; and the measure of the pain in the loss of the soul
must be the measure of the pain in its recovery and gain. Look again at love. What
does it require? Is it wealth, or rank, or fame, or any of the outward possessions and
glories of life? The Song of Songs says, and the experience of every true loving heart
echoes the sentiment, If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it
would utterly be contemned. Love can only be satisfied with love. (H. Macmillan,
D. D.)

Jesus Christ the Physician of His people

I. TO DESCRIBE YOUR SPIRITUAL DISEASE. Sin itself, and all its pernicious
consequences, comprehends the whole disease of human nature.
1. This disease has infected the whole race of mankind.
2. This disease has infected the whole person of every individual. The members
of the body are likewise infected with the disease of sin.
 3. What especially renders this disease an object of apprehension and sorrow is,
that it is mortal. It has not only entirely deprived mankind of strength but
has involved them in death itself.

II. To explain and illustrate the nature of the remedy.

1. Though this Physician healed the most inveterate diseases of the body with a
word, He could cure the distempers of the soul with no other medicine but
the balm of His own blood.
2. With this precious balm our Physician heals all manner of diseases.
3. The cures which the Physician performs by the balm of His blood are all
forever perfect.
4. This wonderful Physician heals His patients without money and without
price. When Zeuxis the Grecian painter presented his incomparable
paintings for nothing, his vanity prompted him to give this reason for his
own conduct, that they were above all price. So Jesus, our Almighty
Physician, who can never be suspected of having indulged a vain-glorious
pride, performed His mighty work of healing freely, and without reward,
because it was impossible to propose to Him any remuneration that would
either merit His favour, or claim His acceptance. The case is precisely the
same to this very day.

III. Why, then, are there so many diseased souls among us?
1. Because multitudes are ignorant and insensible of their real condition. The
patient who labours under the violence of a fever may, in a fit of delirium,
affirm that he is completely recovered from his indisposition; but this very
circumstance is one of the most unpromising symptoms of his disease.
2. Others refuse the Physicians grace, and reject His kind offers of assistance,
from an opinion that it is so near and easy to be obtained, that they may have
it at whatever time they choose to ask it. What greater dishonour can you
offer to the Physician? What greater abuse can you make of this precious
remedy?
3. A third class continue under the power of their spiritual disease on account of
their contempt for the person of the Physician, and their obstinate prejudices
against His prescriptions.
4. Another reason why so many remain under the power of their spiritual
distemper is, that they spend their all upon other physicians.
Application--
1. Are you among the whole who need not the Physician? Awfully dangerous
condition! Death approaches, and ye perceive it not! Beseech the Physician
Himself to quicken you, and make you thoroughly sensible of your real
condition by nature, that finding yourselves guilty, polluted, and condemned
sinners, and feeling the plagues of your own deceitful and wicked hearts, you
may humbly sue for mercy, and without delay repair to that all-sufficient
Physician, whose blood is a balm for every wound of the sin-sick soul, who
of God is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and
redemption.
2. Are ye among the sick who need the Physician? Be not discouraged. Of such
 sickness it may be truly said, that it is not unto death, but for the glory of
God. The more heinous your guilt, the more imminent your danger, so much
more reason have you to apply for relief. Oh, then, speedily have recourse to
this Physician! Thankfully accept of His remedy, and you shall find to your
present comfort and everlasting joy that He is both able and willing to save
to the very uttermost all who come unto God through Him.
3. Are ye now made whole? Go, and sin no more. Rejoice in the Physician and
in His salutary aid. (T. Thomson.)

Balm in Gilead

I. The all-sufficiency of the salvation provided for our perishing souls.

1. The glorious constitution of His person as God and Man in one Christ. He,
who has undertaken the office of our great Physician, is Lord of lords, and
King of kings. All the angels of God worship Him. He is Himself God over
all, blessed for evermore. Yet, wonderful to tell, He is also Man, bone of our
bone, and flesh of our flesh, and made in all things, sin only excepted, like
unto us; whom He is therefore not ashamed to call His brethren.
2. The wonderful way which He has taken to save us from sin. This way was by
giving up to death this Person so gloriously constituted, that by thus dying
He might atone for our sins.

II. The reason why so many persons, notwithstanding, continue in a perishing

condition.
1. Some are altogether insensible of their disease. Engrossed with worldly
business, sunk in sensual pleasures, they give no thought at all, or no serious
thought, to the state of their soul. As to their sin, it gives them no concern.
They regard it as light and trifling.
2. Some are too proud to accept or use the proffered medicine. They think that
they can heal and cure themselves. The proposition of being saved wholly
through the blood and sacrifice of another is too humbling for them. They
cannot submit to be thus indebted to grace.
3. Others there are who use not the remedy prescribed because of its holy
tendency. They know that, while it brings them to the Cross of Christ, it
requires them to take up their cross, to crucify the flesh, and to be crucified
to the world. But to these things, these acts of self-denial and godliness, they
have no mind; therefore they go not to the Physician to heal them. (E.
Cooper, M. A.)

The balm of Gilead

Appalling as our condition may now be, the spectacle of a world abandoned to the
reign of sin, without any corrective or mitigation, would be far more lawful. It is an
instance of the Divine mercy for which we can never be sufficiently grateful, that
where sin abounded grace doth much more abound. The interrogative form of this
statement seems to contemplate, not so much cases of want or woe indiscriminately,
as examples of peculiar and signal distress. Such examples every community might
supply. There are families here and there whose afflictions have given them a sad
preeminence among their neighbours. Stroke after stroke has fallen upon them,
until their cup of bitterness seems filled to the very brim. A blessed thing it is to be
allowed to go to a family in these circumstances, and say, We will not mock you
with the tender of such consolations as the world may have to bestow. But rest
assured there is balm in Gilead which can soothe your wounds, and a Physician
there who knows how to apply it. It was long ago said, the heart knoweth his own
bitterness. And the older we grow, the deeper must become the conviction of every
thoughtful person, that the hearts are not few in number which have some secret
sorrow.
1. Very many of these examples belong to the realm of the affections. Misplaced
love, morbid sensibility, disappointed hopes, abused or unrequited
confidence,--who can compute the measure of unhappiness in the world
which flows from these sources? The world may sneer at the
sentimentalism of such experiences. The essential spirit of the world is as
coarse and cynical where human affections are concerned, as it is arrogant
and impious in dealing with the prerogatives of the Deity. It may very well be
that, in many instances, there is an ill-balanced constitution, or that a
passion has been cherished in opposition to all reason, or that, in some way,
the calamity has been self-imposed. But the consciousness of this only
increases the bitterness of the cup; as it may also prompt to a more careful
seclusion of it from every eye. It were a mission of Godlike philanthropy
could one seek out all these afflicted ones, bowed down with their crushed
hearts, and languishing under the weight of griefs too sacred to be shared by
any earthly bosom, and say to them, Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no
Physician there? Do not repel the suggestion as either unsuited to your state
of mind or as unseasonable. What you need is a Friend whose sympathy can
avail to relieve you, and whose arm can keep you from sinking; a Friend
upon whom you can fix your lacerated affections with a confidence that He
will never betray you; and whom you can love with the conviction that your
attachment to Him can never become so absorbing as to be an occasion of
self-reproach or of sin. Jesus of Nazareth will not disappoint you. Such is the
essential perfection of His nature,--such its boundless amplitude,--that in
Him all your griefs may be assuaged and all your cravings after happiness
satisfied.
2. The moment we pass from the sphere of the affections into the realm of
spiritual things, new forms of suffering meet the eye, as diversified in
character as they are various in intensity. And here, no less than among the
tribes of sickness and sorrow and disappointment, we have but too much
occasion to ask, Is there no balm in Gilead, and no Physician there?
(1) You have seen individuals under the terrors of an awakened conscience.
God has come near to them and set their sins in order before their eyes.
How hopeless is it to attempt to minister relief to a soul in this condition
with any mere earthly specifics! Something widely different from this you
must have before that agitated breast can be tranquillised. And the
boundless mercy of God proffers you all that you need. Is there no balm
in Gilead; is there no Physician there? Yes, thou heavy-laden sinner.
Great as thy sins are, there is a greater Saviour. Ponderous as is thy
burden, what will it be to Him whose hand holds up the firmament and
guides the spheres in their orbits? Deep as may be the crimson dye of thy
 soul, the blood which cleansed Manasseh, and the dying thief, and Saul
of Tarsus, can cleanse thee.
(2) A second glance around the realm we are now traversing reveals another
class of sufferers. These are the doubting, the tempted, the desponding,--
the bruised reeds and the smoking flax,--who desire to follow Christ,
and would give worlds to know that He owned them as His disciples,
but who walk in darkness. Long accustomed to dwell on their conscious
sins and infirmities, their sense of personal unworthiness forbids them to
appropriate the promises, and even restrains them from looking, with
any confidence, to the Saviour. These doubts and misgivings have their
rooting in unbelief, and in unworthy conceptions of the character of the
Redeemer. Conscious ill-desert keeps you from going to Christ. But is
there anything either in His character or in the events of His life to justify
this feeling? How can you say, as you do practically say, There is no
balm in Gilead, and no Physician there?
(3) It is a dark portraiture which the Spirit has drawn of mans moral
character, when, with a single graphic touch of the pencil, he is depicted
as having a heart of stone. The sceptic resents the great indignity. A
heart of stone! Look at the virtues which cluster around humanity! See
the integrity and the truthfulness, the high-toned honour and the
magnanimity, which embellish society! Let these testify how gross a libel
that is upon the race, which ascribes to man a heart of stone! Granted
all. Make the flattering inventory still more flattering, and its every item
shall be acknowledged. The brighter the vestments in which you infold
your idol, the clearer do you bring out the demonstration that his heart is
a heart of stone. It is of his relations Godward that the Scriptures affirm
this quality of him. But we are not now dealing with sceptics. There are
those who, so far from cavilling at this representation, freely concede its
truth. They have reasoned with themselves on the surpassing folly and
impiety of living for this world only. They are convinced that Jesus Christ
ought to be in their eyes the chief among ten thousand; that they ought to
enthrone Him in their hearts with a grateful and confiding devotion; that
they ought to delight in prayer, and to find their happiness in doing
Gods will. They long for this. They would make any earthly sacrifice to
accomplish it. They have laboured and struggled to bring themselves into
this state of mind. But all in vain. The wayward affections will not relax
their hold of earth at the bidding of reason and conscience. Here, at least,
is a class of sufferers whom no earth-born philosophy can reach. But are
they therefore to be abandoned to despair? Far from it. Your case is not
hopeless. That heart of stone can be broken in pieces. That proud will can
be subdued. Those intractable affections can be detached from earth and
lifted to the skies. The love of Christ may yet burn with seraphic ardour
in that breast which has hitherto refused Him its homage. In place of the
ingratitude and distrust with which you have requited Him, your joyful
protestation may yet be heard, Lord, Thou knowest all things: Thou
knowest that I love Thee. Be it so, that your sins are of colossal
magnitude, and as the stars of heaven for multitude. That is a cogent
reason for repentance and contrition; it is no reason for declining to
accept the balm in Gilead and the Physician there. You have no real
 sorrow for your sins. Christ is exalted as a Prince and a Saviour, to give
repentance to Israel, and remission of sins. One glimpse of Him whom
you have pierced, such as the Spirit can afford you, will make streams of
penitential sorrow burst from that heart of stone as the waters gushed
from the smitten rock. You have no faith. But can you not cry, Lord, I
would believe. Help thou mine unbelief? You have no love. Who ever
loved Him, except as he was loved by Him? We love Him, because He
first loved us. Let Him but reveal His love to you, and that will kindle
yours as nothing else can. (H. A. Boardman, D. D.)

The balm of Gilead

or every wrong there is a remedy. God is Almighty. The prophets of old believed
this. The Church of Christ, in all ages, professes to believe this.

I. THERE IS BALM IN GILEAD. And to Gilead we must go to seek and to find it.
That is, the remedy for every wrong must be made the object of our effort to attain.
Gilead--as all students of the Bible know--is the mountainous region east of Jordan,
forming the frontier of the Holy Land. The name itself signifies a hard, rocky
region, and there the fragrant, resinous gum, possessed of such famous healing
properties, was to be found--found, however, not by the casual, unobservant
traveller who happened to pass by that way, but by the man who clambered up the
rocks, scaled the heights, diligently searched among the precious, storm-stunted
shrubs, yielding the healing gum. And so, surely, is it the same with that which the
balm of Gilead symbolises. The remedy for every, or for any, wrong is not to be
found in religious idleness. It must ever be a serious business--a search, requiring an
effort upwards, taxing all the strength that is vouchsafed. And does it very much
matter by what name they are called, who in sincerity attempt the search? or,
indeed, whether the balm they find is all identical in outward appearance? For
instance, the balm of Gilead, the remedy for wrong, comes to us in modern times,
certainly in one way, in the form of scientific truth. Scientific ignorance is the
fruitful cause of how vast a waste of human life!--of disease, and wretchedness, and
pain, and bereavement, and idiocy, and drink, and death! Gods laws and natures
laws are one and the same, and the high priests of science serve at the altar of the
Most High God. Or, again, the balm of Gilead, the remedy for wrong, comes to us in
the form of philosophic thought. Social science, based upon historical research and
experience, economic problems, thought out in the light of what has been, and what
men are, and need--labelled by whatever name--if they are not self-condemned by
insincerity, are all possessed with some healing virtue. So, too, with politics in the
true and highest sense; but, alas! not with party politicalism, unless indeed that
balm serves the purpose of an emetic. Again, the true balm of Gilead, the remedy
for every wrong, is to be found upon the mountain top of revelation. The balm of
revealed knowledge, the comfort of the Holy Ghost, the insight into the spiritual, is
within the reach of all.

II. BUT WHO IS THE PHYSICIAN QUALIFIED TO ADMINISTER THE BALM, to tell us how,
and where, and in what proportion it should be applied? For, indeed, without proper
knowledge, a remedy itself may become a poison; the cure may be more fatal than
the disease. In matters social and spiritual we have many teachers, and some who
seem to be more interested in their own nostrums than in the cures they effect. But
is there no true physician, is there none whose direction and advice we may follow
with absolute confidence? An answer to that question some will immediately give.
Our blessed Lord, they say, is the good Physician (a title which by implication
only our Lord applies to Himself), and to follow Jesus Christ is to be healed of all
that is wrong. Nothing could be truer, and yet is this all the truth? Does not our
Lord Himself point onwards, to the revelation of the Holy Ghost, as the perfect
Physician, as the Teacher, and Leader, and Guide, and Comforter of mens souls?
He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you. Every spiritual man is a
physician qualified, according to the measure of the light which he enjoys, to apply
the healing balm to the sorrows and distresses of others. (A. A. Toms, M. A.)

A cure for diseased souls

I. Mankind universally are in a diseased state.

1. Atheism, infidelity, or unbelief of Divine truths.
2. Ignorance of God and Gospel truths, even among those who profess to know
Him (Hos 4:6).
3. Hardness of heart.
4. Earthly mindedness.
5. Aversion to spiritual duties.
6. Hypocrisy and formality in Gods service.
7. Trusting to our own righteousness.
8. Indwelling corruption.
9. Backsliding.

II. There is a Physician who can cure all diseases.

1. He is infinite in knowledge, and understands all diseases, with the proper
remedies, so that He never can err (Joh 21:17).
2. He has sovereign authority and almighty power, so can command diseases to
obey (Mat 9:2).
3. He has infinite pity, ready to help the distressed, even unasked (Luk 10:33).
4. He has wonderful patience towards the distressed; bears with their
ingratitude, and works their perfect cure.

III. The remedy which he applies to effect the cure.

1. Principally, His own blood.
2. But Scripture speaks of other subservient means.
(1) The Spirit of God, with His gracious operations on the soul.
(2) The Word and ordinances of Christ.
(3) Afflictions.
(4) Faithful ministers.
(5) Prayers of pious Christians.

IV. His method of applying the remedy.

 1. He makes sinners sensible that they are sick.
2. He works faith in the soul by His Holy Spirit.
3. He accomplishes and perfects the cure by the sanctifying influences of the
Spirit.

V. Why so few are healed, notwithstanding there is balm in gilead and a Physician
there.
1. Many are ignorant of their disease, and wilfully so.
2. Many are in love with their disease more than with their Physician.
3. Many neglect the season of healing (Jer 8:20).
4. Many will not trust Christ wholly for healing.
5. Many will not submit to the prescriptions of Christ; self-examination,
repentance, godly sorrow, mortification.
Conclusion--
1. Let those in a diseased state see their danger, for it is great.
2. Balm of Gilead is freely offered in the Gospel.
3. Consider how long you have slighted this balm already.
4. Those whom Christ has healed, manifest their gratitude by living to His glory.
(T. Hannam.)

Is there no Physician there?--

The Divine Physician

I. THE PHYSICIAN is Jesus Christ the Son of God, who, being the Son of God, must
needs be able and skilful; since He is the Christ, He wants not a call to the office,
etc.; as He is Jesus, He cannot but be ready and willing to the work,--who can desire
a better, who would seek after another Physician than Him in whom skill, and will,
and ability, and authority do meet?

II. The PATIENTS are those who stand in need of this Physician, and they most
need Him who think they have least.

III. The DISEASE of these patients is sin--a disease both hereditary, as to the root
of it, which together with our nature we receive from our parents, and likewise
contracted by ourselves, in the daily eruption of this corruption, by thoughts, words,
and works.

IV. The MEDICINE or balm which this Physician administereth to the patient for
the cure of his disease is His own blood, which He is content to part with for our
sakes.

V. The METHOD by which the cure is effected is by cleansing; no cordial like this to
comfort our hearts and to rid us of the ill-humours of our sins, thereby restoring our
spiritual health. (Nath. Hardy.)
The balm and the physician
A distressed father, that had just left the sick bed of a beloved daughter, and was
wandering through the streets in all the dejection of grief, may easily be supposed to
have uttered himself in the language of the text. And if we may suppose that she had
been long subjected to the want of a physician and a nurse, while death must now
ensue as a consequence of that neglect, while there was a remedy at hand, and a
physician hard by; but there was none at hand to call in that physician, or to apply
that balm, by the application of which she might have been restored to health, joy,
and life. One would grieve to hear the solitary moan of such a father, and haste to
know if it is altogether too late to call in the kind and timely physician.

I. THE DISEASE IS ONE OF UNIVERSAL APPLICATION. There has been no nation found
that is not totally depraved. They all practised a gross and God-provoking idolatry.
They made their idols as stupid and as devilish as they could, practising as gross a
perversion of their Supreme Deity as possible, and then they practised upon man all
the outrages that a perverted intellect could contrive.

II. THIS DISEASE IS, OF ALL OTHERS, THE MOST CONTAGIOUS. It has been
communicated through the wide world, and gone into every little ramification of
every kingdom under the whole heaven. It poisons all the human relations, and
mars every human compact; and, first of all, mans covenant with his God. The
result of this is, that it has filled and loaded him with misery to the full, and all
nature groans and travails to be delivered from the bondage of corruption, and be
brought into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

III. Why is not the plague healed?

1. Sinners are not sensible that they are the subjects of this deplorable disease.
The first object of a preached Gospel is to convince them of this fact.
2. If to any extent they are conscious of their condition, they love the very
disease that cleaves to them.
3. They do not love the Physician.
4. They do not love the price at which they can be healed. It must be with Christ
a mere gratuitous healing.
5. Sinners do not relish the manner of the application. This deep repentance,
and this being healed by faith, destroys all human agency and contrivance,
and gives God all the glory. (D. A. Clark.)

Reasons for the irreligion of the masses

I. Our mortal and evangelical resources.

1. No country in the world in all respects equal in privileges.
2. No age comparable to this.
(1) Plenitude of Gods Word
(2) Good books.
(3) Evangelical ministry.
(4) Rich variety of social institutions.
 II. The fearful evils which still exist.
1. Avowed infidelity.
2. General neglect of Divine worship.
3. Juvenile precocity and profligacy.
5. Overwhelming intemperance.

III. The affecting inquiry presented. Why, then, etc. Three classes of reasons.
1. In the Church.
(1) Prevalence of spiritual indifference.
(2) Sectarian contentions.
(3) Fewness of workers.
(4) Want of spiritual self-denial.
(5) Coldness in prayer.
(6) Feeble faith.
2. Reasons in the persons themselves. Feel separated from other classes;
neglected, despised on account of poverty, etc.
3. Reasons in the world. Seductive temptations, dissipating scenes.
Applications--
1. We appeal to Church of Christ. Great responsibility.
2. Sinners are inexcusable. Every man must give account.
3. Gods mercy and grace are all-sufficient.
4. The provisions of the Gospel are freely published. (J. Burnt, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 9

JER 9:1-2
Oh that my head were waters.

Christian anguish over spiritual desolation

There is a solemn beauty in Jeremiahs devotion to the welfare of his fellow
countrymen. Blinded as they were by sin, they could not appreciate his anxiety, and
when his loving devotion broke into the tenderest words of warning, they regarded
him in the light of an enemy instead of a sincere friend. The depth of his feeling, the
tenderness of his words, remind us strongly of another scene which took place more
than five hundred years after these events: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that
killest the prophets, etc. The most beautiful sight on earth is unselfish devotion to
the social, mental, moral and spiritual interests of humanity. While the less
thoughtful may be dazzled by the great military achievements of conquering heroes,
the more thoughtful are rather charmed by that self-sacrificing devotion which,
losing sight of worldly applause and worldly honour, has thought of nothing but the
opportunity of doing good. As the prodigal son, in his ingratitude, profligacy, and
sinful wanderings, did not check the pulsations of his fathers heart, but rather
intensified them and brought to light the richness of his fathers love, so the
unbelief, idolatry, and sinful lives of the Jewish people only served to reveal the
strength, the sweetness and richness of the prophets nature. The history of the
Christian Church is history of men and women who have not counted their lives
dear unto themselves, but who have bestowed their warmest affections and divinest
endeavours upon those who seemed the least likely to respond to such
manifestations of interest and of love. The history of Jewish backslidings, of vows
solemnly taken and as readily broken, reminds us in a vivid manner of scenes which
have transpired from time to time in the Christian dispensation. For the progress of
the Christian Church toward a larger benevolence, a broader charity, a purer
morality, and a more intelligent piety has neither been rapid nor uniform. Seasons
of great revival have been followed by periods of marked decline. Into the midst of
torrid heat comes a wave of arctic cold. A narrow denominationalism has often
thrown its dark shadow across the pathway of Christian catholicity. Creeds,
catechisms, formulas, confessions of faith have often outweighed sobriety, virtue,
benevolence, and all the other graces which adorn the Christian character, while
practical unbelief, clothed in the formulas of an accepted dogma, has passed for
genuine Christianity without even the semblance of a challenge. As each period of
Jewish history was favoured with some that were true and brave--whose words of
instruction, reproof, and warning were spoken above the din of the busy multitudes-
-so each period of the Christian dispensation has been honoured with some John the
Baptist, whose earnest words have resounded from valley to valley, from peak to
peak, and from land to land, echoing the Gospel of the blessed Lord, and
summoning men to self-sacrifice, to holiness, and to purity. Our interest in the
human race will depend largely upon our faith in human possibilities. If we see in
man simply the possibilities of an animal, possibilities, to be sure, greater than
belong to any other earthly creature, but possibilities determined by material
conditions, limited to threescore years and ten, possibilities that have no relation to
a future world--if we see in man nothing but the ability to trace in the sands of time
a few illegible characters, then our interest in his welfare and prosperity can neither
be deep nor abiding. But if, on the other hand, we see in man a creature made in the
Divine image, with feeling, with thought, with spirituality, with volition, with
freedom, with immortal properties, created for a higher sphere and for a better
world, capable of companionship with angels, capable of communion with the
omnipotent Author of his existence, endowed with power to love and serve the
mighty Ruler of the universe, with unlimited capacity for growth and development--
if we see in him an intelligent, moral, responsible, and immortal being, then we have
an object worthy of our broadest sympathies, our warmest affections and our
divinest endeavours. (Ezra Tinker, B. D.)

Genuine philanthropy

I. Genuine philanthropy melting with earnestness.

1. Heart intensely earnest concerning the temporal condition of men. Chaldean
army among them, etc. Weeps as patriot.
2. Heart intensely earnest concerning the moral condition of men. Their
carnalities, idolatries, and crimes affect his pious spirit more than physical
 sufferings and political disasters. Think of the soul--
(1) In relation to its capacity of suffering and happiness.
(2) In relation to the influences for good or evil it is capable of exerting.
(3) In relation to its power of being a delight or a grief to the heart of infinite
Love.

II. Genuine philanthropy sighing for isolation.

1. The sigh of a spiritually vexed soul.
2. The sigh of disappointed love. Nothing is more saddening to generous souls
than the discovery of indifference, ingratitude, and growing vice in the very
men they seek to bless.
Conclusion--
1. The vicariousness of genuine philanthropy. It inspires the possessor with the
spirit that will prompt him to sacrifice his very being for the good of others.
2. The abuse of genuine philanthropy. The greatest sin in the universe is sin
against love.
3. The imperfection of genuine philanthropy. Like the best of everything human,
love is not perfect here. Disheartened, Jeremiah sought isolation. (Homilist.)

Englands sorrows
Sometimes tears are base things; the offspring of a cowardly spirit. Some men
weep when they should knit their brows, and many a woman weepeth when she
should resign herself to the will of God. But ofttimes tears are the noblest things in
the world. The tears of penitents are precious: cup of them were worth a kings
ransom. He that loveth much, must weep much; much love and much sorrow must
go together in this vale of tears. Jeremiah was not weak in his weeping; the strength
of his mind and the strength of his love were the parents of his sorrow. It would
seem as if some men had been sent into this world for the very purpose of being the
worlds weepers. Men have their sorrows; they must have their weepers; they must
have men of sorrows who have it for their avocation to be ever weeping, not so much
for themselves as for the woes of others.

I. To begin, then, with actual murder and real bloodshed.

II. But I have now a greater reason for your sorrow--a more disregarded, and yet
more dreadful, source of woe. Oh, that my head were waters, and mine eyes a
fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night, FOR THE MORALLY SLAIN of the
daughter of my people. The old adage is still true, One half of the world knows
nothing about how the other half lives. Oh, how many of our sons and daughters, of
our friends and relatives, are slain by sin! Ye weep over battlefields, ye shed tears on
me plains of Balaklava; there are worse battlefields than there, and worse deaths
than those inflicted by the sword. Ah, weep ye for the drunkenness of this land! How
many thousands of our race reel from our gin palaces into perdition! But there are
other crimes too. Alas, for that crime of debauchery! What scenes hath the moon
seen every night! Are these the only demons that are devouring our people? Ah,
would to God it were so. Behold, throughout this land, how are men falling by every
sin, disguised as it is under the shape of pleasure. O members of churches, ye may
well take up the wary of Jeremiah when ye remember what multitudes of these you
have in your midst men who have a name to live and are dead: and others, who
though they profess not to be Christians, are almost persuaded to obey their Lord
and Master, but are yea not partakers of the Divine life of God. But now I want, I
can, to press this pathetic subject a little further upon our minds. In the day when
Jeremiah wept this lamentation with an exceeding loud and bitter cry, Jerusalem
was in all her mirth and merriment. Jeremiah was a sad man in the midst of a
multitude of merry makers; he told them that Jerusalem should be destroyed, that
their temple should become a heap, and Nebuchadnezzar should lay it with the
ground. They laughed him to scorn; they mocked him. Still the viol and dance were
only to be seen. And now, today, here are many of you merry makers in this ball of
life; ye are here merry and glad today, and ye marvel that I should talk of you as
persons for whom we ought to weep. Weep ye for No! you say; I am in health, I
am in riches, I am enjoying life; why weep me? I need none of your sentimental
weeping! Ah, but we weep because foresee the future. Oh, if today some strong
archangel could unbolt the gates hell, and for a solitary second permit the voice of
wailing and weeping to come to our ears: oh, how should we grieve! Remember,
again, O Christian, that those for whom we ask you to weep this day are persons who
have had great; privileges, and consequently, if lost, must expect greater
punishment. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Why the righteous should weep for the wicked

I. Because they are infinite blessings.

1. There are many present blessings men lose by rebellion against God. There is
a peace that passeth all understanding, and a joy unspeakable and full of
glory, attending belief in, and devotion to, His service. The having ones
passions in subjection gives serenity of mind. But enjoying of Gods favour,
and the light of His countenance, is the source of richest blessings mortals
possess on earth. But what peace is there for the cursed?
2. But the eternal blessings they lose are beyond imagination.
3. And not these things matters of just lamentation? How must we pity him who,
when there is a rest prepared, and a supper spread for him, in heaven,
provokes God to swear that he shall not enter in, nor even taste of that
supper.

II. Because of the influence woes they entail on themselves.

1. How inexpressibly dreadful are the torments which the wicked will endure in
hell.
2. And can we view sinners hastening to that place of torment and not weep over
them?

III. BECAUSE OF THE AGGRAVATED GUILT UNDER WHICH THEY PERISH. Every offer of
salvation aggravates the guilt of those who reject it; and every increase of guilt is
followed by increase of misery. Infer--
1. How little true charity is there in the world. Charity to the soul is the soul of
 charity.
2. How earnest should men be in seeking the salvation of their own souls.
(Evangelical Preacher.)

Grief for sinners

There is an anecdote told of a careless Sabbath breaker who stumbled into Mr.
Shermans chapel one Sunday evening when he was engaged in prayer. He took his
stand in the aisle, and, seeing the tears rolling down the ministers cheeks and
falling on the book as he was pleading for the conversion of sinners, he was aroused,
and said to himself: This man is evidently in earnest; there must be something in
the condition of sinners that I do not understand. He remained, was instructed and
converted, and became a useful and steady member of the congregation.

Painful solicitude for the souls of others

This concern was incessant with the apostle. I have continual sorrow in my
heart. The pain was unceasing. His interest in sinners was not spasmodic; it had
become blessedly chronic. There are some of us who every now and then get a
passing qualm of conscience and a consequent spurt in the matter, but how long
does it last? It is a mere emotion, a transient feeling, a spasm that scarcely suffices
to stir us for so much as a single Sabbath. Oh, that there were in the pastors heart,
and in the hearts of all his people, a breaking, a yearning that cannot be satisfied, for
the salvation of London, and of all who know not Jesus! I find myself weeping, but I
weep because I weep so little. I confess myself this morning grieving, but I fear my
greatest grief is that I do not grieve as I should. Well, that is a hopeful beginning. Let
us all get to this at least, and we shall reach the other by and by. (Thomas
Spurgeon.)

JER 9:2
Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men.

Two prayers of Jeremiah(with Jer 14:8-9):

--In all the fellowship of, the prophets Jeremiah is by far the most unwilling and
reluctant. If Isaiahs watchword was Here am I--send me, Jeremiahs might have
been, I would be anywhere else but here--let me go. It was out of this besetting
mood of his that the prayer rose which I have taken as the first of my texts, Oh that
I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men, that I might leave my
people and go from them. That is not a prayer for solitude. It is some wayside
caravanserai or hotel which Jeremiah longs for; and there he would have been far
less alone than in his unshared home at Jerusalem. No, it is not a prayer for
solitude, but a prayer to be set where a man can enjoy all the interest of life without
having any of its responsibility. Oh, to have no other work in life than to watch the
street from the balcony window, than to feel the interest and glitter of life, and
achieve your duty towards your fellows, by a kindliness and a courtesy that are never
put to the strain of prolonged acquaintance! But our prayers often outrun
themselves in the very utterance; and Jeremiahs wish, too, carried within it its own
denial Look at the words, That I might leave my people. Emphasise the last two--
My people. They are the answer to Jeremiahs prayer. God had not sent him to
earth to be as separate from the life of men as a musing man is from the river
flowing past his feet; God had sent him, not to watch life from a balcony, but leaping
down to share it; not to live in an inn where a man is not even responsible for the
housekeeping, but has only his way to pay. God had begotten Jeremiah into a
nation. He had made him a citizen. He had given him a patriots lot, with the
patriots conscience and heart. So he stayed on where he was in Jerusalem, and the
world may have lost certain studies in human life in the great caravanserai of the
Lebanon or Arabian desert roads, for wherever he went Jeremiah would not have
kept his brain and pen idle. We may even have lost a book, something between Job
and Ecclesiastes, but we have gained the book of Jeremiah, the book of the citizen-
prophet, and who, because he was a citizen-prophet, and not a caravanserai one,
was also a citizen-priest, the first man who entered into the true meaning of
vicarious suffering, and therefore stands out clear from all the shadows of the Old
Testament--so clear a symbol of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Look now at the main
elements of Jeremiahs experience as he thus stood to his post of prophet and priest
at Jerusalem. I take these elements to be mainly three.
1. The first was the reality of sin. A prophet has got to begin there, or he had
better not begin at all. And he has got to begin there not in order to satisfy
some dogma or another, but because the facts are there. There is a kind of
preaching about sin far too prevalent in our day, which treats of it doctrinally
and not practically, which lays its strength to proving to a man that he must
be a sinner, instead of touching his conscience with the knowledge that he is
one. But Jeremiah laid his finger on the actual plague spots of the people. He
was very definite with these. But there was another note which Jeremiah
sounded equally with that on the reality of sin.
2. It was the note of the swiftness and irretrievableness of time where character
and salvation are concerned. Live with men in the city, grow old with the
same individuals and groups, and learn things--how inexorable habit is; how
irrecoverable are the chances of youth; how short and swift is the summer
granted to each mans character to ripen in; learn how even the Gospel of the
grace of God is just like the sybil of old coming back each time: you have
forced him to return with less power of promise and persuasion; and how
even repentance--that great freedom of man, that joy of God and the angels--
has its times and its places, which, being missed, are not found again, though
we seek them with tears. Upon these thoughts the roll of Jeremiahs
prophecy rises every now and again with a great sob. What distinguished
Jeremiah from all the prophets who had gone before him was that he did not
stand on the banks while all Israel rushed rapidly past him irretrievably to
ruin, but that he was with the people, taking their reproach as his reproach,
and sharing the penalty of their sins.
3. This suffering for the sins of others, being the sin-bearer as well as the
conscience of his people, is the third element of Jeremiahs experience. How
did he come to it? It is interesting to watch, for in Gods providence he was
the first forerunner of Christ in this path. Well, first of all he loved his
people; he had a very rich, tender heart, and he loved his people with the
whole of it. And then God gave him a conscience about them, that conscience
of their sin, and of the penalty to which it was leading. It was in the meeting
 of such a heart and such a conscience that Jeremiah knew how one man can
suffer for others. Oh! it is a terrible fate to be the conscience of those you
love, to be their only conscience, to feel their sins as you know they do not
feel them themselves, and to be aware of the inevitable judgment to which
they are so indifferent. Jeremiah often wondered at it. It perplexed him.
After clearly stating the causes why God should smite Israel, he would
suddenly turn round in his sympathy with the doomed people, and exclaim,
like a beaten animal looking up in the face of his master, Why hast Thou
smitten me? And again, that strange prayer of his, O Lord, Thou hast
deceived me, and I am deceived. Thou art stronger than I. What can we
answer to the perplexed prophet except this, that if a man have the Divine
gift of a pure conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there
comes with such gifts the necessary, the inevitable, obligation of suffering.
The physical results of Israels sin Jeremiah did not bear for the people. He
bore these with the people in the most heroic and self-denying patience, but
he did not do so for or instead of his people. But the spiritual distress, the
keener conscience, the agony of estrangement from God, the knowledge of
His wrath upon sin--these Jeremiah did bear instead of the dull impenitent
Israel. And is it too much to say that it was for his sake that in the end Israel
was saved from utter extinction? Now, with this knowledge of what Jeremiah
came through, look at his second prayer. The two chief words are exactly the
same as before a wayfaring man: and Oh that I were in a lodge of
wayfaring men; and the verb to spend the night, is the same word as the
noun lodge or inn of wayfaring men--literally a place to pass the night.
Jeremiahs second prayer, therefore, is just this, that God would be to the
people what Jeremiah himself had tried to be. (Prof. G. A. Smith.)

Jeremiah, a lesson for the disappointed

No prophet commenced labours with greater encouragements than Jeremiah. A
king reigned who was bringing back the times of the man after Gods own heart.
This devout and zealous king was young. What might not therefore be effected in
course of years? Schism, too, was at an end since Israels captivity. Kings of the
house of David again ruled over the whole land. Idolatry was destroyed by Josiah in
all the cities. Thus, at first sight, it seemed reasonable to anticipate further and
permanent improvements.

I. EVERYONE BEGINS WITH BEING SANGUINE. Jeremiah did. Gods servants entered
on their office with more lively hopes than their after fortunes warranted. Very soon
the cheerful prospect was overcast for Jeremiah, and he was left to labour in the
dark.
1. Huldahs message fixed the coming fortunes of Judah: she foretold the early
death of the good king and a fierce destruction to the unworthy nation. This
prophecy came five years after Jeremiah entered office; so early in his course
were his hopes cut away.
2. Or, the express word of God came to and undeceived him.
3. Or, the hardened state of sin in which the nation lay destroyed his hopes.

II. Resignation a more blessed state of mind than sanguine hope.

 1. To expect great efforts from our religious exertions is natural and innocent,
but arises from inexperience of the kind of work we have to do--to change
the heart and will of men.
2. Far nobler frame of mind to labour, not with hope of seeing fruit, but for
conscience sake, as matter of duty, and in faith, trusting good will be done
though we see it not.
3. The Bible shows that though Gods servants began with success, they ended
with disappointment. Not that Gods purposes or instruments fail, but
because the time for reaping is not here, but hereafter.

III. THE VICISSITUDE OF FEELING WHICH THIS TRANSITION FROM HOPE TO

DISAPPOINTMENT PRODUCES. Affliction, fear, despondency, sometimes restlessness,
even impatience under his trials, find frequent expression in Jeremiahs writings
(Jer 5:3; Jer 5:30-31; Jer 12:1-3; Jer 15:10-18; Jer 20:7-14).

IV. THE ISSUE OF THESE CHANGES AND CONFLICTS OF FEELING WAS RESIGNATION. He
comes to use language which expresses that chastened spirit and weaned heart
which is the termination of all agitation and anxiety in religious minds. He, who at
one time could not comfort himself, was sent to comfort a brother; and in
comforting Baruch he speaks in that nobler temper of resignation which takes the
place of sanguine hope and harassing fear, and betokens calm and clear-sighted
faith and inward peace. (J. H. Newman, D. D.)

JER 9:3
They are not valiant for the truth.

Valiant for the truth

I. INQUIRE WHAT IS THE TRUTH. It is the glorious Gospel of the blessed God.
Without a knowledge of this, oh! how ignorant is the wisest in the things of time!
1. The truth as it is in Jesus was at first but obscurely revealed; a veil was cast
over it which prophets and righteous men desired to remove.
2. The truth as it is in Jesus is a jewel only to be found in the casket of Gods
Word, not in the traditions of men; and that casket--emphatically called the
Word of truth--must be unlocked for us by Him who is the Spirit of truth.

II. How we may be valiant for it.

1. A cordial belief in it must be the first step to a valiant defence of it.
2. Love of the truth, an unalterable and unwavering attachment to it, must
follow a firm belief in it. This principle gives courage to the soldier on the
battlefield; patience to the wife amid scenes of sickness and misfortune.
3. Next follows an uncompromising advocacy of it. We fear not to give utterance
to that in which we firmly believe, and which we ardently love.
4. Valour for Christ, who is the truth personified, will further display itself by
 noble sacrifices for Him, for the dissemination of His truth at home, for its
propagation abroad.
5. Valour for the truth is most signally displayed by a consistent, prayerful, and
persevering obedience to all its requirements. (J. S. Wilkins.)

Valiant for the truth

I. WHAT IS TRUTH, THAT FOR IT ONE CAN BE, SHOULD BE, VALIANT? Truth is real.
Truth is accessible and may be known. Truth is precious. Truth imposes in every
direction obligations that cannot be met except by the most genuine and resolute
valour. The best philologists of our own generation refer the word to a root meaning
to believe, and draw upon the whole group of related languages and dialects to
show that truth is firm, strong, solid, reliable, anything that will hold. It should,
seem, then, that we ought not to believe anything but what is firm, established, and
that truth is what we rightly believe. For this our highest powers can be summoned
into action, while nothing but a poor counterfeit of our best activity can be called
forth in behalf of that which is known or seriously suspected to be unreal. The
sophist may be adroit, dexterous in disposition and argument, and selfishly eager for
victories. The pettifogging advocate in any profession may gain brief successes by
natural powers and discipline, aided by sheer audacity. This is a result and proof of
the worlds disorder. Man is for truth and truth for man--both real. And truth is
accessible and may be known. He who gave us reason and nature, Whose they are,
and Whom they should ever serve, has come in pity to the relief of our impotence
and bewilderment by the disclosures that His Spirit makes. In the Gospel the grace
of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared unto all men. Here is truth that is
real. Here is truth that may be known. Of all precious truth, truth on which souls can
be nourished, truth to which lives can be safely conformed, here is that which is
most precious--truth that enters most deeply and permanently into character and
takes hold of destiny. Of all truth worthy and suited to stimulate mans highest
powers, to the most sustained, and most intense sufficiency, here is that which is
worthiest and most stated. Of all truth that is of such kind and in such relations to us
that it is not only worth our while, but in every way incumbent upon us to put forth
our highest valour to gain it and to hold it, here is the most essential. We are bidden,
Buy the truth and sell it not. And this is not a mere appeal to our self-interest.
Truth, especially this sacred truth, encompasses us with obligations. For this
acquisition we do not merely do well to pay the price of toil and struggle; we fail
grossly and widely in duty if we withhold the price. And what we have so dearly
bought at the price of our humbled pride, at the price of our falling out with the
fashion of this world which passeth away, what we win by the surrender of our
self-sufficiency and imaginary independence, by our resolute self-mastery, our
vigorous effort, and whatever besides the attainment may cost, we are to hold
against all seductions and all assaults, valiant for the truth.

II. WHAT IS THE MANLY VALOUR THAT CAN FIND ANY FAIR AND PROPER FIELD FOR ITS
EXERCISE--its fairest and most proper field in connection with truth? It is not mere
boldness, bravery, courage, but moves in a higher plane, and is instinct with a loftier
inspiration. These may have their source chiefly in the physical and animal, that
which we share with the bulldog and the gorilla; while valour is a knightly grace, and
makes account mainly of the ideal. We shall esteem that the truest valour in which
there is me fullest consciousness and manifestation of manhood, with the clearest
conception and the most persistent adherence to worthy ends of manly endeavour.
There can then be nothing forced or unnatural in the phrase of our text, valiant for
the truth. For what should a true man be valiant rather than for the acquisition,
maintenance, and service of the truth--truth known as real, judged to be important,
valued as precious? And what estimate must we put upon the manhood that can be
strong in the land, but not for truth--energetic, daring, resolved, and persistent for
lower and grosser interests, but not for the truth?

II. BY WHAT CALL FROM WITHOUT DOES TRUTH MOST AUTHORITATIVELY AND
EFFECTIVELY SUMMON VALOUR TO ITS AID? Truth is imperial, not only in the quality of
the authority which it asserts and the richness of the bounty which it dispenses, but
also in the breadth of the dominion to which it lays claim. We have made our first
obedience when we have yielded ourselves to the truth. We are to go on proclaiming
truths rights, and helping it to gain rule over others. We vindicate the rights of the
truth, while we secure blessings to our fellow men through truths ascendency over
them. And this obligation and opportunity subject our manhood to some of the most
searching tests by which we are ever tried. Are we capable of taking larger views of
truth than those which connect it with some prospect of advantage to ourselves? Do
we esteem it for what it is, and not only for what it brings us? And what is the
measure of our discernment of the rights and needs of others, and what is our
response? The manly and Christian spirit has large conceptions of right and duty.
And then truth, while imperial in its rights, is sometimes imperilled by denial and
attack, and that at the hands of the very men whose allegiance it claims. Its rights
are contested; its very credentials are challenged. It encounters not merely the
negative resistance of ignorance and dulness, of low tastes and sensual and earthly
preoccupations; it is met by a more positive impeachment. He who is valiant for
truth will no more suffer it to fight its own battles than a true knight would have
resorted to any such evasion in a cause to which he was committed. And the
response which we make to the summons of assailed truth gives opportunity to
display some of the finest qualities that belonged to the old knighthood--unswerving
loyalty, courage, endurance, self-sacrifice. But there is another call for valour in
behalf of Christian truth higher than that which comes from our fellow men and
their claims upon it. What Christ is on the one side to the truth and on the other side
to us, and what the truth is to Him, supply a new inspiration and strength, and add a
new quality to Christian endeavour--a personal quality that was wanting before. He
who is valiant for the truth because of what it is in its reality and reliableness shows
his discernment. He who is valiant for the truth because of what it is to manhood
shows a wise self-appreciation. He who is valiant for the truth because of the claim
his fellow men have upon it, and upon him if he has it in his possession, shows that
he knows his place, his obligation, his opportunity as a man among men. He who is
valiant for the truth for Christs sake shows that he knows and honours his Lord,
and would make Him indeed Lord of all. Consider what Christ is to the substance of
the truth; what He is to the authority and efficiency of the truth; and what the truth
is to Him in the assertion and manifestation of His Lordship. The truth is not only
Christs as its great Revealer; the truth is Christ as its great Revelation. To him who
asks, What is the way? we answer, The way is Christ. To him who would know, What
is the life? we make reply, The life is Christ. And we proclaim, as that which is of the
highest concern to man to know, the truth is Christ. He is the great embodiment of
truth--truth incarnate. What He was, over and above all that He said, teaches us
what we should seek in vain to learn elsewhere. He was the chief revelation of the
nature, the power, the love, the saving grace of God. (C. A. Aitken, D. D.)

Valour for the truth

I. WHAT IS COMPREHENDED IN THIS IMPORTANT WORD, THE TRUTH? It has been

remarked that truth is a relative term, expressing a conformity between the object
and the mind, a harmony between the object and the 1des we entertain of it: thus,
truth becomes one of those terms, the precise meaning of which can only be
ascertained by determining the subject of which it may be predicated. I propose to
regard the scheme of Divine grace, for the recovery of man--the scheme of which we
are ministers,--as that which alone deserves the supreme appellation of the truth. I
proceed, then, to consider--
1. Mans state as a sinner.
(1) What saith the Scripture as to sin in its nature? (1Jn 3:4.)
(2) What saith the Scripture as to sin in its diffusion, its extent? It
everywhere, without the slightest discernible qualification, represents
human nature as universally and absolutely corrupt (Gen 6:5; Psa 14:2-3;
Jer 17:9; Eph 2:1).
(3) What saith the Scripture as to sin in its consequences? (Rom 6:23; Psa
9:17; 2Th 1:7-9.)
2. Gods work as a Saviour. Justice, as one of the attributes of God, is as
essentially a part of His nature, so to speak, as His Omnipresence, His
Omniscience, His Truth; and, since there is more than a propriety, even a
moral necessity, that all the proceedings of the Deity should be such as to
bring out the full glory of His entire Name, it is manifest that He can only
interpose an arrest of judgment, confer pardon, renovation, and eternal
glory, on atonement being made.

II. WHAT IS REQUIRED TO CONSTITUTE THE CHARACTER DESCRIBED BY THE

EXPRESSION, VALIANT FOR THE TRUTH? Valour is, strictly speaking, a martial term.
We are made to feel and deplore that a contrariety of element exists in connection
with the spiritual world. This gives rise to severe conflict. Now to be valiant, even in
human estimation, requires something more than bravery; yea, more than courage.
There must be a combination of both; or, at least, to be valiant, a man must be
preeminently courageous. Bravery, says an eminent authority, is a mere instinct;
for it depends on mere constitutional temperament. Courage is a virtue, indeed, for
it lies in the mind; it depends on reflection and thought; but he only is valiant, who
weighs the whole enterprise deliberately, lays his plans prudently, and follows them
out systematically; whom defeat may bow, but cannot break; whilst triumph only
stimulates him to renewed effort, inflames him with fresh zeal, and imparts to him a
thirst for new glory--a thirst which nothing can satisfy till the last position is taken
and the last trophy won! To be valiant for the truth, then, requires--
1. That there be a serious and habitual contemplation of the truth.
2. That there be a sincere embracing of the truth, and the practical experience of
 its power in the heart.
3. That there De active and uniform exertion in our respective spheres, for the
spread of the truth.
4. That there be solemn and earnest prayer that the Holy Spirit may accompany,
with His power, all our efforts for the diffusion of the truth.

III. What are the considerations, which are calculated to stir up to the holy
emotions, involved in the expression, valiant for the truth?
1. Let there be serious reflection as to the value of the soul, and the danger which
threatens it whilst uninfluenced by the truth.
2. Let us reflect on the awful rapidity with which souls are passing to their
eternal destiny.
3. Let us reflect on the responsibility that attaches to the office to which we have
been called, and the awful doom that awaits unfaithfulness in its discharge.
4. Let us reflect on the transcendent joy with which ministerial faithfulness will
hereafter be crowned. (John Gaskin, M. A.)

Valiant for the truth

I. WHAT IS THAT WHICH PECULIARLY MERITS THE APPELLATION OF THE TRUTH? The
comprehensive title of the truth was applied to revealed religion, alike in its
principles and commandments, in order to furnish a broad and emphatic distinction
between it and those habits of evil thoughts and practices which had been
engendered and fostered by idolatry. By the same appellation of the truth, we find
pure religion--whether in Patriarchal, or Levitical, or Christian times--is frequently
designated in Scripture, in order to furnish a special recommendation of its
character, and to illustrate its aspect and intention in the world. It is a
communication respecting the being and character of God, the plan of His
government, the authority and the sanction of His law--a communication with
respect to the moral circumstances and character of man, the tendency by which he
is actuated, and the dangers to which he is exposed--a communication respecting
the method of grace, and the restoration of the favour of the Almighty, by which his
apprehended miseries may be removed--and a communication respecting the high
and sublime consecration of human destiny which is reserved for him in that
immortality into which he is to be ushered when existence in this world is
terminated. The verities which are proclaimed by the Christian system, on topics
such as these, plainly possess a value that is perfectly incalculable, comprehending,
as they do, the highest interests of our species. In making the assertion that
Christianity is to be considered, emphatically, as the truth, we must not omit to
mention that it is confirmed in a manner that is perfectly conclusive and convincing.

II. What are the state of mind and course of conduct which the truth, as thus
defined, eminently deserves?
1. To be valiant for the truth involves a firm adherence to the doctrines it
propounds. We well know that many hostile influences are around us, which
tempt us to the blighting influence of doubt, and even of positive infidelity;
such as the fear of incurring the ridicule and the hatred of others, the
 personal suggestions of our own in-dwelling unbelief, and, above all, the
mysterious, though potent, machinations of him who is the arch-enemy of
souls. This of course, at least, requires the exercise of spiritual combat, which
must be displayed by a firm and uncompromising resistance to whatever
might lead us to impugn, to doubt, and to deny.
2. To be valiant for the truth upon the earth involves a holy conformity to the
precepts which it enforces. What holy vigour and boldness are required in
order to resist steadily and successfully the multitudinous abstractions from
holiness--the accumulated adversaries to the purification of the souls--to
repudiate and repel the approaches of Satan--to keep ourselves unspotted
from the world, that we may live soberly, righteously, and godly, according to
the commandment we have received, to crucify the flesh with the affections
and lusts--to cultivate, with devout diligence, the fruits of righteousness
which are by Jesus Christ, to the praise and glory of God; and, with all the
surrounding faithful, to exhibit the power of the truth by the purity of life.
This is to be valiant for the truth; this is heroism indeed!
3. To be valiant for the truth involves the public advocacy before other men of
the claims which it possesses. How many noble examples of this spiritual
valour have we met with in the annals of the Church! See them in the case of
the prophets who were not afraid, though briars and thorns were with them,
and though they dwelt among scorpions, and who yet spoke the word of God
boldly to the rebellious people, whether they would hear, or whether they
would forbear. See them in the apostles, who counted not their lives dear,
etc. See those examples again in the noble army of martyrs, and in the long
and triumphant succession of confessors, and reformers, and teachers, and
missionaries, who have dared ignominy, and contempt, and wrath, and
murder, for the sake of the overthrow of error, and the triumph of the truth
as it is in Jesus.

III. What are the considerations by which this state of mind, and course of
conduct, are specially and powerfully commended?
1. A concern for your own personal welfare. Them that honour Me, I also will
honour. On the other hand, the want of these elements of the spiritual
character, which we have set before you,--to hate put God away--to be
reckless of the claims of the truth--and to live in a discipleship of falsehood,
is, by a necessary vindication of the Divine equity and justice, to live in an
exposure to evils the most fearful which man can ever endure.
2. A concern for the welfare and interests of the Church of God. When valour
and boldness among the disciples of the truth is exhibited and augmented,
then it is an axiom, a thing that needs no proof, in religion, that the truth
which has that exercise will grow mightily, and will prevail. (J. Parsons.)

They proceed from evil to evil.

Evil begets evil

One danger of secret sin is that a man cannot commit it without being by and by
betrayed into a public sin. If a man commit one sin, it is like the melting of the lower
glacier upon the Alps, the others must follow in time. As certainly as you heap one
stone upon the cairn today, the next day you will east another, until the heap reared
stone by stone shall become a very pyramid. See the coral insect at work; you cannot
decree where it shall stay its pile. It will not build its rock as high as you please; it
will not stay until an island shall be created. Sin cannot be held in with bit and
bridle; it must be mortified. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Progression in sin
In the Rabbinical books of the Jews they have a curious tradition about the growth
of leprosy, that it began with the walls of a mans house, then, if he did not repent,
entered his garments, till at last the tatter covered his whole body. And thus it is
with the growth of sin. It begins with the neglect of duty, it may be of prayers; or the
warning voice of conscience is unheeded. Habits of sin are formed; till at last the
soul that lets God alone is let alone by God. (F. G. Pilkington.)

JER 9:5
And weary themselves to commit iniquity.

The uneasiness of a sinful life

Though these words were spoken of the Jews more than two thousand years ago,
yet I shall endeavour to show that it may be said of all wicked men; that a wicked life
is full of weariness and difficulties; that virtue is more easy than vice, and piety than
wickedness.
1. Vice oppresses our nature, and consequently, it must be uneasy: whereas
virtue improves, exalts, and perfects our nature; therefore virtue is a more
natural operation than vice; and that which is most natural must be most
easy. Thus, when we would express anything to be easy to a person or nation,
we say it is natural to them. Moreover, all vices are unreasonable, and what
is against reason must be against nature. And why is it that laws are so
severe against vice, but because it destroys and corrupts the members of the
commonwealth? So that the punishments which public justice in all
countries inflicts upon criminals, are a plain proof how great an enemy vice
is to nature, under whose ill conduct, and for whose errors, it suffers
sometimes the most inexpressible torments. Every vice also has its own
peculiar disease, to which it inevitably leads. Envy brings men to leanness;
the envious man, like the viper, is killed by his own offspring. Lust brings on
consuming and painful diseases. Drunkenness, catarrhs and gouts, and
poverty beside. Rage produces fevers and frenzies. It is owned by all, that
nature is satisfied with little, and desires nothing that is superfluous; by this
rule all these vices are unnatural which consist in excess, or stretch
themselves to superfluity; such as oppression, injustice, luxury,
drunkenness, gluttony, covetousness, and the like.
2. Vice is more unpleasant than virtue; and therefore it must be more uneasy
and wearisome; for we soon weary of anything which is not attended with
pleasure, even though it should bring us some advantage. Without pleasure
there is no happiness or ease. There are indeed some vices which promise a
 great deal of pleasure in the commission of them, but then at best it is but
short-lived and transient, a sudden flash presently extinguished. It perishes
in the very enjoyment, and quickly passes away like the crackling of thorns
under a pot. Thus sinners are like the troubled sea, tossed to and fro, and yet
can find no rest or satisfaction. They ramble on in one kind of debauchery
until they are obliged to try another for a sort of diversion; they go round
from one sin to another, so that their whole life is a course of uneasiness, and
vanity in the strictest sense. Nor is this all, the pleasure of sin being
exhausted in a moment, leaves a sting behind it, that cannot be so soon
plucked out; these pleasures wound the conscience, and occasion uneasy and
painful reflections. A thousand instances of the unpleasantness of vice are
everywhere obvious. Envy is a perfect torment; it cannot fail to make the
man whom it possesses miserable, and fill him with distracting pain and
grievous vexation. It never leaves off murmuring and fretting, while there is
one man happier, richer, or greater than the envious man himself. It is
contrary to all goodness, and consequently to pleasure. Revenge is most
painful and uneasy, both in persuading us that these are affronts, which of
their own nature are none, and then in involving us in more troubles and
dangers than the pleasure of revenge can compensate. Hatred and malice are
the most restless tormenting passions that can possess the mind of man;
they keep men perpetually contriving and studying how to effect their
mischievous purposes; they break their rest, and disturb their very sleep.
Covetousness is a most painful and uneasy vice, it makes the covetous man
sit up late and rise early, and spend all his time and pains in hoarding up
worldly things. Covetousness is unsatiable, the more it gets, the more it
craves; it grows faster than riches can do. From all which it is evident, that all
vicious persons live the most slavish and unpleasant lives in the world, and
this every vicious man acknowledges in anothers case; he thinks the vice he
sees another addicted to, most unpleasant and uneasy.
3. The horror of conscience makes vice uneasy. I might show you that no man
sins deliberately without reluctancy. But though there were no such
disadvantage attending the commission of sin, yet the natural horror which
is consequent upon it, is great enough to render it unaccountable, that any
man should he vicious. Conscience can condemn us without witnesses; and
the arm of that executioner cannot be stopped. And if we consider, that
neither the attendance of friends, nor the enjoyment of all outward
pleasures, can comfort those whose conscience is once awakened, and begins
to accuse them, we cannot but conclude, that vice is to be pitied as well as
shunned; and that this alone makes it more uneasy than virtue, which
sweetens the greatest misfortunes. The greatest punishment that a wicked
man can suffer in this world, is to be obliged to converse with himself.
Diversion or non-attention is his only security; he fears nothing so much as
reflection: for if he once begins to reflect, and fix his thoughts to the
consideration of his by-past life and actions, he anticipates hell himself, he
needs no infernal furies to lash him; he becomes his own tormentor.
4. Vicious persons must in many cases dissemble virtue, which is more difficult
than to be really virtuous. All men who design either honour, riches, or to
live happily in the world, do either propose to be virtuous, or at least pretend
it. Now such pretenders and hypocrites have certainly a very difficult part to
 act; for they must not only be at all that pains which is requisite in being
virtuous, but they must superadd to these all the troubles that dissimulation
requires, which is also a new and greater task than the other. Not only so, but
they must overact virtue, with a design to take off that jealousy, which
because they are conscious of deserving, they therefore vex themselves to
remove.
5. Vice makes the vicious man fear all men; even as many as he injures, or are
witnesses to his vices. (T. Wetherspoon.)

The sinners mental war

This is a suffering world in more senses than one. We are subject to toil and
labour in consequence of the apostasy, and to perpetual vexation of mind, in
consequence of our opposition to the Divine will. The sinner, therefore, is
compelled, if he will continue in sin, to maintain a mental war which devours and
exterminates from his breast all the elements of vital joy.

I. THE SINNER MUST SUSTAIN MORALITY WITHOUT PIETY. Disgrace; loss of property;
of all real friendship; of domestic affection; of the health and life; of self-respect and
elevated companionship; all wait around a course of vice. The vicious man sinks
deeper and deeper in the mire. He must be moral or miserable. It is hard work,
however, to maintain morality without religion. The passions are strong; the world
is full of temptation; the soul is liable to be beat off from its hold on morality, unless
recovered by grace; its course will be tremendous, the progress of its depravity
vehement, and great the fall of it.

II. HE MUST FEEL SECURE WITHOUT A PROMISE. Even the hardest incrustations of
sin cannot prepare the soul to look fully at eternal wailing undaunted. There it
stands, that never ceasing view; that vivid painting of the future; that dark, shadowy,
but distinct, and fearful representation of utter ruin; it is hung out before the soul by
the stem truth of God, from behind every scene of guilt, and along every winding of
the souls weary path. How can he feel secure? Yet how can he bear to face that
vision? If he looks to nature, it warns him; to his companions, they are falling into
the arms of the monster.

III. HE MUST HOPE FOR HEAVEN, WHILE FORMING A CHARACTER FOR PERDITION. He
must hope, and will hope, even if he knows his hope will do no good. Heaven is the
only place of final rest; if he miss it he is lost, undone forever. Holy as it is, and
much as he hates holiness, he must enter there, or eternally be an undone man. No
man can bear the idea of confessed, manifest, public, and hopeless, irrecoverable
disgrace. Every man, therefore, clings to the idea of a final heaven, as long as he can.
But here the sinner has a hard task.

IV. HE MUST RESIST CHRIST WITHOUT A CAUSE. The claims of Christ are not only
just, but compassionate and benevolent. If he will sin, he must contend against the
Saviour in the very interpositions of His astonishing, overwhelming, agonising
mercy. This is hard work for the conscience the wheels of probation drag heavily;
their voice grates fearfully; their cry of retribution waxes loud.
 V. HE MUST TRY TO BE HAPPY WHILE GUILTY. This he cannot accomplish, yet he
must try. He will choose a thousand phantoms; he will grasp after every shadow; he
will be stung a thousand times, yet will he renew the toil, till wearied, hopeless, and
sullen, he lies down to die.

VI. HE MUST HAVE ENOUGH OF THE WORLD TO SUPPLY THE PLACE OF GOD IN HIS
HEART. The heart must have a supreme object; God is able to fill it. On Him the
intellect may dwell, and around the ever-expanding developments of His character,
the affections, like generous vines, may climb, and gather, and blossom, and hang
the ripe cluster of joy forever; but the sinner shuts out God, every vision of His
character is torment, and he turns away to fill the demands of his heart with the
world.

VII. HE MUST ARRANGE MATTERS FOR DEATHS WHILE HE IS AFRAID TO THINK OF

DYING. He must work to get property for his children when he is gone. He must put
his business in a train, so that it may be settled advantageously when he is gone. He
must do all this on the strength and under the impulse of an idea at which he
trembles.

VIII. HE MUST READ THE BIBLE, WHILST HE IS AFRAID TO THINK OR PRAY. This is
especially true of the worldly-minded professor. If he keeps up the form of family
worship, or attends at the house of God, the Bible, the holy and accusing book, is in
his way. Its truths lie across his path. He cannot turn aside, he must trample over
them, while he beholds them under his feet. He knows that his footsteps are heard
around the retributive throne. If driven to console himself by the promises of error,
the sinner has to pervert and wrestle with the Bible. Its denunciations catch his eye,
and burn him while he tries to explain them away. Concluding thoughts--
1. Have we no compassion for a suffering world?
2. Can we do nothing to relieve this miserable condition of our fellow men? The
time for Gods people to pray, and awake, and endeavour mightily, is now--
and with most of us, now or never. (D. A. Clark.)

JER 9:6
Thine habitation is in the midst of deceit.

Strong indictment of Christian countries

Who has not felt as Jeremiah? This is a Christian country. Why? Because the
majority are as bent on self-pleasing, as careless of God, as heartlessly and
systematically forgetful of the rights and claims of others, as they would have been
had Christ never been heard of?
1. A Christian country? Behold its meaningless shibboleths, its two hundred
forms or fashions of Christian belief! How this disunion dishonours Christ.
2. A Christian country? Behold the worship of mammon, the rage of avarice.
Look at the wonderful baits which the company monger throws out day by
day to human weakness and cupidity! The lying advertisements, the
 countless quacks, raising hopes never to be fulfilled.
3. A Christian country, and God denied on the platform and in the press! Where
atheism is mistaken for intelligence, and agnosticism for logic and reason!
Where flagrant lust walks the streets, and gambling reigns!
4. A Christian country: where the rich and noble spend their time in horse
racing, hunting, and shooting innumerable birds and beasts; where
thousands die of need and starvation in fever dens, while untold sums are
spent by the wealthy on whims, toys, and gaiety!
5. A Christian country: where there is more than Egyptian worship of Anubis;
where a pet dog is fondled and pampered, and helpless children suffer and
die! Oh yes! it is a Christian country--the name of Christ has been named in
it for fifteen centuries past; and for that reason Christ will judge it. (C. J.
Ball, M. A.)

JER 9:7
Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, Behold, I will melt them, and try them.

Gods people melted and tried

Observe, here, that God represents Himself as greatly concerned to know what to
do with His people. But notice, next, the Lord is so resolved to save His people, that
He will use the sternest possible means rather than lose any of those whom He
loves. Observe, once more, that Gods concern about His people, and His resolve to
use strange ways with them, spring out of His relationship to them; for He says,
How shall I do for the daughter of My people? My people. They were His, though
they were so far away from Him through their evil ways. When God has chosen a
man from before the foundation of the world, and when He has given that man over
to Christ to be a part of the reward of His souls travail, He will adopt strange means
to accomplish His sacred purpose, and He will carry out that purpose, let it cost Him
what it may.

I. First, these principles may be applied to THE MATTER OF CONVERSION.

1. There is a very simple way of being saved; it should be, I hope it is, the
common way. It is the simple way of following the call of grace. Without any
violence, your heart is opened, as with the picklock of grace. God puts the
latch key into the door, and steps into your heart without a word.
2. This is the way of salvation, but there are some who will not come this way.
There is the Wicket Gate. They have but to knock, and it will be opened; but
they prefer to go round about through the Slough of Despond, or to get under
the care of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who leads them round by the house of Mr.
Legality, who dwells in the village of Morality, and there they go with their
burdens on their backs, which they need not carry even for a single hour, for
they would roll off directly if they would but look to Jesus, and believe in
Him. But they will not do this. There are some of whom God has to say,
How shall I do for the daughter of My people? Why is this? Well, some of
them have a crooked sort of mind, they never can believe anything straight;
 they must go round about. But some others are obstinate in sin. They are not
happy in it; but they will not give it up. Some others are unwilling to confess
sin at all. They think themselves wrong; but they try to make excuses. Then
there are some people who are not saved, but who are outwardly very
religious. They have never omitted going to Church; they have been brought
up carefully, and they have said their prayers regularly, and they have had
family prayer, too. The robe of their self-righteousness clings to them, and
prevents their coming to rest in Jesus. There are some others who will not
come to Christ because they are so full of levity and fickleness. They are all
froth, all fun. They live like butterflies; they suck in the juices from the
flowers, and only flit from one to the other. They are easily impressed one
way and another; but there is no heart in them. And withal, there is another
class of persons that are insincere. There is no depth of earth about them.
They do not really feel what they think they feel; and when they say that they
believe, they do not really believe in their heart.
3. Now, having brought before you these characters, or held up the looking glass
of Gods Word so that they might see themselves in it, I want you to notice
how God does deal with such people very often. According to my text, they
will have to feel the furnace. I have noticed, during a considerable period of
time, some of the self-righteous and the outwardly-religious put into the fire
and melted, by being permitted to fall into some gross and open sin. I pray
God that none of you self-righteous people may be left to go into an open sin;
but it may be that the Lord may leave you to yourselves, to let you see what
you really are, for you probably have no idea what you are. Some, again, have
been melted down by temporal calamities. Oh yes, there are some who
cannot be saved as long as they have a silver spoon in their mouths; but
when they are brought to poverty, it is the nearest way round to the Fathers
house, round by the far country where they would fain fill their bellies with
the husks that the swine eat. At other times, without any overt sin, without
any temporal trouble, God has ways of taking men apart from their fellows,
and whipping them behind the door. They have told me that their sin haunts
them day and night; they cannot hope for mercy; they cannot think that God
will ever blot out their transgressions. They are ground down, and brought
low. This is all meant to work for their good; they would not come to God any
other way. It is by such an experience that God is fulfilling His Word, I will
melt them, and try them.
4. In all this God has one great object. It is just this, first, to hide pride from
men. God will not save us, and have us proud. Grace must have the glory of it
from first to last. Beside that, God means to take us out of our sin, and to do
that He makes it to be a bitter and an evil thing to us. Blessed is the blow that
almost crushes you if it breaks off the connection between you and sin.

II. I want to say something to Christians; for, IN THE MATTER OF CHRISTIAN LIFE,
God seems to say, What shall I do for the daughter of My people? I will melt them,
and try them.
1. Some Christians go from joy to joy. Their path, like that of the light, shineth
more and more unto the perfect day. Why should not you and I be like that?
2. There are other Christians who appear to make much progress in Divine
things, but it is not true progress. Whereas they say that they are rich, and
 increased in goods, and have need of nothing, they are all the while naked,
and blind, and poor, and miserable. The worst thing about their condition is
that some of them do not want to know their real state. They half suspect
that it is not what they say it is; but they do not like to be told so; in fact, they
get very cross when anyone even hints at the truth. Now, there are such
people in all our congregations, of whom God might well say, How shall I do
for the daughter of My people?
3. This is what He will do with a great many who are now inflated with a false
kind of grace: I will melt them, and try them, says the Lord of hosts. He will
put them to a test. Here is a man who has a quantity of plate, and he does not
know the value of it, so he takes it to a goldsmith, and asks him what it is
worth. Well, says he, I cannot exactly tell you; but if you give me a little
time, I will melt it all down, and then I will let you know its value. Thus does
the Lord deal with many of His people. They have become very good, and
very great, as they fancy, and He says, I will melt them. He that is pure gold
will lose nothing in the melting; but he that is somebody in his own opinion,
will have to come down a peg or two before long.
4. Now, the result of melting is truth and humility. The result of melting is that
we arrive at a true valuation of things. The result of melting is that we are
poured out into a new and better fashion. And, oh, we may almost wish for
the melting-pot if we may but get rid of the dross, if we may but be pure, if
we may but be fashioned more completely like unto our Lord! (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

JER 9:13-16
Because they have forsaken My law . . . give them water of gall to drink.

The wages of sin

A quaint preacher, addressing miners, drew a picture of two mines. He
represented payday at one of the mines, and described the long line of men coming
to the cashiers desk to receive their wages. Presently some men came up whom the
cashier did not know. Where have you been working? he asked. We were working
in the other pit, they answered. Then that is the place to go for your money. No,
they said, we like your pay best; we are tired, and we want rest, and we want peace
and plenty. At the pit where we have been working they are treating us cruelly, and
we get no pay, but blows and hard words. Wont you pay us? But the cashier says,
No; you chose to work in the other pit, and you must take the wages they pay; you
cannot work for one employer and get your wages from another. That was fair, was
it not? the preacher asked. His hearers answered that it was. Then, said he, dont
you serve the devil unless you want his wages.

JER 9:21
For death is come up into our windows.
Death an invading enemy

I. Cruel.
1. Strikes at the dearest objects of our affection.
2. Robs us of our most useful men.
3. Drags us from the dearest things of the heart, occupation, social circles,
cherished plans, etc.
4. Reduces our bodies to dust.

II. UNREMITTING. Active in every--

1. Man.
2. Family.
3. Community.
4. Nation.

III. SUBTLE. Fights in ambush, steals into house, poisons food, makes air
pestiferous, etc.

IV. RESISTLESS. All that science, art, wealth, and caution can do has failed.

V. UBIQUITOUS. In waves of air, on billows of deep, in valleys, on mountain, river,

and brook, forest and flowers; whole earth his dominion.

VI. CONQUERABLE. Christ has conquered death--

1. In His own resurrection.
2. In His power on minds of disciples. (Homilist.)

JER 9:23-24
Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom.

Glorying
An idea in this text to which we assign special prominence is this--There is at least
so much similarity between the nature of God and the nature of man, that both can
take delight in the same thing. The spirit of the text is saying, Take delight in loving
kindness, judgment, and righteousness, because I take delight in them; learn the
Divinity of your origin, and the possible splendour of your destiny, from the fact that
you have it in your power to join Me in loving mercy, righteousness, and judgment.
God addresses three divisions of the human family--the wise, the powerful, the
wealthy. And is there any other class which may not be placed in one of these
categories? Each class is sitting at the feet of its chosen idol--science, arms, wealth;
all clad in robes of royalty, if not of godhead. In the hand of each idol is the sceptre
of a venerated mastery, and the temple of each shakes with the thunder of
heathenish worship. Such is the picture. Now to these temples God comes, and, with
the majesty of omnipotence, the authority of infinite wisdom, and the benignity of
all-sustaining fatherhood, says, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither
let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches.
Glory! That is a word which is pregnant with meaning; and it can be better
explained by paraphrase than by etymology. Let not man glory in wisdom, might,
and wealth, so as to be absorbed in their pursuit, so as to make a god of either of
them, so as to regard them as the ultimate good, so as to commit to either his
present happiness and endless destiny. Wisdom! That, too, is a word fraught with
large significance. The wisdom referred to is not that which cometh from above--
beautiful with celestial hues, and instinct with celestial life: it is a wisdom which is
destitute of the moral element; the wisdom of an inquisitive, prying, restless
intellect; that eyeless and nerveless wisdom by which the world knew not God,
and which, when looked at from above, is foolishness; the wisdom which is all
brain and no heart; the wisdom of knowledge, not of character; the wisdom
which dazzles man, but which, when alone, is offensive to God. One substantial
reason for not glorying in the kind of wisdom which we have attempted to depict, is
the necessary littleness of mans vastest acquisitions. Science is a race after God; but
can the Infinite ever be overtaken? Science, perhaps, never got so close to God as
when she bound the capitals of the world together with bands of lightning, and
flashed the wisdom and eloquence of parliaments from continent to continent. High
day of triumph that; she was within hand reach of the veiled Potentate--one step
more, and she would be face to face with the King--was it not so? What was there
between science and God in that moment of sublimest victory? Nothing, nothing,
but--Infinity! There is no searching of His understanding. Another point will show
the folly of glorying in the kind of wisdom we have delineated, namely, the widest
knowledge involves but partial rulership. You say you have found a law operating in
the universe. Be it so: can you suspend or reverse the Divine appointment? Have you
an arm like God? or can you thunder with a voice like Him? The argument is this,--
however extensive may be our knowledge, knowledge can only help us to obey; it
never can confer aught but the most limited rulership; and even that sovereignty is
the dominion not of lord, but of servant, the rulership which is founded in humility
and obedience--the rulership whose seat is beneath the shadow of the Great Throne.
Is man, then, without an object in which to glory? It is as natural for man to glory as
it is natural for him to breathe; and God, who so ordered his nature, has indicated
the true theme of glorying: But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
understandeth and knoweth Me. Here let us rejoin the earnest student of science,
supposing now that, in addition to his being ardently scientific, he is intelligently
devout. He goes to work as before; the flame of his enthusiasm is not diminished by
a single spark; his hammer and his telescope are still precious to him, but now,
instead of being in pursuit of cold, abstract, inexorable laws, he is in search of the
wise and mighty and benevolent Lawgiver; in legislation he finds a Legislator, and in
the Legislator he finds a Father. What we want, then, is personal knowledge of a
Person: we would know not only the works, but the Author, for they are mutually
explanatory. Know the man if you would understand his actions; know God if you
would comprehend nature, providence, or grace. The devout student says he finds
Gods footprints everywhere; he says they are on the rocks, across the heavens, on
the heaving wave, and on the flying wind; to him, therefore, keeping company with
science is only another way of walking with God. The text, however, goes still
farther; it relates not only to personality, but to character: the Deist pauses at the
former, the Christian advances to the latter. Let him that glorieth glory in this, that
he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving
kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. The idea would admit of some
such expression as this: Any knowledge of God, the Creator and Legislator of the
physical creation, should be regarded as merely preparatory, or subordinate to an
apprehension of God as the Moral Governor: that if you know God as Creator only,
you can hardly be said to know Him at all; that if you tremble at His power without
knowing His mercy, you are a pagan; if you seek to please Him as a God of
intelligence, without recognising Him as a God of purity and justice and love, you
are ignorant of Him, and your ignorance is crime. Let him that glorieth, even
glorieth in God, glory in knowing God as a moral Being, as the righteous Judge, as
the loving Father. There must not be adoration of mere power; we must not be
satisfied with utterances of amazement at His majesty, wisdom, and dominion; we
must go farther, get nearer, see deeper; we must know God morally, we must feel the
pulsations of His heart--His heart!--that dread sanctuary of righteousness, that
semi-eternal fount of love. The whole subject, then, may be comprehended in four
points.
1. God brands all false glorying. Upon the head of wisdom, power, and wealth,
He writes, Let no man glory in these. There is a wisdom which is folly;
there is a power which is helplessness; there is a wealth which is poverty.
God warns us of these things, so that if our boasted wisdom answer us not
when we are on the Carmel of solemn encounter between light and darkness,
we may not have God to blame.
2. God has revealed the proper ground of glorying. That ground is knowledge of
God, not only as Creator and Monarch, but as Judge and Saviour and Father.
Reason, groping her way through the thickening mysteries of creation, may
exclaim, There is a God; but faith alone can see the Father smiling through
the King. It will be in vain to say, Lord, Lord, if we cannot add, Saviour-
Friend
3. God, having declared moral excellence to be the true object of glorying, has
revealed how moral excellence may be attained. Is it objected that there is no
mention of Jesus Christ in the text? We answer, that loving kindness,
righteousness, and judgment are impossibilities apart from Christ; they are
only so many names to us, until Jesus exemplifies them in His life, and
makes them accessible to us by His death and resurrection. Do we require
the sun to be labelled ere we confess that he shines in the heavens?
4. God has revealed the objects in which He glories Himself. For in these things
I delight, saith the Lord. Let it be propounded as a problem, In what will
the Supreme Mind most delight? and let it be supposed that an answer is
possible, it might be concluded that the attainment of that answer would
forever determine the aspirations, the resolutions, and the ambition of the
world. We might consider that every other object would be infinitely beneath
the pursuits, and infinitely unworthy of the affections of man. At all events,
this must be true, that they who glory in the objects which delight Jehovah
must be drinking at pure and perennial streams. (J. Parker, D. D.)

What do I glory in
What does a man glory in? At what point does his life leave the plane of
indifference and rise into a boast? What is it that provides for him the river of his
most exquisite delights? The answer to these questions is fruitfully significant. If we
catch a man in his gloryings we take him at his height. Some mens gloryings are to
be found on a purely carnal level; they are sought and proclaimed on the plane of the
brute. Other mens gloryings are found in spiritual realities, among the things of the
Eternal. Unworthy glorying is the minister of stagnancy, paralysis, and death.
Worthy glorying is the minister of progress, liberty, and life. Let us look at the
unworthy gloryings. Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom. That is a very
surprising negative. I did not expect that wisdom would be banned from the circle
of a legitimate boast. Is there not an apparent contradiction between the counsel of
the prophet and other counsellors of the Old Testament Scriptures? Get wisdom.
Fools despise wisdom. A wise son maketh a glad father. We know, too, how our
poets have spoken of the beautiful thing called wisdom. Knowledge comes, but
wisdom lingers; blossom comes, but the fruitage lingers! The wisdom here admired
is a ripe and matured product, the ultimate issue of a prolonged process. It is not in
this sense that the prophet uses the word; he employs it with quite another content.
It is the wisdom of the mere philosopher; the product of speculation and theory; a
wisdom devoid of reverence, and detached from practical life. Life can be divided
into watertight compartments, having no relationship one with the other. We can
separate our opinions from our principles, our theories from our practice. Love of
the fine arts can be divorced from the practice of a pure life. Our artistic wisdom can
be imprisoned as it were in an iron-bound division, and separated from our moral
activities. The musically wise can be the morally discordant. The possession of
musical technique does not necessarily make an agreeable man. The wisdom of
music can be divorced from the other parts of a mans life just as the music room in
a hydropathic establishment is shut off from the kitchen. A man can be skilled in the
decrees of counsel and in traditional lore, and yet he may be morally and spiritually
corrupt. The wisdom of a theologian can be a wisdom without influence upon
morals. A man may preach like a seraph and live like a brute. Let not the mighty
man glory in his might. This is a reference to mere animal strength. It includes a
bald athleticism in the individual, and a bald materialism in the State. But surely
strength is good? Athletic strength and skill are very admirable. But here, again, the
prophet is referring to strength which is devoid of reverence, and therefore strength
which is detached from service. All right use of strength begins with a deep
reverence for it. So it is also with the material might of the State. A sword may be
good if it be reverently regarded. The sword of Gideon; that is always a curse! The
sword of the Lord and Gideon; that is an instrument of benediction! Let not the
rich man glory in his riches. Do not let us relegate this warning to a few
millionaires. A man with a small income may regard his money as irreverently as the
man with an overflowing abundance. The prophet refers to the spirit in which
possessions are esteemed. He refers to riches held without reverence, and therefore
not exercised in wise philanthropy. Possessions used irreverently are used blindly,
and therefore without a true humanity. But how people do glory in bare and
graceless wealth! It is a false confidence. But let him that glorieth glory in this, that
he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord. How far are we away from
the brutal, the material, and the merely opinionative! Here is glorying which centres
itself in the unseen, and fixes itself upon the Lord. Understandeth. The
relationship is reasonable and intelligent. God wants no blind discipleship. We are
to be all alert in our fellowship with the Almighty. We are to worship Him with all
our mind. In malice be ye children, but in understanding be men.
Understandeth and knoweth Me. That is a profound term, suggestive of certainty
and assurance. It has about it the flavour of the familiar friend. We are to
intelligently use our minds to discover the thought and will of God, then we are to
act upon the will, and in our obedience a deep communion will be established. This,
then, is the line of individual progress. We begin in exploration; we use our
understanding in discerning the mind of God. Then we pass to experiment, and we
put to the proof the findings of the mind. From experiment we shall attain unto
experience; our findings will be revealed as truth; our knowledge will mature unto
wisdom. Then shall we know if we follow on to know the Lord. What does God
want us to know about Him? That I am the Lord which exercise loving kindness.
We sometimes say concerning a distinguished man whose presence we have met, I
rather feared him, but his first words made me feel at home. And here is the first
word of the Almighty, and the word is not law or statute, but loving kindness!
Not only kindness, for kindness may be mechanical and devoid of feeling, but
loving kindness! A dainty dish is served by affection. What else does He want me
to be sure about? That I am the Lord that exercise loving kindness and judgment.
Do not let us interpret judgment as doom. Judgment is vindication; it is suggestive
of sure sequence. When I plant mignonette, and mignonette comes in its season, the
sequence is indicative of judgment. Judgment is the opposite of caprice and chance.
The Lord is a God of judgment, and all my sowings will be vindicated. All these
deeper issues are in the hands of God. The Lord is a God of judgment, and of
righteousness. This word is only confirmatory of the preceding word. Judgment is
proceeding and the Vindicator is righteous. He cannot be bribed, He is not of
uncertain temper. He changeth not. (J. H. Jowett, M. A.)

On the unreasonableness and folly of glorying in the possession of

external privileges and advantages

I. The unreasonableness and folly both of individuals and of communities

glorying in the possession of external privileges and advantages. In fact, there is no
passion in our nature which so effectually defeats its own end, or so completely mars
the accomplishment of its object, as that of pride. Wherever respect is impudently
claimed, even where there is real merit at the bottom, it is always reluctantly
conferred. Our pride and self-love in turn take the alarm, and are hurt by the
boldness of the claim. Competitors and rivals, envious of the merit, feel a malignant
pleasure in disappointing the expectations of such candidates for fame. And as most
men have a tincture of envy in their composition, it commonly happens that very
few regret the disappointment. To obtain real, and, in general, unenvied praise,
merit, however transcendent, must not be glaringly displayed, but in some measure
exhibited under a veil; at least, it must be so judiciously and delicately shaded, as to
moderate its lustre.

II. The knowledge and practice of the duties of religion and virtue, while they are
the only true foundation of self-esteem and real glory, are likewise, considered in a
national view, the only just objects of public respect and confidence. Great
intellectual endowments, and the performances to which they give birth, can only be
regarded, when abstractly considered without respect to their application, as
splendid monuments of human genius; when applied to bad purposes, they justly
become the objects of our detestation; but the qualities of the heart, incorruptible
integrity, for instance, disinterested benevolence, exalted generosity, and tender
pity, irresistibly command the esteem, and conciliate the affection of all who have
either seen or heard of such virtues being exemplified. (W. Duff, M. A.)

Aims of life
Men think too much of themselves on one account or another--either on account
of some external condition, or on account of some internal traits and qualities. Now,
it is not to be understood from this declaration of the prophet, that a man shall take
no thought of, and have no pleasure in, external relations. There is pleasure to be
derived from them but there are a thousand secondary things in this life which we
are very glad to have, and which we are glad to be known to have, though we do not
put our heart chiefly on them. It is a pleasant thing for an artist to have vigorous
health; but that is not his power. It is a pleasant thing for a poet to be a musician;
but that is not what he glories in. It is a pleasant thing to an orator that he is rich;
but there is something that he glories in besides riches. Wealth alone affords a very
small compensation of glory. Knowledge is often regarded as the chief and
characteristic reason why a man should think much of himself; but here we are
commanded not to glory in knowledge. There is great excellence in knowledge; but
knowledge is relative. Mathematics will exist after we are dead and gone; but
knowledge of spiritual elements, knowledge of the highest realm, knowledge of right
and wrong, knowledge of character, knowledge of truth--these are all related to our
present condition, and are so far affected by our limitations that the apostle
explicitly declares that the time will come when the universe will be revealed to us,
and when our notions in respect to it will have to be changed as much as the notions
of a child have to be changed when he comes to manhood. Our wisdom in this world
is so partial that we cannot afford to stand on that. And when you consider what
have been regarded as the treasures of knowledge, the folly of it is still greater. Many
a man might just as well have been a grammar or a lexicon, dry and dusty, as the
man of knowledge that he is, so useless is he. And yet men are oftentimes proud that
they know so many things, without any consideration of their use. Go out and see
what men know who know something. Men that have useful knowledge, and the
most of it, are the men that usually are the most humble, and are conscious of the
mere segment of the vast circle of the knowledge of the universe that they possess.
Knowledge is a good thing; but a man is a better thing. A man in his essential nature
and destiny is larger than any special element or development in this life. Therefore,
let not a man glory in his knowledge. Especially let him not glory in it in such a
way as to separate himself from his fellows, and look down upon them. While it may
be supposed that these views, derived from the face of Scripture, are applicable to
our modern condition, it is very probable that the glorying spoken of by the prophet
was that which constituted a peculiarity in the East. In Egypt, and afterwards in
many Oriental kingdoms, knowledge was the prerogative of the priesthood. Those
who had knowledge became a privileged class, and received honour and respect; and
naturally they plumed themselves on it, as men plume themselves on titles today.
Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom. In other words, let not a man because he
belongs to the learned class have contempt for those who have not the privileges
that he has. There are multitudes of men who have not very much to boast of in the
way of kindness and humility and gentleness, but who are proud of their culture.
Neither let the mighty man glory in his might. That is, let no man glory in the
attributes of strength. In the time of the athlete; in the time of the warrior; in the
time when men, being head and shoulders in their stature above all others, as Saul
was, gloried in their stature; in the time when men boasted, as David did, of running
through a troop, and leaping over a wall; in the time when expertness and skill were
in the ascendant; in the time when men were trained to all forms of physical
strength and prowess--in such a time men would naturally come to make their
reputation stand on these things; and the tendency to do so has not perished yet.
Men glory in the fact that they are tall and symmetrical. They glory in their personal
beauty. They glory in their grace. They glory in their walking and their dancing. They
glory in their riding. These things are not absolutely foolish, although the men who
engage in them may be. It is not to be denied that they may be useful, and that they
may reflect some credit upon those who practise them. But what if nothing else can
be said of a man except that he rides well? The horse is better than he! Low down,
indeed, is the man who pivots himself on these inferior and often contemptible
qualities. Let not the rich man glory in his riches. We may as well shut up the
Bible, then. That is too much! Yet a man has a right to glory in his riches, provided
the way of his glorying is through his own integrity as well as skill. Such are the
competitions of business, such are the difficulties of developing, amassing,
maintaining and rightly using wealth, that a man who organises it organises a
campaign, and is a general; and when a man of simplicity and honesty has come out
from the haunts of poverty, and has, by his own indomitable purpose, and industry,
and honourable dealing, and truthfulness, accumulated property, about no dollar of
which you can say to him, You stole it; when a man by integrity has built up a
fortune, it is a testimony better than any diploma. It tells what he has been. The true
grounds of glorying are given in the next clause of the text: Let him that glorieth
glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth Me. The knowledge of God--a
knowledge of those supreme qualities or attributes which belong to the higher
nature, a knowledge of the great elements which constitute God--this may be gloried
in; but men have gloried in their knowledge of gods that were contemptible. There
was not a decent god in all antiquity, such that if a man were like it he could respect
himself. The passions of men were the basis of their character. Therefore it is not
enough that you glory in a god. Let him that glorieth glory in this, that he
understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving-kindness,
judgment, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, saith the
Lord. It is as if He had said, I am the Lord that exerciseth loving kindness without
any regard to return, and without any limitation. I am continually developing,
through the ages, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust. I am a God of lenity,
of goodness, of kindness; but the kindness is not merely superficial--it is kindness
springing out from the heart of God That is the glory of God: and who would not-
be-known as glorying in it? Now, knowing this, being penetrated with a sense of
having such a God, of living in communion with Him, of beholding Him by the
inward sight--having this ideal of life constitutes a knowledge that exalts,
strengthens, and purifies men. But take the qualities that make the true man, as set
forth in Scripture--the man in Christ Jesus. How many men can glory in themselves
because they have conformed their lives to these qualities? If a man, being a
mineralogist, has a finer crystal than anybody else, he rather glories in it, and says,
You ought to see mine. If a man is a gardener, and has finer roses than anybody
else, he glories in them. He may go to his neighbours garden, and praise the flowers
that he sees there; but he says, I should like to have you come over and see my
roses; and he shows them with pride. Nobody shuts his own garden gate when he
goes to see his neighbours garden. He carries his own with him. Men glory in such
outward things; but how many glory in those diamonds, those sapphires, those
precious stones which all the world recognise as the finest graces of the soul? How
many men glory because they have the true, universal, Christian benevolence of
love? Have you in yourself any ideal? Are you aiming for character, for condition, or
for reputation--which is the poorest of them all? It is worth a mans while to be able
to answer to himself the question, What am I living for? What is it that incites me?
Is it vanity? Is it the animal instincts? Is it the external conditions of life? Or, is it the
internal elements of manhood, that take hold upon God and heaven? (H. W.
Beecher.)

On the insufficiency of human wisdom, power, and riches

I. The prohibitions contained in the text.

1. Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom. Men may be wise in their own
conceit,--they may be wise and prudent in the opinion of others,--their
measures and counsels may be, apparently, wisely devised; yet God can and
frequently does frustrate their counsels, and turn the wisdom of man into
foolishness.
2. Neither let the mighty man glory in his might. What is man, the strongest
man, but dust, turned into dust, crushed by the mighty power of God, as a
moth is crushed between the fingers? Just consider upon how little the life of
the strongest man depends,--on so trifling a thing as the respiration of a little
air; that being stopped, he dies. Nor is the combined power of the many, able
to stand at all against the will and the power of God.
3. Let not the rich man glory in his riches. To hear men talk of their thousands,
and to observe them pursuing wealth, one might suppose that riches
bestowed every happiness and produced every safety. Yet ask the rich man if
he is happy; and he will answer, if he honestly answer, No. Is he free from
the fear of evil? can he bribe death and prolong his short life? can he redeem
his soul from hell?
4. It is not only folly to glory in or boast of wisdom, strength, and riches; but it is
also sinful; it is idolatry; it is setting aside the Lord God as our strength and
our portion.

II. THE COMMAND IN THE TEXT. But let him that glorieth, glory in this, etc. That
man alone is truly wise in whose heart the knowledge of the Lord is treasured up;
and who reduces that knowledge to practice; and that man alone is truly blessed
who so far understands and knows the Lord, as to put his trust at all times in the
Lord God of Israel. This knowledge and understanding of the Lord God in all His
adorable perfections, as revealed in His holy Word, and as He is reconciled in Christ
Jesus, are of immensely greater value than all the wisdom, and all the power, and all
the riches which this world can bestow.
1. The Lord exerciseth loving kindness in the earth. They who through faith in
Christ have Jehovah for their Father,--their portion,--have all that can satisfy
an immortal soul throughout eternity. Of His loving kindness they have
experience; and their experience teaches them that Gods loving kindness is
better than life, and therefore their lips praise Him.
2. The Lord also exerciseth judgment in the earth. While He delights in visiting
 the humble soul, and the penitent soul, and the believing soul, with tokens of
His loving kindness, He also visits the impenitent, the unbelieving, the
proud, with His sore judgments: and sometimes in this world He makes
them lasting monuments of His awful justice.
3. The Lord also exerciseth righteousness in the earth. For the exercise of
righteousness, the Lords omniscience, hatred of sin, love of holiness, power,
and faithfulness, fully qualify Him.
Conclusion--
1. To those who trust and glory in human wisdom, strength, and riches. Know
we not that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God? and that
power belongeth unto God?
2. To those who in some measure know the Lord and glory in Him. Your
knowledge is still but small and imperfect: for, how little a portion is heard
of Him! but the thunder of His power who can understand? Still, enough of
Him and of His ways may be known here for every necessary purpose. Walk
as children of light. Seek also an increase of light by studying the Word of
God; by earnest and diligent prayer, that the Spirit of truth may open your
mind to behold, to comprehend more and more, the truths which are
revealed in that Word. (E. Edwards.)

On the grounds of pride

I. The various forms of pride.

1. High birth is one of those external circumstances which give rise to pride.
Ever since civil society has existed, a certain respect for antiquity of descent
has been maintained. But if we reflect on the origin of this deference we shall
find that, so far from affording a foundation for pride, it suggests many
reasons for its exclusion. Do you, proud man! look back with complacency on
the illustrious merits of your ancestors? Show yourself worthy of them, by
imitating their virtues, and disgrace not the name you bear by a conduct
unbecoming a man. Nothing can be conceived more inconsistent than to
exult in illustrious ancestry, and to do what must disgrace it; than to
mention, with ostentation, the distinguished merits of progenitors, and to
exhibit a melancholy contrast to them in character. After all, what is high
birth? Does it bestow a nature different from that of the rest of mankind?
Has not the man of ancient line human blood in his veins? Does he not
experience hunger and thirst? Is he not subject to disease, to accidents, and
to death; and must not his body moulder in the grave, as well as that of the
beggar?
2. Perhaps the proud man is invested with a title. Remember, however, that this
is an appellation of honour, and not of disgrace, and the greatest disgrace
any person can incur, is the assumption of sentiments unworthy of human
nature. Have you obtained your distinction by your own merit? Continue to
deserve and adorn it by your exertions for the common welfare, and by a
behaviour which indicates that you consider yourself as a member of society.
Has your title been transmitted to you from your ancestors? I say to you, as I
said to the man proud of his birth: beware lest their honours be tarnished by
your contemptible enjoyment of them!
3. Some are proud of office. Were offices instituted for the general benefit, or for
the private gratification of the individuals to whom they are severally
assigned? This question the proud man himself will not venture to decide in
favour of his own pretensions. With what appearance of justice, then, can the
man, who is intrusted with the common interest, pretend to look, with a
contemptuous eye, on any honest member of the community?
4. Riches, affording a more substantial and productive possession than either
birth, titles, or public office, may seem to lay a better foundation for pride.
The man who enjoys them is in some measure independent of others, and
may command their services when he pleases. He may, therefore, have some
ground for treating them with disdain. I must confess that persons who
possess an opulent fortune, as well as those who are placed in the higher
stations of society, have many opportunities of observing the servile
obsequiousness of mankind, and may, therefore, be tempted to despise
them. But this is not, in strict propriety of speech, that contempt of others
which arises from external circumstances alone. It is a contempt of
contemptible qualities. Are you, in reality, proud of your wealth? Show me
what title that wealth gives you to deprive your fellow men of their just
portion of respect!
5. Corporeal advantages constitute the subjects of that pride with which many
are infected. They value themselves on their strength, or on their beauty. Let
the strongest man consider that the horse or the ox is still his superior in
point of corporeal vigour; that his individual power is of little avail against
the united force of his fellow men, whom he affects to brave; and that a fever
will make him weaker than the child in the nurses arms. When a man exults
in the elegance of his person, although this folly be not uncommon,
especially in youth, nothing can be conceived more ridiculous. But this
source of pride is more frequent among the daughters of Eve, who seem
sometimes to consider personal attractions as the chief distinction of
character. Let her, whose pride centres in her beauty, consider what her
figure will be in the grave!
6. Sensible of the utter insignificance of external advantages of any kind, as a
ground of exultation, there are Who value themselves exclusively on their
genius, their erudition, their wit, or even on their religion. Such persons are
most ready to laugh at the fool who is proud of anything but mind. The
prophet, however, was of opinion, that even wisdom itself is no subject of
glory. By the term wisdom, in the text, he understands those mental qualities
which attract the admiration of the world. By converting thy abilities into
sources of vain-glory, thou displayest thy ignorance of their end, contractest
their utility, by limiting them to thy own narrow sphere instead of diffusing
their salutary influence through the wide circle of humanity, and subvertest
thy own importance by relinquishing the honourable distinction of a
necessary part of the great community of mankind. Dost thou boast of thy
genius and thy knowledge, abstracted from mildness and benevolence?
Reflect that the most miserable and odious being in the universe is also
possessed of abilities infinitely superior to those of the most sagacious of the
sons of men!
7. Religious pride is, if possible, still more odious and absurd than that just now
mentioned. It is a combination of shocking inconsistencies. It unites
 confession of sin with self-righteousness, humility before God with insolence
towards men, supplication for mercy with the assumption of merit, the
prospect of heaven with the temper of hell.

II. THE ONLY SOLID FOUNDATION OF SELF-ESTEEM. He who understandeth God has
his soul impressed with all that is grand and sublime, is capable of contemplating
Deity, and beholds every terrestrial object sink in comparison. He that knoweth
God is acquainted with infinite perfection, and has acquired the conception, though
still obscure and faint, of unerring wisdom, of consummate rectitude, of
inexhaustible beneficence, of irresistible power, of all that can exalt, astonish, and
delight the soul These attributes, brought to his view by frequent adoration, he must
admire, and love, and imitate. This is the true dignity of human nature, restored, by
grace, to that state from which it had been degraded by sin, nay, raised to higher
capacities and expectations than were granted to primitive innocence. The more we
aspire after this excellence, the more ambitious of this exaltation we become, the
more is our nature improved and our happiness increased and extended. This is the
glory of a Christian, of an immortal soul, of an expectant of heaven, of a blessed
spirit! (W. L. Brown, D. D.)

Of false glorying
Such is the weakness of our nature, that if Providence hath conferred upon us any
remarkable quality, either of body or mind, we are apt to boast ourselves because of
it. In our more serious moments we must condemn such vanity; but pride is so
natural to man, that we find it difficult to subdue.

I. THE NATURAL OR ACQUIRED ENDOWMENTS OF THE MIND. A great genius, fine

parts, and shining talents, are strong temptations to glorying. When a man is
conscious that his understanding is more enlightened, his judgment sounder, his
invention finer, his knowledge more extensive than that of the rest of mankind, he is
in great danger of indulging a little vanity. Yet, still, there is no foundation for
boasting. If those accomplishments are natural they are the gift of God, and call Him
their Author. If they are acquired we owe them in a great measure to the attention
and labour of others, who have contributed to improve them. What a poor figure
would the greatest genius have made without books and a master! Like the diamond
in the mine, it must have remained in its natural state, rough and unpolished. It is
education and letters which enable men to make a figure in life. Besides, is it not
Providence which places us in superior circumstances, and enables us to prosecute
sciences and arts? After all, what is the so-much-boasted wisdom of the wise? Is it
not at best, only a less degree of folly? How shallow is their understanding and how
circumscribed their knowledge! Let me add, how liable is the greatest genius and the
finest scholar to have his faculties deranged! A fall from a horse, a tile from a house,
a fever in the brain, will impair the judgment and disturb the reason of the greatest
philosopher.

II. THE SUPERIOR QUALITIES OF THE BODY. A fine face and an elegant figure are
engaging things, and mankind have held them in a certain degree of admiration.
Hence the possessors of those properties have sometimes become proud and vain.
But what is beauty? A piece of polished earth, a finer species of clay, regularly
adjusted by the great Creator! Those upon whom He hath bestowed it had no hand
in the workmanship, and contributed nothing to finish it. Instead of being puffed up
more than others, they should be more humble, because they are greater debtors to
Providence. How little reason such have to be vain, we have many striking examples;
an inveterate jaundice, a malignant fever, a rapid consumption, will spoil the finest
complexion and impair the stoutest constitution. It were well if the fairest of this
worlds children would aspire after something more durable than looks and dress;
even to have the image of God drawn upon the heart, and the life of Christ formed
within them.

III. THE MORE ELEVATED CIRCUMSTANCES OF OUR LOT. It is no doubt natural to

prefer independence and ease, to straits and toil. Who does not wish to live in
plenty, rather than in penury? Yet what is an immense quantity of gold and silver? It
is no better than dust, a little more refined, upon which men have agreed to put a
certain value. If it is hoarded up it is no better than stone or sand. If it is wasted and
spent it is no longer ours, but the property of another; and how quickly riches
change masters, we have every day striking examples. Riches are intrusted to men as
stewards, and they are accountable for the use which they make of them. If they
employ them for the honour of God and for the benefit of their fellow creatures, they
are a valuable talent, and shall receive an ample recompense; but if they minister to
pride and vanity, to profusion and luxury, to avarice and oppression, they are to be
accounted a curse. Honours and titles are no better foundation for glory than
opulence. If they have been transmitted by our ancestors, we have derived them
from them; if they have been conferred, directly, by the king, we are indebted to
him; and we are under greater obligations for such an act of favour. At best, what are
they but an empty name? They may procure a person precedence, and a little more
respect; but they can contribute nothing to his dignity of character. Again, the voice
of fame is a bewitching thing, and numbers have been strangely captivated with it.
Hence they have courted it with the greatest servility, and by the lowest means.
There is nothing so humbling to which they have not submitted, to gain this empty
sound. Have not some sacrificed the principles of honour, of conscience, of integrity,
to obtain applause? And what is so precarious and uncertain as the breath of a
multitude? It is fickle as the wind, and variable as the weather.

IV. THE RELIGIOUS ACQUIREMENTS WHICH WE MAY HAVE ATTAINED. It is the voice
of reason, and the language of Scripture, that every good and perfect gift cometh
down from above, from the Father of lights. In us dwelleth no good thing! On the
contrary, we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy
rags. If then a good work has been begun in us, it hath been imparted to us by the
Spirit of God, the fruit of which is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Are your understandings more
enlightened, your wills more submissive, your affections more spiritual, your morals
more pure, you owe it to a Divine influence. There cannot be a stronger evidence
that we are entire strangers to grace, than that of thinking of ourselves above what
we ought to think. The very nature of grace is to give all the glory to God. The more
of it we receive, the more self-denied will we become. The obvious conclusion from
this subject is, that pride was never made for man. It originated in hell, and is the
offspring of guilt. Let us tear it from our bosoms as the most unwarrantable and
unchristian disposition which we can possibly cherish. (David Johnston, D. D.)
Human glorying corrected

I. The things in which not to glory.

1. Those which to the natural man seem most desirable--wisdom, strength,
riches.
2. Those in which these Jews inclined presumptuously to boast--external, carnal
advantages.

II. Every man must have something in which to glory.

1. That which he esteems as his highest blessing and honour.
2. God sets before us the best objects of glorying.
(1) Me; both understood and known.
(2) The qualities in which God delights.
Mercy, or loving kindness, as opposed to their vaunted strength. Judgment, and
righteousness, as opposed to their oppression of the weak and distressed. (J. P.
Lange.)

A prohibited and a sanctioned glory

I. The glorying which is prohibited by God.

1. Glorying in wisdom is the glorification of self; therefore forbidden. The mind
that knows and the subjects known are both from God.
2. Glorying in strength is forbidden as self-glorification. History shows Gods
repudiation of this boast: in destruction of Sennacheribs army, decline and
fall of empires founded on mere force, etc.
3. Glorying in wealth is forbidden as self-glorification. Sad to behold a spirit
entombed in a mausoleum of gold and silver.

II. THE GLORYING WHICH IS DIVINELY SANCTIONED. To glory is an instinct in man;

is right, therefore, where the object is worthy of him. God here presents Himself.
There is a gradation set before us:
1. Understanding God. Early education calls this into exercise; events of life
afford it discipline; profound, spiritual verities may be by it examined.
2. Knowing God. This is more than understanding Him. Eternity will reveal
new deeps of Gods eternal love and being.
3. In the understanding and knowledge of God, the spirit of man glories, and
may glory forever. God glories in our glorying in Him. (W. R. Percival.)

False and true glory

I. What we are not to glory in.

1. Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom. Neither in the largeness and
compass of his knowledge and understanding, nor in his skill and dexterity
in the contrivance and conduct of human affairs.
 (1) Because the highest pitch of human knowledge and wisdom is very
imperfect.
(2) Because when knowledge and wisdom are with much difficulty in any
competent measure attained, how easily are they lost.
2. Neither let the mighty man glory in his might.
(1) If we understand it of the natural strength of mens bodies, how little
reason is there to glory in that, in which so many of the creatures below
us do by so many degrees excel us!
(2) Or, if by might we understand military force and power, how little
likewise is that to be gloried in, considering the uncertain events of war,
and how very often and remarkably the providence of God doth interpose
to cast the victory on the unlikely side!
3. Let not the rich man glory in his riches.
(1) Riches are things without us--the accidental ornaments of our fortune.
(2) At the best, they are uncertain.
(3) Many men have an evil eye upon a good estate; so that instead of being
the means of our happiness, it may prove the occasion of our ruin.

II. What it is that is matter of true glory.

1. The wisest and surest reasonings in religion are grounded upon the
unquestionable perfections of the Divine nature. Divine revelation itself does
suppose these for its foundation, and can signify nothing to us unless these
be first known and believed: for unless we be first firmly persuaded of the
providence of God, and of His particular care of mankind, why should we
suppose that He makes any revelation of His will to us? Unless it be first
naturally known that God is a God of truth, what ground is there for the
belief of His Word?
2. The nature of God is the true idea and pattern of perfection and happiness;
and therefore nothing but our conformity to it can make us happy. He who is
the Author and fountain of happiness cannot convey it to us by any other
way than by planting in us such dispositions of mind as are in truth a kind of
participation of the Divine nature; and by enduing us with such qualities as
are the necessary materials of happiness: and a man may as soon be well
without health as happy without goodness. (J. Tillotson, D. D.)

False and true grounds of glorying

I. False grounds of confidence.

1. The wisdom here meant is not heavenly, but earthly wisdom; that penetration
and sagacity which many naturally possess, and some to a considerable
degree; or that knowledge of various kinds about the things of this world,
which they acquire by study and experience. Why should not the man who
has wisdom, glory in it? Because all such glorying is vain; because he has at
last no real foundation for glorying; because, after all, his wisdom cannot
secure success, and may prove in the end, and if gloried in certainly will
prove, to have been foolishness. It is the Lord who gives success, and whose
 counsel alone will stand.
2. By might we may understand either strength or power; strength of body, or
the power of rank, station, or influence. There is no real ground for
confidence in these things. As there is no king saved by the multitude of his
host; so a mighty man is not delivered by much strength. The mightiest
empires have been suddenly overthrown, and the most powerful monarchs
destroyed in a moment.
3. How continually do we see people trusting in their wealth, and boasting
themselves in the multitude of their riches! But how vain is such confidence!
It is like leaning on a broken reed.

II. Thy true ground of glorying.

1. The knowledge of God, here meant, is a knowledge of Him in His true
character and perfections. It is a knowledge of Him as being at once a
merciful Father and a righteous Judge; a just God, and yet a Saviour;
abounding in mercy, love, and truth; and at the same time hating iniquity,
and who will by no means clear the guilty. The knowledge spoken of in the
text is an inward, heartfelt, experimental knowledge of Him. It is such a
belief of Him in our hearts, as leads us to fear and love Him, to rely on and
confide in Him. It is a knowledge founded on trial and experience.
2. They who know the Lord, in the manner that has been described, have a sure
ground of glorying. They glory in that which will never fail, deceive, or
disappoint them. (E. Cooper, M. A.)

False and true glorying

I. There is a disposition in men to glory and self-confidence on account of the

personal accomplishments which distinguish them in the eyes of their fellow
creatures.
1. Bodily strength inspires the idea of great actions in its possessors, and
frequently makes them arrogant and proud. It induces them to assume what
does not belong to them, to violate the properties of life, and to carry about
with them a spirit of defiance and insult in their intercourse with their fellow
creatures.
2. Worldly wisdom inspires confidence more than that which is attached to the
grosser qualities of the human frame; and no men are more in danger of
being wise in their own eyes than those who possess this quality.
3. Nothing is so calculated to fill men with insufferable pride as the possession
of extraordinary riches. It produces a semblance of homage or respect--it
commands the services of mankind--it levies a contribution on all nature and
society, and gives to those who possess it a sort of universal empire; and it is
not at all to be wondered at that these minds are more tempted by pride and
glory than those who seek to be distinguished by worldly wisdom.

II. The false and erroneous basis on which these sentiments of glory and self-
confidence are founded.
1. Neither separately taken, nor in their combined form, will they ever teach
 their possessors their true use; but they frequently turn to hurt, not only to
society at large, but to their own possessors.
2. These things are utterly incapable, either separately or combined, of
supplying some of the most pressing wants, and avoiding some of the most
obvious evils to which our nature is exposed.
3. They are of a very transient duration and possession.

III. There is an object which is of such a nature that it will justify the glory, the
confidence, the self-satisfaction, which it is declared ought not for a moment to be
connected with those which are before enumerated.
1. True religion will teach us the proper regulation and employment of all these
endowments.
2. There is a perpetuity and pledge of future and eternal felicity in the religion of
Jesus Christ; not only that which produces present tranquillity and peace,
but that which furnishes the pledge of an enduring and eternal happiness.
(R. Hall, M. A.)

The Gospel the only security for eminent and abiding national
prosperity
The Jewish nation had come to rely on their wealth, power, and political wisdom.

I. The inefficacy of the common grounds of confidence.

1. Reason has been appealed to, but its impotence in the conflict with passion,
ignorance, and irreligion is demonstrated on every page of history.
2. Education has been relied upon, but knowledge and virtue are not
inseparable. Philosophy, culture, the arts, did not save Rome or Greece from
ruin.
3. The efforts of philosophy to reform and elevate mankind have proved signal
failures in the past.
4. National wealth is thought to be the perfection of prosperity. But in all ages
and lands it has proved the most active and powerful cause of national
corruption.
5. Nor is military genius and prowess any safer ground of confidence than
wealth, as the history of nations illustrates with solemn and awful
significance.
6. Political wisdom, statesmanship, the boast and confidence of nations, is
inadequate to secure and perpetuate national prosperity.
7. Our boasted free institutions, bought and maintained at immense sacrifices,
and the envy of the nations, are not a guarantee of the future.

II. THERE IS EFFICACY IN THE GOSPEL OF THE GRACE OF GOD, AND NOWHERE ELSE,
TO SECURE EMINENT AND ABIDING NATIONAL PROSPERITY. It was devised and bestowed
upon mankind for this purpose; and in its principles, provisions, institutions, and
moral tendencies, it is eminently adapted to elevate, purify, and bless nations as well
as individual man. The proofs of its power to do this are not wanting. See the effect
of Christianity on the laws and institutions of the old Roman Empire--on the social
and political life of Germany at the Reformation--on our own history and destiny as
a nation by means of our Pilgrim Fathers--on the condition of the Sandwich Islands,
and in South Africa among the Hottentots. Hence patriotism demands of the
Christian Church today earnest prayer and the faithful application of the Gospel.
(Homiletic monthly.)

False and true grounds of glorying

I. The reasons why the wise man should not glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty
in his might, nor the rich man in his riches.
1. All these things are the gifts of God, and have neither power nor potency
without Him.
2. They are all of uncertain continuance. As no man can call them into existence,
so no man can command their stay.
3. It ought to moderate our tendency to glory in riches, to remember by what
huckstering practices, by what base, material means they are usually got.
4. Further, wisdom, power, and riches are all things which we must leave at
death, even if they do not before leave us.

II. In what we may safely glory.

1. The knowledge of God affords a just ground for glorying, first, because God
Himself, the object of it, surpasses all created excellencies. He combines in
Himself in a transcendent degree whatever is deep in wisdom, whatever is
majestic in might, whatever is rich in goodness.
2. This knowledge of God as being actually all that to His believing people which
they can need is worthy of being gloried in, as distinguished from human
wisdom, might, or riches, because it places mans confidence on an unshaken
basis; and because, moreover, it is a kind of knowledge which elevates while
it humbles the mind, satisfies its desires while it invites the exercise of all its
powers; fills it with pure, noble, enduring excellence, expires not, but only
becomes perfected at death, and fits the soul for the permanent occupations
and enjoyments of the eternal state. (Stephen Jenner, M. A.)

True and false complacencies

I. False sources of human complacency.

1. It is a false complacency when men prefer a lower to a higher species of good,
when they prefer the material to the moral, the external to the internal
possessions. If a man makes the culture of his soul the supreme concern of
life, a due regard to riches will not injure him, because they become, in that
case, a means to a worthy end. But if, ignoring his inward life, he fixes all his
trust, and finds his treasure in something external, the passion for riches
must lead in the end to the corruption of his character.
2. There is the preference of the physical or natural to the spiritual attributes of
being. What is force without conscience? What is will without righteousness?
What is might without mercy? It is like the blind fury of the earthquake, the
hurricane, or the avalanche, inspiring terror, wonder, and pity, but no true
 joy to the rational part of the man.
3. There is the preference of the intellectual to the spiritual. While the pursuit of
wisdom is of all the noblest to which we can devote ourselves, provided it be
inspired by religion, it is, perhaps, of all the most disappointing if that
inspiration be wanting. Of what profit this weariness of the flesh, this aching
brow, these nightly vigils, this impaired health? How bitterly have such men,
from Ecclesiastes downwards, turned in satire upon the wisdom they had
spent a lifetime in acquiring. But it is not wisdom, it is the untrue spirit in
which wisdom has been pursued, that deserves the satire. Had they from the
first yielded up their souls to intercourse with the Father of Lights, had they
cultivated wisdom as a gift and emanation from Himself, to be used in the
service of His creatures, these disappointments might have been avoided.

II. WHAT, THEN, IS THE TRUE SOURCE OF THE SOULS COMPLACENCY? It is to be

found in the knowledge of the eternal God.
1. We believe in His just and merciful administration of the worlds affairs. He
exercises loving kindness, justice, and right in the earth.
2. We believe in the essential goodness of God. In these things I delight, saith
Jehovah. He governs the world in right and in love, because He is in Himself
a righteous and a loving Being. Nowhere does the righteousness of God more
impress the conscience, fill the soul with a deeper awe, than at the foot of
that cross, where He was made sin for us Who knew no sin, that we might be
made the righteousness of God in Him. And nowhere do the beams of the
eternal mercy break forth more brightly from the parting sky than above that
cross. There the grace that pardons sin, that justifies the sinner, that plucks
up the love of sin by the roots, that pours the balm of celestial hope and
peace into our wounds, the grace that deeply humbles, yet nobly exalts us, is
ever revealed. (E. Johnson, M. A.)

Duty of a prosperous nation

I. What it is for a prosperous nation to rejoice in themselves.

1. It is to rejoice in their own national prosperity because it is their own, and
superior to that of other nations.
2. A people rejoice in themselves when they ascribe their national prosperity to
their own self-sufficiency.

II. What it is for nation in prosperity to rejoice in God.

1. It is to understand and know that God is the Governor of the world.
2. For a nation in prosperity to rejoice in God implies rejoicing, not only that He
governs the world, but that He displays His great and amiable perfections in
governing it.
(1) There is reason to rejoice in the judgment or wisdom God displays in the
government of the world.
(2) There is reason to rejoice in the moral rectitude and perfect
righteousness which God displays in the government of the world.
 (3) There is reason to rejoice in the perfect benevolence which God displays
in the government of the world. He is continually doing as much good as
His wisdom, His justice, His power, and His goodness enable Him to do.

III. This is the duty of all mankind, especially of every nation in the day of
prosperity.
1. Because God has given them all their national prosperity.
2. Because He only, in His governing goodness, can promote and preserve their
prosperity.
Application--
1. We have seen what it is for a people, in prosperity, to rejoice in themselves,
and to rejoice in God, and that these two kinds of rejoicing are entirely
opposite to each other. The one is right and the other is wrong; the one is
pleasing and the other displeasing to God.
2. Have we not reason to fear that our national prosperity will be followed with
national calamities and desolating judgments? (N. Emmons, D. D.)

Pride of worldly greatness

As that is a rebellious heart in which sin is allowed to reign, so that is not a very
enlarged heart which the world can fill. Alas, what will it profit us to sail before the
pleasing gales of prosperity, if we be afterwards overset by the gusts of vanity? Your
bags of gold should be ballast in your vessel to keep her always steady, instead of
being topsails to your masts to make your vessel giddy. Give me that distinguished
person, who is rather pressed down under the weight of all his honours, than puffed
up with the blast thereof. It has been observed by those who are experienced in the
sport of angling, that the smallest fishes bite the fastest. Oh, how few great men do
we find so much as nibbling at the Gospel hook! (T. Seeker.)

Baseless pride
Many a man is proud of his estate or business--of the economy, order, and exact
adjustment of part to part, which mark its management, who ought, to be very much
ashamed of the neglected state of his conscience and heart. Many a woman is proud
of her diamonds, who cares little for the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. It is
his conscience and heart, not his estate or business, it is her spirit, not her
diamonds, which he and she will carry into the eternal world with them; and if God
will only induce them to cultivate spirit, and conscience, and heart, by taking their
diamonds and possessions away from them, is it not most merciful of Him to take
these away, and so quicken them unto life eternal?
The true ground of glorying
The passage assumes that it is right to glory, and the tendency of our nature is to
glory in one thing or another. The heart of man cannot remain empty. If you dont
fill it with one thing, it will fill itself with another. If you dont tell man of the true
God to worship, he will worship a false one.

I. A solemn prohibition.
1. Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom.
 (1) Primarily, the reference is to the wisdom of statesmen, to political
sagacity, and forethought. These are not to be gloried in, as the only way
of escaping from political difficulties, or averting impending disaster and
coming judgments. Political sagacity is not a thing always to be trusted. It
does not always bring peace with honour. It may be another name for
ambition--for the power of outwitting your neighbour, and, under some
pretence or other, invading anothers country, and destroying his liberty.
It may have its root near low cunning, cheating, and chicanery. Let us
rest assured that in all schemes of political sagacity, whatever their
seeming success for a while, unless they are founded on principles of
justice and righteousness, disaster and ruin will ensue. For God--who
ruleth all the worlds--will do right; and He has said that, while
righteousness alone exalteth a nation, sin is the reproach of any people.
(2) The text refers, secondarily, to glorying in wisdom of all kinds--the
wisdom of the student, the scholar, the philosopher. Men are more apt to
be proud of mental gifts and intellectual acquirements than of any other
thing. There is an innate splendour, an imperial dignity, about them
which does not attach to such worldly possessions as riches, gold, silver,
jewellery. The man of great wisdom and intellectual gifts may be inclined
from his elevated place, from his eyrie heights, to look with pity, with
contempt, on the traffickers in small things--the trader, the handler of
tools--while he himself is occupied with thoughts big as the infinite, vast
as immensity, and long as the ages. And yet his pride may be checked by
the thought of his utter dependence for his thinking power on the Divine
hand. No gift comes more directly from the hand of God than mental
power. A little clot of blood will paralyse the active brain, and fling
reason from its throne. Then, how small after all is the sum of his
knowledge and his vaunted wisdom. How men now laugh at the
astrology, the chemistry, and the physical theories of other days! And so,
as truth is infinite and knowledge advancing, the thought that the time
will come when our philosophies shall have passed, when succeeding
generations will wonder that we ever believed them, when they shall look
on our advances in knowledge and wisdom as the groping of children in
the darkness, and estimate our present savants and scientific men as the
merest sciolists and drivellers, this thought may well clothe us with
humility. Besides, unaided human wisdom could not find out God. Men
tried the problem long, but it became the darker and deeper. Didnt Paul
find the ignorance of the most enlightened nation on earth registered in
the public square when he said--Whom, therefore, you ignorantly
worship, Him declare I unto you?
2. Glorying in might is prohibited.
(1) Military prowess. Other nations might, if they pleased, glory in their vast
armaments, but Israel was not allowed to do so. Her strength was in the
Lord. Their armaments didnt preserve those nations. Assyria is
overthrown, her glory is gone, and Egypt is this day in the hands of
strangers. Have the nations of Europe nothing to learn here? Napoleon I,
at the head of his legions, made the world stand in awe of him. He
overthrew Austria at Austerlitz, and then sprang upon the Prussian army,
and smashed its power at Jena. But he in turn is worsted at Waterloo,
 and we see him gnawing his heart on a rock at the equator. Napoleon III,
little more than twenty years ago, considered himself the arbiter of the
peace of Europe. He gloried in his might. In overweening pride he
attacked Germany. She turned upon him in righteous indignation, pulled
the imperial crown from his head, and sent him an exile to another land.
Our military prowess and scientific frontiers, our naval strength and
greatness, will do little for us, if Gods arm be lifted up in anger against
us. Why, not long ago, the storm seized our guard ship Ajax, one of our
most powerful ironclads, and made a play thing of her at the Mull of
Cantyre; and more recently the Bay of Biscay grew angry with the
Serpent warship, and flung her a shipwrecked thing on the Spanish
shore.
(2) The prohibition refers also to the individual. How apt are we, in days of
health and strength, when life is a joy, and the movement of our limbs a
music, to put the day of sickness far from us, to fancy that the clear eye
will never be dimmed, the strong arm never be palsied, and the heart,
now so warm, will continue to beat and throb with unfailing vigour. We
may see the sick, the frail, and the weak around, but we are inclined to
look upon them as a class different from ourselves. Is there not a secret
glorying in all this? How foolish is this! For who can do battle with the
King of terrors?
3. Then you are not to glory in riches. Nothing is more contemptible than that a
man should be proud simply because he happens to have a good account at
his bankers, or a great deal of money in his purse. Why, any man, however
worthless, who makes a happy hit may have that--a gambler on the Stock
Exchange or a pawnbroker. How uncertain are riches as a possession! How
many homes have we seen made desolate! How many households broken up
and families scattered during recent years! I am not insisting on the
uselessness of money. I am not inveighing against the possession of wealth. I
am only cautioning you against making it the source of your happiness, or
the ground of your glorying; for it cannot satisfy the deepest needs of the
human heart. Didnt Queen Elizabeth, on her deathbed, say--I would give
ten thousand pounds for an hour of life? Let not the rich man glory in his
riches.

II. AN EXACT DIRECTION. Let him that glorieth, etc. Here is the subject of
glorying. Understanding God, and knowing Him practically, so as to love Him and
walk in His ways. To understand Him is now possible, for He has made known His
ways to men. His whole dealings with His people are a revelation of Himself. To
know God is now possible; for He hath revealed Himself in the person of His own
dear Son, who is the brightness of the Fathers glory, and the express image of His
person. We may understand and know Him as thus revealed; and if we do, we may
glory. If you rejoice in any other, after kindling a few sparks, you will lie down in
sorrow; but if you glory in knowing God, that is a thing which, stretching into
eternity, casts a shadow over the brightest sublunary splendours, and remains an
everlasting possession. (J. Macgregor, M. A.)

He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord

 There is a French proverb to the effect that to do sway with one thing you must
put another in its place. Men must glory in one thing or other, and so it is not
enough that we be told what not to glory in, but we must also be told what we are to
glory in. We need a word, Thou shalt not; but to give that word force, and make it
last, we need another word, Thou shalt do this.

I. THE FALSE GLORYING WHICH WE ARE WARNED AGAINST. Glorying here means far
more than mere coarse, outward strut and brag. We are all ready enough to blame
that, if not to laugh at it. There may be a far deeper, stronger pride, and glorying,
which is quiet and calm and hidden. Indeed, if you think of it, the worst sort of pride
is not what is shown by outward braveries. The man who parades his finery, and is
so anxious to strike us with astonishment and awe, shows so much concern for our
opinion, and is so set upon making an impression on us, that we cannot help feeling
flattered: his huge effort to stand high in our eyes, and stir our astonishment, must
be complimentary. And even when he walks with his chin in the air, or prances
proudly past us, or looks down loftily from a great height, we must see in all that
proof that he thinks a good deal about us, and is by no means indifferent to the
impression he is making. Whereas, a really prouder man, haughtier and more
scornful, might be far too careless of us, or our judgment, to take any trouble about
us: might scorn to make us feel how high he was, and care nothing whether we
appreciated his greatness or no: heeds us no more than he does the birds that fly
over his head, or peer at him from the hedges, and would as soon think of showing
off before them as of standing on his dignity before common folk like you and me.
1. Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom.
(1) No doubt the chief thought in Jeremiahs mind is political wisdom,
cunning devices of the statesman. At first sight it seems a cheap bargain
to snatch the near profit and risk the anger of God. But in the end such
wisdom turns to folly. Gods wisdom will last longest. The wisest thing in
the end is always found to be the right, duty, obedience. And here is
something which puts all men on a level; makes the simple equal to the
genius. The differences between mere human smartness and sagacity
only reach a very little way. It is so very little of the future that the best
can foresee: and how precarious it all is! Whereas, righteousness and
duty never change and never fail, and the wisdom of doing Gods will
must show itself sooner or later.
(2) Pride of intellect. This is the most tempting of all kinds of pride, and the
most stubborn. Often you could pay no greater compliment, and give no
greater pleasure to a talented, clever, wise thinker, than to warn him
against glorying too much in his intellectual superiority. There is no
reaching these men. Raised aloft on a high pillar of self-sufficiency and
self-satisfaction, happy and snug in the consciousness of their culture,
cleverness, criticalness, they look down on all the world at their feet. In
Gods sight what a farce this must be!
2. Might. Some trust in horses and some in chariots. The might of Israel was
the presence and protection of God. What a shame for them to sink into
dependence on arms and armies! Here, again, we must seek to apply the
warning to our individual case. The apostle John speaks of the pride of life
as one of the lusts of the world to be overcome. And, perhaps, there is
nothing in which men more readily glory than in this hold of life. You may be
 too superstitious, actually, to boast about it, and may remember dimly the
terrible suddenness of change, the chances of death, the risks of sickness, too
much for you positively to glory aloud. But yet it is amazing how
complacently, when we are in health and strength, we can look on the feeble
and ailing, as if they belonged to a set apart from us; as if there was a class of
people who were to be sickly and fragile whom we might pity, but to which
we did not belong. This quiet, complacent self-satisfaction is really glorying
in our strength. And the foolishness of this is seen herein, that there cannot
in all the world be anything so certain to happen as the utter collapse of that
glory in the case of every man and woman alive.
3. Riches. Money answereth all things, and is a very likely thing to glory in. It
is the readiest power and easiest to enjoy, and therefore handiest for use.
And though there is scarcely anything more senseless than purse pride, or
haughtiness of heart on account of wealth, still nothing is more natural than
trust in the power of the purse. Against this danger comes the prophets
warning, calling us to remember how insecure is all wealth, and, therefore,
all glory in wealth. How precarious our peace if wealth be its basis. Is not the
history of our day full of desolate stories of swift and sudden disasters? But,
besides, even though no such chance befall, how helpless riches are to heal
the wounds and woes of life!

II. RIGHT GLORYING. The cure of the false is by putting the true in its place. We
have good news--a glory to tell of as blissful as the worlds fairy tale, and with this
charm of charms, that it is all true, and sure, and everlasting,
1. Knoweth Me. How it leaps to the highest height at once! We have been too
long lingering about the cisterns, the broken cisterns. And now, in a bound,
we go to the wellspring of living waters, God Himself. There is no rest for you
till you get there, till God is your portion. What a glad thing it is we can get
that I that we all are offered it!
2. But observe what it is that is known about God particularly. The historical
meaning, the thought in Jeremiahs mind, is this--that, instead of fretting,
and fighting, and scheming, and sinning to hold their own among the rival
nations, they should rather fall back on God the Ruler of all things, comfort
themselves in calling on Him, glory in this that they know He is the Ruler
among the nations, and will guide for good those who seek and serve Him.
This is life eternal to know Thee. As a man seeking goodly pearls, sells all to
get the one; as a man finding the treasure in the field, sells all else to get that
field; so, having got this knowledge, the charm is gone from all else. The bare
knowledge of the fact at once disenchants of all else. Think of a poor beggar
begging alms, and, gathering them carefully in a wallet, keeping them safe,
suddenly told of plenty and wealth come home I How the news, once known
and believed, would make him fling away his wretched scraps, secure now of
abundance of comforts.
3. Let him glory. It is not a mere saying, that it is a blessed thing should a man
chance to do it, or be able to do it, but it is a counsel and command to do it.
Do not keep propping up your peace with false trusts and props, but cast
yourself on God. (R. Macellar.)
The pride of knowledge
Have you ever seen a boy blow up a bladder? It has not grown--it is puffed up! It
has become big, but it is filled with wind, as a pin will demonstrate. Now, the apostle
says, knowledge blows a man up, and makes him look big, so he seems to himself to
be large. Love is the only thing that builds him up. The one swells him out, so that he
appears greater than he really is. The other develops him by actual increase. The one
bloats and the other builds him. The apostles declaration is, that the mere realm of
ideas, the simple sphere of knowledge, tends to produce among men immense
flabation, and a sense of importance, while love, the Spirit of Christ, is the thing
which augments men, enlarges them, strengthens them, with foundations
downward and a superstructure upward. (H. W. Beecher.)

Rich in grace rather than in goods

I have read of one who did not fear what he did, nor what he suffered, so that he
might get riches; For, said he, men do not ask how good one is, or how gracious
one is, but how rich one is. Oh, sirs, the day is coming, when God will ask how rich
your souls are; not how rich you are in money, or in jewels, or in land, or in goods,
but how rich you are in grace; which should provoke your souls to strive, in face of
all discouragements, to be spiritually rich. (Thomas Brooks.)

Earthly riches unavailing

There are three things that earthly riches can never do; they can never satisfy
Divine justice, they can never pacify Divine wrath, nor can they ever quiet a guilty
conscience. And till these things are done man is undone. (Thomas Brooks.)

Knowing God-the greatest good

Twelve days before his death, little thinking it to be so near, Coleridge wrote to his
godchild a remarkable letter, in which the following sentences occur--I declare unto
you, with the experience that more than threescore years can give, that health is a
great blessing, competence obtained by industry is a great blessing, and to have
kind, faithful, loving friends and relatives is a great blessing; but that the greatest of
all blessings, as it is the ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian.
Let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth
Me.

The knowledge of God

So much emphasis is laid upon knowledge by the writers of Scripture, from its
earliest to its latest books, that we might almost say that knowledge is religion.
Indeed, the Master Himself did say as much (Joh 17:3). Yet religious knowledge is
not religion. That may be possessed by him who is ignorant of God, and lives
without Him. Nevertheless, religious knowledge may be the foundation of religion--
the material from which the Spirit draws the living fire of faith and love. A
knowledge of the facts of the Gospel history is of infinite moment, because they so
clearly, so impressively, so attractively show forth the hidden nature and
unspeakable name of the Eternal. Their importance is evidenced by the fact that the
whole of the epistles are devoted to an exposition of the purposes and meanings
which are infolded in them. Yet we may master all these things intellectually, and
not possess the knowledge of God--the knowledge to which the Scriptures attach
such great importance, the knowledge which is eternal life. Clearly there is a
knowledge within knowledge. So vitally necessary is the inner illumination, that one
man may possess but little knowledge of the facts through which God has revealed
Himself, and yet may know Him; and another may have an exhaustive knowledge of
the facts, and not know Him at all. It is not religious knowledge that saves, but
knowledge of God--knowledge of His mind, which is deeper than anything coming
from His mind; knowledge of His heart, as heart only can know heart, by an instinct,
a sympathy, an appreciation. Here we see the infinite worth of the life of Christ as
manifesting God; because the Spirit that was in Him appeared in forms which we
can best appreciate, and which are best adapted to impress our minds and hearts.
We show ourselves to each other in a thousand ways, consciously and
unconsciously, in the tone and manner in which we speak to a child, or give
instructions to a servant, or address our equals; in the way in which we cherish or
sacrifice our comforts; in the presence or absence of proofs of loving thoughtfulness.
So read, the life of our blessed Lord and Master was continually giving some
evidence of what God is, and was shedding light all along the pathway of men; into
every dark valley and gloomy forest; upon every mystery and sorrow and care. We
have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But
let us try and still further unfold the method by which men come to the knowledge
of God. The beloved disciple says: The Son of God is come, and hath given us an
understanding that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true,
even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. Now, in what
way is that understanding given? Partly by the historic Christ, partly by the Christ
within. The one operation or manifestation of Christ must never exclude the other.
To be with Christ is to acquire the power to know Him. To live in the Gospels is to
understand Him who is their central figure, their Divine glory. Christ is the Light
without; He also opens the eyes to see. He is the supreme revelation of God given for
us to know; He also creates the spiritual understanding which apprehends the truth
and glory and divinity of the revelation. Not by logic, then, do we attain to the
knowledge of God, but by spiritual perception, by faith. And this knowledge of God
is not a comprehension, but an apprehension, of Him, a seizing hold of Him by our
spiritual sense, in response to the hold with which He has seized us. (J. P.
Gledstone.)

How to learn about God

The knowledge of God is not a thing which can be fixed in the beginning, except in
words; in its very nature, the knowledge of God among men must, to a large extent,
be progressive; and it must follow the development of the race itself. There has been,
and there is recognised in the Word of God from beginning to end, a steady progress
in the disclosure of the Divine nature; and we see that in the thoughts respecting
God among men there has been a gradual augmentation of the conception of the
Divine character, arising from the process which I have already delineated. It is true
that in the Bible there is much sublime portraiture representing the character of
God; but, after all, no man knows God until he has personally found Him out in such
a way as that he feels that God has touched him. No man can say, I know God as a
living God. except so far as he has interpreted Him out of his own living
consciousness. Now, suppose you say of God, He is just, true, righteous, pure,
benevolent, lovely. Those qualities being enumerated, there will probably be a
thousand different conceptions of the personality which they go to make up. What
are the circumstances which will make this difference in your conceptions of the
Divine nature? I will explain. Some there are who are far more sensible to physical
qualities than others. The sublimity of power is to their thought one of the chief
Divine attributes. God is omnipotent. That idea touches them. He is omniscient.
Their eyes sparkle when they think of that. He is omnipresent. They have a sense of
that. He is majestic. He has wondrous power. According to their conception He is
God of all the earth. None can resist His might. That is your sense of God. If you
only have such a God, you are satisfied. Another person wants a scientific God. He
says, I perceive that there is a law of light, a law of heat, a law of electricity; I see
that everything is fashioned by law; and my idea of God is that He must be supreme
in science; that there are to be found in Him all those qualities which science is
interpreting to me. His God will be just, generous, faithful; but He will be just,
generous, faithful after the fashion of some Agassiz, or some Cuvier, or some
Faraday. Another man conceives of God from the domestic side, It is the mother
nature that he thinks of--the nature that is full of gentleness; full of kindness; full of
sympathy; full of sweetness; full of elevated tastes and relishes; full of songs; full of
all manner of joy-producing qualities. Another, who is an artist, will feel after the
God of the rainbow--a God of beauty. So every person will be dependent upon the
most sensitive parts of his own soul for his interpretation of God. What is it that
makes one flower blue and another scarlet? No flower reflects all the light. If a
flower is purple it absorbs a part and reflects the rest. If it is blue it absorbs some of
the parts and reflects others. The same is true if it is red. And as it is with the colours
of flowers, so it is with our conception of God. What you are susceptible of, and what
you are sensitive to, in the Divine nature, largely determines what your conception
of God is. Each individual puts emphasis on that part of the character of God which
his own mind is best fitted to grasp. For instance, God is said to be a God of justice,
of truth, and of benevolence. Now, which of those elements is first? Which governs
the others? If God is first sternly just, and then suffers and is kind, that is one sort of
God. If He is first loving, and then in the service of love is stern, and severe even,
that is another kind of God. I hold that the emphasis which you put upon the Divine
attributes determines the character of God in your mind; and when you say, I hold
that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, just, good, true, faithful,
benevolent, you have said what this man says, what that man says, and what I say.
We are all agreed, then, are we? Oh, no! If I could take a Daguerrean picture of the
conception which each one forms of God, it would be found that one puts more
emphasis on justice than love, and that another puts more emphasis on love than on
justice. It would be found that one emphasises one attribute, and another its
opposite; and that the conception which each one forms of the Divine character
depends upon the quality which he emphasises most. The next question which you
would naturally propound to me is, Since these are the ways in which God is
conceived of by men, how shall each fashion in himself the living God? I call the
Bible a picture gallery. It is an historical record which is open to all; but it behoves
us each to have some conception which we call our God, our Fathers God, the living
God. I know of no other way than that which has been practised by the race from the
beginning. I know of no other way than for you, in filling out the catalogue which the
Word of God gives you of the elements of the Divine nature, to employ the actual
perceptions and experiences of this life, in order to kindle before your mind those
qualities which otherwise would be abstract to you. Suppose, then, that you have
built up in your mind, by some such process as this, a personal God--a God of your
own--who fills the heaven with the best things you can conceive of, to which you are
perpetually adding from the stores of your daily experience? for it seems to me that
God is a name which becomes more and more by reason of the things which you add
to it. Every element, every combination of elements, every development which
carries with it a sweeter inspiration than it has been your wont to experience, you
put inside of that name and you call it God. You are forever gathering up the
choicest and most beautiful phases of human life; and with these you build your
God. And then you have a living God adapted to your consciousness and personality.
Now, let me ask you--for I come back to my text, whether it is not a good text to
stand on? Thus saith the Lord, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom. Why, he
is a savant! He is a philosopher! He is world-renowned. He is bathed in peoples
observation. Does not a man rejoice in that? A great many do. Neither let the mighty
man glory in his might. A great many men do rejoice in their might. Let not the
rich man glory in his riches. If that were obeyed it would upset New York in twenty-
four hours. Now and then we are brought to the edge of the great invisible realm,
and then we are made to feel that we need something besides wisdom, something
besides might, and something besides riches. When a man lies sick in his house,
feeling that all the world is going away from him, what can riches do for him? It can
be of but little service to him then. When a man is fifty years of age, and he has large
estates, and a high reputation as a citizen, if he is going to leave the world, what can
his wealth do for him? If he knows that he is going fast toward the great invisible
sphere, does he not need something to hold him up when the visible shall have
broken down in this life? The great emergencies of your life make it needful that you
should have something stronger than wealth, wiser than philosophy, sweeter than
human love, mightier than time and nature: you need God. For when flesh and heart
fail, then He is the strength of our soul, and our salvation forever. (H. W. Beecher.)

JER 9:24
I am the Lord which exercise loving kindness, Judgment, and righteousness in
the earth.

God and the earth

These words teach us--

I. THE EARTH IS THE SCENE OF GODS OPERATIONS. There is a Divine intelligence, a

Divine goodness, a Divine hand everywhere visible to the truly scientific eye, and
deeply felt by the devout consciousness of men. Then--
1. Do not be frivolous. Take your shoes from off your feet: an is holy ground.
2. Do not be indifferent. His eye is on you.
3. Do not be slothful. Be earnest.
4. Do not be sinful. Do not break His laws in His presence. Do not profane His
name, when His ears catch every sound.

II. Gods operations on the earth ARE MARKED BY RECTITUDE AND MERCY. Because
righteousness is here, sufferings follow crime; because mercy is here, the world itself
is kept up: the sun shines, the air breathes, etc.

III. In the exercise of His righteousness and mercy on this earth, God HIMSELF
HAS DELIGHT. Gods happiness is in the exercise of His moral perfections.
1. It is therefore in Himself alone. It is in His own self-activity: happiness is not
in quiescence, but in action.
2. Therefore participation in His blessedness is a participation in His
perfections. (Homilist.)

God working on the earth

I. God is acting on this earth.

1. He is working in natural phenomena. He is in all, the force of all forces, the
impulse of all motion.
2. He is working in human history. He works with individual men, His constant
visitation preserveth their lives; He works with families, communities,
churches, nations.

II. Gods agency on this earth is CHARACTERISED BY RECTITUDE AND LOVE.

1. Who does not see loving kindness, or mercy, in the continuation and
enjoyments of human life?
2. Who does not see judgment, or righteousness, in the miseries that follow
sin on this earth?

III. In the exercise of these moral attributes the GREAT GOD IS HAPPY. Justice and
mercy are but modifications of love; and love in action is the happiness of God as
well of His intelligent creation. (Homilist.)

Divine government

I. THE SCENE OF THE DIVINE OPERATIONS. While there are those who, under the
name of science, falsely so called, deny that God exercises any direct control over the
forces and circumstances of our earth, we who believe in the Divine Word are
prepared to accept this fact as settled. But, while we accept this as a theory, many of
us practically deny it. We see the workings of nature around us, and observe the
constant and rapid changes that take place in our own and others history, and we
speak of laws and of chance, of mechanism and of routine, until we forget God, and
so leave Him out of our calculations altogether. We have need, therefore, to remind
each other now and again, that there is a Divine intelligence and a Divine hand
visible in all the operations that are at work in our world.
1. Let us realise that God is at hand, and that He is working around us and in us,
and it would put an end to frivolity, and destroy indifference. We would then
feel that earth is holy ground, and that life is great and solemn reality.
2. If we were to realise day by day that God is near, exercising His power, and
putting forth His operations around us and in us, we would feel that life is
too solemn and too real to spend in any other way than with earnestness of
 purpose.
3. We could not live profoundly and earnestly without realising a purifying and
ennobling influence.

II. THE CHARACTER OF THE DIVINE OPERATIONS. He is here not to frown upon and
denounce us, but to exercise loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the
earth. In all Gods dealings with men, love, justice, and fairness of the most perfect
kind are blended in the truest harmony. They work one upon the other, so as to
maintain the perfect balance of the Divine nature.
1. There is nothing He does, there is nothing He can do, that is not the outcome
and result of His love.
2. When He sends sorrow or trial upon us, it is in order to take from us
something that He knows will injure us if left in our possession, or to inflict
upon us that wholesome chastisement that He sees necessary for our future
well-being.
3. Retribution is manifest everywhere, but there is mercy equally, and even
more, manifest in supporting the criminal, in mitigating miseries, and in the
power of the Gospel to overcome crime itself. Let any one of us here this
morning read his own history intelligently, and he will find in every chapter
and in every verso loving kindness and judgment blended together and
displaying perfect and complete righteousness.

III. The cause of the Divine operations.

1. God delights in exercising these principles Himself. He is love, He is just, He
is righteous. He has not therefore to force Himself to their exercise. The
spontaneous outgoing of His nature runs necessarily in these channels, and
hence He delights in their display.
2. God delights in the exercise of these principles by man. Were we to gather all
the teaching of the New Testament upon practical Christian life together we
might fairly reduce it all to these elements of loving kindness, judgment,
and righteousness. This is to be made a partaker of the Divine nature, and
to imitate Christ. But we cannot do this by our own strength. We need the
inspiration and the power of Christ. On the Cross of Calvary God has shown
us this most blessed combination in its fullest and most perfect light. (W. Le
Pla.)

JEREMIAH 10
JER 10:1-16
Hear ye the word which the Lord speaketh unto you.

Hearing the Word of the Lord

I. WHAT IS THE WORD OF THE LORD? His law and Gospel.
II. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN HEARING THE WORD OF GOD?
1. That we attend His ordinances.
2. That we observe what we hear.
3. That we understand what we observe.
4. That we believe what we understand.
5. That we remember what we believe.
6. That we practise what we remember.
7. That we continue in what we practise.

III. WHY SHOULD WE HEAR?

1. Because God has commanded it.
2. Because it is for our great interest, it being the means of
repentance, faith, light, comfort, and leads to eternal happiness.

IV. HOW WORTHY OF REPROOF ARE THEY

1. Who do not come to hear.
2. Who do not hear when they are come.
3. Who do not mind what they hear if they do come.
4. Who do not understand what they give attention to.
5. Who will not believe what they understand.
6. Who will not practise what they believe.

V. EXHORTATION.
1. Hear Gods Word with reverence.
2. Caution.
3. Attention.
4. Intention. (W. Stevens.)

JER 10:3-5
For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest (the work
of the hands of the workman) with the axe.

The gods of the heathen

 It is often said of God that He is unknowable. It would seem as if this was
advanced as a kind of reason for not concerning ourselves about Him. The form into
which this thought would be thrown is something like If there is a God, He cannot
be known by the human mind, and therefore we need not try to know Him. It is
remarkable, however, that the Bible distinctly warns us against gods which can be
known; and, indeed, the very fact that they can be known is the strong reason given
for distrusting and avoiding them. The Bible even makes merry over all the gods that
can be known. It takes up one, and says, with a significant tone, This is wood;
another, and laughs at it as a clever contrivance in iron; another it takes up, and
setting it down smiles at it as a pretty trick in goldsmithery. Concerning the false
gods of his time, Isaiah says (Isa 46:7). They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry
him, and set him in his place, and he standeth. Thus everything can be known about
the false gods: we can walk round them; we can tell the very day of their
manufacture; we can give their exact weight in pounds and ounces; we can set down
their stature in feet and inches; we can change their complexion with a brush:
because they are known they are contemptible. In opposition to all this view of
heathen deities stands the glorious revelation of the personality and nature of the
true God. God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit
and in truth. This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and
Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent. A conviction of the vital difference between the
God of the Hebrews and the god of the heathen seems to have forced itself into the
minds even of those to whom the true revelation had not come: Their rock is not as
our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges. All human history would seem
to show that men must have either a knowable or an unknowable God. Every
thinking man has what to him is equivalent to a god. His thought stretched to the
point of perplexity because so much appeals to it that is beyond absorption or
reconciliation becomes to man a species of deity, or in other terms an unknown
and bewildering quantity, which will not allow him to put a full stop to his thinking,
saying, Human life ends here, and beyond it there is no field of legitimate inquiry.
On the other hand, a child loved to idolatry becomes very near to occupying the
position of a god. Be it what it may, either a high conception or a low, it would seem
as if we must find some equivalent to God, either in the fog of chance, the temple of
art, or the sanctuary of revelation. Even false gods put their devotees to great
expense in their service. Take the man who gives himself up to the pursuit of an
idea, chimerical or practical, but large enough to be to him a religion. He lives no
idle life; he does not rise with the sluggard, or lull his brain with opiates; he sees a
beckoning spirit on the high hills, and hears a voice bidding him make haste whilst
the light lasts; he writhes under many an inexplicable inspiration; he dares the flood
that affrights the coward; he cannot spare himself: he is not his own. Such men are
not to be despised. They give life a higher meaning, and service a bolder range. I only
say of them in this connection that their worship is neither easy nor inexpensive.
Men have to rise early, to run great risks, to deny themselves many temporary
gratifications, to say No where often they would be glad to say Yes; they have to
abandon the society of wife and children, and the security and joy of home, that they
may go afar to learn new languages, face new conditions, and endeavour to subdue
oppositions of the most stubborn kind. The highest application of this doctrine is
found in the religion of Jesus Christ. Whoever would gain immortality must hate his
present life, whoever would seize heaven in its highest interpretations and uses
must hold in con. tempt, as to mere permanence of satisfaction, this little earth and
its vain appeals. The service of the true God includes all the grandest ideas of the
human mind. This is the supreme advantage which Christianity has over every phase
of human thought. It keeps men back from no service that is good: on the contrary,
it compels them to adopt and pursue it. Is it a question of high ideals? Then we may
boldly ask what ideal can be higher, and morally completer, than that which is
presented by the religion of Jesus Christ? That ideal may be expressed as peace on
earth, and goodwill toward men, an idea involving personal righteousness,
international honour, the recognition of the broadest human rights, and the
possibility of all nations, peoples, kindreds, and tongues being consolidated into one
Christian brotherhood, not as to mere accidents, but as to supremacy of purpose and
pureness of motive. The followers of Bible godliness are not mere dreamers. They do
more for the worlds progress than any other men in society can do. The advantage
which the Christian worshipper has over all the heathen round about him is in the
fact that he himself was converted from social heathenism and from trust in false
gods. Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as
ye were led. Although this has literally no application to us, its spiritual reference is
abundantly clear: we have followed the customs of the world; we have drunk at its
fountains; we have wandered in its gardens; we have bought its delights; we have
sacrificed at its altars; and today we stand up to testify that the gods of the heathen
can neither hear prayer nor answer it, can neither pity human distress nor relieve it.
We know also with equal certainty, on the other hand, that the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ covers our whole life, answers all its deepest necessities, is a
sovereign balm for every wound, and cordial for our fears. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 10:7
Who would not fear Thee, O King of nations?

Jeremiahs study of providence

Even suppose this were a poetical image, it is full of the finest suggestiveness.
The image is that of a man who has been going up and down the idol temples to see if
he could find a god, and having failed to find what lay upon his heart with all the
tenderness of kinship and appealed to his intelligence with all the vigour of
omniscience, he lifted up his eyes and said, There must be something better than all
this. He must needs in his imagining make a King of nations, rather than be without
one. This makes plain a good deal of the theology of the ages. Men did not create it
merely for the sake of showing mechanical or literary cleverness, but for the sake of
expressing the only possible satisfaction to certain moral and spiritual instincts and
deep religious necessities. We, therefore, should respect all honest broad-minded
theologians. They were pioneers in the higher civilisation; they began to build and were
not able to finish: but every age is not called to build a separate temple; enough if one
age builds partly, then ceases, making room for another generation; all the while the
living temple, often invisible and mystic, is rising solidly and eternally to the skies. A
bold title is this to give to the living God, namely, King of nations. There should be no
other king but God. Israel never wanted a king until Israel forgot to pray. The king was
granted, for God does answer some imperfect and almost vicious prayers. He has no
other way of teaching us. As education advances kings will go down; the Son of Man
will come, the glorious Humanity. Meanwhile, even kings may serve great purposes, but
only so far as they are great men. Kings are only good, and all men are only to be
tolerated and to be honoured, in proportion as they are higher than their office, better
and more than their function in proportion as they live capably for the good of
others. Nothing is to be hurried in any direction. We gain rather by growth than by
violence. He puts his watch right instantly who puts it right by the hands; but he is
much mistaken if he thinks the whole process is over and done by that manipulation.
There is an interior work to be done. So with all civilisation, and all its functions and
offices. We do nothing by merely smiting, striking; but we do everything by concession,
by conciliation, by generous trust, by large education, by magnanimous hopefulness of
one another. The prophet acquires the greater confidence in God in proportion as he
sees the utter weakness and worthlessness of all the gods which men have made. Thus
by experience men are brought to the true religion. Let men shed their gods, as they
shed some infantile disease. Do not hurry them in this matter. Let them really have
time to know how little their gods are. The prophet, having seen what the gods could do,
turned with a new cry and with a profounder adoration to the King of kings, the King of
nations. A beautiful expression is that, King of nations, an expression which takes
up the whole nation as if it were a unit, as if it were one line, and that blesses the
national life. There is an ideality in that conception which is worthy of the finest
imagination. Why should there not be a national unit as well as an individual unit?
Christianity alone can take the sting out of geography, and make the whole human
family one in sympathy and trust and love. If ever Christianity has appeared to do the
contrary, it was by travesty and blasphemy, not by fair honest enlightened interpretation
of principle and duty. Jeremiah turns once more to the worthless gods, and from
verses 11-15 he shows the relation of the false to the true, and the true to the false.
Man is brutish in his knowledge that is to say, when left to himself he goes very little
beyond the line of instinct, animal impulse, and convenience; very clever in his
inventions, but never able to touch the heavens; all he does is based upon the earth, and
does not rise to the blue sky, but by some wind or hand invisible his tower is thrown
down in the night time. This being the case, is man to turn to him. self? Ashamed of the
gods, is man to take up with the idea of self-idolatry or self-instruction? The prophet
replies to that inquiry, O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not
in man that walketh to direct his steps (ver. 23). Now, that is most true; for we have
tried to direct our way, and we have failed, we have made more mistakes than we have
ever confessed; sometimes with a modesty that is difficult to distinguish from self-
conceit, we have owned that we have fallen into occasional error; but who has ever
taken out the tablet of his heart, held it up within reading distance, that others might
peruse the record of miscarriage, misadventure, and mistake? On the other hand, how
many are there who would hesitate to stand forth and say, In proportion to
trustfulness, docility, obedience, has real prosperity come? How many are there who
would confess that they had been stronger after prayer than they were before it, readier
to deal with rough life after they have had long communion with God? Christians should
be more definite in their statements upon these matters. They should not hesitate to use
such words as inspired by God, guided by heaven, directed by the loving Father of
creation. Were we more frank, definite, and fearless about these matters, we should
make a deeper impression upon the age in which we live. The prophet recognises the
need of another ministry which for the present is never joyous, but grievous. O Lord,
correct me, but with judgment; not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing (ver.
24). He would have judgment with measure; he would have chastisement apportioned
to him, not indiscriminately inflicted upon him. Here we have philosophy, forethought,
the economy of strength, the wise outlay of ministerial and penal activity. But who
prays to be corrected? Who prays to be judged? We should get great advantage if we
could begin at that point. Correction that is prayed for becomes a means of grace; it is
received in the right spirit because asked for in the right spirit; but to accept it dumbly,
sullenly, or in the spirit of fatefulness, is to lose the advantage of chastisement. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

God the only object of fear

To fear God is generally used in three senses in Scripture.
1. Fear sometimes signifies terror; a disposition that makes the soul consider itself
only as sinful, and God chiefly as a being who hateth and avengeth sin. There
are various degrees of this fear, and it deserves either praise, or blame,
according to the different degree to which it is carried. A man whose heart is so
void of the knowledge of the perfections of God, that he cannot rise above the
little idols which worldlings adore; whose notions are so gross that he cannot
adhere to the purity of religion for puritys sake; whose taste is so vitiated that
he hath no relish for the delightful union of a faithful soul with its God; such a
man deserves to be praised, when he endeavoureth to restrain his sensuality by
the idea of an avenging God. The fear of God, taken in this first sense, is a
laudable disposition. But it ceaseth to be laudable, it becomes detestable, when
it goeth so far as to deprive a sinner of a sight of all the gracious remedies which
God hath reserved for sinners. It should be left to the devils to believe and
tremble (Jam 2:19). Fear is no less odious, when it giveth us tragical descriptions
of the rights of God, and of His designs on His creatures: when it maketh a
tyrant of Him. Away with that fear of God which is so injurious to His majesty,
and so unworthy of that throne which is founded on equity!
2. To fear God is a phrase still more equivocal, and it is put for that disposition of
mind which inclines us to render to Him all the worship that He requires, to
submit to all the laws that He imposeth, to conceive all the emotions of
admiration, devotedness, and love, which the eminence of His perfections
demands. This is the usual meaning of the phrase. By this Jonah described
himself, even while he was acting contrary to it, I am an Hebrew, and I fear the
Lord the God of heaven (Jon 1:9). In this sense the phrase is to be understood
when we are told that the fear of the Lord prolongeth days, is a fountain of
life, and preserveth from the snares of death (Pro 10:27, 14:27). And it is to be
taken in the same sense where the fear of the Lord is said to be the beginning
of wisdom (Psa 111:10). The fear of the Lord in all these passages includes all the
duties of religion. It seems needless to remark what idea we ought to form of
this fear, for, it is plain, the mere a soul is penetrated with it, the nearer it
approacheth to perfection.
3. But, beside these two notions of fear, there is a third, which is more nearly allied
to our text, a notion that is neither so general as the last, nor so particular as
the first. Fear, in this third sense, is a disposition which considers Him who is
the object of it as alone possessing all that can contribute to our happiness or
misery. Distinguish here a particular from a general happiness. It often
happens that, all things being considered, a particular happiness, considered in
the whole of our felicity is a general misery: and, on the contrary, it often
happens that, all things being considered, a particular misery, in the whole of
our felicity is a general happiness. It was a particular misfortune in the life of a
 man to be forced to bear the amputation of a mortified arm: but weighing the
whole felicity of the life of the man, this particular misfortune became a good,
because had he not consented to the amputation of the mortified limb, the
mortification would have been fatal to his life, and would have deprived him of
all felicity here. It was a particular calamity, that a believer should be called to
suffer martyrdom: but in the whole felicity of that believer, martyrdom was a
happiness, yea, an inestimable happiness; by suffering the pain of a few
moments he hath escaped those eternal torments which would have attended
his apostasy. To consider a being as capable of rendering us happy or miserable,
in the general sense that we have given of the words happiness and misery, is to
fear that being, in the third sense which we have given to the term fear. This is
the sense of the word fear, in the text, and in many other passages of the Holy
Scriptures. Thus Isaiah useth it, Say ye not a confederacy, etc. (Isa 8:12-13). So
again, Who art thou, that thou shouldst be afraid, etc. (Isa 51:12). And again in
these words of our Saviour, Fear not them which kill the body, etc. (Mat
10:28). To kill the body is to cause a particular evil; and to fear them which kill
the body is to regard the death of the body as a general evil, determining the
whole of our felicity. To fear Him which is able to destroy the soul, is to consider
the loss of the soul as the general evil, and Him who is able to destroy the soul
as alone able to determine the whole of our felicity or misery. In this sense we
understand the text, and this sense seems most agreeable to the scope of the
place.

I. GOD IS A BEING WHOSE WILL IS SELF-EFFICIENT. We call that will self-

efficient which infallibly produceth its effect. By this efficiency of will we distinguish
God from every other being, either real, or possible. No one but God hath a self-
efficient will. There is no one but God of whom the argument from the will to the act
is demonstrative. Of none but God can we reason in this manner: He willeth,
therefore He doth. Every intelligent being hath some degree of efficiency in his will:
my will hath an efficiency on my arm; I will to move my arm, my arm instantly
moves. But there is as great a difference between the efficiency of the will of a
creature, and the efficiency of the will of the Creator, as there is between a finite and
an infinite being. The will of a created intelligence, properly speaking, is not self-
efficient, for it hath only a borrowed efficiency. When He, from whom it is derived,
restrains it, this created intelligence will have only a vain, weak, inefficient will. I have
today a will efficient to move my arm: but if that Being from whom I derive this will,
should contract or relax the fibres of this arm, my will to move it would become vain,
weak, and inefficient. Further, the efficiency of a creatures will is finite. My will is
efficient in regard to the portion of matter to which I am united: but how contracted
is my empire! how limited is my sovereignty! It extends no farther than the mass of
my body extends; and the mass of my body is only a few inches broad, and a few
cubits high.

II. GOD IS THE ONLY BEING WHO HATH A SUPREME DOMINION OVER THE
OPERATIONS OF A SPIRITUAL AND IMMORTAL SOUL. From this principle we
conclude that God alone hath the happiness and misery of man in His power. God
alone merits the supreme homage of fear. God alone not only in opposition to all
the imaginary gods of paganism, but also in opposition to every being that really
exists, is worthy of this part of the adoration of a spiritual and immortal creature.
Who would not fear Thee, O King of nations? God alone can act immediately on a
spiritual creature. He needs neither the fragrance of flowers, nor the savour of
foods, nor any of the mediums of matter, to communicate agreeable sensations to
the soul. He needs neither the action of fire, the rigour of racks, nor the galling of
chains, to produce sensations of pain. He acts immediately on the soul. It is He,
human soul! It is He who, by leaving thee to revolve in the dark void of thine
unenlightened mind, can deliver thee up to all the torments that usually follow
ignorance, uncertainty, and doubt. But the same God can expand thine intelligence
just when He pleaseth, and enable it to lay down principles, to infer consequences,
to establish conclusions. It is He who can impart new ideas to thee, teach thee to
combine those which thou hast already acquired, enable thee to multiply numbers,
show thee how to conceive the infinitely various arrangements of matter, acquaint
thee with the essence of thy thought, its different modifications and its endless
operations. It is He who can grant thee new revelations, develop those which He
hath already given thee, but which have hitherto lain in obscurity; He can inform
thee of His purposes, His counsels and decrees, and lay before thee, if I may venture
to say so, the whole history of time and eternity. For nothing either hath subsisted in
time, or will subsist in eternity, but what was preconceived in the counsels of His
infinite intelligence.

III. If the idea of a Being, whose will is self-efficient and who can act immediately on a
spiritual soul, were not sufficient to incline you to render the homage of fear to God, I
would represent Him as MAKING ALL CREATURES FULFIL HIS WILL. If tyrants,
executioners, prisons, dungeons, racks, tortures, pincers, caldrons of boiling oil,
gibbets, stakes, were necessary; if all nature, and all the elements were wanted to
inspire that soul with fear, which is so far elevated above the elements, and all the
powers of nature: I would prove to you that tyrants and executioners, prisons and
dungeons, racks and tortures, and pincers, caldrons of boiling oil, gibbets and stakes,
all nature and all the elements fulfil the designs of the King of nations; and that, when
they seem the least under His direction, they are invariably accomplishing His will.
These are not imaginary ideas of mine; but they are taken from the same Scriptures
that establish the first ideas, which we have been explaining. What do our prophets and
apostles say of tyrants, executioners, and persecutors? In what colours do they paint
them? Behold, how God contemns the proudest potentates; see how He mortifies and
abases them (Isa 10:5, 7, 14:5, 11-15, 37:29). Oh, how capable were our sacred authors of
considering the grandees of the earth in their true point of light! Oh, how well they
knew how to teach us what a king or a tyrant is in the presence of Him by whose
command kings decree justice (Pro 8:15), and by whose permission, and even direction,
tyrants decree injustice! (J. Saurin.)

A royal confession of faith

At Aix-la-Chapelle, on June 20, 1902, the Emperor of Germany spoke with
great earnestness in favour of faith in God. The foundations of the empire, said he,
are laid on the fear of God, I look to all to strengthen the hold of religion on the
people. Whosoever does not base his life on faith is lost. My empire and army, and I
myself, have chosen the protection of Him who said, Heaven and earth shall pass
away, but My Word shall not pass away.
 JER 10:10
He is the living God, and an everlasting King.

The personality of the Deity

In treating the doctrine respecting God, the mind is deeply impressed with
the sense of its importance in its bearing on human duty and happiness. It is the
doctrine of a Creator, the Governor and Father of man. The discussion relates not
merely to the laws of the universe, and the principles by which its affairs are
directed, but to the character and dispositions of the Being who presides over those
laws, and by whose will those affairs are determined. The importance of this
consideration to a true and happy virtue cannot be overestimated. The difference
between conformity to a statute and obedience to a father is a difference not to be
measured in words, but to be realised in the experience of the soul. It is slightly
represented in the difference between the condition of a little child that lives in the
presence of a judicious and devoted mother, an object of perpetual affection, and of
another that is placed under the charge of a public institution, which knows nothing
but a set of rules. The idea of personality must be added to that of natural and moral
perfection, in order to the full definition of the Deity. Without this, He is but a set of
principles or a code of laws. I begin with stating what is meant by the personality of
the Deity. A person is an intelligent, conscious agent; one who thinks, perceives,
understands, wills, and acts. What we assert is, that God is such. It is not implied
that any distinct form or shape is necessary to personality. In the case of man, the
bodily form is not the person. That form remains after death; but we no longer call it
a person, because consciousness and the power of will and of action are gone. The
evidence of this fact is found in the works of design with which the universe is filled.
They imply forethought, plan, wisdom, a designing mind; in other words, an
Intelligent Being, who devised and executed them. If we suppose that there is no
conscious intelligent person, we may say that there is no plan, no purpose, no
design; there is nothing but a set of abstract and unconscious principles. And strange
as it may seem to Christian ears, which have been accustomed to far other
expressions of the Divinity, there have been those who maintain this idea; who hold,
that the principles which govern the universe constitute the Deity; that power,
wisdom, veracity, justice, benevolence, are God; that gravitation, light, electricity,
are God.
1. One of the most observable and least questionable principles, drawn from our
observation of man and nature, is, that the person, the conscious being, is the
chief thing, for the sake of which all else is, and subservient to which all
principles operate. The person, the conscious, intelligent, active, enjoying,
suffering being, is foremost in importance and honour; principles and laws
operate for its support, guidance, and well-being, and therefore are secondary.
Some of these principles and laws have their origin in the relations which exist
amongst intelligent, moral agents; most of them come into action in
consequence of the previous existence of those relations. If there were no such
agents, there either would be no such principles, or they would have no
operation. Thus, for example, veracity, justice, love, are sentiments or
obligations which spring up from the relations subsisting between different
beings, and can exist only where there are persons. We may say, indeed, that
they exist abstractly, in the nature of things; but, if there be no beings to
recognise them, no agents to conform to or violate them, they would be as if
they were not. They are qualities of being, and, like all qualities, have no actual
existence independent of the substances in which they inhere. They have
relation to acts, voluntary acts of truth, justice, goodness; and acts belong to
persons. If there existed no persons in the universe, but only things, there could
be neither the act nor the sentiment of justice, goodness, truth; these are
qualities of persons, not of things; of actions, not of substances. Suppose the
Deity to exist alone in the universe which He has made. Then, from the
conscious enjoyment of His own perfections, and the exercise of His power in
the physical creation, He must dwell in bliss; but, as He has no relations to other
conscious existences, He cannot exercise justice, or truth, or love; they lie in the
infinite bosom as if they were not; they have only a contingent existence. Or
make another supposition. Upon the newly created earth one man is placed
alone. He knows no other conscious existence but himself. What are truth,
justice, charity to him? They are nothing to him. He cannot have ideas of them.
They are sentiments that belong to certain relations between beings, which
relations he does not stand in, and knows nothing of. To him, therefore, they do
not exist. Now, send him companions, and the relations begin, which give those
sentiments birth and make their expression possible. He is in society; and those
principles, which make the strength and order of society, immediately come into
action. The necessities of conscious being call them forth. Thus what is chiefest
in the universe is conscious, active mind; abstract principles are but the laws of
its various relations. This may be illustrated, if necessary, from the analogies of
the physical universe. Which is chief, the law of gravitation, or the universe
which it sustains? The one is but means, the other is end; and the end is always
greater than the means. If you say, No; gravitation is the superior, because it is
the universal power of God; then I reply, You thereby assent to the superiority
of the person over the principle; for, as His power, it is His servant; He controls
and directs it. But if you take the other ground, and speak of gravitation as a
power independent of any being, then you cannot deny that it exists and is
active for the sage of the systems and their inhabitants; operating for their sake,
it is their servant and inferior; without them, it would be inert and non-
existent. Thus the analogy of the physical universe corroborates the position. If
there were no material masses, there could be no gravitation; if there were no
persons there could be no truth, or justice, or love. There is another way of
considering this point. What is it that, in the whole history and progress of
man, has proved most interesting to man? What has been the favourite study,
the chief subject of contemplation and care? Has it not been men, persons?
Have not their character, fortunes, words, deeds, been the chief themes of
thought, of conversation, of letters, of arts? Is it not the interest which the soul
takes in persons that is the foundation of society, of its activity, its inventions,
its advancement in civilisation, its institutions, its laws? Thus the doctrine
which denies personality to God is in opposition to the general economy of
nature, which sets peculiar honour on persons. In all the other relations of its
being, the soul is concerned with nothing so much. Why should it be less so in
its highest relation?
2. It also amounts to a virtual denial of God. Indeed, this is the only sense in
which it seems possible to make that denial. No one thinks of denying the
existence of principles and laws. Gravitation, order, cause and effect, truth,
benevolence, no one denies that these exist; and, if these constitute the
Deity, He has not been, and cannot be, denied. The only denial possible is by
this exclusion of a personal existence. There can be no atheism but this; and
this is atheism. If the material universe rests on the laws of attraction,
affinity, heat, motion, still all of them together are no Deity; if the moral
universe is founded on the principles of righteousness, truth, love, neither
are these the Deity. There must be some Being to put in action these
principles, to exercise these attributes. There is a personal God, or there is
none.
3. Further, to exclude personality from the idea of God, is, in effect, to destroy the
object of worship, and thus to annihilate that essential duty of religion. The
sentiment of reverence may, undoubtedly, be felt for a principle, for a code of
laws, for an institution of government. But worship, which is the expression of
that sentiment, is applicable only to a conscious being, as all the language and
customs of men signify. It is praise, thanks, honour, and petition, addressed to
one who can hear and reply. If there be no such one, if the government of the
world be at the disposal of unconscious power and self-executing law, then
there can be no such thing as worship. Let this be seriously considered. What a
desolation is wrought in society, and in the soul, when the foundation of
worship is thus taken away! It is the suppression of a chief instinct; it is the
overthrow of a system which has always made an inseparable part of the social
order, and in which human character and happiness are intimately concerned.
The relation of man, in his weakness and wants, to a kindred spirit infinitely
ready to aid him, of the insufficient child of earth to a watchful Father in
heaven, is destroyed. There remains no mind, higher than my own, which is
knowing to my desires; there is no Parent above, to whom my affections can rise
and find peace. I am left to myself, and to men as weak as myself. We must not
consent to the injustice which is thus done to the affections. What an instinct is
in them, and how they yearn for something to love and trust, is taught us in all
the religious history of the race.
4. In the next place, this notion removes the sense of responsibility, and so puts
in jeopardy the virtue of man, as we have just seen that it trifles with his
happiness. The idea of responsibility implies someone to whom we are
responsible, and who has a right to treat us according to our fidelity. We,
indeed, sometimes use the word with a little different application; we say
that a man is responsible to his country, to posterity, to the cause of truth;
but this is plainly employing the word in a secondary sense; it is not the
original, literal signification. We hear it said, also, that a man is responsible
to his own conscience; and this is sometimes spoken of as the most solemn
responsibility. In one point of view, justly; since it is responsibility to that
person, whose disapprobation is nearest to us, and whose awards are of the
highest consequence to our peace. But why is it terrible? Because it is
thought to represent and foreshadow the decisions of the higher tribunal of
God. It is the thought of the living Lawgiver and Judge which affects men,
of one whose displeasure they can dread, whose good opinion they can value,
 whose favour they perceive to be life. And herein is perceived the wisdom of
the Gospel of Christ, herein is found its efficacy, that, casting aside all
such abstractions, it appeals wholly to the relations of conscious beings, and
subdues, and reforms, and blesses, by drawing the human soul to the soul of
its Saviour and its God.
5. If, now, we pass to the declarations of the Divine Word, we find that the
doctrine we are opposing stands in direct contradiction to the whole
language and teaching of the Old and the New Testaments. Those volumes
speak of God, uniformly and distinctly, as possessed of personal attributes.
They so describe His perfections and His government, they so recite His
words and His acts, they so assign to Him the relations and titles of the
Creator, King, Lawgiver, Father. Until language changes its meaning, and all
description is falsified, the doctrine of the Divine impersonality is a direct
contradiction of the doctrine of revelation.
6. Further still, it destroys the possibility of a revelation, in any intelligible sense
of the word. A revelation is a message, or a direct communication, from the
infinite mind to the human mind. But, in order to this, there is required a
conscious and individual action on the part of the communicator; and this
implies personality. So that this doctrine virtually accuses the Scriptures of
imposture, since they purport to contain a revelation from God, which, in
the nature of things, is impossible. Nay, let us see the worst of it; it
accuses the apostles of Christ. and the blessed Saviour Himself, of
deliberate fraud and imposition. (H. Ware, D. D.)

One true and living God excludes all possibility of another

God never did, and never will receive the homage of a divided heart.
Alexander, when Darius proposed that the two great monarchs should divide the
world, replied that there was only room for one sun in the heavens. What his
ambition affirmed that God declareth from the necessity of the case. Since one God
fills all things, there is no room for another. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 10:11-12
Thus shall ye say, etc.

A Christians office to bring others to the knowledge of God

These words are written in the Chaldee tongue, whereas the rest of the
prophecy is in the Hebrew: the reason whereof you shall then have, when we have first
seen the occasion, coherence, and sum of the words, which is as followeth: The prophet
having in the end of the last chapter threatened the Jews, and all the neighbour nations
with captivity, Edom, Ammon, Moab, and the Arabians of the wilderness: in this
chapter leaving out the rest he singles out the Jews, to instruct them for their
demeanour and carriage in their captivity; to wit, that they should not learn the way of
the heathen whither they should be carried, that they should not worship the signs of
heaven, nor regard their gods of gold and silver, which could do neither evil nor good.
But lest they should think that they had acquit themselves well, if they abstained from
what they should see the heathen do, he tells them they must yet do more than this,
they must make open profession against their gods; they must proclaim against their
idolatry and false worship; and therefore in the middle of the exhortation, he
interlaceth these words in the Chaldee tongue, Thus shall ye say, etc. These words
then contain a proclamation, which the Jews are enjoined from God to make against the
gods of the Gentiles, when they should be carried captive to Babylon, wherein are to be
considered two things

I. THE PROCLAIMING ITSELF.

II. THE SUM OF THE PROCLAMATION. The proclaiming in these words,

Thus shall ye say unto them. Here are three things
1. The persons who, namely, Ye Jews, who are the worshippers of the living
God; ye captive Jews, carried out of your own land, and living as slaves
and vassals under your proud lords the Babylonians; Ye shall say unto
them.
2. The persons to whom, namely, your lordly masters of Babylon.
3. The manner how; thus, that is, not in cryptic, or mystical terms, or in your
own Hebrew mutterings, a language which they understand not, but in the
vulgar tongue of Babylon.
4. In the sum of the proclamation are two things contained
(1) A description of false gods in these words, The gods which made not
the heavens and the earth.
(2) Their doom in these words, They shall perish from the earth and from
these heavens. (J. Mede, B. D.)
The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall
perish.

The destruction of idolatry

I. THE NECESSARY AND UNIFORM EFFECTS OF IDOLATRY, of the worship of
the gods who have not made the heavens and the earth; and if the fact is granted,
which I believe not to be questioned, that this has been the universal practice of
pagans, I ask no other principle to enable me to spread before you a scene of dark and
pitiable wretchedness, which must excite our commiseration.
1. Where there is idolatry there is no God. All the wants you feel, and which God
only can supply, they feel too. You take your wants to God; they take theirs to
an idol; and an idol is nothing. You go to the fountain of living water; they, to
broken cisterns. They apply parched lips to an empty vessel; they are hungry,
and they dream they eat; they awake, and are not satisfied.
2. Where there is idolatry, there are no morals. The true foundation of morals is
the will of God. That will is holy, because He is holy; and a holy God being
 known, His will is known also to be such. There is no knowledge of morals but
where there is a knowledge of God; and there is no sanction of them. It is true,
that in countries where God is known we may find morals without immediate
reference to God and His will. The conduct may be correct out of regard to
public opinion and character; but this public opinion as to morals is created by
the acknowledged fact, that there is a God that hateth iniquity; and this
acknowledgment is produced by the knowledge of His will. From idolatry no
morality can issue, because there is no superior will in its favour. Vice meets no
check from conscience, none from fear, none from a superior Being watching
every act of man, and registering it for judgment. To be like the gods who have
not made the heavens and the earth, is to be unfit for the society of men. The
worshippers of idols are filled with all unrighteousness. This is the language of
inspiration and of history.
3. Where there is idolatry there is a fatal mistake on the subject of religion. True
religion, indeed, there is not, nor indeed can be. Idolatry and superstition are
not, therefore, as they have sometimes been represented, only different
means of accomplishing the same end, giving men the control and benefits of
religion, though by a different process. This, I fear, has been a too common
notion: The same principles of piety have been supposed to be expressed by
the worship of God and of idols; and he who has returned from an idol-
temple has been regarded as bearing away with him to his home and to his
business, a conscience as satisfied, a spirit as refreshed and comforted, as he
who departs from beholding the power and glory of God in the sanctuary.
What corrective control can be expected except that which results from the
presence of a God of purity, of one who hateth iniquity, and who will
everlastingly punish it?
4. Idolatry is inconsistent with religious comfort. For polytheism admits no
providence. It peoples heaven with gods who war with each other, and each
others worshippers. There is no superintending mind in that heaven, no
common plan, no regular discipline; and there can be no trust.
5. Where there is idolatry, there is no hope.

II. IN WHAT ITS REMEDY LIES.

1. Consider the means which human wisdom, resting only upon human resources,
has proposed to adopt in order to raise the condition of the barbarous or semi-
civilised pagan nations of the earth. Hope has rested
(1) On forms of government. As these improve, and the principles of right
and power are better understood, the moral and civil condition of
nations is expected to advance. The best forms are vain, where public
virtue is wanting; public virtue is the sum of private virtue; and that is
the product only of a true and efficient religion. But good government
supposes laws; and
(2) From laws the effect has been hoped. Consider then the operation of
laws without religion. Allow that you introduce principles of right and
wrong between men, restrain violence, correct fraud, establish order.
 Suppose all this to be done: Can the institutions of law reach the
thought? Can the security of law give peace to the conscience? Can
human judicature absolve from guilt?
(3) But these evils have been traced to ignorance and the revival and diffusion of
science have been depended upon as the means of improving the moral
condition of the pagan world. There is no moral influence in science, merely
as such: It may be an instrument either of good or of evil; but is in itself,
and that from its very nature, indifferent. It is an instrument, however,
which, if a good agent does not seize, an evil one will; and he who sends the
light of knowledge, and consequently power, among the heathen, is bound
to send with it that higher science, and those principles of religious fear and
hope, by which only it can be employed to moral and beneficial purposes.
2. Where, then, is the remedy? It is in the Gospel of the grace of God.
There the deep and pressing want of the world is met.

III. CONSIDER HOW FAR IT LIES WITH US TO APPLY IT. It will not be difficult to
show, both that it is laid upon us to contribute with all our
power to the moral improvement of the world; and that Christian missions are the
means appointed for this purpose, which have the authentication of Divine
authority.
1. They unquestionably accord with the standing rule of the Divine
government, to help man by man.
2. This is still farther confirmed, by a fact of no small importance in determining
our duties on this subject. No nation, lapsed from the light and knowledge of
religion, has ever regained it, while left to itself. On the contrary, we see a
constant sinking.
3. The Christian ministry is the means Divinely appointed for this purpose. (R.
Watson.)

False gods shall perish

We have heard and read of the admired Oracles of the Gentiles, of Apollo at
Delphos, of Jupiter Ammon in Egypt, and many more, too long to be named: but all
of them are long since perished from the earth, and from under these heavens; we
have heard of the names of many gods in former times, of great renown in these
islands of the Gentiles, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Neptune, Juno, Vesta, Venus, Minerva,
Diana, etc. All Europe swarmed with their temples and ceremonies, and yet now are
they perished from the earth. Where is now Bel the god of Babylon, Nisroch, the god
of Assyria, Baal and Ashtaroth, the gods of the Sidonians, Rimmon, the god of the
Aramites? Where is now Dagon of the Philistines, Milcom of the Ammonites,
Chemosh of Moab, and Tammuz of the Egyptians? Even these also, whose names we
hear so frequently in Scripture, are perished with their very names, from this earth,
and under these heavens. (J. Mede, B. D.)

True religion and idolatry

I. GOD EXPECTS FROM US THAT WE SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE BEFORE MEN
OUR FAITH AND BELIEF IN HIM UPON ALL PROPER OCCASIONS; and that upon
no pretence, and for the fear of no inconvenience and danger, we should deny Him,
and act against our conscience.

II. IT IS THE DUTY OF EVERYONE TO PROMOTE VIRTUE AND RELIGION IN

OTHERS TO THE UTMOST OF HIS POWER. If our desires to do this be earnest,
and our behaviour be upright, we shall in some measure succeed; for goodness is of
its own nature communicative, and it commands love and respect, and on both
accounts it will have some weight and influence.

III. THE WORDS OF THE TEXT ARE DIRECTED TO AN UNHAPPY PEOPLE,

stripped of their possessions, surviving the destruction of their fellow citizens, cast out
of their own land, carried into captivity by their proud conquerors, and seemingly
forsaken of God. These persons are exhorted to make profession of their faith, and to
hold fast their religion. If we apply this direction to ourselves, we may learn that we
ought in time of affliction to honour God, and submit to the dispensations of His
providence. By this behaviour we both recommend ourselves to Gods favour, and do
signal service to religion.

IV. The next observation arising from the text is, THAT GOD MAY BE
KNOWN BY HIS WORKS, and that the human understanding may discover, upon
a serious and careful examination, that there is one God, Maker and Governor of
the universe; that all other gods beside Him are gods which made not the heavens
and the earth, that is, no gods in reality.

V. The words of the text are a most illustrious and remarkable prophecy, THAT THE
GODS OF THE GENTILES WHO WERE THEN ADORED SHOULD ENTIRELY
PERISH AND CONSEQUENTLY THAT THE HONOUR WHICH HAD BEEN PAID
TO THEM SHOULD BE GIVEN TO GOD ALONE.
1. It was a time when the knowledge of the true God was confined to very
narrow bounds, and His dominion was almost become invisible. Upon many
accounts, then, and according to human probability, it seemed mere to be
expected that the Jews together with their religion should perish, than that
the Gentiles should forsake their idolatry.
2. Concerning the accomplishment of the prophecy, we may observe that it hath
been in a great measure manifested. For the gods of the Gentiles so often
mentioned in sacred and profane history, the gods of Europe and Asia, of
Greece and Italy, the gods of Babylon, and of all the nations surrounding the
Jews, and with which the Jews were so often concerned, have entirely
perished. This great event hath been produced by the Gospel:
(1) By the preaching of the apostles;
(2) At the time of Constantine; and,
 (3) A few ages afterwards.
3. But the descriptions which the prophets have made of this revolution are so
magnificent, that they seem not yet to have received a total completion. It is
generally and justly supposed that a more glorious age shall come; when the
Jews shall be converted, and the fulness of the Gentiles shall flow into the
Church, and the kingdoms of the earth shall be the kingdom of Christ. (J.
Jortin, D. D.)

Creation, a proof of Divinity

Wearied out by the ingratitude and impenitence of the Jews, God was about to
deliver them into the hands of their enemies. They were to pass many years in a
country of idolaters; and the danger was considerable, that they would forget the true
God, and join themselves to the worshippers of a false. It is to guard them against this
danger that they are thus addressed by the Lord, in the beginning of the chapter
Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the
heathen are dismayed at them. The prophet then proceeds to show the utter vanity of
idolatry, by exposing what we may call the manufacture of the worshipped images. But
it was not enough that the Jews should be fortified in the true religion, and thus
prepared to remain faithful when cast amongst idolaters; God would not be satisfied
with the silent testimony against error which would thus be borne by their conduct, if
they steadfastly adhered to what He had revealed and required. Associated with those
who knew not God, and who gave to idols the honour due unto His name, it would
behove them to be preachers of truth, and to endeavour to win the heathen from their
debasing superstitions. Accordingly, in our text, God puts into their mouths the
message they should deliver. Now, if ever peculiar circumstances might have been
pleaded in apology for not striving to expose error, and instruct the ignorant, those of a
captive people might, we think, have presented the excuse. The Jews might have
reasoned that, dependent as they were upon imperious conquerors, whom it would be
easy to provoke to oppression and to violence, they should not act with the wisdom
which they were bound to exhibit, if they in the least degree interfered with the national
religion. It would be a great thing, they might have said, if the Babylonians allowed
them to worship God after the manner of their fathers, and did not require them to
conform to idolatry; but if, not satisfied with this, they were to denounce the reigning
superstitions, and strive to overthrow the religion of the State, what was to be expected,
but that persecution would be substituted for toleration, and that in endeavouring to
show others their errors they should altogether lose their own religious privileges? And
yet such excuses, however specious, would not have been valid. We seem bound to
gather from this, that whatever our circumstances, we should consider ourselves
charged with a message from God. But we go on to observe in respect of the
proclamation with which the Jews are thus charged, that though its delivery, under their
circumstances, demanded great boldness, the terms in which it is expressed are those
least likely to give offence. We are as much taught to use circumspection in our mode of
reproof, as to avoid flinching from the duty because of the difficulties which may attend
its performance. There is nothing of invective, nothing of bitter declamation, in the
words whose utterance God enjoins. They undeniably condemn the superstitions of the
Chaldeans, but only indirectly, by way of inference rather than of assertion. And it is
very observable, as furnishing a guide to ourselves when dealing with men in error,
that the attack on the Babylonians is to be made through principles acknowledged by
themselves, and not through others which might not be admitted. The Babylonians
would be supposed to concede that the creation proved Divinity; and it was with the
principle thus conceded, and not with one which they would be likely to dispute, that
the Jews were to strive to win them from idolatry. If the Babylonians once allowed its
due weight to the principle, that the true God must be the Creator, it would be easy to
prove to them that their idols had no claim to the being Divine, and then gradually to
conduct them to the truth, that the Jehovah of Israel ought alone to be worshipped; and
therefore are the captives commissioned to utter a proclamation involving no
principles, so to speak, but those of natural religion; just as Paul, when preaching at
Athens, employed the Grecian altars as his weapons of assault upon Grecian
superstitions. But now we must look a little at the truth involved in the proclamation
the truth that Divinity was to be proved from creation. The true God, you observe, is
the God that made the heavens and the earth. The stress is laid on the fact of
creation; and we will endeavour to show you why it is laid there. How came matter into
existence? Who made the matter out of which all other things are made? Here is the
Divine act; and this is the act of creation. No power short of infinite could have made
the material, if any could have afterwards wrought it into the worlds. Give an angel the
material, and, for anything I know, he might work it into the wing or the flower; but to
make the material, and then work it into the exquisite forms, this is beyond any angel;
before Him who can do this, I fall prostrate as God. But we have still, in conclusion, to
consider our text in the light of a prophecy, and to examine what grounds we have for
expecting its literal accomplishment. It was a bold prophecy, as originally uttered, and
there seemed no likelihood of its ever being fulfilled. With the exception of a solitary
people, and that people now exiles and captives, all the inhabitants of the earth then
worshipped false gods. Who could have expected so stupendous a revolution as was
predicted by our text the downfall of heathenism over the whole habitable globe? Yet
already a vast advance has been made towards so glorious a consummation. Where
now is Bel, the god of Babylon, and Nisroch the god of Assyria? Where now are Baal and
Ashtaroth, the gods of the Zidonians? Where now is the Dagon of the Philistines, the
Chemosh of the Moabites, the Milcom of the Ammonites? Or if you pass from scriptural
records to profane, where now are the thousand deities of Greece and of Rome those
whose praises were hymned by the most melodious of poets, whose praise was
renowned on continents and islands, to whom the great and the mean, kings and
warriors, sages and servants, conspired to do honour? Hath it not come true of all these,
that they have perished from the earth and from under the heavens? They made not the
earth, neither were the heavens the work of their hands; and wanting the distinguishing
mark of Divinity, creative energy, it mattered nothing that millions were their
worshippers, that philosophers were ready to uphold their pretensions, and armies to
defend their temples. The true God rose in His jealousy, and with the breath of His
indignation He scattered the idols, so that their very names have vanished from the
territories once crowded with their shrines. And what has been thus already done, is
our warrant that the text shall be accomplished to the letter. False gods, they shall
perish; false principles, they shall perish. False gods, they may have been honoured in
the fairest provinces of this globe, where the sky is the most brilliant, and the foliage
the richest, and the waters the most sparkling; but they spread not out that sky, and
they pencilled not that foliage, and they poured not forth those waters; and therefore
shall they make their grave with the Jupiter, and the Apollo, and the Minerva known
now only in classic story, and swept from classic land. They shall perish from the earth,
and from under these heavens. False principles of a vain philosophy principles which
would substitute reason for revelation, and ascribe to man independence and moral
strength these may have their admirers and defenders; but these cannot conduct to
immortality, these cannot effect a new creation, these cannot build us a home beyond
the grave, and throw open to us new heavens and a new earth; and, therefore, unable
to create, they too shall perish, and the world be willing to take salvation without
money and without price. I require you to try principles as the Babylonians were to try
deities by their power of creating. If there be nothing in a religious system to renew
human nature, to remould the dispositions, and so to alter a man that old things shall
pass away, the system is inadequate to our necessities, and that too, because void of
creative energy, and therefore leaving us in our feebleness and in our corruption; and
every such system shall consequently perish. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
 JER 10:12
He hath made the earth by His power.

Wisdom the source and sovereign of worlds

These words give us two ideas concerning the universe.
I. It is ORGANISED BY WISDOM.
1. This stands opposed to the idea of
(1) The eternity of the universe. The universe is not eternal in its elements,
or combinations. There was a period far back in the abysses of eternity,
when there was nothing, when the Absolute One lived alone.
(2) The contingent origin of the universe. It sprang from no fortuitous
concourse of atoms: By wisdom hath He founded the earth, etc. God has
hollowed out the oceans, and arranged the systems of clouds.
2. The scientific student of nature sees design and exquisite adaptations in every
part of nature: By His knowledge the depths are broken up. We are raised
by science, says Lord Brougham, to an understanding of the infinite
wisdom and goodness which the Creator has displayed in all His works. Not
a step can we take in any direction without perceiving the most
extraordinary traces of design; and the skill, everywhere conspicuous, is
calculated in so vast a proportion of instances to promote the happiness of
living creatures, and especially ourselves, that we feel no hesitation in
concluding that if we knew the whole scheme of Providence, every part would
appear in harmony with a plan of absolute benevolence.

II. It is organised by the WISDOM OF ONE BEING. He the Lord God. It is not
the outcome of many intelligences. One intellect drafted the whole. (David Thomas,
D. D.)

JER 10:19-20
Woe is me for my hurt.

The collapses of life (with Psa 27:5)

I. THE LAMENT OF THE PROPHET. Woe is me for my hurt! My wound is grievous:
Truly this is a grief. It was not merely an irritation, or an inconvenience, or an
annoyance, a disagreeable and disappointing incident, it was a grief a bitter, crushing
overthrow.
1. The overthrow is total. My tabernacle is spoiled, and all my cords are
broken. Victor Hugo tells of a wonderful tent that was given to Napoleon
 by the Sultan Selim: From the outside it appeared like an ordinary tent,
remarkable only for having in the canvas little windows, of which the frames
were of rope; three windows on each side. The inside was superb. The
visitor found himself inside a great chest of gold brocade; upon this brocade
were flowers and a thousand fancy devices. On looking closely into the cords
of the windows one discovered that they were of the most magnificent gold
and silver lace; each window had its awning of gold brocade; the lining of the
tent was of silk, with large red and blue stripes. If I had been Napoleon, I
should have liked to place my iron bed in this tent of gold and flowers, and
to sleep in it on the eve of Wagram, Jena, and Friedland. Now,
metaphorically speaking, Napoleon did dwell in a magnificent tabernacle,
but at length he slept in it for the last time on the eve of Waterloo, for the
whole thing fell into awful ruin. Napoleon III shared the same fortune. He
slept long in his glorious imperial tent, but on the eve of Sedan he slept in it
for the last time, for the splendid fabric vanished as a dream. Within
comparatively few years we have seen many rich and illustrious men like
General Grant in New York, Secretan in Paris, the Gurneys and Barings in
London, reduced to poverty at a stroke their heirlooms scattered, their
estates alienated, their pictures knocked down by auction, their splendid
palaces dismantled and sold. And this kind of thing is ever going on. Crops
are spoiled, ships founder, property deteriorates, tariffs close mills and
factories, fires destroy, clerks embezzle, stocks and shares fall, and lovely
tents are brought to the ground. We see these reverses startlingly in fallen
conquerors, in exiled kings, in bankrupt millionaires; there the thing is writ
large; but in a humbler way financial loss and embarrassment overtake
thousands, and bury their delightful, cozy tents in the sand. Sometimes
melancholy accidents bereave us and break up our homes.
2. The overthrow is sudden. A tent in the wilderness is suddenly broken, and
just as suddenly are the hopes of men laid in the dust. We cannot guarantee
anything. Our happy home may be smitten; our children gone forth; our
health impaired; our days over. Science has invented a whole system of
warning touching the calamities of nature. The seismograph is an alarum
announcing the stealthy steps of the earthquake and volcano. Weather charts
teach much concerning cyclonic disturbances. Various subtile barometers
indicate atmospheric variations, and the mariner on the sea, the miner in
the depths, is warned of impending peril. But there are no instruments fine
enough to detect the approaching tempests and earthquakes which wreck
human fortunes and hopes, no storm drum to warn us into safe harbours.
3. The overthrow is irreparable. There is none to stretch forth my tent any
more, and to set up my curtains. The prophet saw that there was no prince,
no warrior, no statesman, no patriot with the requisite capacity and
strength, to save the State, to retrieve its shattered fortunes, and to recall its
children. The blow was so crushing that the nation was beyond recovery. It is
frequently thus in private life. Physical afflictions prove incurable. The
earthly tabernacle receives a mortal wound; we may linger, but the result is
inevitable. Some financial disasters are absolutely irremediable. Some
domestic bereavements are without compensation or hope. There are no
compensations or substitutes.
 4. The overthrow is personal. Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it (R.V.).
As Miss McKenny writes in her suggestive book, A Piece of an Honeycomb:
The story of human life is ever the same, though told in new versions and in
differing climes. Things go on smoothly with us for years, and we never can
believe that the trouble we are born to will some day overtake us. But the
hour strikes, and the bounds are removed; the flood gates are opened, and
in upon us pours the full, devastating tide of sorrow. Not a new experience
in this world of sin and suffering; yet strangely new and terrible to us. We sit
in dumb desolation in the midst of our spoiled tabernacle. Hearts which
were one with ours are severed from us. It may be by death, or by something
which is worse than that. We stand for the time in darkness upon the
shadow side of God, and see no light of comfort or of restoration. I must
bear it, says the stricken heart, with a wail.

II. THE REFUGE OF THE PSALMIST. For in the time of trouble He shall hide
me.
1. Fly to the living God. Grand dwelling place! Storms and earthquakes it defies;
time does not sap its strength; the topmost wave of the deluge fell short of
its threshold; burning worlds will not scorch it. Happy thing in the dark day
to fall back on the eternal justice, love, and promise. Someone said to
Luther: When Frederic the Elector forsakes you, where will you find
shelter? Under heaven, said the heroic saint. And when everything else has
gone the blue, calm, smiling heaven of the all-encompassing God shall be
our refuge.
2. Rest in the loving Saviour. We are desolate, weak, our tent dissolved, our
strength, our righteousness, our friendships, our hopes are gone; but the
merit and love of Christ, like the strong, silken, embroidered curtains of a
royal tent, wrap us round and keep us from the fear of evil.
3. Prepare for the heavenly home. Not long since, walking in a church, I
observed this epitaph: And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in Thee!
And now, Lord. Now, when everything is absolutely gone. In days past,
seemed to say the dead man, I had something to trust to that was tangible
and ascertainable. I had the members of the body eyes to behold, feet to
run, hands to fight; but all are now paralysed; I had some gold and silver, but
this shroud has no pockets; I had companions and helpers, but lover and
friend is put far from me. Now, Lord, what wait I for? Not a rag left of all
the tent, not a plank of the broken ship; it is absolute ruin and despair, or
absolute faith and victory. My hope is in Thee. And God will not confound
us. (W. L. Watkinson.)

JER 10:23
O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself.

The seat and source of authority in religion

 We cannot but admire the marvellous precision with which instinct works.
The lower animals make no progress, because their work, as the fruit of unerring
instinct, is perfect. Their wants are few and limited, and they are endowed with the
power perfectly to satisfy those wants. But that is what is here denied as belonging to
man. With the greatest wants of any creature, he has the fewest instincts; and
therefore at the beginning of his existence he is the most dependent of all creatures.
Made to think, he is made to go out of himself, to separate himself from all his
surroundings, to know himself as a lonely, isolated individual, and to rise above
himself to the eternal source of all existence. As so constituted, he cannot find the
way of his life within himself. His way is like that of a ship as it crosses the sea. The
chart and compass are there, and the captain too, with his intelligence to regulate
the whole; and yet it cannot be said that her way is within herself, or that she has
within herself all that is needful to direct her over the billows; for, not to speak of the
winds of the free heavens required to fill the sails, there are two points without the
vessel, above and beyond her altogether, by which her course is absolutely
determined. These are the pole star and the destination of the ship: a point in the
high heavens, and a point on the other side of the sea. By those two points is her
course determined across the dark and treacherous deep. The mariner has to be
looking out of himself continually in two directions. His eye has to be now looking at
the heavens, and anon to be sweeping the horizon. And so it is with man. He has the
chart of conscience and the compass of reason; but these have no meaning at all,
save as they imply that which is above and beyond man himself, even the revealed
will of God that word that is settled as a pole star in the heavens; and the true
destination of man as a voyager across the sea of time to the eternal shore.
Suppose, for a moment, that you have a ship at sea, but there are no clear heavens
above it, and no definite destination before it. What a strange and anomalous thing
it would be, blown about by every wind, without meaning or purpose, and certain to
founder at last! Now that is what the life of every man is, who has no belief in a God
above him, and an eternity before him. There are millions of men in that condition
today. But there are others who have found both of these in Christ. He is above
them, and He is before them. He is that One, therefore, by whom their whole course
is fixed their pole star, and their eternal haven.

I. FORMS OF AUTHORITY SUMMED UP CHRIST.

1. The authority of Nature. Wherever we have law we have authority a
something that either enforces itself, and is obeyed by us in spite of
ourselves; or a something that ought to be obeyed, whether we obey it or
not. The laws of Nature are so many principles that for the most part enforce
themselves. We have the power to violate them, but they enforce themselves
not the less. The law breaker does not break the law in the way of setting it
aside, or of rendering it non-effective. Strictly speaking, he only breaks
himself; as when, ignoring the law of gravitation, he steps over the brink of a
precipice. The laws of Nature are universal. They determine the circulation
of the planets and the circulation of the blood. They form a constellation and
they shape a tear. They are uniform in their operation. The same causes, in
like circumstances, are always producing the same results. The laws of
health are those we are bound to respect if we would prolong our days upon
the earth as far as possible. Now, there is clearly an authority here of a
 certain external character.
2. The authority of conscience. If now we turn away from that outer authority, and
consider what we ourselves are, as having a nature of our own, we find that we
are not merely creatures of sensation, capable of bodily pain and pleasure, but
that we have a moral nature, capable of feelings of another kind; emotions of joy
and sorrow, satisfaction and chagrin, self-approbation and shame, springing
out of perceptions of moral good and evil, right and wrong, a something that
ought to have been done, and a something that ought not to be done. Who can
deny that there is a form of authority here, stamped upon our very being; and
that there are laws and rules of moral conduct, which no time can change, to
which the most earnest and thoughtful are keenly alive, and to which only the
most degraded are insensible.
3. The real authority is not in the impersonal whole of nature without us, which,
as impersonal, is inferior to ourselves; nor is it in the conscience within us,
which may be very dimly sensible as to what right and wrong really are, but it
is in the God above us, of Whose will all that is good in nature and man is
the expression; and of whose word, the ideal man, Jesus Christ, is the one
realised embodiment. As the eye is made for the light, so is the conscience
made for God. A conscience without God is an eye in darkness, or a function
without its legitimate object. Mans life attains to perfection, as it
consciously approximates to God, and it moves in its legitimate orbit, as the
centre of its gravity is in Christ.

II. FORMS OF AUTHORITY DERIVED FROM CHRIST.

1. The authority of the Bible. This is derived from Him. The method is an
entirely mistaken one that begins by searching out all the seeming
contradictions, and arguing from these as to the worth of the book as a
whole. The true method is to take ones stand upon the undeniable truth of
the book; and from that point, look at the supposed errors, which will then
appear to be utterly fractional, in their relation to the whole, and
comparatively non-essential in respect of the exclusive claim of the whole. If
that is allowed to be the true method, the question arises In what does the
substantial unity of the Bible consist? We understand it to consist in this,
that it testifies in all its parts, when spiritually understood, to Christ, Jesus
says: Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad. All the
saints and prophets of the old time were looking in this direction; and their
inspiration lay in the extent to which they were elevated to see that vision. In
like manner, the New Testament finds its unity as pointing in all its parts to
the living and incarnate Christ.
2. The authority of the Church. We all know how much this is discounted in our
time; and how much there is to justify this disparagement of the Church.
There are its divisions, its animosities, and what, in some respects, may be
called its failures. But no one whose ideas have been formed along the line of
the Divine purpose is much affected by all that, in the way of being shaken in
his faith. Faith is just the cultivation of ideas, as opposed to a life that is
always buried in what it calls practical affairs. The idea of the Church is that
of a body formed and filled by the Word and Spirit of God. Surely a body of
 that description has some authority? The Spirit of truth is promised to lead
us into all truth. The common convictions of the sanctified thinkers of all
ages have the authority of all the truth they contain.
3. The authority of the State. This, too, is derived from Christ. When Pilate,
speaking in the name of imperial Rome, declared that he had power to dispose
of Jesus, the Master said: Thou hast no power over Me at all, except it were
given thee from above. The State, as empowered to enforce its decisions by
physical force, is clearly separate from the Church, which has no right to lift the
sword. It is no part of the function of the one of those great forms of authority
to supersede the other. But there are questions with which both have to deal.
There is the question of education, the question of the social condition of the
people, the Sabbath question. Questions of this kind cannot be solved apart
from the cooperation of both the spiritual and the secular functions. (P.
Ferguson, D. D.)

Progression and direction

I. NATURAL ACTION. Mans action in life complex, involving two distinct parts, of
which he has only one in himself the power of natural action.
1. Its ease. Just the simple putting forth of the power of life; going on,
without thinking if right or wrong. Danger of forgetting a deficiency in this part
progression: mistake a part for the whole. We think we can act aright,
simply because we have the power of action at all. It is as if the ship could
reach the port just because she has undoubted capacities for sailing, though
no helmsman or compass.
2. This mere power of natural action has a tendency to mislead. It makes a man
unreflective. Proneness to slight the invisible, because it does not intrude
itself upon us, although the things of this life have inseparable association
with those hidden from sight in another world. Thus mans walk may do
much as regards this life, but alas! how little effect for the world beyond.
Leads to a waste of strength; for toil where nothing can be taken, and
inaction where much might be won.

II. NEEDFUL DIRECTION.

1. Take care to go out of ourselves for direction. Shall not remedy the matter
by taking more thought. When we have done much in that way, it will only
be man that walketh, directing his own steps; doing it more carefully, but
still doing it himself. Thus going out of self may be humiliating.
2. The advantages of this going out of self. There will flow in upon us
wisdom from above.
3. But we must yield ourselves to God to be ordered. Content to be led by
ways we know not.
4. Ways are not really open, because apparently so. Nor because we can do this
thing or that, is it therefore right. Because of this error, we have often gone
 into spheres where God is not, and where we should not have been.
5. Success before the world is not, therefore, a proof of our being right, nor of
success in our relationship towards God. Failure here leaves our work but
as wood, hay, stubble. Danger of being too eager for success.
6. Learn not to put implicit confidence in energy or action. It is likely to
mislead; may make the man prominent in us, and not God. (P. B.
Power, M. A.)

The need of a guide

I. IT IS OF IMMENSE IMPORTANCE THAT MANS STEPS IN LIFE SHOULD BE
RIGHTLY DIRECTED. Human life is but a succession of steps, and every step is
important. You may step into a by path where serpents lurk and savage beasts are in
quest of prey. You may step over a precipice from which you will fall to rise no more.
One false step may ruin you forever; every step you give you touch a chord which will
send its vibrations along the awful future. See then you walk circumspectly, not as
fools, but as wise men. The path of life is labyrinthian, cloudy, rugged, perilous, on every
hand beset with dangers.

II. A RIGHT DIRECTION OF HIS STEPS MUST COME FROM A SOURCE

OUTSIDE HIMSELF. It is not in man. What blunders the greatest sages of all times
and lands have made, both in religion and morals! The world by wisdom knew not
God Instinct rightly directs the brute in his path of life; but mans reason has failed to
direct him. Through depravity the eye of reason has become so dim that it cannot see
the right path. We are of yesterday, and know nothing. The right guide, then, must be
sought without, and where? In the written word? It is there, but men, through
difficulties of interpretation, often fail to find it. Where then? In the biography of Christ.
His example is the guide: Follow Me. What St. Augustine said let us all feel. I am a
little child, but my Father is my sufficient Guardian. (Homilist.)

The plan of God

A creature intelligent and responsible, I know how to propose an end to
myself, and to take means towards its accomplishment. It is thus I make a plan for
the development of my faculties, for the selection of my career, for the education of
my family, and for the government of my household. But though capable of willing
and of acting, I cannot arrange at my own discretion either things, events, or
myself; and if sometimes my plans succeed, much more frequently do they fail. This
weakness is so inherent in my movements, and entails so much failure, that my real
life contrasts painfully with my ideal. It is at this moment that Jeremiah interposes
to show me, in the derangement of my plan, a law directing me to a higher plan
namely, the plan of God for me a perfect plan, which is far better than mine, both
as it regards my general interests, and probably my personal advantage; a powerful
plan, which infallibly accomplishes itself, whatever may be the destinies and
vicissitudes of mine; and an all-controlling plan which reigns supremely over mine,
and is intended to rectify it. From this time, that which calls itself overturned in my
plan takes the name of success in that of God: as in those pictures of tapestry that
are worked from behind, the coloured threads, which the workman weaves with a
skilful hand, present an appearance of inextricable confusion, until they are seen on
their true side, which is that not of the workman, but of the artist; so the plan of
man is on the wrong side of life that of God is on the right. Regarded thus, my
action is never without law, nor without result, for I am always accomplishing the
plan of God, knowing it or not, let us rather say, willing it or not. The history of
peoples, of great men, and even of every day, discovers alike, to an attentive
observer, Gods plan, deciding all others without interfering with the free
operations of man. The people, of all others, who can furnish me with the best
illustration are the Israelites. If anywhere there had ever been the appearance of a
plan exclusively belonging to man, it was in heathen Rome, spreading from people
to people the network of that political ascendency, which appears, for a long time, to
be endowed with the singular prerogative of strengthening itself by extension; or in
Christian Rome, spreading from church to church the more subtle network of
religious ascendency, which we see by turns, or rather which we see at the same
time, and in the same places, energetically repulsed, and tamely submitted to, if not
courted. But when we observe this more closely, we discover at a glance, in all that
has happened to one and to the other Rome, the marks of a plan which has not
originated in the judgment of man, but which takes from a higher region its period
of departure and approach. But let us approach our subject nearer: let us come to
everyday life, and to that life considered in all that is most allied to our own being,
and to our own doing; even there, what real part belongs to you in the arrangement
of your domestic life? To begin at the beginning, does not a popular proverb teach
us in how many ways the best contrived conjugal relationships escape not only the
control, but even the anticipations of man? Life, health, family, property; yes, more
sympathy and mutual affection; on how many things do all these depend, which
depend so little on you! The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is of the Lord.
But let us consider that which depends upon us most of all the education of our
children. Here is a son born unto me: I exert over him, after God, the greatest power,
material, intellectual, and spiritual, in the whole universe. One says, this child will
become what I wish him to be, apart from that which is unforeseen yes, the
unforeseen; but then how much does that one word include! Oh! where is the man
so blind as to imagine that he can determine the future of his son? What are we to
say of those educations that break all our arrangements? those arrangements
which sometimes fail after every possible precaution, and others which succeed
when the precautions have been omitted, but where this omission appears to have
favoured a truer and better development? Are we to say that, because our plan fails,
everything is to be abandoned to circumstances, under pretence of leaving
everything to God? No; by no means. There must be no occasion for self-reproach:
there must rather be redoubled diligence and wisdom, along with the deep
conviction that we are working for a plan which is wholly of God. But still, after all,
education, this largest sphere of mans power, is also the scene of his greatest
weakness: and there is no person on the face of the earth more fitted to repeat the
lesson of Jeremiah than the father of a numerous family, entering, like Moses, into
his rest, in sight of that unknown Canaan, into which the generation following
enter. O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that
walketh to direct his steps. No one but Jesus Christ has ever completely realised
the idea of my text; no one has ever been so completely ruled by a plan Divine.
Jesus does nothing, can do nothing, of Himself. He does not proclaim His doctrine,
but the doctrine of the Father Who sent Him; He seeks not His own glory, but the
glory of the Father Who sent Him; He fulfils not His own will, but the will of the
Father Who sent Him; He says only the things which the Father has told Him, and
does only the things which the Father has commanded Him. And yet by no one else
has the will of man and his freedom ever been more fully demonstrated than by
Jesus Christ. The same plan which appears to us as belonging only to the Father,
who devised it, appears equally to belong to the Son, who accomplished it. There is
but one solution possible to this problem. If the Son realises, at the same time, the
plan of the Father, and His own personal plan. it is because the two plans are one;
it is because the Son has so fully adopted the plan of the Father that He has made it
His own; even that plan which He appears alternately to accept and choose
according as we regard it in His obedience, or in His freedom by which means
He accomplished the great law of human nature which Jeremiah has revealed in my
text, but depriving it of all appearance of weakness or of necessity, being so much
the more obedient as He was perfectly free, and so much the more free as He was
perfectly obedient. Behold the mystery we are seeking. Go and do likewise. Of the
two plans that are before you that of God and your own attempt only one of
them; and not being able to impose your own plan on God, adopt His; not in the
spirit of slavish constraint, but in that of filial submission. Thus, like Jesus, you will
accomplish fully the plan of God, which is now become yours, whilst yours is one
with His; and this will be for you, as it was for Jesus, the principle of perfect
reconciliation between interests apparently opposed; for, on the one hand,
accomplishing Gods plan, you will feel yourself to be in order: and, on the other
hand, accomplishing your own, you will feel yourself at liberty. (A. Monod.)

Dependence upon God

I. Consider the conviction here expressed, in its sources.
1. The nature of our condition. It is a dependent one; we are not our own, and
therefore we are not at our own disposal.
2. The limitation of our powers. Vain man, says Zophar, would be wise,
though man be born like a wild asss colt. When he grows up, even when he
comes to what is called years of maturity, of discretion, even then how liable
is he to be deceived and deluded! How narrow then is his horizon of vision;
and how foggy and cloudy is it! How unable is he to distinguish, in a
thousand instances, between appearances and realities!
3. History. You have heard of Robespierre so famous, or rather so infamous
and the torrents of blood which he shed. Yet he originally seemed an amiable
character; so he was deemed in all his neighbourhood. He was a civilian; he
published two books, one on electricity, the other on the code of criminal
jurisprudence, lamenting that it was so sanguinary, and endeavouring to
ameliorate it. But the current of the Revolution laid hold of him, and the
flood hurried him away; and he became the reverse of all he had appeared to
be before.
4. Experience. Franklin says, Experience is a dear school, but adds, Fools will
learn in no other. The fact is, that they will never even in this. We ascribe
always too much to experience: it is not so influential a teacher as many
imagine. I never, says Mr. Burke, knew a man who was not wise before, who
 grew wiser by his troubles. No; things operate upon us according to the
qualities which they find in us: they are mistaken, who suppose they can bring
these qualities.
5. Scripture is another source of this conviction. In all such cases as these to
the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is
because they have no light in them.

II. Consider it in its USES. It is not information that we commonly need. We all
feel what a difference there is between our creed and our conduct what a
difference there is between our speculative and our practical religion. The certainty
of a thing is not that by which we are principally influenced; but the frequent
presentation of it to the mind, and the realisation of it by meditation. There is
nothing so sure as that you shall die; and yet, by pushing this aside continually, you
can live less under the influence of it than perhaps anything else.
1. If a mans way is not in himself, and it is not in man that walketh to direct
his steps, this should produce gratitude. Your advantages and your
indulgences, whatever they have been, are wanting in their firmest support,
their loveliest ornament, and their sweetest relish, unless you acknowledge
the agency of God in them.
2. This should produce submission. You may, indeed, always pray, Father, if it
be possible, let this cup pass from me, if you can add, as our Saviour did,
Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.
3. You are to use the conviction as a check to presumption with regard to
futurity. Boast not thyself of tomorrow.
4. You should apply this conviction to induce you to repair to God in humble and
earnest prayer. Are any of you in perplexity? Wait upon Him; and let integrity
and uprightness preserve you the while. And not only wait upon Him, but also
wait for Him. Do not act while your mind is in a state of uncertainty: secure the
approbation of your conscience by erring, if you do err, unintentionally and
conscientiously.

III. THE ENCOURAGEMENTS of this conviction. Though mans way is not in

himself, and it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps
1. God is able to direct your steps.
2. God is willing to direct your steps.
3. God is engaged to direct them. (W. Jay.)

The craving of mind and heart for light and leading

The Israelites usually asked counsel of God by the Ephod, the Grecians by their
Oracles, the Persians by their Magi, the Egyptians by their Hierophants, the Indians by
their Gymno-sophistae, the ancient Gauls and Britons by their Druids, the Romans by
their Augurs and Soothsayers. It was not lawful to propose any matter of moment in
the senate before their wizards had made observations from the heavens. That which
they did superstitiously, we may, nay, we ought to do in another sense religiously,
conscionably, i.e., not to embark ourselves into any action of great importance and
consequence before we have observed from heaven, not the flight of birds, nor the
houses of planets, or their aspects or conjunctions, but the countenance of God,
whether it shineth upon our enterprises or not, whether He approves of our designs or
not. (J. Spencer.)

JER 10:24
O Lord, correct me, but with judgment; not in Thine anger.

Prayer for correction

I. THE CHRISTIANS NEED OF DIVINE CORRECTION.
1. To keep down pride.
2. To Overcome sloth.
3. To chastise sin.
4. To quicken grace.

II. THE CHRISTIANS PRAYER FOR DIVINE CORRECTION.

1. How he would have God correct him.
(1) Not in anger.
(2) In love.
(3) In judgment.
2. Methods of correction.
(1) Outward afflictions. Loss of property. Loss of friends. Death of
relatives. Personal affliction.
(2) Inward afflictions. Hidings of Gods face. Discomfort in
ordinances. Inability to pray.
3. Blessedness of affliction (Psalm 94:12, 119:71, 75). Lessons
(1) To those who are in a declining state. Expect chastisement.
(2) To those who are under the rod. Do not repine. Look inward.
(John D. Lane, M. A.)

Correction in judgment
I. THE PEOPLE OF GOD MUST EXPECT TO BE CORRECTED FOR THEIR SINS.
1. For the good of the soul. It has compelled many to say, It is good for me
 that I have been afflicted; for before I was afflicted I went astray.
2. For the conversion of the soul. But why does the rod of correction fall
upon Christians?
3. To wean the heart from self-righteousness.
4. To make the backslider sensible of his guilt.
5. Moreover, the corrections of Christians are designed to prepare them for
greater mercies, and for future glory.

II. SHOULD THE LORD CORRECT HIS PEOPLE IN ANGER, THEY MUST
PERISH BEFORE HIM. The Lord Most High is terrible. If His wrath be kindled,
yea, but a little, who can abide the clay of His coming? Hence both David and
Jeremiah, Lord, rebuke me not in Thine anger, etc., were persuaded, that, if the
righteous Governor of the world should visit them in His wrath, their spirits would
fail before Him. The stoutest heart must tremble at His reproof. The most fearless
must be filled with dismay if they fall into the hands of the living God.

III. The text contains THE PRAYER OF AN AWAKENED AND CONTRITE SOUL,
that God would correct him with judgment, and not in anger. The word judgment is
here used in the sense of discernment, in the same manner as in the seventh Psalm.
God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every day: that is, He
observes and regards the way of His servants, but His indignation burns against the
ungodly and the sinner. When the prophet cries, O Lord, correct me, but with
judgment, he prays that the Lord would correct him with discernment; that is, that
He would remember that he was but dust, and so temper the chastisement with
wisdom, love, and mercy, that instead of crushing him it may make him a more
humble and dutiful child, and a more faithful and devoted servant. There are certain
seasons when this prayer is peculiarly suitable and proper.
1. When the mind is deeply humbled before God under a sense of guilt and
misery.
2. The supplication in the text is suitable to every returning backslider. True, I
deserve to perish, but Thy dear Son is the Saviour of sinners. For His
sake, pardon mine iniquity, for it is great. I crave Thy mercy in His name;
and entreat Thee to restore my soul to the paths of righteousness and
peace.
3. In the prospect or under the pressure of any temporal calamity we shall
need this prayer. (R. W. Alton.)

The beneficent design of discipline

Men think God is destroying them because He is tuning them. The violinist
screws up the key till the tense cord sounds the concert pitch; but it is not to break
it, but to use it tunefully, that he stretches the string upon the musical rack. (H. W.
Beecher.).
 JEREMIAH 11

JER 11:4
Obey My voice, and do them.

Obedience of primary import

Much is said about the demoralising effects of army life. Perhaps there is a
tendency to moral decline in the army, but one thing about army life is good. It is a
good thing to learn the lesson of implicit obedience to properly constituted
authority. A Christian must learn this lesson. No man can be a Christian who does
not obey God. And why should this be thought a difficult thing? Soldiers do not
complain because they are required to obey. The hard thing about a soldiers life is
to be required to obey an unreasonable and incompetent leader. Many officers are
superior to the men in the ranks only in official position. In all other respects they
are inferior. But the Christian is never subjected to this sort of humiliation. He has
but one Leader. The pastor is not the Master. Christians are all comrades, all
brethren, all equal before one Lord. One is yore Master. What He says, we will do.
Where He sends, we will go. (Christian Age.)

JER 11:5
Then answered I, and said, So be it, O Lord.

The souls Amen

Jeremiah was naturally gentle, yielding, and pitiful for the sins and sorrows of his
people. Nothing was further from his heart than to desire the evil day. Nothing
would have given him greater pleasure than to have played the part of Isaiah in this
decadent period of his peoples history. But what was possible to the great evangelic
prophet in the days of Hezekiah was impossible now. In Isaiahs case the noblest
traditions of the past, the patriotic pride of his people, and the promises of God all
pointed in the same direction. But for Jeremiah there was an inevitable divorce
between the trend of popular feeling led by the false prophets, and his clear
conviction of the Word of God. It must, indeed, have been hard to prove that the
prophets were wrong, and he was right; they simply reiterated what Isaiah had said
a hundred times. And yet, as he utters the terrible curses and threatenings of Divine
justice, and predicts the inevitable fate of his people, he is so possessed with the
sense of the Divine rectitude that his soul rises up, and though he must pronounce
the doom of Israel, he is forced to answer and say, Amen, O Lord!

I. The souls affirmation.

1. In Providence. It is not possible at first to say Amen in tones of triumph and
ecstasy. Nay, the word is often choked with sobs that cannot be stifled, and
 soaked with tears that cannot be repressed. And as these words are read by
those who lie year after year on beds of constant pain; or by those whose
earthly life is tossed upon the sea of anxiety, over which billows of care and
turmoil perpetually roll--it is not improbable that they will protest as to the
possibility of saying Amen to Gods providential dealings. In reply, let all
such remember that our blessed Lord in the garden was content to put His
will upon the side of God. Dare to say Amen to Gods providential dealings.
Say it, though heart and flesh fail; say it, amid a storm of tumultuous feeling,
and a rain of tears. What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter.
2. In revelation there are mysteries which baffle the clearest thinkers. It must be
so whilst God is God. There is no fathoming line long enough, no parallax
fine enough, no standard of mensuration, though the universe itself be taken
as our unit, by which to measure God. But though we cannot comprehend,
we may affirm the thoughts of God. That we cannot understand is due to the
immaturity of our faculties. But when He who has come straight from the
realms of eternal day steadfastly affirms that which He knows, and bears
witness to what He has seen, we receive His witness and say reverently,
Amen, Lord!
3. In judgment. Gods judgments on the wicked are a great deep. Did we know
more of sin, of holiness, of the love of God, of the yearning pleadings of His
Spirit with men, we should probably understand better how Jeremiah was
able to say, Amen, Lord!

II. THE GROUND OF THE SOULS PEACE. Yea, Father! When face to face with the
mysteries of the atonement, of substitution and sacrifice, of predestination and
election, of the unequal distribution of Gospel light, be sure to turn to God as the
Father of light, in whom is no darkness, no shadow of unkindness, no note
inconsistent with the music of perfect benevolence.

III. THE TRIUMPH OF THE AFFIRMING SOUL. Amen, Hallelujah! Mark the addition
of Hallelujah to the Amen. Here the Amen, and not often the Hallelujah; there
the two--the assent and the consent; the acquiescence and the acclaim; the
submission to the win of God, and the triumphant outburst of praise and adoration
(Rev 15:3, R.V.). (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JER 11:8
They obeyed not.

Sins of omission

I. The great commonness of sins of omission.

1. In a certain sense all offences against the law of God come under the head of
sins of omission. Every sin is a breach of the all-comprehensive law, Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.
How multitudinous our omissions in respect to this command! Too often we
 have had other gods beside Him. So, too, in regard to our neighbour. What
sins of omission daily occur in our various relationships--our neighbours,
our children, our household.
2. Sins of omission are seen in all who neglect to perform the first and all-
essential Gospel command: Repent and be converted; Repent and be
baptized; Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
3. Sins of omission in religious duties. Multitudes neglect the outward worship
of God. But others show religious regard; yet what omissions as to prayer;
how lax in devotion are the most of us! As to the Bible: left unread! As to
service: talents wrapped up in napkin! Our omissions lie upon the horizon of
memory like masses of storm clouds accumulating for a horrible tempest.

II. The cause of this excessive multiplicity of sins of omission.

1. The great cause lies in our evil hearts. Absence of clean heart and right spirit is
at the root: Ye must be born again.
2. The conscience of man is not well alive to sins of omission. While conscience
will chastise men for direct acts of wrong, not awake to sins of neglect.
3. These sins are multiplied through indolence. In the face of eternity, life,
death, heaven, and hell, multitudes are simply ruined because they neglect
the great salvation, and are absolutely too idle to concern themselves.
4. Ignorance. With many ignorance is wilful; have Bible, conscience; yet sin
against light and knowledge.
5. Men excuse themselves so readily about these sins of omission. A more
convenient season is anticipated for repentance, faith, prayer.
6. Many neglect because of the prevalence of the like conduct. To omit to love
and serve the Lord is the custom. But enlightened conscience warns us that
custom is no excuse for sin: it will be no plea at the bar of God.

III. THE SINFULNESS OF SINS OF OMISSION. They cannot be trivial, for--

1. Consider what would be the consequences if God were to omit His mercies to
us for one moment! Suppose Jesus had left an omission in His plan of
salvation; the whole would have failed, and humanity left without remedy or
hope.
2. Reflect what an influence they would have upon an ordinary commonwealth.
If one person has a right to omit his duty, another has, and all have--
watchman, judge, merchant, husbandman; society soon collapse, kingdom
break to pieces.
3. Think how you would judge of omissions towards yourselves. In the case of
your servant, you instantly resent it. So in a soldier. Even in your child: to
neglect your command is regarded as equally criminal as to commit offence.
4. Consider what God thinks of omissions. Saul was ordered to kill the
Amalekites--not one to escape: he saved Agag and best of the cattle;
therefore the Lord said, I have put thee away from being king over Israel!
Ahab was commanded to kill Benhadad on account of great criminality:
Ahab only captured him; therefore, Because thou hast let this man go, thy
life shall be for his life! The man with one talent was condemned because he
neglected to sue it.
 IV. The result and punishment of sins of omission.
1. They will condemn us. The King shall say, I was hungered and ye gave Me no
meat, etc. The absence of virtue rather than the presence of vice condemned
them. Without holiness no man shall see the Lord.
2. If persevered in, they will effectually shut against us the possibilities of
pardon. He that believeth not--is there pardon, rescue for him? No; he is
condemned already, because he hath not believed on the Son of God. Will
the mercy of God blot out sins uurepented of? Nay; sins will cling to us as the
leprosy to the house of Gehazi. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 11:9
And the Lord said unto me, A conspiracy is found
A sad relapse
1. The prophet calls the peoples relapse a plot or conspiracy; thereby suggesting,
perhaps, the secrecy with which the prohibited worships were at first
revived, and the intrigues of the unfaithful nobles and priests and prophets,
in order to bring about a reversal of the policy of reform.
2. The word further means a bond, which is the exact antithesis of the covenant
with Jehovah, and it implies that this bond has about it a fatal strength and
permanence, involving as its necessary consequence the ruin of the nation.
Breaking covenant with Jehovah meant making a covenant with other gods.
If you have broken faith with God in Christ, it is because you have entered
into an agreement with another; it is because you have surrendered to the
proposals of the tempter, and preferred his promises to the promises of God.
(C. J. Ball, M. A.)

JER 11:14
Therefore pray not thou for this people.

Futile prayers
It is futile to pray for those who have deliberately cast off the covenant of Jehovah
and made a covenant with His adversary. Prayer cannot save, nothing can save, the
impenitent; and there is a state of mind, in which ones own prayer is turned into
sin; the state of mind in which a man prays, merely to appease God, and escape the
fire, but without a thought of forsaking sin, without the faintest aspiration after
holiness. There is a degree of guilt upon which sentence is already passed, which is
unto death, and for which prayer is interdicted alike by the prophet of the new and
of the old covenant. (C. J. Ball, M. A.)

JER 11:21
 Prophesy not in the name of the Lord, that thou die not by our hand.

Intimidating the prophet

Think of Bunyan when he is brought before the judge, and the judge says, You! a
tinker! to go about preaching! Hold your tongue, sir! I cannot hold my tongue,
says Bunyan. Then I must send you back to prison unless you promise never to
preach again. If you put me in prison till the moss grows on my eyelids, I will
preach again the first moment I get out, by the help of God. (Life of John Bunyan.)

Intimidators put to silence:--There is the story of a conversation between the

burgomaster in Hamburg and holy Dr. Ducken when he first began to preach. The
burgomaster said to him, Do you see that little finger, sir? While I can move that
little finger, I will put the Baptists down. Mr. Ducken said, With all respect to your
little finger, Mr. Burgomaster, I would ask you another question. Do you see that
arm? No, I do not see it. Just so, said Mr. Ducken, but I do; and while that
great arm moves, you cannot put us down, and if it comes to a conflict between your
little finger and that great arm, I know how it will end. It was my great joy to see the
burgomaster sitting in the chapel at Hamburg, among the audience that listened to
my sermon at the opening of the new chapel. The little finger had willingly given up
its opposition, and the great arm was made bare. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JEREMIAH 12

JER 12:1-6
Righteous art Thou, O Lord, when I plead with Thee.

Communion with God in affliction

I. Why God sees fit to afflict His children by the dispensations of His providence.
1. God sometimes afflicts His children to reclaim them from their delusions in
religion. They are naturally bent to backsliding.
2. God sometimes afflicts His children to try their sincerity, and give them an
opportunity of knowing their own hearts.
3. God sometimes afflicts His children for the purpose of displaying the beauty
and excellence of true religion before the eyes of the world. In some cases, at
least, we can hardly discover any other important end to be answered by
afflicting His peculiar friends, than this, of displaying their superior virtue
and piety.

II. Why they are disposed to converse with Him under His afflicting hand.
1. Because they want to know why He afflicts them.
2. They wish to know how they should feel and conduct themselves in their
afflicted state.
 3. They desire to obtain Divine support and consolation.

III. What methods they take to converse with God in time of trouble.
1. By meditating upon the history of His providence.
2. By reviewing the course of His conduct towards themselves through all the
past scenes and stages of their lives.
3. By prayer, while they are suffering His fatherly chastisements. For this they
are greatly prepared, by musing on His past and present dispensations
towards themselves and others. These fill their mouths with arguments, and
constrain them to draw near to God, and make known their wants and
desires, their hopes and fears. This subject may teach the children of God--
(1) to restrain their unreasonable expectations of outward prosperity in the
present life.
(2) That adversity may be much more beneficial to them than prosperity.
(3) This subject exhibits a peculiar and distinguishing mark of grace, by
which everyone may determine whether he is or is not a real child of God.
It is the habitual disposition of the true children of God to converse with
Him from day to day, under all the various dispensations of His
providence. (N. Emmons, D. D.)

Let me talk with Thee of Thy judgments.

The judgments of God a lawful subject of human study and

consideration
1. It is lawful for the saints to enter into the mystery of Divine providence.
Providence is the work of God. In its movement we may discern the actings
of the Almighty, and if we are properly attentive to it, we may trace the
marks of His power, wisdom, faithfulness, goodness, and holiness.
2. The saints are permitted to use familiarity with God in these inquiries. He
permits them to state their objections, and to make replies to His answers, to
plead with Him, in the language of our text. Let us plead together, says He,
put Me in remembrance, state your objections to any part of My conduct,
declare thou, that thou mayest be justified. Wonderful condescension!
3. It is of the first importance in the inquiries into the dispensations of
Providence, that we retain on our spirits an abiding sense of the essential
moral attributes of the Disposer of events. (T. MCrie, D. D.)

Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?--

The reasons why the wicked are permitted to prosper

I. IT DISCOVERS THE INGRATITUDE OF THE HUMAN HEART, and shows the monstrous
abuse which men often make of the Divine goodness. Wealth and influence, power
and dominion, are the gifts of God, and if suitably improved, are valuable talents.
They give individuals many opportunities of being extensively useful, and of doing
much good. But, when influence and power are made subservient to gratify the
pride, the vanity, and ambition of the sons of men, they are to be accounted the
greatest evil. Yet, it will not be denied, that these are sometimes the sad effects
which they have produced upon particular individuals. Have not some been guilty of
oppression and tyranny, of plunder and robbery, of cruelty and murder? I
acknowledge that it is natural enough to wish for prosperity and affluence, power
and influence; but, if these blessings were to have the same effect upon us which
they have produced in others, would we not account them the greatest curse with
which we could be visited? But, though prosperity may not have so shocking an
influence upon us as upon some others, if it should minister to covetousness, is it
not to be dreaded? Are not these the dispositions which it sometimes excites?
Instead of enlarging the heart, and making it more liberal, does it not render men
sometimes narrow and contracted? Is not this defeating the end of providence, and
perverting its gifts?

II. TO BE THE MEANS OF CHASTISING THE REST OF MANKIND. They are allowed to
gratify their own bad passions, that they may inflict that punishment upon their
fellow creatures which their irreligion and wickedness deserve. Though we may
flatter ourselves that we do not merit correction at the hands of men, none will
maintain that we do not deserve it at the hand of God. Have we not been froward
and undutiful children? God hath told us, in His Word, that He doth not willingly
grieve the children of men; but, when correction becomes necessary, a principle of
affection leads Him to inflict it. He hath often made wicked men the instruments of
His vengeance, to bring His people back to their duty, and to make them learn
righteousness.

III. TO AGGRAVATE THEIR GUILT AND TO HEIGHTEN THEIR CONDEMNATION. God

often setteth the wicked on high and slippery places, that He may bring them down
suddenly, and make their fall the greater. They may move heaven and earth with
their ambition, and think that their mountain standeth strong; when, lo! their feet
are made to stumble upon the dark mountains, and they go down to the silent grave,
where there is neither work, wisdom, knowledge, nor device.

IV. That we may hold higher in esteem those good men who make their wealth
and influence subservient to the glory of God and to the happiness of mankind.
Blessed be God, there are not a few, who, instead of abusing their prosperity, employ
it for the benefit of their fellow creatures! So far from gratifying their pride, and
indulging in luxury, they exert themselves to promote works of industry and charity.
They are ready to deny themselves particular enjoyments, that they may contribute
to the comfort of those around them. Instead of being selfish and worldly, they are
humane and generous. What a blessing is prosperity, when it is the means of doing
good! Our goodness, it is true, cannot extend to God, and He can receive no benefit
from it; but it may be exercised towards His necessitous creatures, and He considers
a kind office done to them as done to Himself.

V. THAT THOSE IN INFERIOR CIRCUMSTANCES MAY BE THANKFUL AND CONTENTED

WITH THE SITUATION IN WHICH GOD HATH PLACED THEM. Perhaps you are apt to envy
those who live in ease and plenty. But are you aware of the temptations to which
prosperous and rich men are exposed, and into which they are too apt to fall? What
if affluence should lead you to indulge in pride and vanity, and make you think of
yourselves above what you ought to think? What if it should attach you so much to
the world, as in a great measure to overlook eternity altogether? Oh, never appear
dissatisfied with your condition, or give way to discontent. The very meanest have
cause for gratitude, because they have still more than they deserve. Let all of us
aspire after being poor in spirit and heirs of the kingdom of God! This is the true
riches, of which none can possibly deprive us. (D. Johnston, D. D.)

The prosperity of bad men and adversity of good men accounted

for

I. WICKED MEN, HOW PROSPEROUS SOEVER THEIR OUTWARD CONDITION IN THIS LIFE,
ARE NOT IN REALITY SO HAPPY AS WE ARE APT TO IMAGINE. The reason why those
wicked men that prosper in the world are reckoned happy is, because the generality
of men entertain a wrong notion of happiness. They fancy it consists in having
abundance of riches. Whatever real satisfaction or comfort riches can afford, we are
bound by the frame of our nature to seek after that satisfaction. But in reality do we
not often see health of body, tranquillity of mind, dwelling in a cottage, whilst bodily
pains and restless anxieties fly daily about the palaces of kings? Which shows that
happiness is something distinct from riches, something which riches alone can
never give us.

II. Supposing the wicked men are more happy, and meet with less trouble than
other men, let us inquire upon what accounts God almighty may permit this,
consistently with the character of a wise, just, and good Governor of the world.
Besides the moral enjoyment which springs from virtue only, there are other
delights accruing to us from the possession of riches, honour, and secular power. Of
these, many wicked men have a greater portion than the virtuous.
1. And the reason is, because some good men are weak in their judgments, and
imprudent or indolent in managing their secular affairs; which exposes them
to many inconveniences, and hinders their rising in the world. Now, if we ask
why the Almighty permits this to the disadvantage of good men, it is the
same as if we should ask why He made men free agents. The disadvantages
virtuous men labour under at present, will doubtless be recompensed, one
day or other, by the just and merciful Governor of the world. In the
meantime, the solid pleasure they enjoy as the immediate consequence of
their goodness, is surely preferable to any external advantages the wicked
may procure themselves by their superior cunning and sagacity.
2. Another reason why God may permit wicked men to prosper in the world
seems to be the natural effect of His overflowing goodness. He would give
them more time for repentance.
3. Perhaps another reason why the Supreme Being withholds some temporal
benefits from good men, which the wicked possess, may be, because He
foresees they will prove hurtful to them. Alteration of circumstances often
creates a change of manners. And there are some tempers which, I believe,
would keep steady to virtue in a scene of adversity, and yet run into open and
extreme degrees of vice in a scene of prosperity.

II. The objection in the text should not in reason make us entertain any
dishonourable thought of the Divine dispensations, but rather teach us to infer the
reasonableness and necessity of a future state. To know the justness of any scheme,
it is necessary to be acquainted with all its parts, and all their mutual relations. How,
then, can we determine every particular in the scheme of Providence, of which we
must confess ourselves utterly ignorant? Should a man take upon him to condemn a
well wrought tragedy by only reading one of its scenes, without considering how it
was interwoven with the main plot and contrivance of the work, would he not be
justly blamed for his partiality! And is not he more inexcusably partial, who
censures the beautiful drama of the Divine government, without knowing the secret
contrivance by which it is carried on? I shall only add one observation more to
justify Providence against the objection in the text, which is, that we are frequently
mistaken who are really good, and who otherwise; and, consequently, are very
incompetent judges when men are equitably dealt by. (N. Ball.)

The prosperity of the wicked

I. When you are repining at the prosperity of the wicked, and feel a consequent
inclination to relax from your faith in Christ, remember that, IN THE REVELATION
THROUGH JESUS CHRIST, WE ARE NOWHERE LED TO EXPECT THAT THE WICKED SHALL
NOT BE PROSPEROUS HERE. Ye will not come to Me that ye may have life, was the
remonstrance of our Saviour. This do, and thou shalt live, the injunction
everywhere implied:--live,--not amidst the joys of this transitory scene, but at the
right hand of God forever! The treasures of earth were never mentioned by Him to
the faithful, but to guard them against their danger, and remind them of a treasure
in heaven. Christ knew the natural opposition of worldly prosperity to the lowly
virtues of the Gospel; and, earnest for the everlasting interests of men, guarded
them against the desire of things, the possession of which might be fatal:--and, if
men would, by ways unwarranted by God, seek what God had forbidden, it was at
the double peril of disobeying His commands, and disregarding His counsels.

II. The Gospel has not only forbidden us to be surprised, or envious, at the
prosperity of the wicked, but has positively shown us that a life of tribulation for
Jesus sake is the proper passport to heaven. Nothing can be so glorious as the
scenes which the Gospel has opened to our faith; but nothing so solemn as those
through which we must pass to reach them. We are, in this life, in a state of
dangerous apostasy from God: and the glare of prosperity is a light but very ill suited
for us to behold. The sufferings of our Lord are held out to our view, that, looking
unto Jesus, who left us an example, that we should follow His steps, we might
take up our cross to do it. Why, then, do you ask, does the way of the wicked
prosper? Why, rather ought ye to ask, should the believer in Christ repine at it? Why
should he sigh for a state the very opposite to that in which His Saviour walked, and,
if gained by sin, gained by means which brought that Saviour to the Cross, and
would now open His wounds afresh?

III. Another argument which I would use, to check repining at the outward
prosperity of sin, is, that IT IS, AT BEST, EXTREMELY OVERRATED, AND ITS NATURE VERY
ILL UNDERSTOOD. It is by no means true that prosperity is confined to the
treacherous dealer and the wicked. God has indeed told us, that, to enter into His
kingdom, we must meet with opposition, wrestle with contending evils, and pass the
time of our sojourning here in fear. But the path, even to temporal blessings, is open
to the believer in Christ, though He commands us not to make them the object of
our ambition, nor expect them as the consequences of our faith. But, even were this
not so, were prosperity confined to sin alone, we surely mistake its nature if its
attractions dazzle us, and think but imperfectly of God if we mistrust His goodness.
He has not so balanced the good and evil, of this life as to make every attraction and
every joy lie on the side of sin. There is no peace to the wicked. They may live in
affluence,--but it is not peace. They may live in indolence,--but it is not peace. They
may live in thoughtlessness,--but it is not peace. It is not that peace which a God of
everlasting mercy can bestow, of which the soul of man, that was made for God, is
capable, and for which it unceasingly longs. In talking of that peace of God, we talk
of what it is impossible for those who have not experienced it to conceive.

IV. But the comprehensive argument, which closes at once all discussion and all
doubts, is THE DISCLOSURE AND ADJUSTMENT OF ALL THE WAYS OF GOD IN THE GREAT
DAY OF GENERAL RETRIBUTION. If there be a subject of contemplation sublimer than
another, or completely interesting to the soul of reasonable man, it is surely the
thought of being led hereafter to behold all the glorious works of the great and
eternal God:--to see how, through all the amazing vicissitudes of time, He has
conducted the affairs of worlds on worlds; and kept distinct, through all the
crossings and confusions of myriads of foes, the strait and narrow path to heaven:--
how from the jarring elements He reared the goodly frame of nature, and settled it
in peace; and, uniting the still more jarring passions and infidel contentions of
mankind, made all conspire to His eternal glory, and cooperate for the universal
good! (G. Mathew, M. A.)

JER 12:2
Thou art near in their mouth, and far from their reins.

God comes nearer to the hearts of His people in their duties than
He doth to any hypocritical or formal professor
By Gods nearness we understand not His omnipresence (that neither comes nor
goes), nor His love to His people (that abides), but the sensible, sweet
manifestations and outlets of it to their souls (Psa 145:18). Note the limitation of this
glorious privilege; it is the peculiar enjoyment of sincere and upright-hearted
worshippers.
1. Sincere souls are sensible of Gods accesses to them in their duties, they feel
His approaches to their spirits (Lam 3:57). The heart fills apace, the empty
thoughts swell with a fulness of spiritual things, which strive for vent.
2. They are sensible of Gods withdrawment from their spirits; they feel how the
ebb follows the flood, and how the waters abate (Song 5:6).
3. The Lords nearness to the hearts and reins of His people in their duties is
evident to them from the effects that it leaves upon their spirits. For look, as
it is with the earth and plants, with respect to the approach or remove of the
sun in the spring and autumn, so it is here as Christ speaks (Luk 21:29).
 (1) A real taste of the joy of the Lord is here given to men, the fulness
whereof is in heaven; hence called (2Co 1:22), The earnest of His Spirit.
And in 1Pe 1:8, glorified joy, or a short salvation.
(2) A mighty strength and power coming into their soul, and actuating all its
faculties and graces. When God comes near, new powers enter the soul;
the feeble is as David (Psa 138:3).
(3) A remarkable transformation and change of spirit follows it. The sight of
God, the felt presence of God, is as fire, which quickly assimilates what is
put into it to its own likeness (2Co 3:18).
(4) A vigorous working of the heart heavenward; a mounting of the soul
upward.
Infer--
1. Then certainly there is a heaven and a state of glory for the saints.
2. But, oh! what is heaven? And what that state of glory reserved for the saints?
Doth a glimpse of Gods presence in a duty go down to the heart and reins?
Oh, how unutterable, then, must that be which is seen and felt above, where
God comes as near to man as can be! (Rev 22:3-4.)
3. See hence the necessity of casting these very bodies into a new mould by their
resurrection from the dead (1Co 15:41).
4. Is God so near to His people above all others in the world? How good is it to
be near to them that are so near to God:
5. If God be so near to the heart and reins of His people in their duties, oh, how
assiduous should they be in their duties!
6. What steady Christians should all real Christians be! For lo, what a seal and
witness hath religion in the breast of every sincere professor of it! (John
Flavel.)

JER 12:5
If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst
thou contend with horses?

The heroism of endurance

Jeremiah had to pay the price of singularity. He had to learn not only to do
without the sweet incense of popular favour, but also to stand unflinching even
when it turned into the hot breath of hatred. He had to submit not only to be
without friends, but to see friends become foes. This experience through which the
prophet passed is a cruel one It either makes a man or mars him, and nearly always
hardens him. It creates an indignation, a holy anger sometimes against men,
sometimes against the strange, untoward state of affairs, sometimes against God.
Jeremiah here is kicking against the pricks which have wounded the feet of men for
centuries: how to account for the fact that in a world governed by a righteous God
righteousness should often have to suffer so much. His indignant soul, on fire for
justice, cries out that it ought not to be so. Jeremiahs wherefore about the wicked is
really a why about himself. Why am I bared to the blast in following Thy will and
performing Thy command? why are tears and strife my portion? why am I wearied
out and left desolate, though I am fighting the Lords battle? That is the prophets
real complaint. Notice the answer, surely the strangest and most inconsequent ever
given. The complaint is answered by a counter-complaint. Jeremiahs charge against
God of injustice is met by Gods charge against Jeremiah of weakness. If thou hast
run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend
with horses? Though in a land of peace thou art secure, yet how wilt thou do (O
faint-hearted one!) in the pride of Jordan? The pride of Jordan means the
dangerous ground by the river, where the heat is almost tropical and the vegetation
is rank. It is jungle, tangled bush wherein wild beasts lurk, leopards and wolves and
(at that time also) lions. The answer to the complaint against the hardness of his lot
is just the assertion that it shall be harder still. Does it seem an unfeeling answer? It
was the answer Jeremiah needed. He needed to be braced, not pampered. He is
taught the need of endurance. Only a heroic soul could do the heroic work needed by
Israel and by God; and it was the greatest heroism of all which was needed, the
heroism of endurance. Nothing worth doing can be done in this world without
something of that iron resolution. It is the spirit which never knows defeat, which
cannot be worn out, which has taken its stand and refuses to move. This is the
patience about which the Bible is full; not the sickly counterfeit which so often
passes for patience, but the power to bear, to suffer, to sacrifice, to endure all things,
to die, harder still, sometimes, to continue to live. The whole world teaches that
patience. Inch by inch each advance has to be gained, fought for, paid for, kept. It is
the lesson of all history also, both for the individual and for a body of men who have
espoused any cause. Christs Church has survived through her power to endure. The
mustard seed, planted with tears and watered with blood, stood the hazard of every
storm, gripped tenaciously the soil, twining its roots round the rocks, reared its head
ever a little higher, and spread out its branches ever a little fuller, and when the
tempest came held on for very life; and then, never hasting, never resting, went on
in the Divine task of growing; and at last became the greatest of trees, giving shelter
to the birds of the air in its wide-spreading branches. It is the same secret of success
for the individual spiritual life. In your patience ye shall win your soul. This method
is utterly opposed to the worlds method of insuring success, which is by self-
assertion, aggressive action, force for force, blow for blow. Patience, not violence, is
the Christians safety Even if all else be lost it saves the soul, the true life. It gives
fibre to the character. It purifies the heart, as gold in the furnace. What do we know
of this heroic endurance? In our fight with temptation, in our warfare against all
forms of evil, have we used our Masters watchword, and practised our Masters
scheme? Think of our temptation in the matter of foreign missions, for example. We
are easily made faint-hearted about it. We say that results are disproportionate to
the effort; or rather (for that is not true) we are overpowered by the vastness of the
work. If we find our small attempt a burden, how can we face the vaster problem of
making the kingdoms of this world the kingdom of God and His Christ? If we are
wearied in our race with footmen, how can we contend with horses? We are so easily
dispirited, not only in Christian enterprise, but also in personal Christian
endeavour. We are so soon tempted to give up. We need some iron in our blood. We
need to be braced to the conflict again. We need the noble scorn of consequence.
What have we done, the best of us, for God or for man? (Hugh Black.)

Testing questions
 The text may be applied to--

I. DUTIES. If in the ordinary duties of life you have been wearied, how will you be
able to meet the higher and special duties to which you may be called? Manfully and
courageously face these, and then you may hope to meet the others with strength
equal to their performance.

II. TRIALS. If the trials which are common to man tax your patience, how will you
do when called to pass through extraordinary? Do not give way under these, but
endure them without shrinking, then when the Job-like trials come, you may bear
them as he did.

III. TEMPTATIONS. If those, common to man, have taxed your strength, and led
you to complain of their severity, how will you do when special and more than
ordinary temptations come upon you? Resist the devil in the first temptation, and
you will be better able to resist him in the second, and so on.

IV. TROUBLES. Do the ripples on the waters of the sea of life affect you, then how
will you do when the surges of the tempest come upon you? Do the dark clouds of
the sky frighten you, then how will you feel when the lurid lightning and terrible
thunders fill the heavens? (J. Bate.)

Comparative estimate of trials

I. The unhappy disposition which shows itself in many persons to disquiet

themselves unduly on account of comparatively small trials. That man should, under
any circumstances, seek to become his own tormentor is a singular anomaly, and
strikingly proves how sin infatuates the human mind. The desire of happiness is a
native and universal feeling in the breast. We do not assert that men are required to
stifle all natural feeling, and to maintain a stoical apathy in reference to what we
term inferior trials. The inconveniences and lighter evils of life must be felt. One
person is seen to brood over what is called the badness of the times: another is in
trouble, because his mercantile or household affairs are disarranged through the
unfaithfulness of servants or dependants: a third is unhappy because the tongue of
slander has gone forth against him: and a fourth is out of sorts because he had
ardently aspired at something which he has failed to obtain. It is observable,
moreover, that persons are often wont to complain in connection with those very
points where they have the least possible ground for complaint. This man makes a
trial of a bad speculation in trade, though his barns are filled with plenty, and his
presses burst out with new wine; and that man makes a trial of certain domestic
irregularities, while, in the main, he is thickly encompassed with domestic mercies.

II. The bearing which the disposition or propensity of which we have spoken, has
upon the real afflictions of life, as well as upon the souls spiritual conflict.
1. In the natural course of things we may expect that man to be ill prepared for a
season of sorrow, who is wont to fret and disquiet himself on common and
frequently recurring occasions. The mind which is not inured to salutary
discipline will, sooner or later, be found an enemy to its own peace.
 2. But let us take higher ground, and view the subject in a spiritual light. In the
case of the true believer, we cannot, for a moment, doubt that God designs
every circumstance which befalls him, however minute, and every trial which
comes upon him, however slight, to work for his good. Neither can we doubt
that this gracious design is answered or defeated, according to the
disposition of mind in which either comforts or crosses are received.
3. All the crosses and inconveniences of life should have the effect of sending the
Christian to a throne of grace. No circumstance which threatens to harass the
mind is too trivial to be carried to God in prayer, with a view to the obtaining
of that assistance which is promised for every time of need. It will seldom,
however, be found that persons who yield to the habit of magnifying inferior
evils, and discomposing their minds with comparatively trifling occurrences,
will see fit to pray for a right spirit in connection with these things, and for
grace suited to the occasion. The consequence of the omission can hardly fail
to be experienced in the darker day of adversity, when large supplies of
strength are needed, and when increased exertion is called for.
4. In spiritual as well as in providential dispensations, the lesser has its bearing
upon the greater. A propensity to be discouraged or alarmed, if perchance an
envenomed dart is, now and then, hurled from Satans quiver, or if a cloud
occasionally overcasts the souls experience, is by no means a desirable
preparative for that severer discipline of the life of grace, with which few of
the Lords people are entirely unacquainted.
Lessons--
1. The language of Divine reproof should put every Christian upon serious and
faithful self-examination.
2. It is well, in a certain way, to anticipate seasons of heavy affliction. Think how
soon health may be interrupted, friends removed, schemes defeated, and
hopes forever blasted! Such thoughts, if sanctified in answer to prayer, will
have a happy effect upon the general character of your experience.
3. Seasons of intense suffering are often made occasions of signal interpositions
in behalf of Gods people. Your emergency shall prove your Heavenly
Fathers opportunity; your heaviest trials shall be made the marked
occasions of your realising the greatness of His power, and the intensity of
His love.
4. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ which imparts to the gloomy foliage of this
wilderness world every particle of the radiance with which it is tinged. To see
in Christ Jesus, the foundation of our every hope, the source of our strength,
the channel of our consolations, the vitality of every spiritual principle and
movement in our souls,--this is truly to know Him as the power of God, and
the wisdom of God. (W. Knight, M. A.)

The Christians triumph

One of the greatest battles on record was fought and won, seven hundred years
ago, by the merchants and artisans of Brussels against the arms of France. Reduced
by famine to the greatest straits, the city one evening opened her beleaguered gates,
not to admit the enemy, but that such as were able to carry arms might march out--
to make their last throw in the bloody game of war. The night, which was falling
down when they came in sight of the banners and tents of France, was spent by their
enemies in riot and carousings. It was spent by these wise, brave burghers in seeking
rest for tomorrows fight; and by their leaders, in making the most skilful
arrangements. The men of Brussels rose with the dawn, and took what was to some,
and might be to all, their last earthly meal. Knowing that they, a few rude townsmen,
had no chance against the magnificent host of France unless God helped the fight for
home, and wife, and children, and liberty, they cried to heaven for help. Every man
made confession, and received the rites administered to the dying. The solemn
service concluded, they rose from their knees; closed their ranks; levelled their
pikes; and wheeling round so as to throw the glare of the sun in the eyes of the
enemy, came down on their lines an avalanche of steel. The charge was irresistible.
They bore cuirass and knightly lance before them; and these base-born traders
scattered the chivalry of France, like smoke before the wind, and chaff before the
whirlwind. This story illustrates a remarkable saying of one who fought many
battles, and seldom, if ever, lost any. Asked to what he attributed his remarkable
success, he replied, I owe it, under God, to this, that I made it a rule never to despise
an enemy. To what warfare is this rule so applicable as to the Christians; to the
battles of the faith; to those conflicts which the believer is called to wage with Satan,
the world, and the flesh? In spiritual matters we are, under the guidance of the Holy
Spirit and of the Word of God, to steer right between the two; and, to help you
forward in this safe and blessed course, let me explain and answer the question of
the text.

I. MAN IS LESS A MATCH FOR SATAN NOW THAN WHEN SATAN, AT THEIR FIRST
ENCOUNTER, PROVED HIMSELF MORE THAN A MATCH FOR MAN. The bravest soldiers
hang back from the breach, where, as it belches forth fire and smoke, they have seen
the flower of the army fall; mowed down like grass. The bravest seamen dread the
storm which has wrecked, with the stout ship, the gallant lifeboat that had gone to
save its crew; men saying, If with her brave hands and buoyant power she, whelmed
among the waves, could not live in such a sea, what chance for common craft? And
what chance for us where our first parents perished? how can guilt stand where
innocence fell? Hope there is none for us out of Christ.

II. IF WE WERE OVERCOME BY SIN ERE IT HAD GROWN INTO STRENGTH, WE ARE NOW
LESS ABLE TO RESIST IT. Fallen though we are, there remains a purity, modesty,
ingenuousness, and tenderness of conscience, about childhood, that looks as if the
glory of Eden yet lingered over it, like the light of day on hilltops at even, when the
sun is down. It has wrung our heart, as we looked on some lost and loathsome
creature--the pest of society, and the shame of her sex--to think of the days when
she was a smiling infant in a mothers happy arms, or, ignorant of evil, lisped long-
forgotten prayers at a mothers knee; when her voice rose in the psalms of family
worship, or of the house of God, like the song of a seraph in the skies. Alas! How is
the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! Justifying this sad
description, The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as
they be born, speaking lies,--alas, how soon does sin cloud lifes brightest dawn! If
we were no match for the cub, how shall we conquer the grown lion? If we had not
strength to pull out the sapling, how are we to root up the tree? Every new act of sin
casts up an additional impediment in our way of return to virtue, and to God; until
that which was once only a molehill swells into a mountain that nothing can remove,
but the faith at whose bidding mountains are removed, and cast into the depths of
the sea. I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.

III. SHOW HOW THESE DIFFICULTIES ARE TO BE OVERCOME. The Spirit and the flesh,
grace and nature, heavenly and earthly influences, are sometimes so fairly balanced,
that like a ship with wind and tide acting on her with equal power, but in opposite
directions, the believer makes no progress in the Divine life. He loses headway. He
does not become worse, but he grows no better; and it is all he can do to hold his
own. Sometimes, indeed, he loses ground; falling into old sins. Temptation comes
like a roaring sea squall, and, finding him asleep at his post, drives him backward on
his course; and farther now from heaven than once he was, he has to pray, Heal my
backsliding, renew me graciously, love me freely--For Thy names sake, O Lord,
pardon mine iniquity, for it is great. Are we never to grow fit for heaven? is our hope
of it but a pious dream, a beautiful delusion? Daily called to contend with
temptation, the battle often goes against us; in these passions, and tempers, and old
habits, the sons of Zeruiah are too strong for us. Not that we do not fight. That
startling cry, The Philistines are on thee, Samson! rouses us; we make some little
fight; but too often resisting only to be conquered, we are ready to give up the
struggle, saying, It is useless; and like Saul in Gilboas battle, to throw away sword
and shield. We would; but that, cheered by a voice from above, and sustained by
hope in Gods grace and mercy, we can turn to our souls to say, Why art thou cast
down, my soul; why is my spirit disquieted within me?--rise; resume thy arms;
renew the combat; never surrender--Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him
who is the health of my countenance, and my God. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

Fearful odds

I. The troubles of THE MIND in this life are often sharp and bitter, enough to tax its
powers to the seeming limit of endurance. When the mind looks back upon its past
history, views its present state, and anticipates its future destiny, and finds in them
respectively occasions of regret, shame, and alarm, it is filled with acute suffering.
And if this survey is directed to its moral condition and relations, if it is led to view
itself as endowed with a capacity to know and choose good and evil, as having its
being under the government of God, bound to obey His laws, and liable to answer at
His throne for all its faults and offences, it tastes the bitterness of an accusing
conscience, and is stung with keen remorse, and agitated with horrible dread. Yet, in
such moments of unwonted moral illumination, we do but guess of that which
shortly shall be. What the eye then sees, it sees, after all, but through a glass
darkly. And oh! if the glimpse be so horrible, what shall be the naked vision? If such
periods be so rich in suffering, what shall be the eternity they foreshadow? For
memory is now exceedingly imperfect, and self-knowledge partial, and the horrors
of the prospect before us mitigated by the medium of future opportunity and
preparation, through which they are seen. Time covers up much of our wickedness
from ourselves; and self-love and the deceitfulness of sin so ten the ugliness of our
faults; and futurity presents a thousand avenues of escape, and convenient seasons
of reformation. Thus we now have resorts and refuges whither we can betake
ourselves from the arrows of conscience. Then, oh! if in this land of peace wherein
we trust,--wherein there is so much in which the soul may confide, so much to stay
it up, and give it quietness in reference to its controversy and reckoning with God,--
we find the sense of our sinfulness and the apprehensions of wrath too much for us,
a wearisome burden too heavy to be borne, what, oh! what shall we do in the
swelling of Jordan, when the waters shall overflow our hiding places? And if a
wounded spirit we cannot bear, now, while there are so many nostrums of our own
to soothe its pains, while there is a sovereign balm at hand to heal it, and a good
Physician near to bind it up; how, oh! how shall we endure its smart, when
indignation shall vex it as a thing that is raw beneath its own eye; and the eye of
God, shining into it with an insufferable brightness, shall give it a keen sense of what
it has been, is, and shall be, and all the universe cannot afford it a covert, or a
balsam to assuage its agony?

II. THE BODY has its pains, too, in this life, and they are many and exquisite. We
are fearfully as well as wonderfully made, compacted of an infinite number of
frail, delicate, and sensitive fibres, which are broken and lacerated by very trivial
causes and accidents. What, then, may be the sufferings of which an immortal and
spiritual body may be capable? And how intolerable the anguish, of which the
refined and exquisite texture of that indestructible and everlasting organisation
which awaits us at the resurrection, may be susceptible!

III. We are here forced to endure distresses of estate, of OUTWARD AND RELATIVE
SITUATION. Here is one who wears the outward paraphernalia of consequence and
prosperity, but there is a worm gnawing at the heart of his happiness. There is some
hidden mischief that spoils all; some vicious, or sickly, or idiot child, it may be, some
wayward spirit in his family, some root of bitterness in his domestic
circumstances, which men either do not see, or justly estimate, that poisons all his
good things. Yonder is a man who might be happy, if there were not so many above
him in society, whose level he cannot reach. A little matter will suffice to destroy the
sweetness of a thousand blessings. Now, if we find it so hard to bear the
inconveniences and annoyances of this life, where is the strength to endure the
discomforts of a situation in a world, where all the society is vile and malignant,
hateful, and hating one another, and all the circumstances fraught with nothing
but mortification, disgrace, restraint, impotent desire, ineffectual effort, and
hopeless resistance? Oh! then, let the exhaustion and vexation wherewith our
Omnipotent Antagonist makes known His power in the milder visitings of His
displeasure that reach us this side the grave, persuade us to leave off our mad
rebellion, and seek a timely peace. (R. A. Hallam, D. D.)

Gradations of trial

I. TO THOSE WHO ARE DISCOURAGED BY TRIFLING DIFFICULTIES, IN THE SERVICE OF

GOD. To renounce Christian service because of its difficulties, is to faint among the
footmen, and ultimately to contend with the horses. For how will it be when
awakened conscience, with its multiplied rebukes, assails thee? How wilt thou
assuage the mourning over lost opportunities, and the deep remorse called up by the
retrospect of a wasted life?

II. TO THOSE WHO SUCCUMB TO BUT FEEBLE TEMPTATIONS. Take the case of one
who has recently fallen into the commission of sin--open, known sin. The
inducements to commit the great transgression were not powerful in themselves,
but the unhappy victim was ensnared almost without resistance; perhaps from want
of vigilance, or it may have been through desperate carelessness. The circumstances
may even have proved favourable for a triumph over the powers of darkness. A few
urgent cries for deliverance would have been successful, escape was close at hand,
but the effort, alas! was not made, or feebly made; and now the memory of that sin
haunts the conscience, destroys the peace, and embitters all the joys of life. Falling
thus easily into the wiles of Satan, what will become of you when he cometh in like a
flood? How will you endure when resistance must be unto blood striving against
sin? In that hour, unless the heart be established by grace, you will be driven like
chaff from the threshing floor. Or, take the case of the young man who, while yet in
his fathers house, surrounded by all the amenities of domestic love, and sheltered
by the sanctions of a Christian home, has fallen, nevertheless, into sinful habits.
What will become of him when all these restraints are removed?

III. TO THOSE WHO SINK UNDER LIGHT AFFLICTIONS. It is not insensibility which is
required of us, because there can be no courage in bearing what we do not feel; nor
are we to sink into despair in the hour of suffering, because that would sacrifice the
virtue of the trial. The happy medium is prescribed (Heb 12:5). It is, however, a very
narrow pathway this, between too much and too little feeling of Divine
chastisement. There is too much sensibility when we are rendered incapable of the
worship of God, or are thrown out of sympathy with our fellow men, or when we are
utterly absorbed in sorrow to the neglect of all the pressing claims of duty. There is
too little feeling of Divine chastisement when we are not, by its agency brought to
faithful heart searching, and to anxious inquiry respecting the purpose of our
Heavenly Father in the correction. Let us look at all our trials as opportunities of
personal advantage. The exercise of patience is of itself a grand moral lesson. To be
joyous in tribulation is greater grace than to be zealous in the time of strength. It
may help us in the season of depression and suffering to compare our condition with
that of others. The most accumulated of distresses, the strangest combination of
griefs, will not make us the worst off in the world. Least of all can we count our
sorrows against His who gave Himself an offering and a sacrifice to God for a
sweet-smelling savour. We can also in the midst of all afflictions anticipate the
rapidly approaching hour of deliverance. We shall presently cast off all earths
calamities as the drops of a summer shower that have scarcely penetrated through
our garments.

IV. TO THOSE WHO ARE NOT PROFITING BY FAVOURABLE PROVIDENCES. One of the
later Latin poets has an apologue on the missing of opportunity worthy of our
attention. A visitor to the studio of Phidias having inspected the statues of the
different deities, inquired the name of one unknown object. It had winged feet,--to
show how swiftly it flies; its features were covered with hair,--because, when
approaching the spectator, it is rarely identified; it was bald behind,--because when
once gone none can seize upon it;--closely following at its heels was a slavish form.
The first is Opportunity,--the last Repentance. Men miss the goddess Opportunity,
and fall into the arms of Repentance. So are the sons of men snared in an evil time,
when it falleth suddenly upon them. (W. G. Lewis.)

The progressive trials in lifes mission

 The preceding verses display two things in the spiritual history of the prophet,
which good men in all ages have often deeply felt--
1. An apparent incongruity between a fundamental article of religious belief, and
the common facts of society. The righteousness of God he grasped with the
tenacity of an earnest faith, it lay as the basis of all his religious views; and
yet the facts of society, everywhere, seemed to contradict it. He saw, on all
hands, the wicked prosperous and happy.
2. An incongruity between the fundamental spirit of religion and the passing
feelings of the moment. The underlying spirit of religion is love; love to God
and love to man--love even to enemies; but the prophet here expresses
feelings in direct opposition to this spirit. How does he feel towards these
wicked men? Commiseration? No, vengeance! Now, the text must be
regarded as a gentle but impressive reproof, addressed by the great God to
the prophet, for his want of forbearance and self-control.

I. The trials in lifes mission are of various degrees of power in the history of the
same man.
1. None ever sailed the sea of mortal life and found every wind and tide
propitious, the ocean always calm, and the horizon ever bright. But we are to
speak of trials of a certain class, not the trials which come upon a man
independent of his conduct, such as physical pain, bereavement, etc.; rather
of such as are connected with the prosecution of his duties,--the trials of
endeavour.
2. Every man has a mission; and every man who endeavours to fulfil it will meet
with trials.
(1) There are trials in the endeavour to get knowledge. These obstruct the
child in studying his alphabet, and the sage in grappling with the last
problem.
(2) There are trials in the endeavour to get a living.
(3) There are trials in the endeavour to get moral excellence.
(4) There are trials in his endeavour to serve his age. What stolid ignorance-
-what warping prejudices--what base habits--what moral obtuseness--
what indifference, ingratitude, and sometimes malignity!

II. THE MAN WHO FAILS TO CONTEND SUCCESSFULLY WITH THE LESSER TRIALS, WILL
NOT BE ABLE TO WITHSTAND THE GREATER. This principle is capable of application to
all the departments of action to which we have referred: but we shall apply it
exclusively to the comparative difficulties of getting religion in different periods of
life.
1. We apply it to youth and age. With youth there are docility of disposition,
tenderness of feeling, and freedom of intellect. As age comes on these
disappear, and prejudices, indifference, and confirmed habits take their
place.
2. We apply it to health and disease. There is required, especially in adult life
and for investigating minds, a large amount of mental abstraction as the
necessary means of attaining religion. Disease and suffering are not only
unfavourable to such abstraction, but, in many cases, necessarily prevent its
 exercise.
3. We apply it to life and death. What is religion? The surrendering of our all to
God,--the yielding up of ourselves as a living sacrifice. How can the man,
therefore, who cannot resign himself to a commercial loss, or who responds
most inadequately, if at all, to the claims of benevolence in life, be able,
cheerfully, to yield his friends, property, and all he has, and is, to the great
God in death? (Homilist.)

The less and the greater conflict

The Christian life is an exercise; necessarily a trial of strength and scene of
discipline. But in the order of nature and providence there is a wise gradation, a
benevolent introduction from the lesser to the greater ills of life. Steadfastness,
patience, cheerful confidence in the smaller and less dangerous conflicts of life, will
discipline and adapt us to bear the fiery assaults of the enemy.

I. ORDINARY LIFE, COMMON EVERYDAY LIFE, IS THE RUNNING WITH THE FOOTMEN,
IS THE LAND OF PEACE, WHERE WE ARE SECURE. It tries our temper, our patience, our
principles. It puts us to the proof whether we honour God most and best. Look
where you will, be what you may, life is a trial. Riches, learning, piety, nothing can
ward off trouble. It is a condition, not an accident of humanity.

II. There is a benevolent preparation and education for greater and more
distressing conflicts by accustoming us to those which are common. The unerring
eye sees the cup, the strong fatherly hand measures the draught. But we must bear
in mind, when we have to tread the winepress alone, that God has a purpose in every
vexation of daily life, in every cross, in every baffled enterprise, in every silent tear;
and that that purpose is to prepare us by steadfastness in what is little and easy to
bear, for confidence in Him under greater perils, in troubles which are hard to bear.
The light in the darkness of todays disappointment is designed to make us hold fast
the lamp against the hour of that darkness which may be felt. Let no one think
these lessons of daily life unimportant. He that despiseth little things shall perish
by little and little. We must learn the secret of strength while running with the
footmen.

III. IN THIS DIVINE REMONSTRANCE IT IS DISTINCTLY IMPLIED THAT WE SHALL BE

CALLED TO CONTEND WITH THE HORSEMEN. The future is dark with shadows, but the
Lords words will hold good of us all. Prepared or unprepared we must meet the
storm, and if a little rain frighten us, how shall we meet it? Our sins, our
weaknesses, our temptations, the virulence of the enemy, all render the coming
struggles inevitable. Whatever you have gone through in this way is but a
preparation for the hour of darkness; you will be called to contend with an enemy
stronger than yourself, as a horseman is stronger than a footman; and you will be
trodden down unless you are clothed with the strength of Him who is able to make
you confident, though a host should encamp against you. (B. Kent.)

Trivial trouble
We condole with ourselves about troubles which are nothing but passing
inconveniences; pin pricks are crucifixions. The fact is we bewail ourselves so
continually and piercingly because we have little or no real trouble. Consider the
sorrows of your neighbours, the misfortunes and crushing trials of your friends, and,
in comparison, your troubles are absurd. Landsmen crossing the sea are full of
anxiety and protest if only a slight breeze rock the ship; they are in anguish as if they
suffered shipwreck; but the old salt, who has known the wrath of the ocean, smiles
at their fretfulness and fear: and our neighbours and friends, who know what
trouble is, listen with a compassionate smile to the glib recital of our toy tragedies.
Our lamentations over this, that, or the other trifle, are convincing proof that we are
well off; one genuine misfortune, one shattering thunderbolt, would hush our woeful
tale. In the meantime we make more ado about a crumpled rose leaf than thousands
of noble men and women do about a crown of thorns. The age in which we live tends
to intensify sensitiveness, and we need to be on our guard against magnifying
molehills into mountains and thistles into forests. We are taken care of on every
side, our thousand artificial wants are promptly and ingeniously met, we have
facilities and luxuries innumerable, until we become hypersensitive, and feel
ourselves martyrs if the wind blows a little hot or cold, if we suffer toothache, or are
overtaken by the pleasant trouble of the rain. The habit of observing these shallow
troubles, nursing them, talking about them, making fax more of them than we justly
ought to make, is to be carefully watched. It tends to impair the largeness, strength,
and heroism of the soul, and to leave us unfortified against the real trials which most
likely await us a little farther on. If the footmen weary us, how shall we contend with
horses? A calm, wise, reticent way of bearing ordinary irritations, annoyances, and
misfortunes will discipline and brace us to play our part worthily when we must
battle with the avalanche, earthquake, and flood. (W. L. Watkinson.)

Prepare for greater things

If they cannot face the candle, what will they do when they see the sun?
(Demosthenes.)

Effort easier now than it will be in the future

If, in early life, when sin was comparatively weak and conscience was
comparatively strong, we were so easily and so often overcome by temptation, what
hope for us when this order is reversed; when conscience has become weak and sin
grown strong? If we were no match for the cub, how shall we conquer the grown
lion? If we had not strength to pull out the sapling, how are we to root up the tree? If
it exceeded our utmost power to turn the stream near its mountain cradle, how shall
we turn the river that, roaring and swollen, pours its flood on to the sea? If we could
not resist the stone on the brow of the hill, how shall we stop it when gathering
speed at every turn, and force at every bound, it rushes into the valley with resistless
might? Sin gaining such power by time and habit.
And if in the land of peace, wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee,
then how wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?--
The land of peace

I. Expostulation.
1. God has appointed to all of us our peculiar trials; some have a heavy burden,
and are inclined, on looking upon the events which befall them, to join in the
 complaint of the patriarch, All these things are against me. Deep calleth
unto deep, etc. (Psa 42:7); while that which has fallen to the lot of others is
so slight as hardly to be called trial at all. The point in question, however, is
not as to the degree of trial, but as to the way in which it is borne, and the
results it is producing. All trials have their own work to perform, their result
to produce, which could be produced in no other way; but then let us ask
ourselves individually, Are these trials producing that result in my own case?
We know what those fruits are; the patience, the bringing under the
impatient and rebellious will, and the disciplining it to wait in humble
submission upon God, the experience of self, and of the evil within, of Gods
love as exactly suiting the need felt--the hope, not impulsive and uncertain,
but sure and steady, and making not ashamed.
2. Similar thoughts may be suggested with regard to our conflict with sin and
internal corruption. We are apt to complain of the difficulties of our
Christian course. The way of self-denial and cross-bearing is found to be a
hard way, the power of indwelling corruption is great, and love is cold. This
is all true; but God warned us on our setting out, that the race we were
engaging in was no easy matter, but that it would call for every energy, and
that at no time could vigilance be laid aside with safety. The question is,
then, have those difficulties complained of led to increased distrust of self--
more constant watchfulness? There may be greater difficulties yet to be
overcome, a greater and more important work to be done for the Masters
sake, and how can utter failure be avoided in these more difficult contests,
unless we are gaining ground in that to which we have already been called?
The question is (and this point is a most important one), not what success
might you be gaining under other conditions, with temptations less strong,
with fuller opportunities of good, and so forth; but in that particular conflict
to which you are called, with those very besetting sins, prone to this infirmity
or that, are you striving in the strength of the Lord earnestly and
unremittingly?
3. There is a thought which may be brought to our minds by the typical idea
familiarly attached to Jordan, as the emblem of death. Is there not often too
wide a difference between a Christian employed in the active duties of life,
and the same man when cast upon a bed of sickness, and knowing that
perhaps his end may be near? There is necessarily a difference in the
demonstration of feeling, but should there be this difference in the whole
tone as it were of our religion? Unless now, while all is peaceful, and matters
are going on in their accustomed course, there is the habitual living upon
Christ, with a frequent sense of His presence, and delight in communion
with Him, how shall we do in the swelling of Jordan?

II. ENCOURAGEMENT FROM THE CONVERSE THOUGHT. If you have been faithful in
that which is less, there is room for hope that you will be upheld in that which is
greater, that if you have not been wearied and neglectful in the lesser conflict in
which you have already been engaged, you will not be suffered to fall or be overcome
in any that may yet threaten you. Have you misgivings and doubts as to future
attacks of sin, and the strength of temptation under some new circumstances which
may hereafter arise? As far as your own strength is concerned there is indeed much
reason for that fear, but you know whom you have believed, whose strength has
been put forth for you, on whose arm you have leant in the past, and therefore
although your race were to become far more arduous than it is now, although
hundreds of difficulties now unforeseen should spring up into being, yet you will not
doubt His love, or distrust His power. What you have learnt of His past faithfulness
and love forbids you to be apprehensive for the future; you will trust and not be
afraid, knowing that you can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth you.
The question is worthy of serious consideration, especially by those who, convinced
of the vanity of earths gratifications, and of the value of the Christian portion, are
yet withholding their hearts from Christ, and are yet unwilling to be wholly His.
This, indeed, is the land of peace wherein you trust; but is yours indeed a true peace
which will abide? Peace is truly offered, reconciliation provided, all ready on Gods
part. Peace will surely follow upon pardon--upon the purging away of sin in the
blood of Jesus, but is that peace truly yours now? (J. H. Holford, M. A.)

Then how wilt thou do In the swelling of Jordan?--

The swelling of Jordan

I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND PRIMARY MEANING OF THE WORDS. Like many
of the names that occur in Old Testament Scripture, that of Jeremiah--raised up,
or appointed by God,--has a peculiar significance, if we consider the duties,
important, yet hazardous, he was called upon to discharge during successive reigns.
Jeremiah was very young when the Word of the Lord first came to him, in the
thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah, while he was resident at Anathoth, his native
city. There, after the prophetic gift was imparted, he continued to live for several
years, until the hostility, not only of his fellow townsmen, but of the members of his
own family having been aroused, on account, probably, of the holiness of his life,
and the fidelity of his remonstrances, he quitted Anathoth, and took up his residence
at Jerusalem. The finding of the Book of the Law, five years after he had begun to
prophesy, must have had a powerful influence on the mind of Jeremiah, in whom,
doubtless, the young and right-minded king Josiah found valuable help in the efforts
he put forth with a view to promote national reformation. No sooner, however, was
the influence of the court in favour of true religion withdrawn, than Jeremiah
became an object of attack, as he had doubtless been long an object of dislike, on the
part of those whose anger had been roused by his rebukes. This bitterness of
opposition continued during successive reigns, and at various times his life was
threatened. At the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, he was put in
confinement by Pashur, the chief governor of the house of the Lord; but he seems
soon to have been liberated, for we find that he was not in prison at the time when
Nebuchadnezzars army commenced the siege of Jerusalem. The prophet Jeremiah
had severe trials and manifold difficulties and discouragements to contend against.
His counsels were rejected, and his voice was lifted up in the name of Jehovah
seemingly in vain; his soul yearned with solicitude and tender affection towards
those who turned a deaf ear to his admonitory voice, despised his counsels, and
would have none of the reproofs he was commissioned to utter. By footmen some
understand the Philistines and Edomites, whose armies were composed principally
of infantry, and by horses the Chaldeans, who had abundance of cavalry and
chariots in their army, and who subsequently ravaged Palestine, at the time of
Nebuchadnezzars invasion. But whether such be the force of the allusion or not, the
gist of the argument seems to be as follows:--if lesser trials seem hard to be borne; if
earthly losses have a sting of bitterness, and often inflict a severe wound; is there not
need of holy resolution, based on a sure foundation, when, in addition to minor ills,
as in the swelling of Jordan, which periodically overflowed its banks in the time of
harvest, mens lives might be placed in jeopardy, their flocks exposed to lions driven
out of their lairs, and the produce of the harvest fields submerged or swept away; so
the more ordinary trials of life, which yet demanded patience and meekness, would
be followed by graver emergencies, such as a heaven-derived and supported hope,
resting on no insecure or shifting foundation, but upon the Rock, the Rock of Ages,
could alone enable men to bear up under; when, so to speak, the heavens grew dark,
the waters raged, the banks were overflowed, the lashing hail fell, the earth shook
and trembled, the lightning glanced and the thunder rolled, as in the severity of an
almost tropical storm? How wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?

II. Practical lessons, applicable to various classes of persons.

1. To those who are careless about religion and its claims. It were almost
ludicrous, if it were not also most melancholy, to notice man, who is
indebted to God for all that he possesses, thus standing to defy the
Omnipotent in arms; yet such is the attitude assumed by everyone who
defies, maligns, insults the Great Benefactor, who, if strong to save, is also
mighty to inflict just and condign punishment upon His foes. Now, consider
this, says the Psalmist, ye that forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and
there be none to deliver.
2. To the undecided. The position resembles that of a man on shifting sand,
liable to the encroachment of the swiftly flowing stream. Ah! if at certain
times uneasiness could not be banished, but care ate as a canker into the
heart of what had the semblance of joy; an angry God, as it were, seen above;
the abyss of darkness opening beneath; blackness of darkness, as if
around; what need of arriving at a proper and satisfactory decision! Now,
while, mercy can be found; while Gods invitation through Christ is heard, of
turning to the Stronghold as a prisoner of hope; for if lesser difficulties
have been perplexing; if grief and disappointment have already planted
furrows on the brow, what shall be the end of them that will not obey the
Gospel of God; who will not comply with a Saviours bidding, nor give their
minds to the truth, nor allow of the Holy Spirits action upon the heart?
3. To such as are living in antagonism and opposition to Gods holy mind and
will. Judgment may appear to be deferred; it is impending nevertheless--God
hath spoken it.
4. To doubting Christians. Pilgrim, come: there is bread enough, and to spare.
Tempted one, come: strength shall be given and decision imparted to repel
the evil suggestion, as Paul at Melita cast aside the viper that sprang out of
the fire, and fastened upon his hand. Mourner, approach; the Friend of
mourners can support under earthly blanks and losses. (A. R. Bonar.)

The swelling of Jordan

I. Certain circumstances which make death more appalling than any other
calamity.
1. Death must be met alone.
 2. Not only the solace of thine accustomed society, but every other temporal
result will then fail thee.
3. Death ushers us into a new and strange world. Well may flesh and blood
shrink from the prospect of being effectually unhinged from all that is usual
and accustomed--effectually divested of every material and earthly
association, and of dipping its foot in the brink of that cold river, whose flood
is appointed to roll over the head of all flesh.
4. Our great Enemy, as in all our trials so in this especially, will be at hand to
improve it to our ruin.

II. To every sincere believer in Christ the horror with which the above
circumstances invest death is entirely dispelled.
1. Although the Christian, in the trying hour of dissolution, cannot, any more
than others, fall back upon the sympathy and support of his fellow men, still
he is not left in the pitiful plight of the worldling and sinner to encounter
death alone (Psa 23:4).
2. What is it to him, if all earthly stays and confidences be broken up? He has
not built his hopes of eternity on refuges of lies. He has an anchor of the
soul sure and stedfast. He has first the sure word of promise, assuring him
that his Lord will be with him when he passes through the rivers (Isa 43:2).
And then he has the gracious and glorious work of atonement and mediation,
upon which is based the everlasting covenant which God has made with him
in Christ, and from the consideration of which he may draw up endless
supplies of peace and satisfaction, even in those dark hours of disquietude.
3. It follows next to speak of the acquaintance which the Christians soul has
during life contracted with the new sphere into which the swelling of Jordan
bears him away. Some regards and respects to things terrestrial he must
have entertained as dwelling on the earth--but this home, the home of his
affections, has never, since he became a sincere Christian, been situated here
below. This is only the house of his pilgrimage, and he accounts it so to be.
While walking on the earth he has his conversation in heaven. Accordingly
death ushers him into no strange scene, and introduces him to no strange
company. No, he is already come to Mount Sion, etc. (Heb 12:22-24).
4. The Lion of the tribe of Judah is at hand to wrestle with the lion who
walketh about seeking whom he may devour, and to bear away
triumphantly from the conflict his own redeemed servant without the loss of
a hair of his head, thus asserting his claim to divide a portion with the great,
and to divide the spoil with the strong. (Dean Goulburn.)

The swellings of Jordan

If troubles, slow as footmen, surpass us, what will we do when they take the feet of
horses? and if now in our lifetime we are beaten back and submerged of sorrows
because we have not the religion of Jesus to comfort us, what will we do when we
stand in death, and we feel all around about us the swelling of Jordan? What a sad
thing it is to see men all unhelped of God, going out to fight giants of trouble; no
closet of prayer in which to retreat, no promise of mercy to soothe the soul, no rock
of refuge in which to hide from the blast. Oh, when the swift coursers of trouble are
brought up, champing and panting for the race, and the reins are thrown upon their
necks, and the lathered flanks at every spring feel the stroke of the lash, what can we
on foot do with them? How can we compete with them? If, having run with the
footmen, they wearied us, how can we contend with horses? We have all yielded to
temptation. We have been surprised afterwards that so small an inducement could
have decoyed us from the right. How insignificant a temptation has sometimes
captured our soul. And if that is so, my dear brother, what will it be when we come
to stand in the presence of temptation that prostrated a David, and a Moses, and a
Peter, and some of the mightiest men in all Gods kingdom? If the footmen are too
much for us, wont the odds be more fearful against us when we contend with
horses? But my text suggests something in advance of anything I have said. We must
all quit this life. Oh, when the great tides of eternity arise about us, and fill the soul
and surround it, and sweep it out towards rapture or woe, ah, that will be the
swelling of Jordan. Our natural courage wont hold us out then. However familiar
we may have been with scenes of mortality, however much we may have screwed our
courage up, we want something more than natural resources. When the northeast
wind blows off from the sea of death, it will put out all earthly lights. The lamp of the
Gospel, God-lighted, is the only lamp that can stand in that blast. The weakest arm
holding that shall not be confounded; the strongest one neglecting that shall
stumble and die. Oh, I rejoice to know that so many of Gods children have gone
through that pass without a shudder. Someone said to a dying Christian: Isnt it
hard for you to get out of this world? Oh, no, he says, it is easy dying, it is blessed
dying, it is glorious dying; and then he pointed to a clock on the wall, and he said:
the last two hours in which I have been dying, I have had more joy than all the
years of my life. General Fisk came into the hospital after the battle, and there were
many seriously wounded, and there was one man dying, and the general said: Ah,
my dear fellow, you seem very much wounded. I am afraid you are not going to get
well. No, said the soldier, I am not going to get well, but I feel very happy. And
then he looked up into the generals face, and said: I am going to the front! But
there is one step still in advance suggested by this subject. If this religion of Christ is
so important in life, and so important in the last hours of life, how much more
important it will be in the great eternity. Alas! for those who have made no
preparation for the future! When the sharp-shod hoofs of eternal disaster come up
panting and swift to go over them, how will they contend with horses? And when the
waves of their wretchedness rise up, white and foamy, under the swooping of eternal
storms and the billows become more wrathful and dash more high, oh, what, what
will they do amid the swelling of Jordan? (T. De Witt Talmage.)

Are you prepared to die

I. This is an EXCEEDINGLY PRACTICAL QUESTION. How wilt thou do? is the inquiry.
There are some subjects which are more or less matters of pure faith and personal
feeling; and though all Christian doctrines bear more or less directly upon the
Christian life, yet they are not what is commonly meant by practical subjects. Our
text, however, brings us face to face with a matter which is essentially a matter of
doing and of acting: it asks how we mean to conduct ourselves in the hour of death.
Christians may differ from me on some points, but I am sure that here we are united
in belief--we must die, and ought not to die unprepared.
 II. It is UNDOUBTEDLY A PERSONAL QUESTION. How wilt thou do? It
individualises us, and makes us each one to come face to face with a dying hour.
Now we all need this, and it will be well for each one of us to look for a minute into
the grave. We are too apt to regard all men as mortal but ourselves. The ancient
warrior who wept because before a hundred years were passed he knew his immense
army would be gone, and not a man remain behind to tell the tale, would have been
wiser if he had wept also for himself, and left alone his bloody wars, and lived as a
man who must one day die, and find after death a day of judgment. Each one of you
must die. We all come into the world one by one, and will go out of it also alone. We
had better therefore take the question up as individuals, seeing that it is one in
which we shall be dealt with singly, and be unable then to claim or use the help of an
earthly friend.

III. It is one of the MOST SOLEMN questions. Death and life are stern and awful
realities. To say that anything is a matter of life and death, is to bring one of the
most emphatic and solemn subjects under our notice. Now, the question we are
considering is of this character, and we must deal with it as it becomes us, when we
investigate a subject involving the everlasting interest of souls.

IV. This question was put by way of REBUKE to the prophet Jeremiah. He seems
to have been a little afraid of the people among whom he dwelt. They had evidently
persecuted him very much, and laughed him to scorn; but God tells him to make his
face like flint, and not to care for them, for, says He, If thou art afraid of them, how
wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan? This ought to be a rebuke to every Christian
who is subject to the fear of man. There is an old proverb, that he is a great fool that
is laughed out of his coat, and there was an improvement on it, that he was a
greater fool who was laughed out of his skin; and there is another, that he is the
greatest fool of all who is laughed out of his soul. He that will be content to be
damned in order to be fashionable, pays dear indeed for what he gets. Oh, to dare to
be singular, if to be singular is to be right; but if you are afraid of man, what will you
do in the swelling of Jordan? The same rebuke might be applied to us when we get
fretful under the little troubles of life. You have losses in business, vexations in the
family--you have all crosses to carry--but my text comes to you, and it says, If you
cannot bear this, how will you do in the swelling of Jordan? When one of the
martyrs, whose name is the somewhat singular one of Pommily, was confined
previous to his burning, his wife was also taken up upon the charge of heresy. She,
good woman, had resolved to die with her husband, and she appeared, as far as most
people could judge, to be very firm in her faith. But the jailers wife, though she had
no religion, took a merciful view of the case as far as she could do so, and thought, I
am afraid this woman will never stand the test, she will never burn with her
husband, she has neither faith nor strength enough to endure the trial; and
therefore, one day calling her out from her cell, she said to her, Lass, run to the
garden and fetch me the key that lies there. The poor woman ran willingly enough;
she took the key up and it burned her fingers, for the jailers wife had made it red
hot; she came running back crying with pain. Ay, wench, said she, if you cannot
bear a little burn in your hand, how will you bear to be burned in your whole body?
and this, I am sorry to add, was the means of bringing her to recant the faith which
she professed, but which never had been in her heart. I apply the story thus: If we
cannot bear the little trifling pangs which come upon us in our ordinary
circumstances, which are but as it were the burning of your hands, what shall we do
when every pulse beats pain, and every throb is an agony, and the whole tenement
begins to crumble about the spirit that is so soon to be disturbed?

V. The question may be put as A MATTER OF CAUTION. There are some who have no
hope, no faith in Christ. Now I think, if they will look within at their own experience,
they will find that already they are by no means completely at ease. The pleasures of
this world are very sweet; but how soon they cloy, if they do not sicken the appetite.
After the night of merriment there is often the morning of regret. Who hath woe?
who hath redness of eyes? They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek
mixed wine. It is an almost universal confession that the joys of earth promise more
than they perform, and that in looking back upon them, the wisest must confess
with Solomon, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Now if these things seem to be
vanity while you are in good bodily health, how will they look when you are in
sickness? If vanity while you can enjoy them, what will they appear when you must
say farewell to them all?

VI. I use the question as EXCITING MEDITATION in the breasts of those who have
given their hearts to Christ, and who consequently are prepared to die whenever the
summons may come. Well, what do we mean to do, how shall we behave ourselves
when we come to die? I sat down to try and think this matter over, but I cannot, in
the short time allotted to me, even give you a brief view of the thoughts that passed
through my mind. I began thus, How shall I do in the swelling of Jordan? Well, as
a believer in Christ, perhaps, I may never come there at all, for there are some that
will be alive and remain at the coming of the Son of Man, and these will never die. A
sweet truth, which we place first in our meditation. I may not sleep, but I must and
shall be changed. Then I thought again, How shall I do in the swelling of Jordan? I
may go through it in the twinkling of an eye. When Ananias, martyr, knelt to lay his
white head upon the block, it was said to him as he closed his eyes to receive the
stroke, Shut thine eyes a little, old man, and immediately thou shalt see the light of
God. I could envy such a calm departing. Sudden death, sudden glory; taken away
in Elijahs chariot of fire, with the horses driven at the rate of lightning, so that the
spirit scarcely knows that it has left the clay, before it sees the brightness of the
beatific vision. Well, that may take away--some of the alarm of death, the thought
that we may not be even a moment in the swelling of Jordan. Then again, I thought,
if I must pass through the swelling of Jordan, yet the real act of death takes no time.
We hear of suffering on a dying bed; the suffering is all connected with life, it is not
death. A dying bed is sometimes very painful; with certain diseases, and especially
with strong men, it is often hard for the body and soul to part asunder. But it has
been my happy lot to see some deaths so extremely pleasing, that I could not help
remarking, that it were worth while living, only for the sake of dying as some have
died. Well, then, as I cannot tell in what physical state I may be when I come to die, I
just tried to think again, how shall I do in the swelling of the Jordan? I hope I shall
do as others have done before me, who have built on the same rock, and had the
same promises to be their succour. They cried Victory! So shall I, and after that die
quietly and in peace. If the same transporting scene may not be mine, I will at least
lay my head upon my Saviours bosom, and breathe my life out gently there.

VII. How wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan? may be well used by way of
WARNING. You grant that you will die, and you may die soon. Is it not foolish to be
living in this world without a thought of what you will do at last? A man goes into an
inn, and as soon as he sits down he begins to order his wine, his dinner, his bed;
there is no delicacy in season which he forgets to bespeak, there is no luxury which
he denies himself. He stops at the inn for some time. By and by there comes in a bill,
and he says, Oh, I never thought of that--I never thought of that. Why, says the
landlord, here is a man who is either a born fool or else a knave. What I never
thought of the reckoning--never thought of settling day! And yet this is how some
of you live. You have this, and that, and the other thing in this worlds inn (for it is
nothing but an inn) and you have soon to go your way, and yet you have never
thought of settling day! Well, says one, I was casting up my accounts this
morning. Yes, I remember a minister making this remark when he heard of one
that east up his accounts on Sunday. He said, I hope that is not true, sir. Yes, he
said, I do cast up my accounts on Sunday. Ah, well, he said, the day of judgment
will be spent in a similar manner--in casting up accounts, and it will go ill with those
people who found no other time in which to serve themselves except the time which
was given them that they might serve God. You have either been a dishonest man,
or else you must be supremely foolish, to be spending every day in this worlds inn,
and yet to be ignoring the thought of the great day of account. But remember,
though you forget it, God forgets not.

VIII. Before I close I must guide your thoughts to what is THE TRUE PREPARATION
FOR DEATH. Three things present themselves to my mind as being our duty in
connection with the dying hour. First seek to be washed in the Red Sea of the dear
Redeemers blood, come in contact with the death of Christ, and by faith in it you
will be prepared to meet your own. Again, learn of the Apostle Paul to die daily.
Practise the duty of self-denial and mortifying of the flesh till it shall become a habit
with you, and when you have to lay down the flesh and part with everything, you will
be only continuing the course of life you have pursued all along. And as the last
preparation for the end of life, I should advise a continual course of active service
and obedience to the command of God. I have frequently thought that no happier
place to die in could be found than ones post of duty. If I were a soldier, I think I
should like to die as Wolfe died, with victory shouting in my ear, or as Nelson died,
in the midst of his greatest success. Preparation for death does not mean going alone
into the chamber and retiring from the world, but active service, doing the duty of
the day in the day. The best preparation for sleep, the healthiest soporific, is hard
work, and one of the best things to prepare us for sleeping in Jesus, is to live in Him
an active life of going about doing good. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Who shall carry me over the river

A prominent business man thus expressed himself to a Christian minister: I am
interested in Church matters, and always glad to see ministers when they call. But I
have thought the subject over long and carefully, and have come to the deliberate
decision that I have no need of Jesus. A single week had not passed before that man
was taken sick. His disease was accompanied with such inflammation of the throat
as forbade his speaking at all. This enforced silence continued until the hour, of
death, when he was enabled to utter simply this one despairing whisper: Who shall
carry me over the river?
The swelling of Jordan
 These words are a remonstrance which God addresses to His prophet, Jeremiah.
He had the most shrinking, sensitive nature of all the Hebrew prophets. Yet his task
was to make a stand for God in the time of his nations direst need. Babylon, the
great heathen power, had thrown a cord round the neck of Israel which it tightened
every year. Its forces were closing round Jerusalem with the slow but sure pressure
of a military advance. And the people all the while were unaroused, like sleeping
children in a house that has caught fire. The politicians trusted to their diplomacy;
they hoped to fight the brute force of the enemy with their wits. The priests and the
prophets drugged the conscience of the nation with the facile phrases of a lazy and
stupid trust. Jeremiah stood out alone, like Athanasius against the world, hated
alike by the statesmen and the leaders of the religious world. There are usually, we
say, two sides to every question, and the case for Jeremiahs foes was something like
this. He seemed to them a tiresome herald of ill, prating always of fateful things
because he had a gloomy nature. He seemed to be without any patriotic feeling,
constantly saying hard things about his own country, and glorifying Babylon as the
avenging instrument of God. So it had come about, long ere the last crisis of
Jerusalem, that the Jews felt a bitter hatred of Jeremiah. We have read (Jer 11:18;
Jer 12:6) how, somewhat early in his history, some of them tried to kill him. The
prophet was paying a visit to his native village of Anathoth, a few miles from
Jerusalem. He was ignorant of danger. And all the while his own townsmen and
brethren were plotting his death. But for some special providence of God his career
would have reached a too early close. But now, when the danger is past, a strange
thing is seen. There is no record of any psalm of deliverance to help the praise of our
later generations. But, as if in its place, there falls on the prophet one of those
terrible moods of depression when, in Bunyans language, he is held in the grasp of
Giant Despair and thrown into Doubting Castle. Why must he face with single hand
the troops of the wicked? Why cannot God strike in and cut short the struggle? He
who by nature was sensitive as a reed became by Gods grace as an iron pillar and a
brazen wall. And so it is here. In the words of the text, the demon of depression is
driven off and retires for a season. Jeremiah crushes the cowardly thoughts that had
arisen within him by the vision of sterner trials in the future. The brush with the
men of Anathoth is a small affair, a mere race with footmen; Jerusalem in the days
to come will see him try his speed against horses. Soon he will look back to the
present time as to a mild land of peace, girdled by a summer-dried river. Ah, you
say, we have little in common with a great prophet. He was set to do a loud-
resounding task, while our days are passed in obscurity, far away from the roar of a
battle of the nations. Yes, but all human lives run up to a centre. The inner struggle
of every soul is the same, whether it is fought out in the cottage, or in the tent of the
soldier, or in the fiery heart of the prophet. It has come readily to men to liken
human life to a stream descending to the sea. But it is not the precise image of the
text, which rather compares the life of man to the flat meadows that adjoin some
mighty stream. For long months of the year there is a time of holy quiet. The flowers
are gay, the grass is green, the river murmurs gently as if singing a song of rest, the
boys and girls are shouting at their play. But one day a change seems to come over
the stream. Its gentle murmur swells into a threatening roar. The days of dreadful
ease are gone; desolation looks men in the face with a grey and grim reality; the evil
days have come. That is the image of the text. What of its practical meaning? There
are times when our duty seems almost easy, when it is not hard to beat off
temptation. Such times are our land of peace. But there are other times, when the
need is sore and the contest cruel. Every nerve is strained. Such times are for us as
the swelling of Jordan. The text puts into heightened and rhythmic words a very
obvious truth, which surely wins emphasis and illumination from the stern history
to which it belongs. It should make us cease moaning over our trivial griefs, when
we find that God speaks so lightly of a serious trouble. Jeremiah had barely escaped
with his life, yet his foretaste of the bitterness of death is compared to a land of
peace. He gets no petting, and is promised no relief from such trial in the future. He
is merely asked to reflect on the principle that underlies all moral heroism. He that
is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much. Let us follow out this
principle in two or three illustrations. Take first of all the everyday calls of duty,
what Keble has named the trivial round, the common task. To all of us, at some
time in our lives, there come periods of crisis when a heavy demand is made on our
store of courage and endurance. Then it is that the dire need sifts our character and
declares the moral poverty or wealth. As the man is, so is his strength. The text tells
us that this great clay of the swelling of Jordan is bound together with our easy
days in the land of peace. Those deeds of vast renown, which the grace of God calls
out on occasion, do not come flashing out of a background of moral laxity or shame.
They are not idle, lawless lights of heaven, coming we know not whence, going we
know not whither. They have been prepared for by long and quiet days of lowly
service. In the Character of the Happy Warrior Wordsworth insists that a soldiers
brave feats of daring in battle are just the outcome of faithfulness to duty in days of
peace. In the mild concerns of ordinary life the genuine hero is training for a
mightier task. Suddenly he confronts some awful moment, weighty with solemn
issues. Then the hidden strength leaps forth. He is attired with sudden brightness,
like a man inspired. Water; we say, does not rise higher than its source, and
certainly men and women do not leap to a height and marvel of self-sacrifice until
their daily practice has subdued them to a resolute self-mastery. Take, as a second
illustration of the principle of the text, our everyday experiences of temptation and
moral defeat. The man who brings his conscience to bear on his everyday tasks is
training for higher things in a future that may rush on him at any moment. But there
is also the sad opposite of that truth. Neither for good nor for evil can we wholly cut
ourselves away from our past life. The years that are no more have a part on shaping
the years that are to be. The fall from grace today was easier because yesterday you
did not strive mightily against sin. Habits and desires move on to their climax and
fulfilment. Alike in the kingdom of God and the kingdom of sin, you have no
permission to stand still. Every day of our lives puts us to some proof or trial. These
things are so, yet it is only in our high moments that we fully realise and act upon
them. We forget that the oft-repeated story of a ruined life tells not of one great fall,
but of many little ones. Men overlook the tiny breaches which sin has made in the
wall of resistance. They are weary of this endless running with the footmen. After
long days there steals on them the drowsiness of the enchanted ground. But the
weariness is fatal, as the soft sleep of the tired traveller amid the falling snow. Let us
remember that those periods of moral crisis struck even upon the stainless Christ.
He was tempted, an apostolic writer tells us, in all points as we are. But temptation
concentrated its powers in great turning points of His history, in the wilderness and
in the agony of the garden, in the remonstrance of a chosen apostle and in the hour
of darkness on the Cross. All the disastrous forces with which the moral atmosphere
was charged gathered themselves together and burst in furious storm. And the life of
Jesus resembles in this the life of men. All our history is in part a history of
temptation. But there are times in the lives of all of us when temptation
concentrates its powers. Our life is no longer a series of skirmishes. Now at length it
is a pitched battle with the enemy in full armour, and all his forces set in array
against us. (D. Conner, M. A.)

JER 12:9
Mine heritage is unto Me as a speckled bird.

A speckled bird
Mine (Gods) heritage is unto Me as a speckled bird. As an owl, say some, that
loveth not the light; as a peacock, say others, as oft changed as moved. God, that
could not endure miscellany seed, nor linsey-woolsey, in Israel, can less endure that
His people should be as a speckled bird, here of one colour, and there of another; or
as a cake not turned (Hos 5:4). (John Trapp.)

Gods people as speckled birds

Mine heritage (the godly mans) is unto me as a speckled bird. When living at
Cambridge Mr. Spurgeon was appointed to preach at a village lust outside the city,
and during the day, after much reading and meditation, he was unable to light upon
a suitable text, and was, as Bunyan would say, much tumbled up and down in his
thoughts. Rising from prayer and the reading of the Scriptures he walked to the
window, and, looking out, espied on the other side of the narrow street a solitary
canary upon the roof ridge, surrounded by a crowd of sparrows that were all pecking
at it. At that moment the verse quoted flashed into his mind, and he started off upon
his country walk, restful in heart and mind, and composed his sermon as he
journeyed, the main points of his discourse being the peculiarity of Gods people and
the persecutions they suffer in consequence. He thus speaks of the episode himself:
I preached with freedom and ease to myself, and, I believe, with comfort to my
rustic audience. The text was sent to me, and if the ravens did not bring it, certainly
the sparrows did. (Chas. Spurgeon.)

JEREMIAH 13

JER 13:1-11
Then I went to Euphrates, and digged, and took the girdle from the place where I
had hid it: and, beheld, the girdle was marred, it was profitable for nothing.

The cast-off girdle

In many instances the prophets were bidden to do singular things, and among the
rest was this: Jeremiah must take a linen girdle and put it about his loins, and wear
it there till the people had noticed what he wore, and how long he wore it. This
girdle was not to be washed; this was to be a matter observed of all observers, for it
was a part of the similitude. Then he must make a journey to the distant river
Euphrates, and take off his girdle and bury it there. When the people saw him
without a girdle they would make remarks and ask what he had done with it; and he
would reply that he had buried it by the river of Babylon. Many would count him
mad for having walked so far to get rid of a girdle: two hundred and fifty miles was
certainly a great journey for such a purpose. Surely he might have buried it nearer
home, if he must needs bury it at all. Anon, the prophet goes a second time to the
Euphrates, and they say one to another, The prophet is a fool: the spiritual man is
mad. See what a trick he is playing. Nearly a thousand miles the man will have
walked in order to hide a girdle, and to dig it up again. What next will he do?
Whereas plain words might not have been noticed, this little piece of acting
commanded the attention and excited the curiosity of the people. The record of this
singular transaction has come to us, and we know that, as a part of Holy Scripture, it
is full of instruction. Thousands of years will not make it so antique as to be
valueless. The Word of the Lord never becomes old so as to lose its vigour; it as still
as strong for all Divine purposes as when first of all Jehovah spoke it.

I. In our text we have AN HONOURABLE EMBLEM of Israel and Judah: we may say,
in these days, an emblem of the Church of God.
1. God had taken this people to be bound to Himself: He had taken them to be as
near to Him as the girdle is to the Oriental when he binds it about his loins.
The traveller in the East takes care that his girdle shall not go unfastened: he
girds himself securely ere he commences his work or starts upon his walk;
and God has bound His people round about Him so that they shall never be
removed from Him I in them saith Christ, even as a man is in his girdle.
Who shall separate us? saith Paul. Who shall ungird us from the heart and
soul of our loving God? They shall be Mine, saith the Lord.
2. But Jeremiahs girdle was a linen one: it was the girdle peculiar to the priests,
for such was the prophet; he was the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were
in Anathoth. Thus the type represents chosen men as bound to God in
connection with sacrifice. We are bound to the Most High for solemn
priesthood to minister among the sons of men in holy things. The Lord Jesus
is now blessing the sons of men as Aaron blessed the people, and we are the
girdle with which He girds Himself in the act of benediction by the Gospel.
3. The girdle also is used by God always in connection with work. When Eastern
men are about to work in real earnest they gird up their loins. When the Lord
worketh righteousness in the earth it is by means of His chosen ones. When
He publishes salvation, and makes known His grace, His saints are around
Him. When sinners are to be saved it is by His people when error is to be
denounced, it is by our lips that He chooses to speak. When His saints are to
be comforted, it is by those who have been comforted by His Holy Spirit, and
who therefore tell out the consolations which they have themselves enjoyed.
4. Moreover, the girdle was intended for ornament. It does not appear that it
was bound about the priests loins under his garments, for if so it would not
have been seen, and would not have been an instructive symbol: this girdle
must be seen, since it was meant to be a type of a people who were to be unto
God for a people, and for a name, and for a praise and for a glory. Is not
this wonderful beyond all wonder, that God should make His people His
glory? But now, alas! we have to turn our eyes sorrowfully away from this
surpassing glory.
 II. These people who might have been the glorious girdle of God displayed in
their own persons A FATAL OMISSION. Did you notice it? Thus saith the Lord unto
Jeremiah, Go and get thee a linen girdle, and put it upon thy loins, and put it not in
water.
1. Ah, me! there is the mischief: the unwashed girdle is the type of an unholy
people who have never received the great cleansing. No nearness to God can
save you if you have never been washed by the Lord Jesus. No official
connection can bless you if you have never been washed in His most precious
blood. Here is the alternative for all professors,--you must be washed in the
blood of Christ, or be laid aside; which shall it be?
2. The prophet was bidden not to put it in water, which shows that there was not
only an absence of the first washing, but there was no daily cleansing. We are
constantly defiling our feet by marching through this dusty world, and every
night we need to be washed. If you suffer a sin to lie on your conscience, you
cannot serve God aright while it is there. If you have transgressed as a child,
and you do not run and put your head into your Fathers bosom and cry,
Father, I have sinned! you cannot do Gods work.
3. The more this girdle was used the more it gathered great and growing
defilement. Without the atonement, the more we do the more we shall sin.
Our very prayers will turn into sin, our godly things will gender evil. O Lord,
deliver us from this! Save us from being made worse by that which should
make us better. Let us be Thy true people, and therefore let us be washed
that we may be clean, that Thou mayest gird Thyself with us.

III. Very soon that fatal flaw in the case here mentioned led to A SOLEMN
JUDGMENT. It was a solemn judgment upon the girdle, looking at it as a type of the
people of Israel.
1. First, the girdle, after Jeremiah had made his long walk in it, was taken off
from him and put away. This is a terrible thing to happen to any man. I
would rather suffer every sickness in the list of human diseases than that
God should put me aside as a vessel in which He has no pleasure, and say to
me, I cannot wear you as My girdle, nor own you as Mine before men.
2. After that girdle was laid aside, the next thing for it was hiding and burying. It
was placed in a hole of the rock by the river of the captivity, and left there.
Many a hypocrite has been served in that way.
3. And now the girdle spoils. It was put, I dare say, where the damp and the wet
acted upon it; and so, when in about seventy days Jeremiah came back to the
spot, there was nothing but an old rag instead of what had once been a pure
white linen girdle. He says, Behold the girdle was marred; it was profitable
for nothing. So, if God were to leave any of us, the best men and the best
women among us would soon become nothing but marred girdles, instead of
being as fair white linen.
4. But the worst part of it is that this relates undoubtedly to many mere
professors whom God takes off from Himself, laying them aside, and leaving
them to perish. And what is His reason for so doing? He tells us this in the
text: He says that this evil people refused to receive Gods words. Dear
friends, never grow tired of Gods Word; never let any book supplant the
Bible. Love every part of Scripture, and take heed to every word that God has
 spoken. Next to that, we are told that they walked in the imagination of their
heart. That is a sure sign of the hypocrite or the false professor. He makes his
religion out of himself, as a spider spins a web out of his own bowels: what
sort of theology it is you can imagine now that you know its origin. Upon all
this there followed actual transgression,--They walked after other gods to
serve them and to worship them. This happens also to the base professor.
He keeps up the name of a Christian for a little while, and seems to be as
Gods girdle; but by and by he falls to worshipping gold, or drink, or lust. He
turns aside from the infinitely glorious God, and so he falls from one
degradation to another till he hardly knows himself. He becomes as a rotten
girdle which profiteth nothing. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Nearness to God destroyed by sin

I. Nearness to God.
1. These Jews were like a girdle bound upon the loins. Should have entwined
themselves around God. So nations may be near--
(1) In the great things that God had done for them.
(2) In the covenant relation which He had entered into with them.
(3) In the privileges which He had conferred upon them.
2. Man is near God.
(1) By nature. Created in Gods image.
(2) Near to Gods heart.
(3) Near in Gods care over him.
(4) Near in the privileges of liberty, religion, knowledge, discipline, warning.
(5) In a position to become eternally nearer by growing up into Christ.
(6) Brought near for Gods glory.

II. His nearness destroyed by sin.

1. Sin is the destroyer of nations as well as individuals. The Jews destroyed by
idolatry, lust, selfishness, pride.
2. As of nations, so of individuals: sin will destroy them, unless resisted and cast
out.
3. This destruction is voluntary. The sinner is a suicide.
4. God is represented as active in this destruction.
(1) Not that God deserts the sinner first.
(2) But, when measure of sin is full, God removes restraints, and sets in
motion the agency of judgment.
5. This destruction will consist in--
(1) Separation from God.
(2) Utter corruption and rottenness.
Learn--
1. The terrible power of sin.
 2. To guard against it as our chief enemy. (E. Jerman.)

Good reasons for singular conduct

Good Words contains an excellent story about Professor Blackie by the editor, Dr.
Donald Macleod:--Professor Blackie frequently stayed at my house when lecturing
in Glasgow. He was always at his best when one had him alone. One night we were
sitting up together, he said in his brusque way: Whatever other faults I have, I am
free from vanity. An incredulous smile on my face roused him. You dont believe
that: give me an instance. Being thus challenged, I said: Why do you walk about
flourishing a plaid continually? Ill give you the history of that, sir. When I was a
poor man, and when my wife and I had our difficulties, she one day drew my
attention to the thread-bare character of my surtout, and asked me to order a new
one. I told her I could not afford it just then; when she went, like a noble woman,
and put her own plaid shawl on my shoulders, and I have worn a plaid ever since in
memory of her loving deed! The prophet Jeremiah must often have been looked
upon as a man of eccentric conduct. But like Professor Blackie with his plaid shawl,
he was not actuated by whims, fancy, or vanity. Jeremiahs warrant for the singular
use to which he put his girdle was the authority and mandate of the Lord.

JER 13:10
This evil people which refuse to hear My words.

Rejecters of Gods word

I. SENSATIONAL PREACHING: IN WHAT SENSE TO BE APPROVED. The style of this

teaching of Jeremiah looks sensational. He is bidden to take a fine, new linen girdle-
-a most important and ornamental part of an Oriental gentlemans garments--and
bury it for a time near the Euphrates. Taking it up afterwards, he was to exhibit it to
the people of Judah and Jerusalem, with all the marks of injury and decay upon it,
as a sign and type of the decline and decay that the Lord would bring on them in
Babylon, when, parted from Him to whom they had been bound as a girdle to a
mans body, they should be buried under the oppression and contempt of their
proud and domineering captors.

II. Rejection of the divine word.

1. Even the most highly favoured persons may reject Gods Word.
2. The transgressors in such cases prefer their own imagination to Gods
revelations. Religion says to God, Thy will be done. The natural heart says,
My will be done--Who is the Lord that I should obey Him?
3. The moral influence of such perverseness is bad, progressively bad. Having
cast off God, the human nature cannot stand up alone. It needs a support. It
must worship. So it goes after other, and of course false, gods. Every sin has
three distinct effects, apart from the punishment of the future:
(1) It depraves and deteriorates the nature that sins. The brain is not broken,
but strained; the marble is not fractured, but the eye of omniscience sees
 the flaw.
(2) It familiarises with evil and goes so far towards making an evil habit.
(3) It renders some other sin not only easier, but apparently necessary.
Having done one thing, says the sinner, of course I had to do the
other.
4. The effect of rejecting Gods Word is lamentable in the extreme. If the fire of
Divine anger burnt up that vine which He had planted, how will it be with
the common tree of the forest?

III. By whom is the word of the Lord rejected?

1. In a certain strict and literal sense every unbeliever is an infidel, i.e. he is
without faith. But many are without faith who yet assent to the general truths
of Gods Word. Many infidels have made it their own interest to impugn and
deny Divine revelation. A man has broken its precepts--perhaps suffered
socially in consequence--has not repented, but only been embittered, begins
to count those who censure or condemn him first bigoted, narrow-minded,
then pharisaical, and hypocritical or fanatical. They justify their action by the
Scriptures, and he begins to transfer his dislike to the Scriptures, feels a
pleasure in any doubt cast on them, flatters himself that to weaken them is to
strengthen his case, and that contempt poured on them is respect won back
for him. Hence the bitterest scoffers have often been the religiously trained
sinners.
2. Sceptics are included among the rejecters of Gods Word. Not that they are
necessarily irreligious, or deniers of a Divine Being and of obligation to Him;
but they deny the Scriptures as an authoritative revelation from Him and
make nature a sufficient teacher.
3. If I include Romanism among the rejecters of Gods Word, it must be with a
qualification. That system admits the inspiration, Divine origin, and partial
authority of Gods Word, and so far as it can appeal to Scripture does so. Its
sins in this regard are:
(1) Putting up beside the Word tradition, which, like that of the Pharisees,
makes the Word of God of no effect.
(2) Making the authorisation of the Scripture depend on the Church, and
constituting the Church the only expounder of Scripture.
(3) And following from this, she withholds the Scriptures from her people.
4. The indifferent and unbelieving reject Gods Word. You have heard it
explained, read it, had it urged on you by beloved ones, now praising God in
the rest of the saints. Have you believed it? Received Christ? Are you resting
on Him? Doing His will? For if not, your condemnation is doubly sure. (John
Hall, D. D.)

Gods girdle

I. Israel and Judah clave unto Jehovah as a girdle to the loins of a man.
1. Unto His person for favour.
2. Unto His Word for direction and teaching.
 3. Unto His promise for encouragement.
4. Unto His worship for devotion.

II. ISRAEL AND JUDAH WERE THEN A PRAISE AND GLORY TO JEHOVAH. A girdle of
strength and honour before the nations.
1. As opposed to the idolatries of the world.
2. As expressing obedience to Divine law.
3. As exhibiting the beneficial effects of true religion.

III. Israel and Judah became faithless and disobedient.

1. An evil people refusing to hear the Word.
2. A stubborn people going their own way.
3. A deluded people in vain imaginations.
4. An idolatrous people, like the nations less favoured, going after other gods to
serve and worship them.

IV. ISRAEL AND JUDAH BECOMING FAITHLESS, BECAME ALSO WEAK AND WORTHLESS.
Went from prominence to obscurity, from freedom to captivity, from privilege to
punishment. (W. Whale.)

Cleaving unto God

In Trinidad there are small oysters to be found that grow upon trees, or rather
cluster round the roots of trees, in the river mouths. The little bivalves are so firmly
attached that it is usual to saw down the trees in order to obtain the oysters, and
such an attachment is typical of the ideal life of a Christian. He should love the Lord
his God, and obey His voice, that he may cleave unto Him. God, who is the source of
all life, will indeed be his life and the light of his days. As the strength of the tree is
placed at the disposal of the oyster, so is the omnipotence of God offered to all who
will trust Him. (Christian Commonwealth.)

Which is good for nothing.

Good for nothing

I. DWELL UPON A PAINFUL FACT. All was done for them that could be, and yet good
for nothing.

II. Point out the cause of their sad condition.

1. They refused to hear the Word of the Lord.
2. They followed the imagination of their hearts.
3. They became idolaters.

III. Show what they might have been as a people.

1. Separated from the nations as peculiarly the people of God.
 2. Before the nations for the glory of Jehovah, as opposed to idols.
3. Among the nations as witnesses and examples.

IV. Proclaim some universal truths.

1. Refusing to hear Gods Word is proof that the people are all evil people.
2. An evil people will substitute a false worship for that which is true.
3. A false worship will produce and foster an erroneous religious life.
4. A people walking according to the imagination of their own hearts must be
useless to themselves, to the world, to the Church, or to God. (W. Whale.)

The unprofitableness of a sinful life

I heard the other day a Sunday school address which pleased me much. The
teacher, speaking to the boys, said, Boys, here is a watch; what is it for? To tell the
time. Well, said he, suppose my watch does not tell the time, what is it good for?
Good for nothing, sir. Then he took out a pencil. What is this pencil for? It is to
write with, sir. Suppose this pencil wont make a mark, what is it good for? Good
for nothing, sir. Then he took out a pocket knife. Boys, what is this for? They were
American boys, so they shouted, To whittle with,--that is, to experiment on any
substance that came in their way, by cutting a notch in it. But, said he, suppose it
will not cut, what is the knife good for? Good for nothing, sir. Then the teacher
said, What is the chief end of man? and they replied, To glorify God. But
suppose a man does not glorify God, what is he good for? Good for nothing, sir.
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 13:12-14
Do we not certainly know that every bottle shall be filled with wine?

Drunk with evil

They are supposed to think that the prophet is merely stating what was the plain
meaning of the words, and, under that impression, to reply, What great matter is
this, to tell us that bottles which are made to be filled with wine should be filled with
wine?--not seeking for any deeper meaning in the Lords Word. But, thus saith the
Lord, Behold I will fill all the inhabitants of this land. These were the bottles truly
spoken of, even the kings that sit upon Davids throne, etc. Now the drunkenness
wherewith they were to be filled was not drunkenness with wine, but drunkenness
with an evil spirit, with a mad spirit, with a spirit of discontent, a breaking up of all
the bonds of society, a spirit of contempt of God, and of all Gods ordinances. This
was the drunkenness wherewith they were to be filled--in consequence of which they
were to be falling against, and crushing each other, as happens to a nation in which
all subordination disappears, and all is anarchy and confusion, and the people are,
as it were, dashed against each other. And this is said to be the Lords judgment
upon them. It is after the manner of God that, when men refuse the Spirit of God,
they should be given up to the spirit of Satan; that, when men refuse to be dwelt in
of the Holy Spirit, they should be dwelt in by the spirit of madness and of fury; and
this was the judgment threatened upon the Jews, that they should be dashed one
against another, even the fathers and the sons together; and then, as if he would say,
Do not think that I am not in earnest; do not think that, because judgment is my
strange work, it is a work in which I will not engage: be assured that it shall be as I
say, I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy. Three times God
declares that He will not show mercy, but, on the contrary, destroy; because there is
a voice which God has put within us to testify that God is merciful; and because
there is a bad use which men are apt to make of the suggestions of that voice; and
they are apt to feel as if a good and merciful God could not find it in His heart to put
forth His hand to judgment. Oh, if men but knew Gods tender mercy, they would
indeed feel that that must be a strong reason which could move Him to pluck His
hand from His bosom and rise up to wrath. It is as if God were saying--I have so
proved My love to you, My unwillingness that you should perish, that ye may be
slow to believe that I, even I, will punish. But be not deceived; there are reasons
strong enough to prevail--to shut up even My compassions. I will not pity, nor spare,
nor have compassion, but destroy. (J. M. Campbell.)

The wine of the wrath of God

1. Every man is being fitted a vessel to honour or dishonour, to good or evil.
2. Every man will ultimately be filled to his utmost capacity by good or evil,
according to his spiritual state.
3. The process of adaptation is being carried on by loyalty or disobedience to
truth and God.
4. Where all are evil, everyone will be injurious to the others. This will make a
hell. The reverse of this is true also.
5. God, who is love, has a time for severity as well as a time for mercy.
6. If God help not, none can aid effectually. (W. Whale.)

I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons
together, saith the Lord.--
Divine punishments
These words should be spoken with tears. It is a great mistake in doctrine as well
as in practice to imagine that the imprecations of Holy Scripture should be spoken
ruthlessly. When Jesus came near the city He wept over it.

I. DIVINE PUNISHMENTS ARE POSSIBLE. If we are not destroyed, it is not for want of
power on the part of the offended Creator. The universe is very sensitively put
together in this matter; everywhere there are lying resources which under one touch
or breath would spring up and avenge an outraged law. Now and then God does
bring us to see how near death is to every life. We do not escape the rod because
there is no rod. It is of the Lords mercies that we are not consumed. Think of that.
Do let it enter into our minds and make us sober, sedate--if not religious and
contrite.

II. DIVINE PUNISHMENTS ARE HUMILIATING (Jer 13:13). Some punishments have a
kind of dignity about them: sometimes a man dies almost heroically, and turns
death itself into a kind of victory; and we cannot but consent that the time is well
chosen, and the method the best for giving to the mans reputation completeness,
and to his influence stability and progress. God can bring us to our latter end, as it
were, nobly: we may die like princes; death may be turned into a kind of coronation;
our deathbed may be the picture of our life--the most consummately beautiful and
exquisite revelation of character--or the Lord can drive us down like mad beasts to
an unconsecrated grave. How contemptuous He can be! How bitter, how intolerable
the sarcasm of God! I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear
cometh. The Lord seems now and again to take a kind of delight in showing how
utterly our pride can be broken up and trampled underfoot. He will send a worm to
eat up the harvest: would He but send an angel with a gleaming sickle to cut it down
we might see somewhat of glory in the disaster. Thus God comes into our life along a
line that may be designated as a line of contempt and humiliation. Oh, that men
were wise, that they would hold themselves as Gods and not their own, as Divine
property rather than personal possession! Then would they walk soberly and recruit
themselves in many a prayer, and bring back their youth because they trust in God.

III. DIVINE PUNISHMENTS WHEN THEY COME ARE COMPLETE. I will destroy them.
We cannot tell the meaning of this word; we do not know what is meant by
destruction; we use the term as if we knew its meaning,--and possibly we do know
its meaning according to the breadth of our own intention and purpose; but the
word as used by God has Divine meanings upon which we can lay no measuring line.
We cannot destroy anything: we can destroy its form, its immediate relation, its
temporary value; but the thing itself in its substance or in its essence we can never
destroy. When the Lord says He will take up this matter of destruction we cannot
tell what He means; we dare not think of it. We use the word nothing, but cannot
tell what He means by the nothingness of nothing, by the negativeness of negation,
by the sevenfold darkness, by the heaped-up midnight of gloom. My soul, come not
thou into that secret:

IV. DIVINE PUNISHMENTS ARE AVOIDABLE (Jer 13:16). The door of hope is set open,
even in this midnight of threatening; still we are on praying ground and on pleading
terms with God; even now we can escape the bolt that gleams in the thundercloud.
What say you, men, brethren, and fathers? Why be hard? why attempt the
impossible? why think we can run away from God? and why, remembering that our
days are but a handful, will we not be wise and act as souls that have been
instructed? (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 13:15-17
Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the Lord hath spoken.

Jehovah hath spoken: will ye not hear?

I. THERE IS A REVELATION. For the Lord hath spoken.

1. The voice which we are bidden to hear is a Divine voice, it is the voice of Him
that made the heavens and the earth, whose creatures we are.
2. It is a word most clear and plain, for Jehovah hath spoken. He might have
taught us only by the works of His hands, in which the invisible things of
 God, even His eternal power and Godhead are clearly seen. What is all
creation but a hieroglyphic scroll, in which the Lord has written out His
character as Creator and Provider? But since He knew that we were dim of
sight and dull of comprehension, the Lord has gone beyond the symbols and
hieroglyphs, and used articulate speech such as a man useth with his fellow:
Jehovah hath spoken!
3. Moreover, I gather from the expression in the text that the revelation made to
us by the Lord is an unchangeable and abiding word. It is not today that
Jehovah is speaking, but Jehovah hath spoken: His voice by the prophets
and apostles is silent now, for He hath revealed all truth which is needful for
salvation.
4. This revelation is preeminently a condescending and cheering word. The very
fact that the great God speaks to us by His Son indicates that mercy,
tenderness, love, hope, grace, are the burden of His utterance.

II. Since there is a revelation, IT SHOULD BE SUITABLY RECEIVED.

1. If Jehovah hath spoken, then all attention should be given; yea, double
attention, even as the text hath it, Hear ye, and give ear. Hear, and hear
again: incline your ear, hearken diligently, surrender your soul to the
teaching of the Lord God; and be not satisfied till yea have heard His
teaching, have heard it with your whole being, and have felt the force of its
every truth. Hear ye, because the word comes with power, and give ear,
because you willingly receive it.
2. Then it is added, as if by way of directing us how suitably to hear this
revelation--Give glory to Jehovah your God.
(1) Glorify the Lord by accepting whatsoever He saith unto thee as being
infallibly true. In all its length and breadth, whatsoever the Lord saith we
believe; and we desire to know neither less nor more than He has spoken.
(2) We must receive the word, however, in a hearty and honest manner so as
to act upon it. We must therefore repent of the sin which the Lord
condemns, and turn from the way which He abhors; we must loathe the
vice which He forbids us, and seek after the virtue which He commands.
(3) But we must go further than repentance and the acceptance of the truth
as truth, we must further reverence the gracious voice of God when He
bids us believe on Christ and live. He has couched that message of love in
so blessed a form that he who does not accept it must be wantonly
malicious against God and against his own soul.

III. Pride in the human heart prevents such a reception.

1. In some it is the pride of intellect. They do not wish to be treated like children.
Things that are despised, hath God chosen, and things that are not, to bring
to naught the things that are: that no flesh may glory in His presence. Oh, let
none of us be so proud as to lift up ourselves in opposition to that which
Jehovah hath spoken!
2. In some others it is the pride of self-esteem. It is a dreadful thing that men
should think it better to go to hell in a dignified way than to go to heaven by
the narrow road of a childlike faith in the Redeemer. Those who will not
 stoop even to receive Christ Himself and the blessings of eternal life deserve
to perish. God save us from such folly!
3. Some have a pride of self-righteousness. They say we see, and therefore
their eyes are not opened: they cry we are clean, and therefore they are not
washed from their iniquity.
4. In some, too, it is the pride of self-love. They cannot deny their lusts.
5. The pride of self-will also works its share of ruin among men. The unrenewed
heart virtually says--I shall not mind these commands. Why should I be tied
hand and foot, and ruled, and governed? I intend to be a free thinker and a
free liver, and I will not submit myself.

IV. HENCE THERE COMES AN EARNEST WARNING. Give glory to the Lord your God,
before He cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains.
Listen, thou who hast rejected God and His Christ till now. Thou art already out of
the way, among the dark mountains. There is a Kings highway of faith, and thou
hast refused it; thou hast turned aside to the right hand or to the left, according to
thine own imagination. Being out of the way of safety, thou art in the path of danger
even now. Though the sunlight shines about thee, and the flowers spring up
profusely under thy feet, yet thou art in danger, for there is no safety out of the
Kings road. If thou wilt still pursue thy headlong career, and choose a path for
thyself, I pray thee remember that darkness is lowering around thee. The day is far
spent! Around thy soul there are hanging mists and glooms already, and these will
thicken into the night-damps of bewilderment. Thinking but not believing, thou wilt
soon think thyself into a horror of great darkness. Refusing to hear what Jehovah
has spoken, thou wilt follow other voices, which shall allure thee into an Egyptian
night of confusion. Upon whom wilt thou call in the day of thy calamity, and who
will succour thee? Then thy thoughts will dissolve into vanity, and thy spirit shall
melt into dismay. Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself,
and to all thy friends. Thou shalt grope after comfort as blind men grope for the
wall, and because thou hast rejected the Lord and His truth, He also will reject thee
and leave thee to thine own devices. Meanwhile, there shall overcloud thee a
darkness bred of thine own sin and wilfulness. Thou shalt lose the brightness of
thine intellect, the sharp clearness of thy thought shall depart from thee, professing
thyself to be wise thou shalt become a fool. Thou shalt be in an all-surrounding,
penetrating blackness. Hence comes the solemnity of this warning, Give glory to
the Lord your God, before He cause darkness. For after that darkness there comes a
stumbling, as saith the text, before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains.
There must be difficulties in every mans way, even if it be a way of his own devising;
but to the man that will not accept the light of God, these difficulties must
necessarily be dark mountains with sheer abysses, pathless crags, and impenetrable
ravines. He has refused the path which wisdom has cast up, and he is justly doomed
to stumble where there is no way. Beware of encountering mysteries without
guidance and faith, for you will stumble either into folly or superstition, and only
rise to stumble again. Those who stumble at Christs Cross are like to stumble into
hell. There are also dark mountains of another kind which will block the way of the
wanderer mountains of dismay, of remorse, of despair.

V. THERE REMAINS FOR THE FRIENDS OF THE IMPENITENT BUT ONE RESORT. Like our
Lord in later times, the prophet beheld the city and wept over it: he could do no less,
he could do no more. Alas, his sorrow would be unavailing, his grief was hopeless.
Observe that the prophet did not expect to obtain sympathy in this sorrow of his. He
says, My soul shall weep in secret places for your pride. He would get quite alone,
hide himself away, and become a recluse. Alas, that so few even now care for the
souls of men! This also puts a pungent salt into the tears of the godly, that the
weeping can do no good, since the people refuse the one and only remedy. Jehovah
has spoken, and if they will not hear Him they must die in their sins. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Attention to Gods Word

I. How should we attend to it?

1. With reverence.
2. In faith.
3. Diligently, earnestly.
4. Intelligently.
5. Intending to be governed by it.
6. Prayerfully.

II. There is here an implied neglect.

1. Men are filled with other things.
2. They do not know its worth.
3. They do not apprehend the bearing it may have on their well-being.
4. They are not willing to submit to its teachings.

III. Why should we attend?

1. The dignity and glory of the Lord.
2. His wisdom and knowledge.
3. His beneficence, interest, and love.
4. He speaks to us of matters in which we have the deepest interest.
Learn--
1. To read the Bible regularly.
2. To treasure it in the heart.
3. To honour it in your life. (E. Jerman.)

Be not proud.--
Pride

I. Different kinds of pride.

1. Race pride--pride in ancestors.
2. Face pride--pride in outward appearance.
3. Place pride--pride in social position.
 4. Grace pride--pride in godliness.

II. THE WARNING. Be not proud--

1. Because we have nothing to be proud of.
2. Because it is abhorrent to God.
3. Because it is unlike Christ.
4. Because it is ruinous.
Apply--
(1) Some are very proud.
(2) Some occasionally.
(3) Some are bravely struggling against pride. (J. Bolton.)

The warning against pride

Many of the inhabitants of the valleys that lie between the Alps in Switzerland
have large swellings, called goitres, which hang down from the sides of their necks,
like great bags. They are horrible things to look at. And yet, strange as it may seem,
the Swiss get to be proud even of these dreadful deformities. They look down with
contempt on their neighbours who do not have these terrible swellings, and call
them the goose-necked people. And so we see that pride is a sin into which we are
all in danger of falling. And here we have Gods warning against pride.

I. PRIDE BRINGS WITH IT UNHAPPINESS. The fable says, that there was a tortoise
once, that was very unhappy because he could not fly. He used to look up and see the
eagles and other birds spreading out their wings and floating through the air. He
said to himself, Oh, if I only had wings, as those birds have, so that I could rise up
into the air, and sail about there as they do, how happy I should be! One day, he
called to an eagle, and offered him a great reward if he would only teach him how to
fly. The eagle said--Well, Ill try what I can do. You get on my back, and Ill carry
you up into the air, and well see what can be done. So the tortoise got on the back
of the eagle. Then the eagle spread out his wings and began to soar aloft. He went
up, and up, and up, till he had reached a great height. Then he said to the tortoise:
Now, get ready. Im going to throw you off, and you must try your hand at flying.
So the eagle threw him off; and he went down, down, down, till at last he fell upon a
hard rock and was dashed to pieces. Now here you see, it was the pride of the
tortoise which made him so unhappy, because he couldnt fly. And it was trying to
gratify his pride which cost him his life.

II. PRIDE BRINGS WITH IT TROUBLE. We never can set ourselves against any of
Gods laws without getting into trouble. Two masons were engaged in building a
brick wall in front of a high house. One of them was older and more experienced
than his companion. The younger one, whose name was Ben, placed a brick in the
wall which was thicker at one end than at the other. His companion noticed it, and
said--Ben, if I were you I wouldnt leave that brick there. Its not straight, and will
be likely to injure the wall by making it untrue. Pooh! said Ben, what difference
will such a trifle as that make? You are too particular. My mother used to teach
me, said his friend, that truth is truth; and that ever so little an untruth is a lie, and
that a lie is no trifle. Now Bens pride was offended by what his friend had said to
him. So he straightened himself up, and said in an angry tone--Well, I guess I
understand my business as well as you do. I am sure that brick wont do any harm.
His friend said nothing more to him. They both went quietly on with their work,
laying one brick after another, and carrying the wall up higher, till the close of the
day. Next morning they went back to go on with their work again. But when they got
there they found the wall all in ruins. The explanation of it was this: that uneven
brick had given it a little slant. As the wall got up higher, the slant increased, till at
last, in the middle of the night, it tumbled over and fell down to the ground. And
here we see the trouble which this young man brought on himself by his pride. If he
had only learned to mind this Bible warning against it, that wall would not have
fallen down, and he would have been saved the trouble of building it up again.

III. PRIDE BRINGS WITH IT LOSS. The apostle tells us that God resisteth the proud,
but giveth grace to the humble. So if we give way to pride, we are in a position in
which God is resisting us, and then it is certain, that we can expect nothing but loss
in everything that we do. When we begin to love and serve God, He says to each of
us, from this day will I bless thee. And are told that the blessing of the Lord
maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow. The way in which Gods blessing makes His
people rich is in the peace, joy, happiness He gives them; the sense of His favour and
protection which they have in this world, and the hope of sharing His presence and
glory forever in heaven. But if we give way to pride we cannot love and serve God;
and then we must lose His blessing--the greatest loss we can ever meet with in this
world. (R. Newton, D. D.)

God glorified in the fall of pride

I. What is it which stops people from hearing the voice of God?

1. One form of pride is shame. Many kept from Christ because ashamed to come
and give themselves up to Him. For fear of the paltry scorn, the momentary
ridicule, the soul will risk eternity!
2. There is the pride of respectability and social position. Hold apart from
religion, because in the one way all must go without distinction. Yet what can
justify in a lost sinner any high and vain thoughts of self?
3. There is the pride that conceals a wound. Gods Word has stricken the heart;
healing and joy could be had if we humbly go to God, yet hide the grief and
unrest within, from man and Heaven.
4. There is the pride of self-righteousness. What say when before the Throne--
that you were too good to accept the Gospel?

II. Human pride must effectually be broken down.

1. When pride humbled and man crushed, God speaks. What say? Give glory to
the Lord your God. Your God still, though turned back on Him and
grieved Him.
2. The contrite soul cannot realise its inability to glorify God. Broken down,
powerless, self-despairing, cast yourself on His salvation.
3. There is a desperate alternative: that you will not hear. By and by your feet
will stumble on the dark mountains. The day of disease will come; life will
 grow dim; the thin grandeur of a fading world will begin to pass away; all
around the gloom will thicken, and on a dying world gross darkness of
unrelieved despair will cover you. Then the last moment arrives; one
terrified look for light, but in vain; the soul is carried away into captivity.
(W. H. M. H. Aitken, M. A.)

JER 13:16-17
Give glory to the Lord your God.

I. COUNSEL. Give glory to the Lord.

1. Because the Lords glory is mans good.
2. Because in them that glory might appear.
3. Because by them that glory might be obscured.

II. WARNING, Before He cause darkness, etc.

1. Fading light. No clear vision when God is not glorified.
2. Stumbling feet. No power of progress unless for Gods glory.
3. Bewildering night. Captivity. All lost.

III. PLEADING. But if ye will not hear, etc.

1. The counsel of tender love.
2. The counsel of utter unselfishness. (J. Fatten.)

God glorified by His people

I. AN EXHORTATION. What is meant by giving glory to God? To ascribe glory to His

name, to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, to show forth His glory, to
confess Him before men, not only with our lips but in our lives, to believe on Him, to
fear Him, to put our whole trust in Him, to call upon Him, to honour His holy Name
and His Word, and to serve Him truly all the days of our life. But all these can be
traced to two fountains.
1. By faith in Christ we glorify God.
(1) It is His gift, and God is glorified in His gifts.
(2) It is the substance of things hoped for, brought home to the believers
mind; and these being things of glory beyond the veil, God is glorified by
their manifestation.
(3) It is the evidence of things not seen, and thus brings glory to God,
because it takes God at His word, and sets to its seal that God is true,
and glorifies Him in His truth.
(4) Through it we are saved; it opens a window in the souls dark dungeon,
and lets in the glories of a crucified and an exalted Saviour; it opens a
fountain of newborn hope in the mind, and that fountain is Christ in us
the hope of glory; it brings back Gods image, and restores in Christ
 what we lost in Adam. It is a lowly faith, and thus brings glory to God. It
is a living faith; it comes from a living root, even the root and the
offspring of David. It is a loving faith. It is a working faith. It is a
watching and a waiting faith--it watches for the coming of the Lord--it
watches and waits more than they that watch for the morning.
2. By repentance we glorify, or bring glory to God. The evidence or characteristic
mark of this true repentance is holiness; we give glory to God by a holy
spirit,--Glorify Him, says the apostle, in your bodies and spirits, which are
His. We give glory to God by a holy life--Let your light so shine before
men, etc. We give glory to God by holy lips, for the Spirit, speaking by the
Psalmist, says, Whoso offereth praise glorifieth Me.

II. THE MOTIVE. God never positively causes darkness, for He is not the author of
evil--He does so negatively. The clouds and mists ascending from the earth obscure
the light of the suns beams from our sight, nevertheless, far above those mists and
shadows, though invisible to us, that glorious orb is shining as undimmed and
unbroken as before. Thus it is with God and His sinful people--our iniquities go up
as a thick mist from the face of the earth, and our transgressions as a thick cloud,
and separate between us and our God. What then is this darkness?
1. There is a spiritual darkness in mans soul--of despair.
2. There is a mental darkness caused by disease of the body affecting and
effacing the mind.
3. There is a mortal darkness--the darkness of death. To a believer death has no
sting, for Christ has plucked it away--to a believer death has no gloom, for
Christ has passed through its dark vaults and left a track of light behind Him;
but who can paint the darkness that settles round the deathbed of an
ignorant or unbelieving sinner, who dies knowing nothing, fearing nothing,
hoping nothing!
4. There is an immortal darkness--the darkness of hell. (R. S. Brooke, M. A.)

Giving glory to God by repentance

God is the eternal fountain of honour and the spring of glory; in Him it dwells
essentially, from Him it derives originally; and when an action is glorious, or a man
is honourable, it is because the action is pleasing to God, in the relation of obedience
or imitation, and because the man is honoured by God, and by Gods vicegerent: and
therefore God cannot be dishonoured, because all honour comes from Himself; He
cannot but be glorified, because to be Himself is to be infinitely glorious. And yet He
is pleased to say that our sins dishonour Him, and our obedience does glorify Him.
He that hath dishonoured God by sins, that is, hath denied, by a moral instrument of
duty and subordination, to confess the glories of His power, and the goodness of His
laws, and hath dishonoured and despised His mercy, which God intended as an
instrument of our piety, hath no better way to glorify God than, by returning to his
duty, to advance the honour of the Divine attributes, in which He is pleased to
communicate Himself, and to have intercourse with man. He that repents confesses
his own error, and the righteousness of Gods laws; and, by judging himself,
confesses that he deserves punishment; and therefore, that God is righteous if He
punishes him; and, by returning, confesses God to be the fountain of felicity, and the
foundation of true, solid, and permanent joys. And as repentance does contain in it
all the parts of holy life which can be performed by a returning sinner, so all the
actions of a holy life do constitute the mass and body of all those instruments
whereby God is pleased to glorify Himself.
1. Repentance implies a deep sorrow, as the beginning and introduction of this
duty: not a superficial sigh or tear, not a calling ourselves sinners and
miserable persons: this is far from that godly sorrow that worketh
repentance: and yet I wish there were none in the world, or none amongst
us, who cannot remember that ever they have done this little towards the
abolition of their multitudes of sins: but yet, if it were not a hearty, pungent
sorrow, a sorrow that shall break the heart in pieces, a sorrow that shall so
irreconcile us to sin, as to make us rather choose to die than to sin, it is not
so much as the beginning of repentance. But I desire that it be observed that
sorrow for sins is not repentance; not that duty which gives glory to God, so
as to obtain of Him that He will glorify us. Repentance is a great volume of
duty; and godly sorrow is but the frontispiece or title page; it is the harbinger
or first introduction to it: or, if you will consider it in the words of St. Paul,
Godly sorrow worketh repentance:--sorrow is the parent, and repentance is
the product. Let us, therefore, beg of God, as Calebs daughter did of her
father: Thou hast given me a dry land, give me also a land of waters, a
dwelling place in tears, rivers of tears; that, as St. Austins expression is,
because we are not worthy to lift up our eyes to heaven in prayer, yet we
may be worthy to weep ourselves blind for sin. We can only be sure that our
sorrow is a godly sorrow, when it worketh repentance; that is, when it makes
us hate and leave all our sin, and take up the cross of patience or penance;
that is, confess our sin, accuse ourselves, condemn the action by hearty
sentence: and then, if it hath no other emanation but fasting and prayer for
its pardon, and hearty industry towards its abolition, our sorrow is not
reprovable.
2. No confession can be of any use, but as it is an instrument of shame to the
person, of humiliation to the man, and dereliction of the sin; and receives its
recompense but as it adds to these purposes: all other is like the bleating of
the calves and the lowing of the oxen, which Saul reserved after the spoil of
Agag; they proclaim the sin, but do nothing towards its cure; they serve
Gods end to make us justly to be condemned out of our own mouths, but
nothing at all towards our absolution. Our sin must be brought to judgment,
and, like Antinous in Homer, laid in the midst, as the sacrifice and the cause
of all the mischief.
3. Well, let us suppose our penitent advanced thus far, as that he decrees against
all sin, and in his hearty purposes resolves to decline it, as in a severe
sentence he hath condemned it as his betrayer and his murderer; yet we
must be curious that it be not only like the springings of the thorny or the
highway ground, soon up and soon down: for some men, when a sadness or
an unhandsome accident surprises them, then they resolve against their sin;
but as soon as the thorns are removed, return to their first hardness, and
resolve then to act their first temptation. They that have their fits of a
quartan, well and ill forever, and think themselves in perfect health when the
ague is retired, till its period returns, are dangerously mistaken. Those
intervals of imperfect and fallacious resolution are nothing but states of
death: and if a man should depart this world in one of those godly fits, as he
 thinks them, he is no nearer to obtain his blessed hope than a man in the
stone-colic is to health, when his pain is eased for the present, his disease
still remaining, and threatening an unwelcome return. That resolution only
is the beginning of a holy repentance, which goes forth into act, and whose
acts enlarge into habits, and whose habits are productive of the fruits of a
holy life.
4. Suppose all this be done, and that by a long course of strictness and severity,
mortification and circumspection, we have overcome all our vicious and
baser habits; suppose that we have wept and fasted, prayed and vowed to
excellent purposes; yet all this is but the one half of repentance, so infinitely
mistaken is the world, to think anything to be enough to make up
repentance. But to renew us, and restore us to the favour of God, there is
required far more than what hath yet been accounted for (2Pe 1:4-5). We
must not only have overcome sin, but we must, after great diligence, have
acquired the habits of all those Christian graces, which are necessary in the
transaction of our affairs, in all relations to God and our neighbour, and our
own persons. It is not an easy thing to cure a long-contracted habit of sin. Let
any intemperate person but try in his own instance of drunkenness; or the
swearer, in the sweetening his unwholesome language: but then so to
command his tongue that he never swear, but that his speech be prudent,
pious, and apt to edify the hearer, or in some sense to glorify God; or to
become temperate, to have got a habit of sobriety, or chastity, or humility, is
the work of a life. (Bishop Jeremy Taylor.)

Give glory to God

I. THE COMMAND. One way in which we may obey this command is by confession
of sin, the humbling of self before God on account of general unworthiness, and also
on account of particular acts of sin. Our natural hearts think but little of sin in this
light, as dishonouring to God; they are accustomed and inured to sin; and hence it
excites no feeling of aversion, unless exhibited in its grosser forms. By the
confession of sin, therefore, God is to be glorified, and how full the promises which
God has connected with it! (Pro 28:13; Psa 32:5; 2Sa 12:13.) Closely connected with
this confession of sin there is a way in which we are called upon to give glory to the
Lord our God, and that is, by receiving Gods offered salvation. The public means of
grace have been afforded this year as usual. And yet the fact forces itself upon us, as
painful as it is obvious, that there may be an outward participation in these
privileges, and at the same time no glory given to God. There is nothing so
dishonouring to God as unbelief, for in the solemn words of inspiration, He that
believeth not God hath made Him a liar, etc. We may observe, also, that when there
is this exercise of faith, receiving Gods offered salvation, its tendency is not to exalt
the pride of man, but to ascribe all the glory to God: see, for example, Eph 1:1-23,
where the grace of God is so fully set forth, and three times in that one chapter the
expression occurs that every step of that salvation is to the praise of His glory. But
again, we may obey the command to give glory to the Lord our God by aiming to live
according to His will. This can be effected by those only who are obeying the
invitations of the Gospel; others have various aims in life, but if Christ is not
received into the heart, they cannot live according to Gods will. The Lord has a right
to look for obedience in His professing people. We give glory to God, by simple
childlike confidence in Him and in His providential care and love, by the discharge
of the ordinary duties of life, conscientiously as in His sight, and by thus acting up to
the spirit of that command, Whether therefore ye eat or drink, etc. So, also, by
submission to His will we are to give glory to God, that which is so easy when Gods
will runs parallel, so to speak, with our own--so hard when it runs counter to our
natural desires. Then to glorify God in the fires, amid the various trials which every
year brings in its course, trials which have to do with health, or circumstances, or
bereavements; to sin not, nor charge God foolishly; like Aaron to hold our peace in
mute submission when the heart is too full for utterance; to receive the gracious
assurance given by the lips of our Divine Master, Said I not unto thee, that if thou
wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? to know the loving sympathy
of Him who has said, I am He that comforteth you; one whom his mother
comforteth, so will I comfort thee. The various other ways in which we are to give
glory to God, and live according to His will, may be summed up in the one
expression, fruitfulness in good works.

II. THE TIME FOR YIELDING THIS OBEDIENCE IS LIMITED. Before He cause
darkness, etc. In this figure the present time is compared to the day--the time for
work, and for obedience, and for giving glory to God,--the time for guiding us safe
through the narrow path that leads to heaven and home. Oh, how solemn is the
thought of the uncertainty of life. How fearful that darkness must be when it
overtakes the sinner groping about in lifes byways, instead of being at the gates of
the heavenly city, where all is light forever; lifes work undone, and no more the call
heard to glorify God, but the cry which excludes hope, He that is unjust, etc. (J. H.
Holford, M. A.)

Giving glory to God

There are two ways of giving glory to God.

I. BY GIVING HIM BACK HIS OWN GLORY. There are three mirrors in which Gods
glory is seen. Now, of these mirrors, some are broken and some stained. The first
mirror was stained by the sin of man--creation was stained and lost its glory and its
beauty by the first stain on it. Oh! the breath of Adams corruption comes as a thick
fog on the face of the glass, and until that thick fog is removed, we shall not see
Gods glory in the creation. The second mirror is the Word. The Word is stained, the
steam of our own corruption goes forth, our darkened understandings, our stubborn
will, our adulterous affections, our perverse imaginations send forth a filthy effluvia,
and the filthy effluvia gathers into a thick and impenetrable mist, and that covers the
glass. Besides that, there is the darkness of hell. But when the Holy Spirit removes
the cloud and enables you to look into the mirror--into the cleansed and polished
mirror,--then you behold the glory of God. Again, there is a third glass, the glass of
the Church. This glass is broken, the visible Church now is not presenting the glory
of God; the visible Church now is as a mirror shattered into a thousand fragments,
and until the Holy Ghost comes and joins together these shattered fragments of the
mirror, we never shall see God in the Church. The principal glory of the Church is
holiness--there is no glory like that! but there is another glory which the Church has
lost--and she ought not to have lost it--she has lost it, however, through unbelief--I
mean the glory of power from God. We ought to have the gifts of the Spirit among us
now as well as His graces; and I do believe, when you shall be brought to pray for the
same--when you shall be brought to expect the promise of the Father, the Lord will
respond to your prayer, and all creation shall testify in a moment that He is a
prayer-hearing and prayer-answering God.
1. Now, to come more closely, we give glory to God when we see Him as He is--
when we see Him as a Father--when we do not see the doctrine about Him as
a Father, but see Himself as a Father.
2. We give glory to God when we behold His love in Christ, and are delighted
with that love.
3. We give glory to God in a third particular, when we yield ourselves to His
Spirit.

II. We give glory to God WHEN WE GIVE GOD CREATED GLORY. The first thing is to
catch His own glory and send it back, and the second, to give Him created glory. In
giving God created glory, begin with your own heart--that is the centre nearest to
you, begin with the hearts of your brethren, the heart of your wife, the heart of your
child, the heart of your father, the heart of your servant, the heart of your neighbour,
the heart of your landlord, the heart of your tenant, endeavour to get all their hearts
given to God, as His throne and dwelling place, and then have the hearts of all you
can speak an affectionate word unto, given unto God. Then go out over all creation,
and endeavour to give all creation to God; endeavour to take the gold of the world,
endeavour to take the fruits and the flowers of the world, and give them to God. You
behold the religion of God like the famed river of Grecian song which cannot come
to any land without irrigating that laud with golden sands, and you desire to send
the stream of Gods religion, which restrains evil and cherishes virtue, which rescues
man from sin, and enstamps on him holiness, you endeavour to mend that over the
length and breadth of the moral world, that it may go as a stream of richness, a
stream of fertilisation, a stream of refreshing and beauty over every part of the wide
world. (N. Armstrong.)

God glorified by repentance

I. THE REPENTANCE DEMANDED OF US IN SCRIPTURE differs widely from a mere

transient regret at having done wrong, and a passing resolve, that we will abstain for
the future from certain grosser misdoings. The repentance which conducts to
salvation is a thorough change of the whole man, commencing with new views of the
nature of sin, and of its character as committed against a God of unbounded loving
kindness, and gradually overspreading the life and conversation, till all around
recognise that fresh creation which undeniably attests Divine interference.
1. Take the sense which a true penitent has of the nature of sin, and the
confession, as well by action as by word, which that sense will dictate. There
is nothing which more strikingly distinguishes man in his natural state from
man in his renewed state, than the difference in the estimates which the two
form of sin. The wonder with the natural man is, why sin should be
everlastingly punished; the wonder with the renewed man is, how a thing so
heinous can ever find pardon. Then if from the present we pass to the future,
and observe the alleged consequences of transgression extending themselves
like lines of fire through all the spreadings of mans after existence, why,
more than ever the stranger to repentance will be sensible of that recoil and
 jar of feeling which indicates suspicion that God is not just in thus taking
vengeance. But how different is it with the renewed--that is, with the
penitent man! God appears righteous in taking vengeance; this is the
discovery, this the unhesitating conviction of the individual in whose mind
are the workings of genuine repentance. But if it be true, according to these
showings, that to exhort a man to repent is to exhort him to pass from the
condition in which his notions of sin obscure all Gods dealings, to one in
which they illustrate and vindicate those dealings--from the entertainment of
the suspicion that the Creator may do wrong, to entertaining the assurance
that the Creator does right in exacting everlasting penalties; if this be true,
then surely repentance, as including a right sense of sin, may be identified
with glorifying God.
2. Consider the confession, as well by action as by word, which a true penitent
will make of his sin, and see whether such confession will not give glory to
God. My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make
confession unto Him. Making confession, you observe, is associated, or
rather identified, with the giving God glory. When Achan owned that he had
taken of the accursed thing, he publicly proclaimed that God had shown
Himself omniscient as having brought to light what no eye but his own had
observed. The acknowledgment, moreover, was proof to the nation, that God
had not smitten without cause, and that His threatenings always take effect;
thus witnessing, so that the whole congregation would understand the
testimony, to the justice, authority, and holiness of Jehovah. For he who,
moved by the workings of a righteous contrition, falls before his Maker, and
confesses himself a sinner, owns to the having forsaken the fountain of living
waters, and hewn out to himself cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no
water. When he uses the tongue which is emphatically described as the best
member which we have, in testifying to the evil of departure from God, in
asserting the truth of what God hath uttered in regard of mans fallen estate,
and the necessity that we return unto holiness if we would attain unto
happiness, this confession of sin carries with it an announcement to all who
here try the Word by the test of experience, as it would hereafter to the
breathless onlookers as the strange work of judgment goes forward, that
there is an ascertained righteousness in Gods dealings with unrenewed men
as with traitors to that government which extends wheresoever there is
moral accountableness. In acknowledging myself a sinner, I acknowledge
myself a rebel against the Almighty, and thus out of my own mouth the
eternal justice would be vindicated if there were pronounced upon me that
sentence of banishment which is yet to be heard by an impenitent multitude;
and certainly if that confession of sin which is a fruit or element of
repentance can in any degree cause God to be justified when He speaks, and
clear when He judges, there can be no debate that in this very degree it
brings honour to God; in other words, it explains what is done in the text,
where, summoning men to repent, the prophet summons them to give glory
to God. And oh! there is a confession which is far stronger, and more
productive of glory than that of the lip, even that of the life. Repentance,
whatever its internal workings, amounts in its outward demonstration,
which is known and read of all men, to a complete change of conduct.
 II. THE PROPHET LAYS DOWN A LIMITATION AS TO TIME. Before. There is a whole
volume of intelligence, and that, too, startling and touching intelligence, in this one
word. It is as much as to say, You cannot avoid giving it at one time or another; you
must give it after if you refuse to give it before. Give it, therefore, while it may be
accepted as an offering, and defer it not until it be exacted as a penalty. And
certainly it is a truth which but little reasoning would suffice to establish, that glory
will finally be won to God from every section of the universe, and from every
member of that intelligent family with which its spreadings are peopled. The power
of refusing to give God glory will expire with death, when the day of probation has
been followed by the day of condemnation; and beyond all doubt, in the punishment
of the reprobate as in the happiness of the righteous, there shall be a perpetual
harvest of honour unto God. Hell, as well as heaven, must be the scene for the
display of the Divine attributes; and wherever these attributes have place of
development, there undoubtedly the Almighty is glorified. And therefore, I do not
say of the dying sinner, going hence in his ungodliness, that he has outlived all
opportunity of giving glory to God; we rather say of him that he has just reached the
necessity of giving glory to God. A moment more--oh! even in that moment he might
grasp the Cross; but let that moment be another and the last of dishonour done to
God, and infinity is before him, paved with the burning tribute which has here been
withheld, so that to die in rebellion is only to transfer to eternity arrears which
eternity cannot exhaust. We leave the combination in its inexplicable awfulness: we
have no language for a state where the fire is unquenchable, and yet the darkness is
impenetrable. We thank God we may yet all give glory before our feet stumble, and
before the day closes. We are not yet on the dark mountains; it may be, we are
approaching them. The old must be approaching them--the young may be
approaching them; but if we seem to behold them on the horizon--the gloomy,
frowning masses--still the Sun of Righteousness hath not yet gone down on our
firmament; still there needs nothing but the looking in faith unto Jesus, delivered
for our offences, and raised again for our justification, and the beams of that Sun
shall edge, as with a line of gold, the dark and dreaded rampart, or rather throw a
transparency into the stern barrier, so that it shall seem to us to melt into the garden
of hope, the land where the river of life is ever flowing, and the tree of life is ever
waving. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

The suspension of Divine judgments

Give glory to the Lord your God BEFORE. We may see a rough image of the
suspension of Divine vengeance against sin, and of the real terrors of that
suspension, which only a timely repentance can avert, in the mountain torrent
swollen by the melting of the winters snow. At first a sudden fuller flow announces
to the inhabitants of the valley that the thaw has commenced. But the increasing of
the waters suddenly ceases, not to the contentment but to the alarm of the
inhabitants of the valley below. It inspires their fear and arouses their energies.
Instantly they sally out with axe and hook and cord. Mark how eagerly they climb
the rugged slippery hill. They know that the present quietude of the torrent tells of
future disaster. It is a plain indication to them that some tree has floated down the
current, and by the whirling of the waters in a narrow channel has been forced
athwart the stream; that there is being rapidly constructed a natural dam, behind
which the flood will gather, and seethe and swell and rage with ever-increasing fury,
until it carries all before it, and bursts with devastating volume and force on the
farms and fields below; and the purpose of these men who are hastening upwards is
to let out the flood before it assumes these dangerous proportions. In like manner
the guilty and impenitent have as little reason to be at ease because sentence
against an evil work is not executed speedily. On the contrary, that very fact should
arouse them to an instantaneous repentance; for while in mercy the long-suffering
of God as a mighty dam obstructs the forth flowing of His righteous vengeance,
when in judgment it is at length removed, the terrors of wrath will be in exact
proportion to the space in which they were treasured up. (R. A. Bertram.)

Before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains.

Darkness and the dark mountains

It is difficult to imagine a more perilous situation than that of a man overtaken by
darkness among the mountains of the East. The face of the sky has become suddenly
blackened with clouds; the serene light of the stars guides his feet no more; the
warring elements threaten his immediate destruction; and, without guide to conduct
or friend to comfort him, he can do nothing but anticipate ruin. Should he sit down,
he may perish under the cold; should he advance, rocks and precipices rise
everywhere around; and, to increase his horror, the wild beasts of the forest fill up
with their prolonged roar the pauses of the storm. But if he has himself rushed
causelessly upon his fate; if, notwithstanding that, toward evenings close, he had
been assured, by those who knew them well, that all the prognostics of an immediate
storm were gathering in the sky, he gave an incredulous ear to the intimation; if,
notwithstanding that there were offered to him the hospitalities of a cheerful
dwelling; if he still persisted in his own determination; and if, on finding that his
purpose was inflexible, an experienced guide was offered to conduct him, whose
services he sullenly rejected;--then, indeed, can we easily understand how the
remembrance of these things will occasion only additional agony at every moment
when his feet stumble on the dark mountains, and that, to the other horrors of his
perilous state, there will be superadded the bitterest self-reproach for his own
infatuation. Yet all this, as the metaphor under consideration suggests to us, is but a
faint emblem of the sinners wretchedness. To him there is a day of grace; but it too,
if unimproved, is succeeded by a night of darkness, and thick gloom. If uncovered by
that pavilion which God has erected, he must wander as an outcast on the
mountains, uncheered by heavens mercy. Hence the earnest counsel of the prophet,
Give glory to the Lord your God, etc.

I. The darkness of AFFLICTION.

1. You are now happy, let us suppose, beyond many around you in the world.
Your health is unimpaired, and your strength fails not. But where is your
security that this state of things shall continue? May not the pestilence that
walks in darkness creep silently into your midnight bed? Give now, then,
glory to God ere health is taken from you, and you wander on the dark
mountains of disease.
2. Or, it may be, your friendships and connections are all blessed of heaven.
Now, then, give glory to God; for, sooner than you apprehend, the days of
darkness may fall, and your happiness vanish as a dream. Those little ones
who now cheer your dwelling may soon go to swell the congregation of the
 dead; or, worse even than that, some of them, fair as is now their early
promise, may fall in temptations hour into follies, or crimes, which shall
make you wish rather that they had never been born.
3. Or, once more, your worldly circumstances are fair and flourishing. You have,
if not great wealth, what is better, a competent portion of good things; and,
while many cry for bread when there is none to give them, you have enough
and to spare. But soon, perhaps, your substance shall be dissolved as snow,
and your riches take to themselves wings as eagles. Now, then, give glory to
God, ere your feet stumble on the mountains of destitution.

II. The darkness of INSANITY. Ye whose reason is now sober, whose judgments are
now clear, whose understandings are now acute and comprehensive,--are you sure
that so they shall continue to the end? Did you never know any instance of a human
creature, once as calm and rational as you, hurried as by a whirlwind into the vortex
of insanity? Did you never know a case, where neither hereditary transmission, nor
constitutional temperament, nor evil habits, could have made way for reasons loss?
And where, then, is the security that yours shall not be the lot of those who call truth
error, and error truth? That would be darkness indeed, yea, gross darkness, and the
very shadow of death. Is it not wise, then, now to give glory to God, lest haply your
feet should stumble on that dark mountain?

III. The darkness of DESPAIR. It is an awful condition that of a human creature at

once apprehensive of judgment and incredulous of mercy. Sometimes this mental
depression is a constitutional infirmity, and results more from a finely sensitive
nature than a habitually depraved heart. Sometimes, too, it is owing to a gloomy
system of theology, which would ordain those to be sorry whom God has not
commanded to make sad. And sometimes it is the fruit of educational seeds,
growing up at length even as the grapes of Sidon. But in the great majority of
instances, the cause of the distemper is previous impenitence. The soul, having at
length become alive to a sense of its guiltiness and danger, sinks into the depths of
despair, says of itself, No hope, no hope; and to those who would administer
comfort if they could, replies only, Miserable comforters are ye all! That which a
philosopher has remarked concerning the earthquake, is eminently true of such a
state as this. One may escape from pestilence, from famine, and from sword. The
storm and tempest may be run from. The cloud that is as yet no bigger than the
hand of a man may be seen afar off, and, when discerned, a refuge may be sought
from it. The inundation of waters may be escaped by a timely flight; and even the
lightning of heaven may be conducted by a safe passage from our dwellings. But the
motions of the earthquake arise in a moment, and surprise one into an agony of
alarm. Even thus it is with despair, that worst enemy of the sinners soul. The
desponding spirit sits down at the gate of death, and refuses to be comforted. Give
glory then to God, before your feet stumble on the dark mountains.

IV. The darkness of DEATH and the GRAVE. Between that darkness and you there
may be only a single step. The eleventh hour may be about to sound its solemn knell,
and the sentence may go forth, This night thy soul shall be required of thee. The
lamp of life may be well supplied with oil, and yet it may burn only for a brief
season. An unexpected breath of wind may extinguish it in a moment; and you know
that, in the grave, that cannot be done which has been left undone. Now, therefore,
give glory unto God before your feet stumble on the dark mountains. Do bug think
how unworthy an offering to Him would be the relies and refuse of a wicked life;
and consider that, even although the night of death may, in your case, be preceded
by an evening of sickness, it is most perilous to delay commencing the work of
religion to a season when the memory may have become treacherous, the moral
feelings blunted, and the conscience seared. Think, too, even should you retain the
use of all your mental faculties to the last, how difficult it will be for you to assure
yourselves that your repentance is of the right sort,--that which is unto salvation,
and needeth not to be repented of.

V. The darkness of HELL. The future torments of the wicked, as well as the
felicities of the just, it is far beyond the power of imagination to comprehend. The
most calamitous condition in which a human being may be placed on earth admits
of some relief: let a man be ever so much afflicted, desolate, or forsaken, there is
commonly some comfort to be had. The sympathy of others at least may be extended
to him; or, if even this be wanting, he has the prospect of getting his sufferings
terminated by death. But in regard to the torments of the wicked in a future life, it is
not so. There the misery is unmingled, and the pain undiverted by any soothing
application. The fountains of sympathy are there dried up; compassion is unknown;
nor can even death itself be looked forward to. Add to this, that all the tormenting
passions will then be let loose upon the guilty soul And if even one of these passions,
when brought into full action, is maddening here, what shall not the effect be there,
when all that is fierce and malignant in its own nature shall war against the soul?
Only think what shame does--what sorrow, what despair, what hatred do--in the
present life; and then conceive, if you can, what all of them together will do for a
condemned spirit in the future state. If this be the end of the ungodly (and that it is
so the God who cannot lie has solemnly assured us), give glory to God before your
feet stumble on the dark mountains. (J. L. Adamson.)

The dark mountains

I. CONTEMPLATE THE WANDERERS. Darkness is used in Holy Scripture to denote

that repugnance to God and spiritual things which sin produces in the mind (Isa 9:2;
Rom 1:21). Talk to them of these things, and their sealed lips and cold indifference
will prove that they have not been taught the way of righteousness by the Spirit of
truth. And no wonder (1Co 2:14). But this condition is not forced upon men by any
irresistible power. It is true that they are all born in sin and shapen in iniquity (Psa
51:5); but the remedy for their blindness is ever at hand, if they would but receive it.
Here, then, we see the culpability of their state; it is willing ignorance; they refuse to
be enlightened (Joh 3:20). No wonder, therefore, that they prefer the dark
mountains of sin in order that they may pursue, as they list, the forbidden works of
darkness (Job 24:13). And this rebellion against the light may be traced up to the
depravity of their hearts. They are not only willingly ignorant, and therefore
criminally guilty, but their affections are corrupted. Here, again, we have another
idea suggested by the term darkness, It implies the moral pollution of human
nature, which is opposed to that inward purity which the light of the Holy Spirit
communicates. The heart of the wicked is actually depraved and vitiated; and from
that source, as from a contaminated fountain, flow the copious streams of
ungodliness and worldly lust.
 II. Expose their danger.
1. As we dwell attentively on the scene thus brought before us, we discover that
these mountains are overspread with many rough places and pitfalls. No
wonder, then, that, encompassed as they are with darkness, without a light
or a truthful guide, we see many of those wanderers continually falling. We
picture to ourselves that young man, just released from the parental
restraints of home, wandering up the side of yonder dark mountain in the
depth of night. He does not mean to wander far, and he thinks he can easily
retrace his steps at will. But although to those whose eyes are spiritually
opened it is dark and sterile ground, it possesses for him a secret and
seductive attraction, which leads him on and farther still he goes.
2. They were not happy when they began the dismal journey, and they have
never been happy since; but we see them stumbling into greater miseries at
every step they take.
3. As we gaze upon these wanderers, we see by the light of the text a thicker
darkness overspreading the mountains, and some are rapidly lost to our
sight in the impenetrable gloom. At first we see but a comparatively light
cloud, the cloud of affliction. That poor wanderer has squandered his health
in the service of sin; and now he is brought low, he can enjoy sin no longer.
As our vision is still resting on the dark mountains, another cloud arises; see
it shooting forth the forked lightnings of Gods judgments, and many are the
victims it brings low.

III. ENFORCE THE EXPOSTULATION OF THE TEXT. To give glory to God is to honour
Him, and God is honoured when we turn to Him with hearty repentance, and
submit ourselves in obedience to His authority. (W. D. Brock, B. A.)

Dark mountains

I. IN THE ONWARD WAY OF YOUR LIFE DARK MOUNTAINS LIE BEFORE YOU, WHICH YOU
MUST CROSS FOR YOUR FURTHER PROGRESS. We may travel for a time along the
pleasant greensward of youth, but as we advance to our middle life and ripest years,
we must expect to ascend acclivities, and clamber up steeps unknown to our earlier
career. By and by, if we have not before met with them, we shall espy mountainous
heights right across our road, and there will be no avoidance of them. These we must
traverse, and they will tax all our strength to the utmost. Man is born to trouble, as
the sparks fly upwards. One of these mountains may be that of worldly adversity,
an obscure position in society, the want of a suitable opening, and the toil and
sadness connected with insufficient means. Or it may be, whilst you are happily
exempt from this, you have a more mountainous obstacle in your delicate and
precarious health. Disappointments, too, reverses, losses, may trouble you as they
trouble others, and make your life way uphill, stony, and rugged. You may find
yourself, moreover, ere you are aware, clambering up to the top of a long and
toilsome height, and when you gain the summit there yawns beneath you, on the
other side, a terrific precipice, down which, if you fall, your destruction is inevitable.
This is the hilltop of temptation, and to each of us there comes at intervals an evil
day, when a solitary false step on our part will ruin us for this life and the future. We
climb, too, a sharp mountain of sorrow when we stand by the bedside of those
whom, though we love, we shall see them here no more, and presently follow the
form that embodied them in its passage to the grave that shall hide it. Some, and it
may be many, of these mountainous acclivities you will have to traverse. Look, and
you will see them; then make ready for the steep ascent. There is one mountain
height to which I have not referred, up which, if you have not yet crossed it, sooner
or later you must travel. You are a stoner. Sin involves punishment. As surely as you
have sinned, so surely you must reap the consequences. There will come a time to
you, if it has not yet come, when your sin will cause you grief. This mountain,
whether of repentance or remorse, may likely prove a steep and high one. It will be
hard work for your soul to get up over it. It is these mountain ranges of our way that
invest our life here with such awful solemnity and grandeur. The big sorrows that
beset us, give a solid reality to our existence, and stamp it with dignity and worth.
Gods will is, that each of us shall he equal and superior to the life obstacles He has
adapted to us. You must climb them; you cant help yourself; you must move
onward.

II. THE NATURAL DARKNESS OF THESE MOUNTAINS WILL BE ALLEVIATED OR

INTENSIFIED BY OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD. If you are right with God, and are giving
Him glory in your life, God will be a light to you as you ascend your difficult way.
And that light, too, will give you strength. You will see where you are, and whither
you are going; the hilltop will not be so far off, the path thitherward, though
meandering and tortuous, will be discernible, and the track of footsteps before you
will give you cheer. Ay, and with the light of heaven around you, there will be the
strength of heaven within you; and as the natural darkness of the mountain will be
swallowed up in the light of heaven, so the weakness of your heart will be forgotten
in the strength that is imparted. The Holy Spirit will testify that you are a child of
God, an heir of the kingdom of heaven, for what son is he a father chasteneth not?
And if, for a moment, you should fail, you will feel a hand helping you upward, and
hear a voice cheering you onwards; and should it come almost to the worst, as with
Jesus in Gethsemane, there will be an express angel from heaven to strengthen you.
Should you, I say, when you come to these mountain troubles of your way, be in
close relationship to God, giving glory to Him in your life, you will prove His
presence and His help; you will see His light and His favour, and will find needful
strength to enable you to prosecute your course. But should this not be so; should
you, apart from God and alienate from His love, be pursuing your life career merely
by the natural force which is derived from your animal and mental vigour; should
you unexpectedly find yourself at the base of a mountainous trouble, whose steep
sides ascend with a frightful incline, on whose summit, overhangs a portentous
cloud, casting its deep shadows all along your appointed way--your situation will be
deplorable indeed.

III. HOW MAY THESE, EVILS BE AVOIDED? Give glory to the Lord your God. The
Lord is your God, your Creator, your Proprietor, your Sustainer, your Provider, your
Defender, your Helper, your Governor, your Guide. On Him you depend, and in
Him you live. Without Him you are nothing; in Him you are complete and full. You
are so constituted by Him, and have such capacities given you, that you can know
Him, admire Him, love Him, and serve Him. He expressly made you that you should
do this. It is the design of His creation, the intent of your existence. If you achieve
this, you answer His purpose and satisfy His mind. If you fail in this, you thwart His
intention and disappoint His expectation. (W. T. Bull, B. A.)

JER 13:20
Where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?

A question for parents and pastors

Here is a flock that is being inquired about, not a flock only, but a beautiful flock.
1. The question comes into our family life, and asks us where all the children are,
those lovely children, that banished the silence of the house and made it ring
with music. They were fair, they were charming, they were affectionate; what
a sweet, merry little fellowship they made!--where are they? Have they been
spoiled into evil, flattered into self-idolatry, neglected into atheism? Have
they been over-instructed, over-disciplined, wholly overborne, so that the
will has not been only broken but shattered? He is no shepherd, but a tyrant,
who does not cooperate with his children, lure them, fascinate them, and
give them sacred instruction without appearing to do so, and who when
offering religious privileges offers them as if offering coronation, yea, and all
heaven.
2. The question enters also into our Church life, saying to every pastor, Where
is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?--not large, perhaps, but
so expectant, so sympathetic, so cooperative. What the flock wants is
pastoral preaching. The difficulty is to overcome the temptation to preach to
somebody who is not there. The preacher must always know himself to be set
for the healing and nurture of men. In every congregation there am the
broken-hearted, those who are shattered in fortune, feeble in health,
spiritually-minded; women who have great home cares; souls that cannot
thrive on criticism; lives that need all nourishment and comfort and loving
sympathy. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Gods claim on parents

I. What is here shown us respecting the flock.

1. It is not yours in proprietorship, only in charge. Children are peculiarly and
specially Gods. Authority over them is Gods gift to parents but He has a
claim prior to yours. He continues His work of creation in every child born.
Its existence is wonderful. Much more so its capacities--physical, mental,
social, spiritual.
2. Christ highly estimates the flock. Christian hospitality to a child is homage to
God.

II. The responsibility of parents to whom God has entrusted His flock.
1. They have to impart religious ideas. At home the first principles are instilled:
indeed, the childs mind is there made acquainted with the germ of all truth--
sin, forgiveness, righteousness, salvation, love human and Divine: all the
 ideas involved in religion.
2. Parents represent to their children the character of the Invisible God. The
Gospel is a declaration of the paternal love.
3. The inquiry for the flock will be addressed to parents.

III. THE WAY IN WHICH THIS RESPONSIBILITY SHOULD BE MET. If you would prepare
to answer joyfully this question, set it before you as--
1. A distinct purpose. The wish for your childrens salvation is not enough.
Register a purpose in the sight of God.
2. Intense devotion is necessary. To have converting power over your own
children you must love their souls, and hold them fast for God. (A. Davies.)

Where are you

What a question this for ministers and for people! For ministers. Where are the
few sheep whom He has put under our care? What have we done for them? And for
the flock likewise, Gods people and children. What a question for them! Where are
you?

I. You are GODS FLOCK. The people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.
He acknowledges you as His sheep, and like the Good Shepherd, He knows you
every one. He looks at you as you are, and thinks of the difference between one and
another.

II. His flock is BEAUTIFUL.

1. For what He has made them. Look how beautiful He has made us all in body,
mind, and soul.
2. Because of what they are capable of. Look at the wonderful things which man
has been enabled to do, and then think what more God may intend him to
do. Look at him sailing over the sea, and travelling over land by means of fire
and water! And then think what may not mans mind and body be capable of
doing. But look at man sanctified by the Holy Ghost, his soul filled with
grace, and bringing forth fruits of righteousness. How beautiful is a
Christian, when he is gentle, forgiving, loving, forgetting himself, and
seeking to help others, bearing trials without murmurs, and rejoicing even in
sorrow!
3. Because of what they are intended for. You, poor creatures that you are,
disappointed and disappointing yourselves so constantly, promising
yourselves so much and performing so little--God intends you to be lights in
this world, to show the way to those around you, and to be His companions
in heaven.

III. WHERE ARE YOU? Where am I?

1. We are here, whilst so many others have been called away.
2. Judge yourselves where you are in spiritual things.
(1) To this end review your opportunities, and see what they have done for
you, where they have left you. They are like the wind or steam to a ship,
 like the carriage or train to the traveller; they are intended to help you on
your way, and you ought to find yourself nearer home since you have had
the use of them.
(2) Judge yourselves about open, plain public sins. What have there been of
these in the year? drunkenness, swearing, thieving, cheating, lying,
uncleanness, wasting Sunday, slandering your neighbour. Have you done
such things as these?
(3) Judge yourselves whether you are more in earnest about religion than
you were. Are you ever anxious about yourself? Are you taking any pains?
(W. H. Ridley, M. A.)

Christian responsibility
To the minister of Christ, when looking back on the irremediable past, and
forward on the dim future, the thought must naturally arise,--How much have we to
answer for, and what answer shall we make? But let all seriously minded Christians
consider how great is the responsibility of us all, with respect to children and young
persons, that they be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Everyone knows that example is more forcible than precept, and especially evil
example than good precept. When grown-up persons then, whether parents or
others, use themselves to violent and intemperate language, swearing, or indecent
expressions, or slander, it is as if they took pains to instruct children in the language
of lost spirits. Or, to glance at another case; many there are who, while they preserve
a decent exterior of conduct, yet leave their children, or other young persons for
whom they are in any manner responsible, to shift for themselves; I mean in
religious matters, take no personal care or trouble to give them an education
substantially Christian. But I ask, Is not that which is true and good for the parent,
true and good for the child? Must not fathers and mothers be answerable for the
bringing up of their little flock, the children whom God has given them, in the
nurture and admonition of the Lord? And can this be true Christian nurture and
admonition, to habituate them to those unfixed and unprincipled notions and ways
in the great matter of Divine worship, and communion with Christs Church here
militant, but in heaven triumphant? This responsibility lies on us all--all grown-up
persons--all have an influence either for good or evil on the younger; and happy will
they be, who shall be found to have exerted this influence to the honour of our
Almighty Lord and Master, and the edification of that flock which He purchased
with His own blood. Such persons, if parents, have made it a principal matter of
their thoughts and cares that their children should be also Gods children. (Plain
Sermons by Contributors to the Tracts for the Times.)

JER 13:21
What wilt thou say when He shall punish thee?

A question to the impenitent

It was in view of certain threatened calamities that were to come on Judah from
the hand of the Lord, that this question is asked of her. I put this question to each
individual who is not obeying the Gospel of Christ. What wilt thou say, dying as thou
art living, appearing before God in judgment as thou appearest to Him now,
continuing impenitent, persisting in disobedience to the Gospel, if the character
thou carriest into eternity be that which you are now forming for it? But perhaps you
have no faith in future punishment; perhaps you do not believe that you, or any
sinner will ever be brought into these circumstances. Then you have no faith in the
veracity of God, or in the Bible as His Word. You are fulfillers of prophecy, for it is
said (1Pe 3:1-22) there should be such as you. But you say, the belief is
unreasonable; it conflicts with all our ideas of benevolence and justice. What! that a
righteous moral Governor should punish incorrigible offenders, rebels that refuse to
be reconciled to Him, though often invited, and the meanwhile most kindly dealt
with by their injured Sovereign, and when the terms of reconciliation are easy as
they could be made, and the whole expense of bringing it about is borne by God! The
question is not, what now you have to say, for now you imagine you have a great deal
to say. And some can speak long and fluently in a strain of self-exculpation; but
then, when confronted with your Maker and Judge; and when all things are seen by
the clear and searching light of eternity; then, what wilt thou say?
1. You will not be able to say that you were ignorant of the existence of the law,
for the transgression of which you are condemned.
2. Nor can you say that this law is unintelligible. Whatever obscurity attaches to
the doctrines of the Bible, none rests on its precepts.
3. Nor, again, can you reasonably complain of the character of this law. The law
is holy, and the commandment holy, lust, and good. Its spirit is love; its
tendency happiness.
4. Nor can you complain of any want of adaptation in this law; that it transcends
your capacities, exceeds your natural powers of performance. No; you want
no new faculty to obey it perfectly. You want only a rectified heart. You want
but the will.
5. You cannot plead ignorance of its penalty. You cannot say that you were not
warned of the consequences of disobedience; and that God strikes, before He
speaks. What has not been done to deter you from sinning? What
obstructions have not been thrown in your way to destruction! But you
surmount them all. What then wilt thou say, when He shall punish thee?
That you have never transgressed this law, or only once, or but seldom, and
then inadvertently, through infirmity? This you will not say; you cannot.
Who has not sinned many times, and deliberately? Will you say that your sin
did no harm, injured no one, no one but God? But you must allow the
Lawgiver to be the judge of that. The consequences of a particular sin He
alone is able to trace out. Will you be able to say, that, when you had sinned,
God hastened the execution of the sentence against you; waited not for a
second offence, and gave you no opportunity to evade the stroke; that as
soon as you found you had sinned, you were sorry, and penitently sought His
face, but was spurned away; and that, seeing your case to be hopeless, you
went on sinning in despair? What will you say? That there was an
irreversible Divine decree that stood an insurmountable obstruction in your
way to heaven, and even impelled you in the downward direction? You will
see by the light of eternity that that was not the case, nor indeed the doctrine
of those who were supposed to hold it. What then wilt thou say, when He
 shall punish thee? I can think of nothing, nothing exculpatory, nothing
extenuating. You will be speechless, not through intimidation, but from
conviction, not as unable to speak, but as having nothing to say; self-
condemned, as well as condemned by your Judge; conscience confirming the
decision against you, and your own self through all eternity reproaching you,
and thus nourishing a worm gnawing within worse than the fire that shall
burn about you. And shall it come to this? Shall this be the issue of life? (W.
Nevins, D. D.)

Future punishment

I. The punishment supposed.

1. Sometimes it commences in the present world.
2. It will assuredly be inflicted after death.
3. It will be consummated at the judgment day.
4. It will be proportionate (Mat 19:27; Rom 2:6; Rev 2:23).
5. That it will be everlasting.

II. The interrogation presented.

1. Will you say it is unrighteous?
2. Will you say it is severe?
3. Will you say that you were not warned?
4. Will you plead for a further period of trial?
5. Will you confess your guilt, and seek mercy?
6. Will you endeavour to resist the almighty arm? (Isa 27:4; Nah 1:5)
7. Will you endeavour to meet your doom with firmness? (Pro 1:27; Rev 6:17.)
Application--
1. Future punishment may be averted. Bless God that you are favoured with time
and opportunities; with mercy, and with gracious invitations.
2. Timely repentance, and sincere faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, will infallibly
preserve you from the wrath to come. (J. Burns, D. D.)

The justice of future punishment

I. Offer three general remarks.

1. All the afflictions to the wicked have the nature of punishment: they are not
salutary. Grace turns the serpent into a rod; but sin turns the rod into a
serpent. The former turns poison into a remedy; the latter, the remedy into
poison.
2. Punishment is the natural and necessary consequence of sin. If we drink of
the cup of abominations, God will give us the cup of trembling (Psa 75:8).
3. Whoever are the immediate instruments of inflicting punitive evils, God is the
author of them.
 II. CONSIDER THE SOLEMN INQUIRY IN OUR TEXT. What wilt thou say when He
shall punish thee?
1. Wilt thou charge God with injustice, or say that the punishment is
undeserved? To admit such a thought betrays the greatest insolence and
pride, as well as an entire ignorance of all the principles of truth and
righteousness (Rom 3:5-6; Rev 15:3; Rev 16:7).
2. Wilt thou say that God is severe and that though punishment be deserved, yet
it is too great for the offence? (2Th 1:6-10.)
3. Wilt thou say that thou wast taken by surprise, without being warned; and
that, therefore, judgments came unlooked for? The very heathens cannot say
this; for as the creatures instruct them, so conscience warns them.
4. Wilt thou desire a further time of trial, that judgment may be deferred, and a
longer season of probation be afforded thee? Instead of wishing for a greater
extension of Divine forbearance, God might say to the dying and desponding
sinner, The measure of thine iniquities is already full, and further
forbearance would only make it run over. Put in the sickle, for the harvest is
ripe.
5. Wilt thou say that thou hast sinned by an inevitable necessity, and that thy
ruin was predetermined? But if this be the language of sinners in this world,
it will not be so in the world to come. They will then know that if they were
the slaves of sin and Satan, they were so voluntarily, and by choice; that if
they were sold to commit iniquity, like Ahab, they sold themselves; and that
if any spiritual blessing were withheld, it was that to which they had no claim
and for which they had no desire (Jer 7:10; Isa 63:17; Mat 23:37 Joh 5:40;
Act 2:23; Joh 12:39; Joh 15:22; Rom 9:19-20).
6. The question proposed in the text implies that the sinner will have nothing to
say when he falls into the hands of God. (B. Beddome, M. A.)

A serious question

I. THE PUNISHMENT REFERRED TO. A freethinker once said, I am seventy years

old, and have never seen such a place as hell, after all that has been said about it. A
child at once replied, But have you ever been dead yet?
1. The punishment itself. This is brought before us--
(1) By express declarations.
(2) In figurative forms.
2. Its infliction.
(1) God, faithful to promises, must also be to threatenings.
(2) Graded, in accordance with degree of crime.

II. The persons on whom it will be inflicted.

1. Atheists.
2. Unbelievers.
3. Hypocrites.
4. Persecutors.
 5. Backsliders.

III. THE QUESTION, What wilt thou say? Many can talk now, revile, question,
sneer. What will you say then? (Homiletic Magazine.)

No appeal
Advert to the time when, in the order of the Divine government, ungodly sinners
will be punished according to law. What wilt thou say in extenuation of thy guilt,
and against the justice of the punishment that He shall inflict upon thee?
1. Will you say that you did not know the law which you had broken? Whose
fault was that? Had you not a Bible as your own? Had you not a law in your
conscience which acquitted or accused you in the actions of life?
2. That you meant no wrong in what you had done? Then why do wrong? For
pleasure? For profit? Was this any justification of wrong-doing?
3. That your sins had not done such evil as to deserve such punishment? Can
you be a judge in this?
4. That God might have prevented you sinning, and the results of your sins, if
He had been so disposed? Yes, had He destroyed your free agency. But did
not God use means to prevent you, and you would not?
5. That you sinned only a short time in comparison with the duration of your
punishment? Punishment is not given in its duration according to the time
taken in the act of transgression. The act of murder, and its punishment.
6. That you have only done as others have done? A thousand doing wrong is no
justification or extenuation of one doing a similar or the same wrong that
they have committed.
7. That you have not been so bad as others? The law knows nothing of degrees in
crime, so far as exempting from punishment. Besides, he that offends in one
point is guilty of all.
8. That while you have done many things that have been wrong, you have done
others that have been right? Doing a right will not save you from the
punishment of doing a wrong.
9. That you had great temptations to do as you have done? But there were at
your command resources of help sufficient to keep you from their power.
10. That you were led into sin by bad examples? There were good examples to
follow as well as bad, why did you not follow them?
11. That you were never educated? Education has nothing to do with moral
principles and actions.
12. That you were never warned or admonished against sin? Can this be true? If
you were not, whose fault was it? Had you not warnings and admonitions of
conscience and of the Spirit of God?
13. That the Spirit of God never strove with you? This is false, or Gods Word is,
and human experience. Perhaps you so quenched the Spirit as to harden
your heart.
14. That you were born into the world with a sinful nature, and could not help
sinning? But God made every provision to meet your case in this respect.
 15. That the inconsistencies of Christians were a stumbling block to you? If one
man walk awry, or if he stumble, is that any reason why you should do so
16. That you were preordained by God to do as you have done? This is false,
both in reason and in Scripture.
17. That your punishment is too severe? It is no wonder you should say this. Is it
undeserved? Is it against law and justice?
18. That your punishment is more than you can bear? You should have thought
of this before. Did you in committing sin think of how others could bear the
wrong you were doing them? How God could bear your sins? (Local
Preachers Treasury.)

JER 13:23
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?

The Ethiopian

I. The question and its answer.

1. The difficulty in the sinners case lies--
(1) In the thoroughness of the operation. The Ethiopian can wash, or paint;
but he cannot change that which is part and parcel of himself. A sinner
cannot change his own nature.
(2) In the fact that the will is itself diseased by sin. In mans will lies the
essence of the difficulty: he can not, means that he does not will to have it
done. He is morally unable.
(3) In the strength of habit. Practice in transgression has forged chains, and
bound the man to evil.
(4) In the pleasure of sin, which fascinates and enslaves the mind.
(5) In the appetite for sin, which gathers intensity from indulgence.
Drunkenness, lechery, covetousness, etc., are a growing force.
(6) In the blindness of the understanding, which prevents men from seeing
the evil of their ways, or noting their danger. Conscience is drugged into
a deep sleep.
(7) In the growing hardness of the heart, which becomes more stolid and
unbelieving every day, till nothing affects it.
(8) In the evident fact that outward means prove ineffectual: like sope and
nitre on a negro, they fail to touch the living blackness.
2. For all these reasons we answer the question in the negative: sinners can no
more renew themselves than Ethiopians can change their skins.
(1) Why then preach to them? It is Christs command, and we are bound to
obey. Their inability does not hinder our ministry, for power goes with
the word.
(2) Why tell them that it is their duty to repent? Because it is so: moral
inability is no excuse: the law is not to be lowered because man has
 grown too evil to keep it.
(3) Why tell them of this moral inability? To drive them to self-despair, and
make them look to Christ.

II. Another question and answer.

1. All things are possible with God (Mat 19:26).
2. The Holy Spirit has special power over the human heart.
3. The Lord Jesus has determined to work this wonder, and for this purpose He
came into this world, and died, and rose again (Mat 1:21).
4. Many such jet-black sinners have been totally changed: among ourselves
there are such, and in all places such may be found.
5. The Gospel is prepared with that end.
6. God has made His Church long for such transformations, and prayer has been
offered that they may now be wrought. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Evil habits a great difficulty to reformation of life

Habit may be looked on--
1. As a necessary law.
(1) A facility of performing an act in proportion to its repetition.
(2) A tendency grows up in us to repeat what we have often done.
2. As a beneficent law. It is because acts grow easier and generally more
attractive the oftener they are performed, that men advance in the arts, the
sciences, the morality, and the religion of life.
3. As an abused law. The text is a strong expression of its abuse. The words of
course are not to be taken in an absolutely unqualified sense. The idea is
great difficulty. Our subject is the difficulty of converting old sinners, men
accustomed to do evil.

I. It is a self-created difficulty.
1. Habit is but an accumulation of acts, and in each of the aggregate acts the
actor was free.
2. The sinner himself feels that he has given his moral complexion the Ethiopian
stain, and painted his character with the leopard spots. This fact shows--
(1) The moral force of human nature. Man forging chains to manacle his
spirit, creating a despot to control his energies and his destiny.
(2) The egregious folly of wickedness. It makes man his own enemy, tyrant,
destroyer.

II. IT IS A GRADUALLY AUGMENTING DIFFICULTY. Habit is a cord. It is strengthened

with every action. At first it is as fine as silk, and can be broken with but little effort.
As it proceeds it becomes a cable strong enough to hold a man of war, steady amidst
boisterous billows and furious winds. Habit is a momentum. It increases with
motion. At first a childs hand can arrest the progress. As the motion increases it
gets a power difficult for an army of giants to overcome. Habit is a river, at its
headspring you can arrest its progress with ease, and turn it in any direction you
please, but as it approaches the ocean it defies opposition, and rolls with a
thunderous majesty into the sea.
1. The awful condition of the sinner.
2. The urgency for an immediate decision Procrastination is folly.
3. The necessity of the special prayers of the Church on behalf of aged sinners.

III. It is a possibly conquerable difficulty.

1. The history of conversions shows the possibility of overcoming this difficulty.
2. The mightiness of Christ shows the possibility of overcoming this difficulty,
He saves to the uttermost.
Uttermost in relation to the enormity of the sin--uttermost in relation to the age of
the sinner. (Homilist.)

Evil habits and their cure

If we compare together these words of Jeremiah with other words on the same
subject by Isaiah we arrive at a more complete view of the force of evil habits than is
presented to us by this single text. Come, now, let us reason together, though your
sins, etc. This is the essential message of Christ, that there is forgiveness of sins--
that the transgressions of the past can be blotted out and he who has done evil learn
to do good. This doctrine was very early objected to. It was one of the arguments
that the educated heathen in the first ages of the Christian Church brought against
Christianity that it declared that possible which they believed to be impossible. It is
manifest to everyone, writes Celsus, the first great polemical adversary of
Christianity, who flourished in the second century, that those who are disposed by
nature to vice, and are accustomed to it, cannot be transformed by punishment,
much less by mercy, for to transform nature is a matter of extreme difficulty, but
our Lord has taught us that what is impossible with men is possible with God, and
Christianity proved again and again its Divine origin in accomplishing this very
work which, according to men, was impossible. Against the sweeping assertion of
Celsus to the contrary, we may place the living examples of thousands upon
thousands who through the Gospel have been turned from darkness to light and
from the power of Satan unto God. To trace the steps of such a change in any
particular case is one of the most fascinating studies in biography; but no study will
ever explain all, for in the work of a souls regeneration there is a mystery which can
never be brought into the mould of thought. The wind, said Christ, bloweth where
it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or
whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit, but mans part in the work
can be conceived, and this is what we should strive to understand, so that we may
work with God, and there are three chief ways in which we may do so:
1. There is resistance. As every yielding to temptation strengthens a bad habit, so
every act of resistance weakens it. It was the belief of the North American
Indians that the strength of the slain foe passed into the body of the slayer;
and in the moral world it is so, for not only does resistance take from the
force of habit, it strengthens the will against it, so that in a double way acts of
resistance undermine the force of habit.
2. Then there is education. Every man who is not wholly lost to a sense of right-
doing feels every time he gives way to an evil habit a silent protest working in
 his breast, something that tells him he is wrong, that urges him to do
differently, that interferes with the pleasure of the sin, mingling with it a
sense of dissatisfaction. This protest will generally take the form of urging us
towards the good which is opposite to the evil in which we are indulging. And
by educating, by drawing out the desire after this good more and more, the
evil is more and more put to flight. Thus the way to overcome inattentiveness
of the mind is not so much to fix our attention on the fault, as to cultivate
and educate its opposite, concentration of mind.
3. Once again, there is prayer. It has been said that to labour is to pray, and that
is true in a measure; and those who labour in resisting evil habits and in
cultivating good ones are, in a sense, by such actions praying to God; but
anyone who has ever prayed knows that that definition does not exhaust the
meaning or force of prayer. Prayer is more than labour--it is having
intercourse with God. It is one of the chief means by which we are made
conscious that we are not alone in the battle of life; but that there is One with
us who is our unchangeable Friend, who looks down upon us with an interest
that never flags, and a love that never grows cold. (Arthur Brooke, M. A.)

Inability to do good arising from vicious habits

I. TO EXPLAIN THE NATURE OF EVIL HABITS, PARTICULARLY THE TENDENCY OF THEM,

TO RENDER MEN INDISPOSED TO MORAL GOODNESS. No habit leaveth a man in a state
of indifference, it putteth a strong bias upon his mind to act according to its
direction, as experience showeth in innumerable instances, and in the most ordinary
affairs, and even amusements of life; how naturally and easily do we fall into the
beaten track, and hold on the accustomed course, though our reason discerneth no
importance in it at all! Nay, by the influence of habit, trifles are magnified into
matters of great moment, at least they engage the desire, and determine the active
powers as if they were, so that we find it very difficult to break them off. Again, the
only rational way of reclaiming men from ill practices is, by convincing them that
they are ill, and that they must be attended with unhappy consequences to
themselves: but the effect of habits is to darken the understanding, to fill the mind
with prejudices, and to render it unattentive to reason. How then shall they that are
accustomed to do evil learn to do well, since they are biassed against it, being expert
in the contrary practice, and since they have made themselves in a great measure
incapable of instruction?

II. Consider particularly how we are to understand that disability to do good

which is contracted by being accustomed to do evil.
1. That the impotence is not total nor equal to that which is natural, will appear
from the following considerations.
(1) Where there is a total disability, and equal to that which is natural, there
can be no guilt.
(2) It is very well known in a multitude of instances, that men by strong
resolutions, and a vigorous exertion of the natural force of their minds,
have actually conquered very inveterate habits, and turned to a quite
different way of living.
2. You see then where the difference lieth, that it is in ourselves, and what that
 impotence is which ariseth from habits, that it is no more than irresolution
which is properly the fault of the mind, and to be charged wholly upon it.
3. God waiteth to be gracious to them, unwilling they should perish, if they are
disposed on their part to submit to the remedy which His mercy hath
provided. (J. Abernethy, M. A.)

Habits
1. Everyone remembers how much of his discipline as a child was connected
with points of manner; how often he was reproved for little rudenesses, etc.
And if by the neglect of others or by his own he formed any such habit, does
he not remember too how much pain and effort it cost him to get rid of it,
however little pleasure there might be in indulging it, or however easy it
might appear, in prospect, to part with it at any moment when it might
become troublesome? And I need not remind any of you of the force of habit
as shown, in an opposite way, in matters which, though they occupy much of
your time and thoughts elsewhere, must yet be regarded as trifling in
comparison with the graver subjects which ought to fill our minds here; I
mean, in those exercises of bodily strength and skill which form so large a
part of our youthful training.
2. But now go one step farther, and observe the effect of habit, for good or evil,
upon the mind. If language be your chief subject of study, the repeated sight
of certain symbols, which were at first entirely strange and unintelligible to
you, makes them familiar, and associates them forever in your mind with the
ideas which they symbolise; and the repeated formation for yourselves of
words and sentences in that foreign language, according to certain rules,
gives you at last an almost intuitive and instantaneous perception of what is
right and beautiful in it. This is the reward of the diligent; their reward in
proportion to the original gift of mind for which they are not responsible,
and to their diligence in the use of it for which they are. And if this be, in
intellectual matters, the force of habit for good, need I speak of its influence
for evil? Those repeated neglects which make up the school life of an idle or
presumptuous boy; the little separate acts, or rather omissions of act, which
seem to him now so trifling; the postponements, half-learnings, or total
abandonments of lessons; the hours of inattention, vacancy, or wandering
thoughts, which he spends in school; the shallowness and looseness and
slovenliness--still worse, the too frequent unfairness--of his best
preparations of work; these things too are all going to form habits.
3. The soul too is the creature of habit. Have you not all found it so? When you
have for two or three days together forgotten your prayers, has it not
become, even in that short time, more easy to neglect, more difficult to
resume them? When you have left God out of sight in your daily life; when
you have fallen into an unchristian and irreligious state of mind and life, how
soon have you found this state become as it were natural to you; how much
less, day by day, did the idea of living without God alarm you; how much
more tranquil, if not peaceful, did conscience become as you departed
farther and farther in heart from the living God! But there is another, an
opposite, habit of the soul, that of living to God, with God, and in God. That
too is a habit, not formed so soon or so easily as the other, yet like it formed
 by a succession of acts, each easier than the last, and each making the next
easier still.
4. I have spoken separately of habits of the body, the mind, and the soul. It
remains that we should combine these, and speak a few serious words of
those habits which affect the three. Such habits there are, for good and for
evil. There is a devotion of the whole man to God, which affects every part of
his nature. Such is the habit of a truly religious life; such a life as some have
sought in the seclusion of a cloister, but which God wills should be led in that
station of life, whatsoever it be, to which it has pleased or shall please Him to
call us. One day so spent indeed, is the earnest, and not the earnest only hut
the instrument too, of the acquisition of the inheritance of the saints in light.
How can we, after such thoughts, turn to their very opposite, and speak of
habits affecting for evil conjointly the body, the mind, and the soul? Yet such
habits there are, and the seed of them is often sown in boyhood.
5. It is the fashion with some to undervalue habits. The grace of God, they say,
and say truly, can change the whole man into the opposite of what he is. It is
most true: with God--we bless Him for the word, it is our one hope--all
things are possible. But does God give any encouragement in His Word to
that sort of recklessness as to early conduct, which some practically justify by
their faith in the atonement? Is it not the whole tenour of His Word that
children should be brought up from the first in the nurture and admonition
of the Lord?
6. I have spoken, as the subject led me, of good habits and evil: there is yet a
third possibility, or one which seems such. There is such a thing, in common
language at least, as having no habits. Yes, we have known such persons, all
of us; persons who have no regularity and no stability within or without;
persons who one day seem not far from the kingdom of God, and the next
have drifted away so far from it that we wonder at their inconsistency. As you
would beware of bad habits, so beware also of having no habits. Grasp
tenaciously, and never let go, those few elements at least of virtuous habit
which you acquired in earliest childhood in a Christian home. You will be
very thankful for them one day. (Dean Vaughan.)

Importance of the rigid formation of habits

I. HOW FAR THE INFLUENCE OF HABIT EXTENDS. Habit extends its influence over the
body, the mind, and the conscience The body, considered merely as an animal
frame, is much under the influence of habit. Habit inures the body to cold or heat;
renders it capable of labour, or patient of confinement. Through habit the sailor
rides upon the rocking wave without experiencing that sickness which the
unaccustomed voyager is almost sure to feel. I might now proceed from the body to
the mind, only there are some cases which are of a mixed nature, partaking both of
body and mind, in which we neither contemplate the body apart from the mind, nor
the mind apart from the body; and habit has its influence upon both. Such is the
pernicious use of strong liquors, habit increases the desire, diminishes the effect of
them. So all undue indulgence of the body increases the desire of further indulgence.
The appetite by constant gratifications becomes uncontrollable; and the mind also
grows debauched, is rendered incapable of purer pleasures, and altogether unfit for
the exercises of religion. Nor is it only through the body that habit has its effect upon
the mind. There are habits purely mental, as well as habits purely bodily.
Profaneness may become a habit; a man may contract a habit of swearing, a habit of
speaking irreverently of sacred things. So the anger of a passionate man is often
called constitutional. Further, the Apostle Paul speaks of those whose mind and
conscience is defiled. Habit has its effect on the conscience also. One would think
that the more frequently a man had committed a fault, the more severely would his
conscience upbraid him for it. But the very contrary is the case: his conscience has
become familiar with the sin, as well as his other faculties of mind or body.

II. THE DIFFICULTY OF OVERCOMING HABITS. Even in the case of those who have
been soberly and virtuously brought up, and whose life is unstained by a course of
profane or licentious conduct, there is a principle of evil which keeps them far from
God. They have no love to Him, no delight in Him, no communion with Him. How
much more palpably impossible is it for the wretched sinner to break his chains,
when sin by long indulgence has become habitual; when the body itself has been
made subject to it, the mind polluted by it, and the conscience seared as with a red-
hot iron! Does experience teach you to expect that these men will correct
themselves! It may be that such men may change one sin for another, a new bad
habit, as it acquires strength, may supplant an old one, the sins of youth may give
way to the sins of age. But this is not ceasing to do evil, and learning to do well. It is
only altering the manner of doing evil. With men it is impossible, but not with God;
for with God all things are possible. Divine grace can not only take away the greatest
guilt; it can also enlighten the darkest understanding, and sanctify the most corrupt
heart.

III. Address two descriptions of characters.

1. Those who are still walking in their accustomed way of evil.
2. Those who have been delivered from it. (J. Fawcett, M. A.)

Habits
The formation of habits goes on in part by conscious volition or purpose. Men set
themselves at work in certain directions to acquire accomplishments and various
elements of power. Thus are habits formed. And the same process goes on under a
more general schooling. We are living in society at large. Not only are we influenced
by that which goes on in our households, but there is the reflection of a thousand
households in the companionship into which we are thrown day by day, which
influences us. The world of most persons is a microcosm with a small population;
and they reflect the influence of the spheres in which they have had their training
and their culture. The influences which surround them, for good and evil, for
industry or indolence, are well-nigh infinite in number and variety. Every man
should have an end in view; and every day he should adopt means to that end, and
follow it from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, and from year
to year. Then he is the architect of, and he is building, his own fortune. Out of a
careless and unarmoured way spring up mischievous habits which at first are not
very striking, nor very disastrous. Prominent among them is the habit of
carelessness respecting the truth--carelessness in respect to giving ones word in the
form of a promise. Never make a promise without a distinct and deliberate thought
as to whether you can fulfil it; or not; and having made a promise, keep it at all
hazard, even though it be to your damage. Do not break your word. Then, aside from
that mode of falsifying, men fall into the habit of uttering untruths. The love of truth
is not in them. They do not esteem truth for itselfs sake. They regard it as an
instrument, as a coin, as it were; and when it is profitable they speak the truth, but
when it is not profitable they are careless of it. Multitudes of persons by suppression
falsify and they use so thin and gauzy a veil as this: Well, what I said was strictly
true. Yes; but what you did not say was false. For you to tell the truth so that no one
shall suspect the truth, and so that it shall produce a false and illusory impression--
that has an evil effect upon others, and a still more evil effect upon your own
character. The desire to conform your speech to Yea, yea, and Nay, nay; the desire
for simplicity of truth; the desire to state things as they are, so that going from your
mind they shall produce pictures in anothers mind precisely as they lie in your own-
-that is manly. Still more likely are men by extravagance to fall from strict habits of
truth. We live in an age of adjectives, Nothing is natural. The whole force of
adjectives is exhausted on the ordinary affairs of life, and nothing is left for the
weightier matters of thought and speech. Men form a habit in this direction,
Frequently it is formed because it is very amusing. When a man has a good
reputation for speaking the truth, and he speaks in a back-handed way, at first it is
comical; as, for instance, where a man speaks of himself as being a dishonourable
fellow when he is known to be the very pink of honesty and scrupulousness; or,
where a man speaks smilingly of trying with all his might to live within his income,
when he is known to roll in riches. Such extravagances have a pleasing effect once or
twice; and not only individuals, but families and circles fall into the habit of using
extravagant words and expressions, because under certain conditions they are
amusing; but they cease to be so when they are applied to the common elements of
life, and are heard every day. They become altogether distasteful to persons of
refinement, and are in every way bad. The same is true of bluntness. Now and then
the coming in of a blunt expression from a good, strong, honest man is like a clap of
thunder in a hot, sultry day in summer--and we like it; but when a man makes
himself disagreeable under the pretence that bluntness of speech is more honest
than the refined expressions of polite society, he violates good taste and the true
proportions of things. Nor is it strange, under such circumstances, that a man feels
himself easily led to the last and worst form of lying--deliberate falsification; so that
he uses untruth as an instrument by which to accomplish his ends. Closely
connected with this obliteration of moral delicacy there comes in a matter of which I
will speak, reading from Ephesians, the 5th chapter--All uncleanness, or
covetousness, let it not be once named among you, etc. Where men tip their wit
with salacious stories; where men indulge in double entendre; where men report
things whose very edge is uncomely and unwholesome; where men talk among
themselves in such a way that before they begin they look around and say, Are there
any ladies present? where men converse with an abominable indecorum and
filthiness in repartee, jesting with things that are fine, and smearing things that are
pure, the apostle says, It is not convenient. The original is, It is not becoming. In
other words, it is unmanly. That is the force of the passage. And we are forbidden to
indulge in these things. Yet very many men run through the whole of them, sink into
the depths of pollution, and pass away. I scarcely need say that in connection with
such tendencies as I have reprobated will come in the temptation to a low tone of
conduct socially; to coarse and vulgar manners, and to carelessness of the rights of
others. By good manners I mean the equity of benevolence. If you will take the 13th
chapter of 1st Corinthians, and, though it be perverting the text a little, substitute for
charity the word politeness, you will have a better version of what true politeness
is than has ever been written anywhere else. No man has any right to call himself a
gentleman who is oblivious of that equity of kindness which should exist under all
circumstances between man and man. I have noticed a want of regard for the aged.
Grey hairs are not honourable in the sight of multitudes of young men. They have
not trained themselves to rise up and do obeisance to the patriarch. I have observed
that there was a sort of politeness manifested on the part of young men if the
recipient of it was young and fair; but I have noticed that when poor women come
into a car, sometimes bearing their babes in their arms, young men, instead of
getting up and giving them their places, are utterly indifferent to them. The habits of
our times are not courteous, and you are not likely to learn from them the art of
good manners, which means kindness and equity between man and man in the
ordinary associations of life; and if you would endow yourself with this Christian
excellence you must make it a matter of deliberate consideration and assiduous
education. I will mention one more habit into which we are liable to fall, and toward
which the whole nation seems to tend: I mean the habit of loving evil. I refer not to
the love of doing evil, but to the love of discussing evil. True Christian charity, it is
also said in the 13th of 1st Corinthians, rejoiceth not in iniquity. A man ought to be
restrained from any commerce with that which is evil--evil news, evil stories, evil
surmises, evil insinuations, innuendoes, scandals, everything evil that relates to
society. Set yourselves, then, as Christian men and women, to abhor evil and to
rejoice not in iniquity, but in the truth. I will speak of one other habit--namely, the
growing habit of profanity. Men accustom themselves to such irreverence in the use
of words which are sacred, that at last they cease to be words of power to them. Men
swear by God, by the Almighty, by the Lord Jesus Christ, in a manner which shocks
the feelings and wounds the hearts of truly conscientious people. And they who thus
addict themselves to rudeness of speech violate the law of good society. Not only
that, but; they do it uselessly. You do not give weight to what you are saying in
conversation by the employment of expletives. There is no statement which is more
forcible than that which is expressed in simple language. And in giving way to the
habit you are doing violence to the Word of God, to your best moral instincts, and to
your ideal of the sanctity of your Ruler and your Judge; and I beseech of you who are
beginning life to take heed of this tendency, and avoid it. We are all building a
character. What that character is to be it doth not yet appear. We are working in the
dark, as it were; but by every thought and action we am laying the stones, tier upon
tier, that are going into the structure; and what it to be the light of the eternal world
will reveal. It is, therefore, wise for every man to pray, Search me, O God; try me
and see if there be any evil way at me. It is worth our while to go back to the Old
Testament again, and say, Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By
taking heed thereto according to Thy Word. The cleanest Book, the most
honourable Book, the most manly Book, the truest, the simplest, and the noblest
Book that ever was written or thought of is this Book of God. In the Psalms of David,
in the Proverbs of Solomon, in the whole New Testament, you cannot go amiss.
Them is not one place where you will be led down morally, where the ideal is not
noble, and where it does not ascend higher and higher, till you stand in Zion and
before God. (H. W. Beecher.)

Of the difficulty of reforming vicious habits

 I. The great difficulty of reforming vicious habits, or of changing a bad course, to
those who have been deeply engaged in it and long accustomed to it. This will fully
appear--
1. If we consider the nature of all habits, whether good, or bad, or indifferent. A
rooted habit becomes a governing principle, and bears almost an equal sway
in us with that which is natural. It is a kind of a new nature superinduced,
and even as hard to be expelled, as some things which are primitively and
originally natural.
2. This difficulty ariseth more especially from the particular nature of evil and
vicious habits. These, because they are suitable to our corrupt nature, and
conspire with the inclinations of it, are likely to be of a much quicker growth
and improvement, and in a shorter space, and with less care and endeavour,
to arrive at maturity and strength, than the habits of grace and goodness.
3. The difficulty of this change ariseth likewise from the natural and judicial
consequences of a great progress and long continuance in an evil course.

II. The case of these persons, though it be extremely difficult, is not quite
desperate; but after all, there is some ground of hope and encouragement left, that
they may yet be reclaimed and brought to goodness.
1. There is left, even in the worst of men, a natural sense of the evil and
unreasonableness of sin; which can hardly be ever totally extinguished in
human nature.
2. Very bad men, when they have any thoughts of becoming better, are apt to
conceive some good hopes of Gods grace and mercy.
3. Who knows what men thoroughly roused and startled may resolve, and do?
And a mighty resolution will break through difficulties which seem
insuperable.
4. The grace and assistance of God when sincerely sought, is never to be
despaired of. (J. Tillotson, D. D.)

The difficulty of repentance

I. FROM THE NATURE OF HABITS IN GENERAL OF VICIOUS HABITS IN PARTICULAR.

Concerning habits, we may observe that there are many things which we practise at
first with difficulty, and which at last, by daily and frequent repetition, we perform
not only without labour, but without premeditation and design. Thus it is with the
habits of memory. By frequent practice and slow degrees we acquire the use of
speech: we retain a surprising variety of words of arbitrary sounds, which we make
the signs of things. Thus it is in the habits of the imagination. When we accustom
our minds to certain objects, when we call them often before us, these objects, which
at first were perhaps as indifferent as any other, become familiar to us, they appear
uncalled and force themselves upon us. Thus it is with the habits of sin. They are
acquired like other habits by repeated acts; they fix themselves upon us in the same
manner, and are corrected with the same difficulty. A sinner by long offending
contracts an aversion from his duty, and weakens his power of deliberating and
choosing upon wise motives. By giving way to his passions he has made them
ungovernable; they rise of themselves, and stay not for his consent, and by every
victory over him they gain new strength, and he grows less able to resist them. His
understanding and reason become unserviceable to him. At first, when he did amiss,
he was ashamed of it; but shame is lost by long offending. Add to this, that vicious
habits make a deeper impression and gain faster upon us than good habits. Sin
recommends itself to our senses by bringing present profit or pleasure, whilst
religion consists frequently in renouncing present profit or pleasure for a greater
interest at a distance, and so recommends itself, not to our senses, but to our reason;
upon which account it is more difficult to be good than to be bad. One being asked,
what could be the reason why weeds grew more plentifully than corn? answered,
Because the earth was the mother of weeds, but the stepmother of corn; that is, the
one she produced of her own accord, the other not till she was compelled to it by
mans toil and industry. This may not unfitly be applied to the human mind, which
on account of its intimate union with the body, and commerce with sensible objects,
easily and willingly performs the things of the flesh, but will not bring forth the
spiritual fruits of piety and virtue, unless cultivated with assiduity and application.

II. FROM EXPERIENCE. There are few who forsake any vice to which they are
remarkably addicted. The truth of this may be easiest observed in those faults where
the body seems not to be much concerned, such as pride, conceit, levity of mind,
rashness in judging and determining, censoriousness, malice, cruelty, wrath,
moroseness, envy, selfishness, avarice. These bad dispositions seldom forsake a
person in whom they are fixed. Besides, many of them are of so deceitful a nature,
that the mind entertains them and knows it not; the man thinks himself free from
faults which to every other person are most visible.

III. SCRIPTURE CONCURS WITH REASON AND EXPERIENCE. When the Scriptures
speak of evil habits, they make use of figures as strong and bold as language can
utter and the imagination conceive, to set forth their pernicious nature. Persons in
that condition are said to be enclosed in a snare, to be taken captives, to have sold
themselves to work wickedness, to be in a state of slavery. Even those passages
which contain great encouragement and favourable promises to repentance, inform
us at the same time of the difficulty of amending. Our Saviour gives a plain and
familiar representation of it. A shepherd, says He, rejoices more over one sheep
which was lost and is found, than over ninety-and-nine which went not astray. Why
so? For this, amongst other reasons, because he could not reasonably expect such
good fortune, and had little hopes of finding a creature exposed to a thousand
dangers, and unable to shift for itself.

IV. Reflections useful to persons of all ages and of all dispositions.

1. If the words of the text were to be taken rigorously and in the strictest sense, it
would be a folly to exhort a habitual sinner to repentance, and an
unreasonable thing to expect from him a natural impossibility; but it is
certain that they mean no more than an extreme difficulty.
2. There are persons who sincerely profess the Christian religion, who fear God
and desire to be in His favour, but whose lives are not so conformable to
their belief as they ought to be, who are sorry for their faults, and fall into
them again, who make not the progress in goodness which they acknowledge
to be justly expected from them, and who have not that command over their
 passions which by a little more resolution and self-denial they might acquire.
Such persons should seriously consider the difficulty of reforming bad
habits, and the extreme danger of that state: for though it be not their
present condition, yet if they use not timely caution, sad effects may ensue.
3. These sad examples should be a warning to those whose obedience is so
incomplete and sullied with so many defects, whose love of virtue is not
equal and uniform, and whose affections are placed sometimes on God and
religion, and sometimes on the follies and vanities of the world.
4. There are Christians who abstain from known and deliberate transgressions,
who strive to make a daffy progress in goodness, and to perform an
acceptable service to God. The difficulty of reforming vicious habits may
warn them to be upon their guard, that after they have set out well and
proceeded well, they fail not at last, nor lose a reward near at hand.
5. They who have wisely and happily preserved themselves from evil habits
ought to be very thankful to God, by whose blessing they are free from that
heavy bondage, and strangers to the sad train of evils which attend it. (J.
Jortin, D. D.)

The sinners helplessness

I. If man cannot turn himself to happiness and God, why not?

1. Because of the force of sinful habit. The man who has his arm paralysed
cannot use it for his own defence; and sin deprives the soul of power, it
paralyses the soul. The man thinks he can pray, but when the time comes, he
finds that sinful habits are so strong upon him that he cannot. I well
recollect, one winter night, when the storm was raging and the wind was
howling, being called up to attend one who was in the agonies of death, and
who had long been living an avowed life of sin, but he became anxious at the
last to know if it were possible for him to find a place of safety; and never
shall I forget the answer which that poor man made to me, when I directed
him to pray: Pray, sir! I cannot. I have lived in sin too long to pray. I have
tried to pray, but I cannot, I know not how; and if this be all, I must perish.
A long continued life of sin had paralysed that mans soul; and it does so,
consciously or unconsciously, in every case.
2. Because of the fault of his sinful nature. You know well, that if the glorious
sun in the heavens were to shine upon the face of a man who is naturally
dead he would neither see it nor feel its warmth. If you were to present to
that man all the riches of the world he would have no eye to look at them, no
heart to wish for them, no hand to put forth to grasp them. And so with the
man who is unconverted. He may be all alive to sin, he may have all the
powers of his mind in full exercise, but his heart is alienated from God; he
has no wish for the unsearchable riches of Christ; he has no desire to
become enriched with those treasures which shall endure forever.
3. Because of the enmity of Satan. Do you see that poor man who has been
toiling in all the heat of a summers day with a heavy burden upon him? His
strength is now gone, and he has fallen into the ditch; and when he tries to
raise himself, do you see that tyrant who has got his foot upon his back, and
who plunges him again into the ditch and keeps him down? You have them a
 picture of the enmity and power of Satan.

II. IF MAN CANNOT TURN HIMSELF, IF HE BE LIKE THE ETHIOPIAN WHO CANNOT
CHANGE HIS SKIN, WHY TELL HIM OF IT? Is it not to pour insult upon his miserable and
abject condition? Oh no! It is necessary to tell him of his helplessness.
1. Because God commands it. His eye is upon the poor prodigal in all his
wanderings: He knows the desperate wickedness and deceitfulness of his
heart; He, the Lord, searches the heart; He knows what it is best for fallen
man to know and to be made acquainted with; and He tells those whom He
sends to be His ambassadors to preach the Word, to proclaim the whole
counsel of God, to keep back nothing whatsoever that is contained in the
revealed will of God.
2. Because there must be a sense of need before deliverance can be experienced.
If a man were to have an idea, when he was in a building surrounded by
danger, that whenever he pleased he could get up and take the key out of his
pocket and unlock the door and walk out, then he might indeed sit still and
laugh at those who would fain arouse him to a sense of his danger; but if you
can tell the man that the key which he fancies he possesses he has lost--if you
can get him to feel for it, if you can once bring him to the conviction that he
has lost it, and that he cannot get out of the building in which he is, then you
rouse him from his state of apathy, then you bring him to the point at which
he is ready to welcome the hand of any deliverer.
3. God has promised to give us His Holy Spirit. Here the sinners objections are
met. If he has no power, yet if he has the wish to be delivered from his
dreadful state, God promises to pour out His Spirit; and that Spirit leads to
Jesus, convinces of sin, and then takes of the things of Jesus and applies
them to the sinners soul

III. Inferences.
1. Without Christ men must perish.
2. Is there not a danger of delay in this matter?
3. Think of the responsibility of this present moment. (W. Cadman, M. A.)

Custom in sin exceeding dangerous

I. The defilement of sin.

1. Its inherence.
(1) This should humble and abase us in consideration of our vileness; not
lead us to excuse our sins.
(2) We see here what cause we have to desire that God would change our
nature, and bestow a new nature on us.
2. Its monstrousness.
(1) It alters a mans country; turns an Israelite into an Ethiopian, and thus
causes a degeneration there.
(2) It also alters a mans nature; gives him the quality and disposition even
of the beasts, makes him a leopard, and thus makes a degeneration there.
 3. Its multiplication. A beast of divers colours, marks, and spots (Gal 5:19).
4. Its universality. A deformity in all parts and members (Isa 1:5; Gen 6:5).

II. The entanglements of sin.

1. The qualification or condition of the persons accustomed to do evil. More
correctly, taught to do evil. Taught--
(1) By doctrine and instruction. There is a great deal of such teaching in the
world (Mat 5:19; Tit 1:11; Mar 7:7; 2Ti 4:3-4).
(2) By pattern and example. That which men see to be practised they soon
and easily fall into.
(3) By practice and use accustomed to do evil. Use makes perfect.
2. The invincible necessity which follows upon custom in sin: they cannot do
good.
(1) An impotency to good (Gal 5:17).
(2) A precipitancy unto evil (Ecc 8:11).
Conclusion--
1. Take heed of having anything to do with sin at first.
2. If any should fall into sin, do not stay in it, but hasten out of it with speed
(Rom 6:1).
3. Take heed of relapses, and falling back to sin again (2Pe 2:20). (T. Herren, D.
D.)

The alarming power of sin

I. THE HABITS OF MEN ARE STRENGTHENED AND CONFIRMED BY INDULGENCE. Even

habits which relate to matters of indifference become inveterate, and are with great
difficulty modified and overcome. The longer a man continues in sinful courses, the
more fully his mind becomes trained in these habits of resistance to all that is good.
He is insensibly led on from one course of wickedness to another, till he is under a
sort of necessity of sinning. He has taken so many steps in this downward road, and
his progress has become so accelerated and impetuous that he cannot resist it.

II. The influence of this world, as men advance in life, usually becomes more
perplexing, and a greater hindrance to their conversion. While the eye is pleased, the
ear regaled, and all the senses delighted, there is everything to corrupt and destroy.
A man in middle life may, now and then, feel powerful inducements to become
pious; the grasp of the world may, for a short season, be partially relaxed; and he
may withdraw himself for a little from his old companions, to think of the scenes of
that invisible world to which he is hastening; but soon his courage and self-denial
fail him, and he is soothed or frightened away from his purpose. Some golden bait,
some earnest entreaty, some subtle stratagem, some unhallowed influence
disheartens him, and he goes back again to the world. The world is still his idol. The
concerns of time absorb the attention and exhaust the vigour of his mind. Having
thrown himself into the current, he becomes weaker and weaker, and though the
precipice is near, he cannot now stem the tide and reach the shore.
 III. As years increase, men become less interested in the subject of religion, and
more obdurate and averse to any alteration in their moral character. The season of
sensitiveness and ardent affection is gone by. The only effect which the most
powerful instructions or the best adapted means of grace are apt to have upon such
a mind, is increasing insensibility and hardness, and greater boldness in iniquity.
They cannot endure to be disturbed in their sins. When you urge the claims of piety
upon them, they treat the whole matter with neglect and contempt. They have made
up their minds to run the hazard of perdition, rather than be roused to the severe
and dreadful effort of forsaking their sins. Here, too, is the danger of men
accustomed to impenitence. The scenes of eternity to such men have a melancholy
and direful aspect. Everything is conspiring to harden, deceive, and destroy them;
and there is little probability that these augmented obstacles to their conversion will
ever be removed.

IV. THE THOUGHT OF MULTIPLIED AND LONG-CONTINUED TRANSGRESSION IS VERY

APT TO DISCOURAGE ALL ATTEMPTS AT REPENTANCE. Not unfrequently they will tell
you, Once the work might have been performed, but it is now too late; the
favourable opportunity is past; human life is but a dream, and the day of hope is
gone by! It is a dark--very dark problem, whether persons of this description will
ever repent and believe the Gospel. It is true that Gods mercies are infinite; that
those who seek Him shall find Him; that the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth
from all sin; and that while there is life there may be hope; and yet a more hopeless
condition this side eternity cannot easily be conceived, than the condition of such a
man.

V. THERE IS AWFUL REASON TO APPREHEND THAT GOD WILL LEAVE MEN OF THIS
DESCRIPTION TO PERISH IN THEIR SINS. If we look into the Bible, we shall find that
most of the prophets and apostles, as well as those who were converted through
their instrumentality, were called into the kingdom of God in childhood, or youth, or
in the dawn and vigour of manhood. One of the distinctive features of all revivals of
religion is, that they have prevailed principally among the young. It has also been
remarked, that in ordinary seasons, the individuals who have occasionally been
brought into the kingdom of Christ, with few exceptions, have been from those not
habituated to impenitence. Almost the only exception to this remark is found in
places where men have never sat under faithful preaching, and never enjoyed a
special outpouring of the Holy Spirit, until late in life. In such places I have known
persons brought into the vineyard at the eleventh hour. And this is also true of
heathen lands. But even here, there are comparatively few instances of conversion
from among those who have grown old in sin. Conclusion--
1. Admonition to the aged. What the means of grace could do for you, they have
probably clone; and that your day of merciful visitation has well nigh reached
its last limits. God still waits that He may be gracious. And He may wait till
the last sand of life has fallen. But, oh, how ineffably important to you is the
present hour! Your hoary hairs may be even now a crown of glory, if found
in the way of righteousness. Let not another hour be lost! This very call
rejected may seal our destiny.
2. Our subject addresses those who are in middle life. The period most
auspicious to the interests of your immortality is gone. You are now in the
midst of your most important designs and pursuits, and probably at the
 zenith of your earthly glory. Everything now conspires to turn away your
thoughts from God and eternity. Better leave every other object unattained
than your eternal salvation. Better give up every other hope, than the hope of
heaven. Oh, what a flood of sorrows will roll in upon you by and by, when
you see that the harvest is past, the summer is ended, and you are not
saved!
3. Our subject addresses the young. Yours is the season of hope. If you become
early devoted to God, you may live to accomplish much for His cause and
kingdom in the world; your influence and example may allure multitudes
around you to the love and practice of godliness; and you may be delivered
from the guilt of that destructive influence, which will plant thorns in your
dying pillow. (G. Spring, D. D.)

Habit
When in a vacant hour we fall into reverie, and the images of the past come
pouring out of the storehouse of memory at their own sweet will, how arbitrary
appears the succession of our thoughts! With a rapidity greater than that of seven-
leagued boots, the mind passes from country to country, and from century to
century. This moment it is in Norway, the next in Australia, the next in Palestine,
the next in Madagascar. But this apparent arbitrariness is not real. In reality thought
is linked to thought, and for the wildest leaps and most arbitrary turns of the fancy
there is in every ease a sufficient reason. You are thinking of Norway; but that makes
you recall a friend who is now in Australia, with whom you visited that picturesque
country; and so your thought flies to Australia. Then, being in Australia, you think of
the Southern Cross, because you have been reading a poem in which that
constellation was described as the most remarkable feature of the southern
hemisphere. Then the likeness of the name of the cross makes you think of the Cross
of Christ, and so you pass over centuries and find yourself in Palestine; and the
Cross of Christ makes you think of the sufferings of Christians, and your mind is in
Madagascar, where the missionaries have recently been exposed to suffering. Thus,
you see, beneath the phenomena apparently most arbitrary, there is law; and even
for the most apparently unaccountable flights and leaps of the mind there is always
a good reason.

I. THE ORIGIN OF HABIT. Habit may be conceived to arise in this way. When, in the
revolution of time--of the day, or the week, or the month, or the year,--the point
comes round at which we have been thinking of anything, or have done anything, by
the law of the association of ideas we think of it again, or do it again. For instance,
when day dawns we awake. We get out of bed because we have done it at that time
before. At a later hour we take breakfast, and go away to business, for the same
reason; and so on through the day. When Sunday morning comes our thoughts turn
to sacred things, and we make ready to go to the house of God, because we have
always been accustomed to do that. The more frequently anything has been done,
the stronger is habit, and frequency acts on habit through something else.
Frequency gives ease and swiftness to the doing of anything. We do anything easily
and swiftly which we have done often. Even things which seemed impossible can not
only be done, but done with facility, if they have been done often. A celebrated
character tells that in a month he learned to keep four balls up in the air and at the
same time to read a book and understand it. Even tasks that caused pain may come
to be done with pleasure, and things that were done at first only with groans and
tears may at last become a source of triumph. It is not only the mind that is involved
in habit. Even the body is subdued to its service. Do we not recognise the soldier by
his gait, the student by his stoop, and the merchant by his bustle? And in the parts of
the body that are invisible--the muscles and nerves--there is a still greater change
due to habit. Hence the counsel of the philosopher, and I think it is a very profound
counsel: Make your nervous system your ally instead of your enemy in the battle of
life.

II. EXCESSIVE HABIT. Habit, even good habit, may be excessive. It tends to become
hide-bound and tyrannical. There is a pharisaical sticking to opinions once formed,
and to customs once adopted, which is the principal obstacle to human progress.
Yet, on the whole, there is no possession so valuable as a few good habits, for this
means that not only is the mind pledged and covenanted to good, but the muscles
are supple, and even the very bones are bent to what is good.

III. DESIRABLE HABITS. I should be inclined to say that the most desirable habit
which any young person can seek to have is self-control; that is the power of getting
yourself to do what you know you ought to do, and to avoid what you know you
ought to avoid. At first this habit would be exceedingly difficult to acquire, but there
is an enormous exhilaration when a man can do the thing he knows he ought to do.
It is moral strength that gives self-respect, and it will very soon win the respect of
others. The second habit I would like to name is the habit of concentration of mind.
I mean the power of withdrawing your thoughts from other subjects, and fixing
them for long at a time on the subject in hand. I am sure many of you know how
difficult that habit is to acquire. If you attempt to think on any particular subject,
immediately you will think of other things; but by perseverance your mind will
become your servant, and then you are on the way to being a thinker, for it is only to
people who begin to think in this way that the secret and joy of truth unfold
themselves. I mention, as the third desirable habit, that of working when you are at
work. I do not care what your work is, whether work of brain or hand, whether well-
paid or ill-paid; but what I say is, do it as well as it can be done for its own sake, and
for your own sake. Do it so that you can be proud of it. There is one other habit that I
should like to mention that is very desirable, and that is prayer. Happy is that man
who at some hour or hours every day--the time which he finds to be most suitable
for himself--goes down on his knees before his Maker. I say happy is that man, for
his heavenly Father who seeth in secret will reward him openly.

IV. THE TYRANNY OF EVIL HABIT. Evil habits may be acquired through simply
neglecting to acquire good ones. Like weeds, they grow up wherever the field is
uncultivated and the good seed is not sown. For example, the man who does not
work becomes a dissipated loafer. The young man who does not keep up the habit of
going to church loses spiritual instinct--the instinct for worship, for fellowship, for
religious work, and becomes a prey to sloth on the Sabbath. The tyranny of evil habit
is proverbial. The moralists compare it to a thread at the beginning, but as thread is
twisted with thread, it becomes like a cable which can turn a ship. Or they compare
it to a tree, which to begin with is only a twig which you can bend any way, but when
the tree is fully grown, who can bend it? And apart altogether from such
illustrations, it is appalling how little even the most strong and obvious motives can
turn aside the course of habit. This truth is terribly expressed in our text: Can the
Ethiopian, etc. I suppose we all have contracted evil habits of some kind, and
therefore for all of us it is an important question, Can these be unlearned and
undone?

V. HOW TO BREAK BAD HABITS. Moralists give rules for undoing evil habits. Here
are some of them.
1. Launch yourself on the new course with as strong an initiative as possible. I
suppose he means, do not try to taper your evil habit off, but break it off at
once. Give it no quarter; and pledge yourself in some way; make some public
profession.
2. Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is rooted in your life.
3. Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make,
and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of
habits you aspire to gain.
4. Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
day. This writer strongly recommends that every one who seeks moral
strength should every day do something he does not want to do, just to prove
to himself he has the power of doing it. He would not mind very much
whether it was an important thing or not, but he would say, Every day do
something deliberately that you do not want to do, just that you may get
power over yourself--the power of getting yourself to do anything you want.
5. I do not disparage rules like these. We have to work out our own salvation
with fear and trembling, but the other half of that maxim is equally true, It
is God that worketh in you both to win and to do His good pleasure. (James
Stalker, D. D.)

Habit
1. To form a vicious habit is one of the easiest processes in nature. Man comes
into a world where sin is, in many of its various forms, originally pleasant,
and where evil propensities may be gratified at small expense. Nothing is
required but to leave man to what is called the state of nature, to make him
the slave of habitual sensuality. But even after the mind is, in some degree,
fortified by education, and reason has acquired a degree of force, the ease
with which a bad habit can be acquired is not less to be lamented. Vice gains
its power by insinuation. It winds gently round the soul, without being felt,
till its twines become so numerous, that the sinner, like the wretched
Laocoon, writhes in vain to extricate himself, and his faculties are crushed at
length in the folds of the serpent. Vice is prolific. It is no solitary invader.
Admit one of its train, and it immediately introduces, with an irresistible air
of insinuation, the multitude of its fellows, who promise you liberty, but
whose service is corruption, and whose wages is death.
2. The effects of sinful indulgence, which make its relinquishment so difficult,
are, that it perverts the moral discernment, benumbs the sensibility of
conscience, destroys the sentiment of shame, and separates the sinner from
the means and opportunities of conversion. The moral discernment is
perverted. As the taste can be reconciled to the most nauseous and
unpleasant impressions, the eye familiarised to a deformed object, the ear, to
 the most grating and discordant noises, and the feeling, to the most rough
and irritating garment, so the moral taste becomes insensible to the
loathsomeness of vice. Another effect of habitual transgression is, to banish
the sentiment of shame. It is the tendency of habit to make a man regardless
of observation, and at length of censure. He soon imagines that others see
nothing offensive in what no longer offends himself. Besides, a vicious man
easily gathers round him a circle of his own. It is the society of numbers
which gives hardihood to iniquity, when the sophistry of the united ingenuity
of others comes in aid of our own, and when, in the presence of the
shameless and unblushing, the young offender is ashamed to blush. The last
effect of vicious habits, by which the reformation of the sinner is rendered
almost desperate, is, to separate him from the means of grace. He, who
indulges himself in any passion, lust, or custom which openly or secretly
offends against the laws of God or man, will find an insuperable reluctance to
those places, persons, or principles by which he is necessarily condemned.
One means of recovery yet remains, the reproof and example of the good.
But who will long bear the presence of another, whose very looks reprove
him, whose words harrow up his conscience, and whose whole life is a
severe, though silent, admonition?
3. Do you ask when education should commence? Believe me, it has begun. It
began with the first idea they received--the insensible education of
circumstances and example. While you are waiting for their understandings
to gain strength, vice, folly, and pleasure have not waited your dilatory
motions. While you are looking out for masters and mistresses, the young
immortals are under the tuition of innumerable instructors. Passion has
been exciting, and idleness relaxing them, appetite tempting, and pleasure
rewarding them, and example, example has long since entered them into her
motley school. Already have they learned much, which will never be
forgotten: the alphabet of vice is easily remembered. Is it not time to
examine, whether there be not in you some vicious habit, which,
notwithstanding your caution, frequently presents itself to their greedy
observation, thus recommended by all the weight of parental authority? But,
though the doctrine of the early operation of habit be full of admonitions, it
presents consequences, also, full of consolation and pleasure. God hath set
the evil and the good, one over against the other; and all His general laws are
adapted to produce effects ultimately beneficial. If the love of sensual
pleasure become inveterate by indulgence, the pure love of truth and
goodness, also, may, by early instillation and careful example, become so
natural and constant, that a violation of integrity, and offence against
gratitude, a breach of purity or of reverence toward God, may prove as
painful as a wound. (J. S. Buckminster.)

The force of habit

I. THE NATURE OF OUR HABITS GENERALLY. As we become accustomed to the

performance of any action, we have a proneness to repeat it on like occasions, the
ideas connected with it being always at hand to lead us on and direct us; so that it
requires a particular effort to forbear it, but to do it demands often no conscious act
of the will at all. Habits of body are produced by repeated external acts, as agility,
gracefulness, dexterity in the mechanical arts. Habits of mind are formed by the
repeated exertion of the intellectual faculties, or the inward practical principles. To
the class of mental habits belong the moral virtues, as obedience, charity, patience,
industry, submission to law, self-government, the love of truth. The inward practical
principles of these qualities, being repeatedly called into exertion, and acted upon,
become habits of virtue: just as, on the other hand, envy, malice, pride, revenge, the
love of money, the love of the world, when carried into act, gradually form habits of
vice. Habit is in its own nature therefore indifferent to vice or virtue. If man had
continued in his original righteousness, it would have been, what the merciful
Creator designed it to be, a source of unspeakable moral strength and improvement.
Every step in virtue would have secured further advances. To what point man might
at length have reached by the effect of use and experience thus acting on faculties
made for enlargement, it is impossible to say, and it is vain to inquire. For we are
lost creatures. We are prone to commit sin, and every act of it only disposes us to
renewed transgressions. The force of these evil habits lies much in the gradual and
almost imperceptible manner in which they are acquired. No man becomes
reprobate at once. The sinner at first has difficulties. Shame, conscience, education,
motives of religion, example, the unreasonableness of vice, the immediate evil
consequences of it in various ways, Gods judgments on sinners, alarming events in
His providence, the admonitions of friends and the warnings of ministers, are all
barriers to the inundation. But habits, insensibly formed, sap the embankment. The
powerful current works its way, and all opposing hindrances are carried before it. It
is, indeed, true, that habit, in many cases, diminishes the enjoyment derived from
sin. The sense of vicious pleasure is palled by indulgence. But, unhappily, the same
indulgence which lessens the pleasure increases the vicious propensity. A course of
debauchery, for example, deadens the sense of pleasure, but increases the desire of
gratification. The passive principle is in some degree worn away, but the active
principle is invigorated. Drunkenness, again, destroys the sensibility of the palate,
but strengthens the habit of intemperance. A continued course of impiety and
profaneness lessens the lamentable pleasure which the scoffer originally felt in
insulting religion, but confirms him in the practical rebellion against its laws. A
continued course of worldliness and irreligion takes off from the zest and relish of
worldly pursuits, but augments the difficulty of renouncing them. They are become
joyless; but are still followed from a sort of sad necessity.

II. THE CONSEQUENCES ARISING FROM CORRUPT HABITS, IN OUR FALLEN STATE. Any
one transgression, if habitual, excludes from the kingdom of heaven, and every
transgression is in the way of speedily becoming so: here lies the danger. Look at
yonder criminal, whose hands have violated the property, and perhaps been
imbrued in the life, of his fellow creature. His conscience is seared as with a hot iron.
Is he ashamed when he commits abomination? Nay, he is not at all ashamed, neither
can he blush. What has brought him hither? What has transformed the meek and
decent and reputable youth into the fierce and vindictive ruffian? Evil habits. He
began with breaking the Sabbath; this led to wicked company; drunkenness
followed, and brought every other sin in its train--lust, passion, malice, desperation,
cruelty, bloodshed. The road, dreadful as it seems to us, was easy to him. One bad
habit prepared for the following. But my design is, not to dwell on a picture too
shocking for a calm consideration; but to point out the danger of the same principle
in cases by far more common and less suspected; and where the fatal effects of sinful
customs in hardening the heart against the calls of grace and duty are less
conspicuous perhaps at first sight, but not less fatal to the conversion and salvation
of the soul. For what can account for that sober and measured system of sensual
indulgence in which the great mass of mankind live, but habit working on the fallen
state of mind? How is it that an immortal creature, gifted with reason and destined
for heaven, can go insecure, in gratifying, all those earthly passions, which he once
well knew to be inconsistent with a state of grace; but which he now pursues,
forgetful of God and religion? What has made him morally insensible to the
obligations of holiness, purity, and the love of God? The habit to which he has
resigned himself. The effect has not been brought about at once. The desire for
indolent and sensual gratification has increased with indulgence. Every day his
resolutions for serving God have become weaker, and his practical subjugation to an
earthly life has been confirmed. He has lost almost all notions of spiritual religion
and self-government. He moves mechanically. He has little actual relish even for his
most favourite pleasures; but they are necessary to him. He is the slave of the animal
part of his frame. He vegetates rather than lives. Habit has become a second nature.
If we turn from this description of persons, and view the force of habit in multitudes
of those who are engaged in the affairs of trade and commerce, or in the prosecution
of respectable professions, we need only ask what can account for the practical
object of their lives? Why are nefarious or doubtful practices so frequently
countenanced? Why are precarious speculations so eagerly embraced? Why are the
aggrandisement of a family, the amassing of riches, the gratification of ambition, so
openly pursued? And how does it arrive that this sort of spirit pervades so many
thousands around us? It is their habit. It is the force of custom and the influence of
the circle in which they move. They came by degrees within the magic charm, and
are now fixed and bound to earth and its concerns. Again, notice for a moment the
intellectual habits of many of the scholars and philosophers of our age. The world by
wisdom knows not God. The pride of our corrupted hearts readily forms the
properly intellectual or reasoning part of our nature to habits, as ensnaring and as
fatal, as any which have their seat more directly in the bodily appetites. If once the
inquisitive student resigns himself to a daring curiosity, applies to the simple and
majestic truth of revelation the sort of argumentation which may safely be employed
in natural inquiries, he is in imminent peril of scepticism and unbelief. The mind
comes within a dangerous influence. A young and superficial reader once fixed in a
habit of this sort, comes at last either tacitly to explain away the fundamental
doctrines of the Holy Trinity, of the Fall, of human corruption, of redemption, and
the work of the Holy Ghost, or openly to sacrifice them to the madness of infidelity,
or to the scarcely less pernicious errors of the Socinian heresy. And whence is all
this? Habit, working on a corrupt nature, has produced it, confirmed it, riveted it.
Habit is as fruitful and as fatal a cause of intellectual disorder as of merely animal or
sensual depravation. What, again, seduces the mere external worshipper of God to
withhold from his Maker him heart, whilst he insults Him with a lifeless service of
the lips? What, but the surprising and unsuspected influence of evil habit? He
knows that the Almighty sees everything. He cannot but acknowledge that outward
ceremonies, if destitute of fervent and humble devotion, are nothing less than a
mockery of God, and abominable in His sight. And yet he proceeds in a heartless
round of religious duties,--a mere lifeless shadow of piety. This he has so long
allowed himself to offer to the Almighty, that at last his mind is unconscious of the
impiety of which he is guilty. A habit of formality and ceremonial observance, with a
practical, and perhaps at length an avowed, opposition to the grace of true religion
as converting and sanctifying the whole soul, has darkened even his judgment. Nor
can I forbear to add that the general indifference to practical religion, which prevails
in our age, may be traced back in a great measure to the same cause. Men are so
accustomed to put off the concerns of their salvation, and to disregard really
spiritual religion, that they at length learn to draw a regular and well-defined line
between merely decent and reputable persons, and those who lead a seriously
religious life; and to proscribe the latter as extravagant and hypocritical.

III. THE EXTENT AND MAGNITUDE OF THAT CONVERSION TO GOD WHICH IS

THEREFORE NECESSARY. A state of sin and a state of holiness are not like two ways
running parallel by each other, and just parted by a line, so that a man may step out
of the one into the other; but like two diverging roads to totally opposite places,
which recede from each other as they go on, and lead the respective travellers
farther and farther apart every step. What, then, is to bring man back to God? What
to break the force of custom? What is to stop him in his rushing down the precipice?
What to awaken him in his profound lethargy? What to be the starting post of a new
race? What the principle of a new life? What the motive, the master motive, of a
thorough and radical moral alteration? There never was, there never can be, any
other effectual method proposed for these high purposes but that which the
Scriptures reveal, an entire conversion of the whole soul to God by the mighty
operation of the Holy Spirit. God alone that created the heart can renew it after His
image. When the soul receives this new and holy bias, then the evil habits in which
men formerly lived will resolutely be relinquished, and other and better habits will
succeed. They will then repent of sin and separate from it. They will watch and pray
against temptation. They will believe in the inestimable promises of life in Jesus
Christ, trusting alone in His merits, and renouncing their imagined righteousness
which was of the law. They will depend exclusively on the graces and influences of
the Holy Spirit for every good thought and every holy action. Thus they will stop at
once in the course of their former habits, and begin to form new ones. They will now
enter on a life of humility and fear, of conscientiousness and circumspection, of
mortification and purity, of meekness and temperance, of justice and charity; all
springing from faith in the atonement of Christ, and from a genuine love to His
name. (D. Wilson, M. A.)

On vicious habits

I. There is in human nature so unhappy an inclination and propensity to sin, that

attention and vigilance are always requisite to oppose this inclination, and maintain
our integrity. The power and influence of habit is the subject of daily observation.
Even in matters merely mechanical, where no attention of mind is required, custom
and practice give, we know, an expertness and facility not otherwise to be acquired.
The case is the same, however unaccountable, in the operations of the mind. Actions
frequently repeated form habits; and habits approach near to natural propensions.
But if such be the influence of habits in general, vicious ones are still more peculiarly
powerful. If the power of custom be on all occasions apt to prevail, we shall have still
less inclination to oppose it where the object to which we accustom ourselves is
naturally agreeable and suited to our corruption. Here all the resolution we can
summon to our assistance will be requisite, and perhaps ineffectual. We may form
an idea of the unhappy situation of an habitual offender from the difficulty we find
in conquering even an indifferent custom. What was at first optional and voluntary,
becomes by degrees in a manner necessary and almost unavoidable. And yet,
besides the natural force of custom and habit, other considerations there are, which
add to the difficulty of reforming vicious manners. By vicious habits we impair the
understanding, and our perception of the moral distinction of actions becomes less
clear and distinct. Smaller offences, under the plausible pretext of being such, gain
the first admittance to the heart: and he who has been induced to comply with one
sin, because it is a small one, will be tempted to a second, from the consideration
that it is not much worse. And the same plea will lead him on gradually to another,
and another, of still greater magnitude. Every new sin is committed with less
reluctance than the former; and he endeavours to find out reasons, such as they are,
to justify and vindicate what he is determined to persist in, and to practise: and
thus, by habits of sinning, we cloud the understanding, and render it in a manner
incapable of distinguishing moral good and evil. But further: As, by long practice
and perseverance in sin, we lose or impair the moral discernment and feeling of the
mind; so, by the same means, we provoke the Almighty to withdraw His assisting
grace, long bestowed in vain.

II. Yet, notwithstanding this difficulty and danger, the sinner may have it in his
power to return to duty, and reconcile himself to God. When once the sinner feels
his guilt,--feels just impressions of his own disobedience, and of the consequent
displeasure and resentment of heaven; if he is serious in his resolutions to restore
himself by repentance to the favour of his offended God; God, who is ever ready to
meet and receive the returning penitent, will assist his resolution with such a
portion of His grace, as may be sufficient, if not totally, at once to extirpate vicious
habits, yet gradually to produce a disposition to virtue; so that, if not wanting to
himself, he shall not fail to become superior to the power of inveterate habits. In this
case, indeed, no endeavours on his part ought to be neglected,--no attempts left
unessayed, to recommend himself to the throne of mercy. Never, therefore, think of
postponing the care of your salvation to the day of old age; never think of treasuring
up to yourselves difficulties, sorrows, repentance, and remorse, against an age, the
disorders and infirmities of which are themselves so hard to be sustained. Let not
these be the comforts reserved for that period of life which stands most in need of
consolation. What confusion must cover the self-convicted sinner, grown old in
iniquity! How reluctant to attempt a task to which he has always been unequal; and
to travel a difficult road, which opens to him, indeed, happier prospects, but has
hitherto been found impracticable! But if any of us have unhappily lost this first,
best season of devoting ourselves to God,--and have reserved nothing but shame,
sorrow, and remorse, for the entertainment of riper years;--let the review of former
transgressions be an incitement to immediate repentance. (G. Carr.)

The power of evil habits

I. The power of sin, as inherent in our nature.

1. It pervades all our faculties, whether of mind or body.
2. It finds in us nothing to counteract its influence.
3. It receives aid from everything around us.
4. It conceals its influence under specious names. Amusement, conviviality,
 good breeding, etc.

II. Its power, as confirmed and augmented by evil habit.

1. Its odiousness is diminished.
2. Its power is strengthened.
3. Its opportunities for exercise are multiplied.
4. The powers whereby it should be resisted are destroyed.
5. Everything good is by it put at an unapproachable distance. (C. Simeon, M.
A.)

The force of habit

It is, as Mr. Darwin says, notorious how powerful is the force of habit. The most
complex and difficult movements can in time be performed without the least effort
or consciousness. It is not positively known how it comes that habit is so efficient in
facilitating complex movements; but physiologists admit that the conducting power
of the nervous fibres increases with the frequency of their excitement. This applies
to the nerves of motion and sensation as well as to those connected with the act of
thinking. That some physical change is produced in the nerve cells or nerves which
are habitually used can hardly be doubted, for otherwise it is impossible to
understand how the tendency to certain acquired movements is inherited. That they
are inherited we see with horses in certain transmitted paces, such as cantering and
ambling, which are not natural to them; in the pointing of young pointers and the
setting of young setters; in the peculiar manner of flight of certain breeds of the
pigeon, etc. We have analogous cases with mankind in the inheritance of tricks or
unusual gestures. As to the domination which evil habit acquires over men, that
needs not even a passing allusion. It is remarkable that the force of habit may affect
even caterpillars. Caterpillars which have been fed on the leaves of one kind of tree
have been known to perish from hunger rather than to eat the leaves of another tree,
although this afforded them their proper food under a state of nature. Their conduct
might suggest reflection to men who are tempted by habit to risk death by adherence
to debauched courses rather than return to a natural mode of living. (Scientific
Illustrations and Symbols.)

Effects of habit
While shaking hands with an old man the other day we noticed that some of his
fingers were quite bent inward, and he had not the power of straightening them.
Alluding to this fact, he said, In these crooked fingers there is a good text. For over
fifty years I used to drive a stage, and these bent fingers show the effect of holding
the reins for so many years.
How habits are formed
A writer describing a stalactite cave says, Standing perfectly still in the cavernous
hall I could hear the intense silence broken by first one drop of water and then
another, say one drop in each half minute. The huge rock had been formed by the
infinitesimal deposit of lime from these drops--deducting the amount washed away
by the same water--for the drops were not only building, they were wasting at the
same time. The increase was so minute that a years growth could hardly be
estimated. It is a powerful illustration of minute influences. A man might stand
before it and say, It is thus my habits have all been formed. My strong points and
my weaknesses all come from influences as quiet, minute, and generally as secret as
these water drops.
No substitute for spiritual renewal
No earthly change whatever can be a substitute for the change which comes from
above; any more than the lights of earth will suffice for the sun, moon, and stars;
any more than all the possible changes through which a potter may pass a piece of
clay can convert it into the bright, pure, stamped, golden coin of the realm. (J.
Bates.)

Moral suasion cannot renew the soul

All mere outward declarations are but suasions, and mere suasions cannot change
and cure a disease or habit in nature. You may exhort an Ethiopian to turn himself
white, or a lame man to go; but the most pathetic exhortations cannot procure such
an effect without a greater power than that of the tongue to cure nature; you may as
well think to raise a dead man by blowing in his mouth with a pair of bellows. (S.
Charnock.)

Washing an Ethiopian
Then the shepherds led the pilgrims to a place where they saw one Fool and one
Want-wit washing an Ethiopian, with an intention to make him white; but the more
they washed him the blacker he was. Then they asked the shepherds what this
should mean. So they told them saying, Thus it is with the vile person: all means
used to get such a one a good name, shall in conclusion tend but to make him more
abominable. Thus it was with the Pharisees; and so it shall be with all hypocrites.
(J. Bunyan.)

A change of heart should be immediately sought after

The longer you stay, the more leisure you give the devil to assault you, and to try
one way when he cannot prevail by another, and to strengthen his temptations: like
a foolish soldier who will stand still to be shot at, rather than assault the enemy. And
the longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot
bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree? If you cannot pluck up
a tender plant, are you more likely to pluck up a sturdy oak? Custom gives strength
and root to vices. A blackamoor may as well change his skin, or a leopard his spots,
as these who are accustomed to do evil can learn to do well. (R. Baxter.)

The Divine and human element in conversion

There is produced in a telescope an image of a star. There is produced in the soul
an image of God. When does the image of the star start up in the chamber of the
telescope? Only when the lenses are clear and rightly adjusted, and when the axis of
vision in the tube is brought into exact coincidence with the line of the rays of light
from the star. When does the image of God, or the inner sense of peace and pardon,
spring up in the human soul? Only when the faculties of the soul are rightly adjusted
in relation to each other, and the will brought into coincidence with Gods will. How
much is mans work, and how much is the work of the light? Man adjusts the lenses
and the tube; the light does the rest. Man may, in the exercise of his freedom, as
upheld by Divine power, adjust his faculties to spiritual light, and when adjusted in a
certain way God flashes through them. (Joseph Cook.)

JER 13:27
O Jerusalem I wilt thou not he made clean?

The necessity of holiness

I. The question.
1. It is of great importance to be cleansed from the filth of sin, and is what
should be sought after with the utmost seriousness (Eze 36:25).
2. Cleansing the heart from sin is the work of God. He that cleanses from guilt,
must also cleanse us from corruption; and Christ is made unto us
sanctification, as well as righteousness and redemption (Tit 3:4-6).
3. God has much at heart the sanctification of His people (Isa 48:18).
4. Our own unwillingness is the great hindrance to our sanctification. When the
will is gained, the man is gained; and those who will be made clean are in
part made so already.
5. Yet the obstinacy of the will shall not prevent the purposes of grace: Gods
design shall be accomplished, notwithstanding all.

II. The various answers which will be made.

1. Some are willing to be delivered from the punishment of sin, but not from its
power. Those who would have the former without the latter, are likely to
have neither.
2. Others would be cleansed outwardly, but not inwardly. No prayers, lastings,
pilgrimages, penances, nor any other external performances, can supply the
want of internal holiness. The sepulchre, however painted and adorned, is
but a sepulchre still.
3. Some would be made partly clean, but not wholly so.
4. Some would be made clean, but they do not like Gods way of doing it, or the
means He uses for this purpose.
5. There are some who would be made clean, but it must be hereafter. Like Saint
Austin, who prayed to be delivered from his easily besetting sin, but added,
Not yet, Lord!
6. More awful still: some speak out and say, they will not be cleansed at all. They
prefer sin and hell to holiness and heaven.
7. Put this question to the real Christian, or the truly awakened sinner, whose
conscience has been filled with remorse for his past transgressions, and who
has found a compliance with the call of every lust to be the severest bondage
Wilt thou be made clean? Yea, Lord, says he, with all my heart! When
shall it once be? This very instant, if I might have my wish. It is what I pray
for, wait for, and strive after; nor can I have a moments rest till I obtain it.
(B. Beddome, M. A.)
God is desirous of saving men

I. THE WOES WHICH IMPENITENT SINNERS HAVE REASON TO EXPECT. The

punishment that awaits sinners is most tremendous. The loss of heaven is one part
of it: and who shall declare how great a loss this is?

II. HOW UNWILLING GOD IS TO INFLICT THEM. He complains of mens obstinacy in

rejecting the overtures of His mercy. Long has He waited to no purpose: yet still He
waiteth to be gracious unto us. He stands at the door of our hearts, and knocks.
Address--
1. Those who imagine that they have no need of cleansing. Let none entertain
such proud conceits. The best amongst us, no less than the worst, need to be
washed in the blood of Christ and be renewed by His Spirit; and without this
cleansing, must inevitably perish.
2. Those who are unwilling to be cleansed.
3. Those who desire the cleansing of their souls. It is the blood of Christ alone
that can cleanse from the guilt of sin; and the Spirit of Christ alone that can
cleanse from the power and pollution of sin. To apply these effectually, we
must embrace the promises, and rest upon them, trusting in God to
accomplish them to our souls. (Theological Sketchbook.)

Soul cleansing
1. The great need of the soul.
2. The great helplessness of the soul.
3. The great grace of God.
4. The great drawback on our part.
5. The great work of the ministry.
(1) To bring home the feeling of guilt.
(2) To ask the question of the text.
(3) To direct to the cleansing fount.
(4) To urge the importance of immediate application. (W. Whale.)

Gods desire to bless the sinner

I. Mans uncleanness--
1. In heart;
2. In life;
3. In religion.

II. Gods desire that he should be clean.

III. His expostulation with s.

 IV. Our refusal.

V. GODS CONDEMNATION. (H. Bonar, D. D.)

A hopeful question
It would seem as if the prophet were speaking the language of despair; but a little
rearrangement of the translation will show that the prophet is really not giving up all
hope: Woe unto thee, O Jerusalem! wilt thou not be made clean? Shall there not at
the very end be a vital change in thee? When the day is drawing to a close shalt thou
not feel the power of the Holy One, and respond to it? Shalt thou not be born as a
child at eventide? So the spirit of the Bible is a spirit of hopefulness. It will not lose
any man so long as it can keep hold of him. It is a mother-like book, it is a most
shepherdly book, it will not let men die if they can be kept alive. Here is the Gospel
appeal: Wilt thou not be made clean? Here is no urging upon Jerusalem to clean
herself, to work out her own regeneration, to throw off her own skin, and to cleanse
her own characteristic spots and taints and stains. These words convey an offer,
point to a process, preach a Gospel. Hear the answer from the leper: Lord, if Thou
wilt, Thou canst make me clean. There is a river the streams whereof receive all our
diseases, and still the river flows like crystal from the throne of God. We know what
the great kind sea is. It receives all the nations, gives all the empires a tonic, and yet
rolls round the world an untainted blessing. The question addressed to each heart is,
Wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it once be? Shall it not be at once? Shall it
not be at the very end? Shall not the angels have yet to report even concerning the
worst, last of men, the festers of moral creation, Behold, he prayeth! The
intelligence would vibrate throughout heaven, and give a new joy to eternity. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 14

JER 14:1-9
They came to the pits, and found no water; they returned with their vessels
empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads.

The drought of nature, the rain of grace, and the lesson therefrom

I. First, consider that MAN IS A VERY DEPENDENT CREATURE. He is, in some

respects, the most dependent creature that God has made; for the range of his wants
is very wide, and at a thousand points he is dependent upon something outside of
himself.
1. Man, as a living creature, is peculiarly dependent upon God as to temporals.
On what a feeble thread hangs human life! Water, though it be itself
unstable, is needful to the establishment of human life, and without it man
expires. Many an animal can bear thirst better than man. Other creatures
carry their own garments with them; but we must be indebted to a plant, or
 to a sheep, for the covering of our nakedness. Many other creatures are
endowed with sufficient physical force to win their food in fight; but we must
produce our own food from the soil. We cannot produce food from the earth
without the dew and the rain. However cleverly you have prepared your soil,
however carefully you have selected your seed, all will fail without the rain of
heaven. Even though your corn should spring up, yet will it refuse to come to
the ear if the heavens be dry. Nor can you of yourself produce a single
shower, or even a drop of dew. If God withholdeth the rain, what can the
husbandman do? Yes, and life itself would vanish as the food of life ceased. It
would be an instructive calculation if it could be accurately wrought out--to
estimate how much bread food there is at any time laid up upon the surface
of the earth. If all harvests were to fail from this date; if there were no
harvests in Australia during our winter, no harvests early in the year in India
and the warm regions, if there were no harvests in America and in Europe, I
have been informed that, by the time of our own harvest months, there
would be upon the face of the earth no more food than would last us for six
weeks. God does, indeed, give us bread as we need it; even as, in the
wilderness, He gave the manna; but we are every hour dependent upon His
generous care.
2. In spiritual things this dependence is most evident. The priceless blessings of
pardon and grace: how can we procure them apart from God in Christ Jesus?
So is it with the life and the power of the Spirit of God, by which we are able
to receive and enjoy the blessings of the covenant; the Holy Spirit, like the
wind, bloweth where He listeth, and the order of His working is with the
Lord alone. The new life whereby we receive the Lord Jesus: how can it come
to us but from the living God Himself?
3. Here is the pity of it: against God, upon whom we are so dependent, we have
sinned, and do sin. We are dependent upon Him, and yet rebellious against
Him. If pardoned, it must be by the exercise of the sovereign prerogative
which is vested in Jehovah, the Lord of all, who doeth as seemeth good in
His sight. Provided it can be done justly, sovereignty may step in and rescue
the guilty from his doom; but this is a matter which depends upon the will of
the Lord alone. If you are executed, the condemnation is so well deserved,
that not a word can be said against the severity which shall carry out the
sentence.

II. MEN MAY BE REDUCED TO DIRE DISTRESS. Men, being dependent upon God, may
be reduced to dire distress if they disobey Him, and incur His just displeasure.
1. To proceed a little in detail with the words of my text: when the Lord causes
sinners to feel the spiritual drought, pride is humbled. Their nobles have
sent their little ones to the waters. The philosopher grows into a little child,
and gladly accepts the cup which aforetime he sneered at.
2. But you observe that when humbled and made thirsty, these people went to
secondary causes: they came to the pits, or reservoirs. Thus souls, when they
are awakened, go to fifty things before they come to God. It is sad that, in
superstition, or in scepticism, they look for living streams. They try
reformation of manners--I have nothing to say against it; but apart from God
reformation always ends in disappointment.
 3. If you read on, you will find that when they went to these secondary supplies,
they were disappointed: They came to the pits, and found no water. They
thirsted to drink; but not a drop was found to cool their tongues. It is an
awful thing to come home from sermon with the vessels empty; to rise from
the communion table, having found no living water, and return with vessels
empty. To close the Bible, and sigh, I find no comfort here, I must return
with my vessel empty. When the ordinances, and the Word yield us no
grace, things have come to an awful pass with us. Do you know what this
disappointment means?
4. Now upon this disappointment, there followed great confusion of mind; they
became distracted; they were ashamed and confounded. Thus have I met
with many who, after going to many confidences, have been disappointed in
all, and seem ready to lie down in despair, and put forth no more effort. They
fear that God will never bless them, and they will never enter into life
eternal; and so they sign their own death warrants. Shall I confess that I have
been better pleased to see them in this condition than to hear their jovial
songs at other times? It is by the gate of self-despair that men arrive at the
Divine hope.
5. At last, when these people came to despair, it is very remarkable how
everything about them seemed to be in unison with their misery. Listen to
the third verse: They covered their heads. Did you hear the last words of
the fourth verse? They were the very same: They covered their heads.
Surely the second is the echo of the first. It is even so: earth has sympathy
with man. Nature without reflects our inward feelings.

III. Mans only sure resort is his God. God is a refuge for us.
1. There is no help anywhere else. The very best of duties that you and I can
perform, if we put our trust in them, are only false confidences, refuges of
lies, and they can yield us no help.
2. Nay, look; according to the text there is no help for us even in the usual means
of grace if we forget the Lord. O tried and anxious soul, the sacraments are
all in vain, though they be ordained of heaven; and preaching and reading,
liturgy and song, are all in vain to bring the refreshing dew of grace. Thou art
lost, lost, lost if a stronger arm than mans be not stretched out to help thee!
3. But with God is all power. He is the Creator, making all things out of nothing;
and He can create in thee at once the tender heart, the loving spirit, the
believing mind, the sanctified nature.
4. Well, then, what follows from this? If God hath all this power, our wisdom is
to wait upon Him, since He alone can help. We draw this inference:
Therefore we will wait upon Thee.
5. Do I hear somebody say, How I would like to pray? Yes, that is the way to
come to God. Come to Him by prayer in the name of Jesus. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Concerning the dearth

I. The effects of drought upon inanimate creation.

1. The pits were empty. Some of these were natural hollows in the hard rocks
 and in the caves where evaporation was less speedy. Others were dykes and
cisterns, the work of man. But neither nature nor art could afford supplies
when God dealt with them in His judgments.
2. The ground was chapt (Jer 14:4). Earths wounds for mans sin. Mute mouths
crying to heaven for pity.
3. There was no grass (Jer 14:5). The world is complex, man is complex, God is
complex. In complex systems harmony is essential to life,--discord is ruin.
The shower can do nothing good without the sun. The sun can only scorch if
the rain fall not. Earth can produce no fruit unless both sun and shower
combine to aid.

II. The effects of drought upon the animal creation.

1. The hind calved in the field, and forsook it (Jer 14:5). The fact that the hind
was in the field proves that pasture had failed on the higher lands. It was not
unusual for the hind to drop her calf by reason of fright or grief (Psa 29:9).
The maternal instinct in these creatures being strong, it was very unusual for
them to forsake their young, and can only be accounted for by the entire
failure of the mother to obtain food or drink.
2. The wild asses were in intense agony on account of hunger (Jer 14:6). These
creatures were capable of great endurance, and needed but little to sustain
life.

III. The effects of drought upon the human creation.

1. The husbandmen were ashamed.
2. The people generally were languishing.
3. The nobles were threatened with death through thirst.

IV. The effects of drought on the devout heart of Jeremiah.

1. He regarded it as a chastisement for sin.
2. He regarded God as their only hope.
3. He earnestly prayed for mercy.
Application--
1. In forsaking God, they forsook the fountain.
2. Earths broken cisterns cannot be a substitute for the Divine.
3. Jesus says, If any man thirst, etc. (W. Whale.)

JER 14:7-9
O Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, do Thou it for Thy names sake.

The prayer of contrite Israel

I. A mournful fact acknowledged.

1. Even in the case of Gods own people, sin does not pass away and die after it is
 committed, no, nor even after it is pardoned.
2. The sins of Gods people bear testimony against them, an open and public
testimony.
(1) They witness against them before God.
(2) They witness against them to others. They proclaim them to the whole
spiritual world to be vile, guilty creatures, undeserving of any one of the
many blessings they are receiving; yea, deserving of nothing but
Jehovahs utmost abhorrence and displeasure.
(3) And our sins, the prophet intimates, testify against us at times to
ourselves also. And this appears to be the leading idea in the prophets
words.
3. Our sins are peculiarly apt to bear this secret testimony against us, when we
attempt to draw near to God. A sense of guilt, shame, and self-loathing, takes
possession of us, and sometimes well-nigh breaks our hearts.

II. A petition offered.

1. Its humble boldness. Under other circumstances there would be nothing
remarkable in this, but we have here a prayer offered up while sin is accusing
and conscience smiting. When our iniquities testify loudly against us, when
we feel sin brought home powerfully by the Holy Spirit to our consciences,
There is an end to prayer, we are tempted to say: with all this guilt and
pollution upon us, we must not attempt to go into Gods presence. Now one
of the hardest lessons we have to learn in Christs school, is to overcome this
tendency in sin to drive us from the Lord. God, as He is revealed to us in the
Gospel, is the sinners God, and what the sinner has to learn in the Gospel is,
that as a sinner he may draw near to Him, and find favour with Him, and be
accepted by Him, and pardoned, and loved. If your iniquities are testifying
against you, do not aim to silence their voice; let no one ever make you
believe that God does not hear the witness they bear, and that you need not
heed it; but aim at this--to believe all that your sins say against you, and yet
in spite of it all to seek Gods mercy and trust in it.
2. The lowly submission it manifests. It stands in the original simply, Do Thou.
There can be no doubt but that next to the pardon of her sin, deliverance
from her troubles was the blessing the afflicted Church most desired at this
time; but she does not ask for it. Her mouth seems suddenly stopped as she
is about to ask for it. She feels as though in her situation, with her enormous
sins crying out so loudly against her, she must not dare to choose for herself
any blessing. All she says is, Do Thou. Do Thou something for us. Interfere
for us. Give us not up. We will bless Thee for anything Thou doest, so that
Thou wilt not abandon us. And in a manner like this does every soul pray,
that is deeply contrite. It has boldness enough amidst all its guilt to come to
Gods throne and to keep there, but beyond this it has sometimes no
boldness at all. It leaves God to show mercy to it in His own way, and to deal
with it after His own will. All it desires is to be treated as His child, and then
come what may, it will bless Him for it.

III. THE PLEA THE PROPHET URGES IN SUPPORT OF HIS PRAYER. It is the name or
glory of God; O Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, do Thou it for Thy
names sake. This prayer then, you perceive, is more than a simple prayer for
mercy. The publicans prayer in the temple was that. Any really contrite sinner may
offer it; he will offer it and offer it often even to his dying hour. But the prayer before
us implies a considerable degree of spiritual knowledge, as well as deep contrition.
No man will offer it, till he is become well acquainted with the Gospel of Jesus
Christ; till he has discovered the wisdom and glory, as well as the grace, of it, and
imbibed something of its spirit. (C. Bradley, M. A.)

Mans iniquities testifying against him

I. What it is for a man to find his iniquities testify against him in his addresses to
God.
1. Sin is not dead when it is committed. The act is transient, but the guilt is of a
permanent nature.
2. When the man draws near to God in the exercise of His worship, sin meets
him there; appears to him as a terrible ghost (Isa 59:11-13).
3. Sin testifies two things for God against the man.
(1) Their unworthiness of any favour from the Lord.
(2) Their liableness to punishment, yea, to a curse instead of a blessing, so
that the soul is often made to fear some remarkable judgment.
4. This witness is convincing. So, in the text, we find the panel denies not the
testimony, but pleads for mercy.
5. Upon this, the gracious soul is filled with holy shame and self-loathing.
6. He is damped, and his confidence before the Lord is marred as to any access
to Him, or obtaining favour at His hand.

II. How comes it that sin is found thus testifying against men?
1. It flows from the nature of sin and guilt upon an enlightened conscience.
2. It is a punishment from the Lord for former backslidings and miscarriages.
3. God so orders it, that it may be a mean to humble them, and make them more
watchful against sin for the time to come.

III. THE PLEA. For Thy names sake.

1. We must plead with Him for His Christs sake; and when guilt stares us in the
face, we must look to God through the veil of Christs flesh.
2. We must plead with Him for His glorys sake. Punishing of sin glorifies God
much, but pardoning of sin glorifies Him more. (T. Boston, D. D.)

Sin should be fully confessed

I warrant thee thou shalt never go beyond the truth in stating thy sin, for that
were quite impossible. A man lying on the field of battle wounded, when the surgeon
comes round, or the soldiers with the ambulance, does not say, Oh, mine is a little
wound, for he knows that then they would let him lie; but he cries out, I have been
bleeding here for hours, and am nearly dead with a terrible wound, for he thinks
that then he will gain speedier relief; and when he gets into the hospital he does not
say to the nurse, Mine is a small affair; I shall soon get over it; but he tells the
truth to the surgeon in the hope that he may set the hone at once, and that double
care may be taken. Ah, sinner, do thou so with God. The right way to plead is to
plead thy misery, thine impotence, thy danger, thy sin. Lay bare thy wounds before
the Lord, and as Hezekiah spread Sennacheribs letter before the Lord, spread thy
sins before Him with many a tear and many a cry, and say, Lord, save me from all
these; save me from these black and foul things, for Thy infinite mercys sake.
Confess thy sin; wisdom dictates that thou shouldest do so, since salvation is of
grace. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Jeremiah a wrestler with the Lord in prayer

I. In what the Lord is strong against the prophet. The sin of the people.

II. In what the prophet is strong against the Lord. The name of the Lord.
1. In itself, Gods name compels Him to show He is not a desperate hero, a giant
who cannot save.
2. In that His name is borne by Israel. (Heim.)

Prayer has within itself its own reward

I. CONFESSION. This fitly begins. It is the testimony of iniquity, and that this
iniquity is against God Himself. When we are to encounter any enemy or difficulty,
it is sin weakens us. Now confession weakens it,--takes off the power of accusation.

II. PETITION. For Thy names sake. This is the unfailing argument which abides
always the same, and has always the same force. Though thou art not clear in thy
interest as a believer, yet plead thy interest as a sinner, which thou art sure of. (T.
Leighton.)

Pleas for mercy

How many there are who pray after a fashion in times of great distress. When they
are brought to deaths door, then they say, Send for someone that will come and
pray at our side. What a wretched position is this, that we should only be willing to
think of God when we are in our direst need! At the same time, notice what a great
mercy it is that God does hear real prayer even if it be presented to Him only
because we are in distress. He giveth liberally, and upbraideth not.

I. I speak to the church of God at large wherever it has backslidden and to each
believer in particular who may have departed from the living God in any measure.
Note, there are here pleaders guilty. The pleaders seem to say, Guilty, ay, guilty, for
there is no denying it. Our iniquities testify against us. I would that every child of
God felt this whenever he has gone astray. In addition to there being no denying it
there is no excusing it, for our backslidings are many. If we could have excused
ourselves for our first faults, if possibly we might have offered some extenuation for
the fickleness of our youth, yet what are we to say of the transgressions of our riper
years? Not only is our guilt past denying and past excusing, but also it is past
computation. We cannot measure how great have been our transgressions, and the
next sentence may well imply it: We have sinned against Thee. Well, now, next to
this plea of guilty, what do the culprits say? What plea do they make why they
should obtain mercy? I observe, first, that they bring no plea whatever which has
fallen from themselves in any degree. They do not plead before God, that if He will
have mercy they will be better. But still, there is a plea. Oh, blessed plea l the master
plea of all: Though our iniquities testify against us, do Thou it for Thy names sake.
Now, here is a prayer which will avail for us when the night is darkest and not a star
is to be seen. The first name which the backsliding Church here gives to God has a
blessing--O the hope of Israel. Next, observe the Church of God pleads His next
merit: The Saviour thereof in time of trouble. God has saved His people, and the
name of God is the Saviour in the time of trouble. Then, next, she does not mention
the name that is implied in the words. She says, Why shouldest Thou be as a
stranger in the land?--one, that is, merely travelling through, who takes little notice
of the trouble because He is not a citizen of the country; one that merely puts up for
a night in the house, and therefore does not enter into the cares and trials of the
family. She does as good as call Him the Master of the house, Lord of the house. But,
then, she goes a little further than that, and the plea is this: that He was, whatever
they might be, their God. Thou, O Lord, art in the midst of us, and we are called by
Thy name. The Church says, Lord, if Thou dost not help us now, the men of the
world will say, God could not help them, they were brought into such a condition at
last that their faith was of no use to them. Why shouldest Thou be as a mighty man
that cannot help?

II. I WANT TO SPEAK TO POOR TROUBLED HEARTS WHO DO NOT KNOW THE LORD. I
cannot take the whole of my text for them, but only a part, and say to them, I am
right glad that you want to find peace with God; right glad that you are unhappy and
distressed in soul. You say, I want peace. Well, take heed that you do not get a false
peace. So begin by confessing your guilt. When you have done that, I charge you
next, do not try to invent any kind of plea; do not sit down and try to make out that
the case was not so bad, or that your bringings up might excuse you, or that your
constitutional temperament might make some apology for you. No; have done with
that and come with this one plea: Do it for Thy names sake. Lord, I cannot blot out
my sins; I cannot change my nature; do Thou it. I have no reason why I should hope
that Thou wilt do it; but for Thy names sake. This is the master key that unlocks
every door. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Triumphant prayer

I. THE MYSTERIOUS CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE IDEAL OF ISRAEL AND THE ACTUAL
CONDITION OF THINGS. The ancient charter of Israels existence was that God should
dwell in their midst; but things are as if the perennial presence promised had been
changed into visits, short and far between. Two ideas conveyed: the brief transitory
visits, with long dreary stretches of absence between them; and the indifference of
the visitant, as a man who pitches his tent for a night, caring little for the people
among whom he tarries the while. More: instead of the perpetual energy of the
Divine aid promised to Israel, it looks as if Thou art a mighty man astonied, etc.,--
a Samson with locks shorn.
 II. Our low and evil condition should lead to earnest inquiry as to its cause.
1. The reason is not in any variableness of that unalterable, uniform, ever-
present, ever-full Divine gift of Gods Spirit to His Church.
2. Nor in the failure of adaptation in Gods Word and ordinances for the great
work they had to do.
3. The fault lies here only: O Lord, our iniquities testify against us, etc. We
have to prayerfully, patiently, and honestly search after this cause, and not to
look to possible variations and improvements in order and machinery, etc.

III. THIS CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR EVIL CONDITION AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSE
LEAD ON TO LOWLY PENITENCE AND CONFESSION. We err in being more ready, when
awakened to a sense of wrong, to originate new methods of work, to begin with new
zeal to gather in the outcasts into the fold; instead of beginning with ourselves,
deepening our own Christian character, purifying our own hearts, and getting more
of the life of God into our own spirits. Begin with lowly abasement at His footstool.

IV. The triumphant confidence of believing prayer.

1. Look at the substance of His petition. He does not prescribe what should be
done, nor ask that calamity be taken away, but simply for the continual
Divine presence and power.
2. Look at these pleas with God as grounds of confidence for ourselves.
(1) The name: all the ancient manifestations of Thy character. Thy memorial
with all generations.
(2) Israels hope: the confidence of the Church is fixed upon Thee; and Thou
who hast given us Thy name hast become our hope.
(3) The perennial and essential relationship of God to His Church: we
belong to Thee, and Thou hast not ceased Thy care for us. (A. Maclaren,
D. D.)

The sinners plea

I. The sinners acknowledgment.

1. The prophets confession is precisely such as befits the world at large.
2. With too great reason, also, may it be adopted, even by the best of men.

II. The sinners plea.

1. Open to all. Never urged in vain.
Application--
1. What should be the effect of sin upon the soul? Conviction of sin should not
keep us from, but bring us to God. Sin is a just ground for humiliation, but
not for discouragement.
2. What shall surely be effectual to remove it from the soul? Prayer: penitential
weeping; humble and contrite, fervent and persevering; offered in
dependence on Gods promised mercies in Christ. (C. Simeon, M. A.)
The name of the Lord a plea for temporal blessings

I. We begin with TEMPORAL GOOD THINGS. None indeed are particularised by

Jeremiah. All that he asks is comprised in these words, Do Thou. But anyone who
observes the context may see what the prophet would have. He would have dew, and
rain, and fruitful seasons, for the preservation of man and beast.
1. Temporal good things pertain to the present life. In heaven we shall neither
hunger nor thirst, and since we look for a body without animal appetites,
duty, interest, and honour call on us to keep these appetites of our present
body under subjection.
2. In the present life temporal good things are necessary. Without a competent
portion of these men cannot live. The body, which is the workmanship of
God, must be fed and clothed; and how great is His goodness in providing for
it things that are needful! Let heaven, and earth, and seas, praise the Lord.
3. Temporal good things are promised. Till the purpose of God be accomplished,
the present frame of the world, in the riches of His goodness, and long-
suffering, must be upheld; and promises of upholding, and of the means of
upholding it, are made to Christ, for the sake of His body, the redeemed (Isa
49:8; Hos 2:22-23).
4. Temporal good things are produced by the power and goodness of God,
operating in material and secondary causes. The heavens and the earth, the
sun, the rain, the dew, and the air, have not the power of vegetation and
fertility in themselves. They are merely instruments by which the power of
God is exerted.
5. Temporal good things are turned away by our iniquities (Jer 3:2-3; Jer 5:24-
26).
6. Temporal good things are benefits for which intercession and prayer should
be made. In the prayer which our Lord taught the disciples a petition for
these appears: Give us this day our daily bread.

II. THE PLEA which appears in the text for temporal good things. It is, you
observe, the name of the Lord: O Lord,--do Thou for Thy names sake.
1. An honourable plea, and worthy of God, before whom and concerning whom
it is used. The glory of His name is the end, and the motive, and the reason of
His works; and in doing for it the works like Himself, and independent of
considerations of worth in creatures. In the name of the Lord our God every
ray of essential and revealed glory meets, and shines forth; and to make this
glory the supreme end of His operations and communications, is a perfection
which He cannot deny nor give away. This supreme motive He avows, and
holds up to the adoration of His people, and jealousy for it is His praise and
His honour (Eze 36:22; Isa 48:9-11; Psa 115:1).
2. A prevailing plea. For His names sake great and marvellous works have been
wrought (Eze 20:9; Eze 20:14; Eze 20:22; Eze 20:44). When the motive in
the heart of the Sovereign is the plea in the mouth of the supplicant,
confidence of being accepted and heard, confidence modest, humble,
reverential, and submissive, imparts joy to the heart of the petitioner, raises
 in his soul the expectation of hope, and makes his face to shine as if it were
anointed with fresh oil.
3. A continual plea, and good throughout all generations, under all
dispensations, among all nations, and in all extremities (1Ch 17:21; Isa 63:11-
16).
4. The supreme plea under which every other plea is subordinated. In the
prayers and intercessions of holy men other considerations often appear.
Poverty, reproach, affliction, persecution, necessity, and other things, have
been pied at the throne of grace. But the name, or glory, of the Lord our God
is the supreme and ruling consideration into which other pleas are to be
resolved.

III. Our pleading the name of the Lord for temporal good things IN THE FACE OF
INIQUITY, or when it is testifying against us. In such discouraging circumstances
Jeremiah pleaded. The whole body of national evil stood before him; and, with this
monster appearing to his eye, and its voice roaring in his ear, he cried, Do Thou for
Thy names sake.
1. A sense of sin strongly affects the heart and conscience before the Lord.
Jeremiah is the mouth of the kingdom, and speaks like a man of feeling. He
felt the weight of the public guilt, heard it crying for vengeance, and believed
that the Lord was justly offended because the land was greatly defiled. This
feeling is not common and natural to man. There were but few in Judah who
were suitably affected with the national iniquities, and among ourselves the
number of mourners is either diminished or else they are hid in corners and
chambers, out of the sight of the public eye and the knowledge of one
another.
2. The righteousness of the Lord, in turning away temporal good things because
of iniquity, is believed and acknowledged. Of this Jeremiah was persuaded
himself, and of this no mean was neglected to persuade the nation. In
withering seasons, professions of the equity and justice of Providence are in
every mouth; but in the lives of many who make these professions, fruit of
the lips doth not appear. Fruit of this kind is found only on a few trees of
righteousness, which are grafted in Christ, and raised and trained up by the
spirit of holiness.
3. The iniquities which provoke the Most High to withhold, or turn away,
temporal good things are acknowledged with humiliation and sorrow of
heart. Concerning these Jeremiah is not silent. In his intercessory prayer
confession holds a distinguished place. His exercise is exemplary, and in
similar circumstances should be followed. Reigning and crying sins breaking
out, whether in the higher or lower ranks of society, or in both, ought to be
acknowledged to be what they are, provocations of wrath and causes of
calamity. But to bring men to this reasonable duty is extremely difficult.
Confession gives such a stab to self-righteousness, and such a blow to natural
pride, that nothing can bring us effectually to submit to it, except the Spirit
of God working by His Word in us mightily.
4. The covenant of grace is apprehended, truly and distinctly, in the light of the
Word. To this covenant temporal good things are annexed, and in its
administration, promises of these are performed. By the obedience,
 sufferings, and death of Christ, the condition is fulfilled; and in performing
the promises and bestowing the blessings, both of the life which now is and
of that which is to come, the justice and holiness of God glorify themselves in
the highest.
5. Considerations of the obedience, blood, and intercession of Christ, are
presented to the Lord, and opposed to prevailing iniquities.
6. Submission to the will and good pleasure of the Lord of all. Creatures, far less
sinners, should never be peremptory in their supplications, nor prescribe to
the Sovereign. Pleas for the removal of distress are furnished to us by the
Word, and instructions given to use these with reverence and importunity.
But beware of limiting the Sovereign, who, by calamity no less than by
deliverance, can magnify Himself.

IV. EXHORTATION AND INSTRUCTION. Unto men of prayer we address ourselves in

the hearing of all, and through the blessing of God and the working of His Spirit, all
will be corrected and instructed.
1. In your exercise and practice let a true sense of sin appear. It is not calling sin
names, or fixing upon it the epithets, bagful and abominable, but hating and
abhorring it, which the Lord requires.
2. Acknowledge the righteousness of God in withholding some temporal good
things, which in the ordinary course of His Providence we looked for at this
season. Why doth the Sovereign send upon us hail for rain, and heaps of
snow instead of clouds of dew? Why doth He draw out winter to an unusual
length, and fill our ear with the howling of shepherds, instead of the singing
of birds? Why do not applications to His goodness prevail? Hath He
forgotten to be gracious? No. Doth His promise fail? No. Is His hand
shortened, that it cannot save? No. Is His ear heavy, that it cannot hear? No.
But our iniquities, let it be preached in the valleys, proclaimed in the
mountains, and sounded in the dwelling places of atheism and irreligion--
Our iniquities have separated between us and our God, and our sins have
hid His face from us, that He will not hear.
3. Confess unto the Lord these trespasses which are committed against Him in
the midst of the land, which provoke Him to withhold good things, and
which cause Him to send upon us evil things. Acknowledgment of sin, and
supplication for pardon, are always mixed with the prayers and intercessions
of His people for temporal good things.
4. In pleading, when iniquities testify against you, keep before you the covenant
of peace, to which temporal good things are added. Unless your eye be kept
upon this covenant, it will be impossible to understand how God, whose right
hand is full of righteousness, glorifies Himself in accepting your persons,
sustaining your pleas, fulfilling your petitions, and blessing you with good
things. But if the covenant, with its condition, promises, and administration,
be considered, and the place which temporal good things possess observed,
every seemingly interfering interest, with respect to the perfections and glory
of God, will appear to be adjusted and consolidated upon the clearest and
firmest principles.
5. With the plea, and every form of the plea, for the benefits of the covenant,
introduce the name and office of the Lord Jesus Christ. Having fulfilled the
 condition, in His obedience unto death, He is constituted, by wisdom and
grace, heir, administrator, and dispenser of the blessings.
6. Be submissive and modest in pleading for temporal good things. Of the ways
of the Lord we are incompetent judges; and, in all applications upon the
name, should submit ourselves to His wisdom and righteousness, and leave
to His good pleasure what is to be done. (A. Shanks.)

JER 14:8
O the Hope of Israel, the Saviour thereof in time of trouble.

God and troubled humanity

I. What God always is to troubled humanity.

1. The Hope.
(1) The Inspirer of all true hope.
(2) The Sustainer.
(3) The Realiser.
2. The Saviour.
(1) The redemption system He has given to the world attests this.
(2) The experience of all who had attended to His directions testifies this.
Every man that has adopted Gods remedial scheme has been saved.

II. What God sometimes seems to troubled humanity. A stranger, etc.

1. When Christlike enterprises are frustrated.
2. When the most useful men are cut down in the very zenith of their life.
3. when prosperity attends the wicked, and adversity the good.
4. When enormous outrages are rampant in society. (Homilist.)

Why shouldest Thou be as a stranger in the land.--

Gods withdrawings from His people, and their exercise under
them

I. When it may be said God withdraws and behaves as a stranger to His people.
1. When He withholds His wonted acts of kindness to them.
2. When He threatens to remove from them the signs and symbols of His
presence.
3. When, though continuing the ordinances and sacraments, He renders them
profitless.
4. When the Divine providences are adverse.
5. When He denies them access to Himself.
 II. Why the Lord deals thus with his people.
1. When they fall into gross sin and bring reproach on religion.
2. When they become earthly minded.
3. When they become slothful and formal in duty.
4. When they neglect or slight the Mediator, by whom we have access to God.
5. When they sin under or after great affliction.
6. When they do not cherish and entertain the influences of the Holy Spirit.
7. When they grow hardened and impenitent under provocation.

III. When it may be said we are properly exercised under such a painful
dispensation.
1. When we are truly sensible of our loss, and that our sin is the cause of it.
2. When we place all our happiness in Gods favour and presence.
3. When we engage all the powers of our souls to seek after God.
4. When we diligently embrace every opportunity for finding an absent God, and
use every appointed means.
5. When we wrestle with Him in prayer to return.
6. When we are not satisfied with the best means, unless we find God in them.

IV. Whence it is that the Lord, being as a stranger to His people, occasions them
so much concern.
1. Because of the incomparable happiness arising from the enjoyment of His
presence.
2. Because of the sad effects attending the loss of His presence.
Infer:
1. There are but few true seekers of God among us.
2. The misery of these who are far from God now, and may be deprived of His
presence forever.
3. The sad case of those whom God forsakes, never to return again. (T.
Hannam.)

A welcome for the stranger

When the messenger of Mercy was travelling through the world, he asked himself
at what inn he should alight and spend the night. Lions and eagles were not to his
mind, and he passed by houses wearing such warlike names; so too he passed by
places known by the sign of The Waving Plume, and the Conquering Hero, for he
knew that there was no room for him in these inns. He hastened by many a hostelry
and tarried not, till at last he came to a little inn which bore the sign of The Broken
Heart. Here, said Mercys messenger, I would fain tarry, for I know by experience
that I shall be welcome here
The Messiah-A stranger among His own people
The greatest marvel of all creation is that the Son of God should come to redeem;
and next to that is this, that having come, He should be neglected and rejected by
those who had so long looked for Him. Here is the greatest wonder in all history: a
nation neglecting the realisation of its own dream. Search your histories and see if
you can find a parallel case. The old Jewish theocracy aspired to pretensions that
Rome, Greece, Persia, and Egypt never dared to dream, to bestow to the world one
universal king. And what is that land of Palestine, and what are these Jews who
aspire to such pretensions as this?. . .It has no deep thought like India; no genius of
stability like China; no sense of beauty like Greece, no high culture like Egypt, no
powerful arms like Rome, and yet there is the fact; they speak concerning the
kingdom their king should establish. The Gentiles shall come to Thy light, and
kings to the brightness of Thy rising. Yet, marvellous to relate, when she had given
her King to the world she refused to crown Him. He came unto His own, and His
own received Him not (the hope of Israel--a stranger in the land). George Mac
Donald tells in one of his stories of a born-blind lamplighter who illuminated the
city at night, but had no sense of what he was doing. Thus the Jews closed their eyes
to the great light which they gave to the world. (Geo. Matheson, D. D.)

JER 14:9
Why shouldst Thou be . . . as a mighty man that cannot save?

God rendered powerless by man

A strong man may be rendered powerless by a reel of cotton being wound around
him. Each thread so brittle, yet all together is irresistible. So a large number of
inconsistencies and insincerities may make God powerless to help you, or to work
mightily through you to the salvation of others. He may be in the midst of you, and
you may be called by His name; great issues for His kingdom and glory may seem at
stake; mighty possibilities within your reach! and yet He is as a mighty man that
cannot save. There is might enough in God to save the weakest and sinfullest of His
children; and you are unsaved because of the limitations you have placed upon Him.
1. You are not absolutely willing to be delivered from your sins.
2. You do not entirely believe in His power and will.
3. You have not definitely handed the whole matter over to Him, and believed
that He has accepted the charge.
4. Or--and this is perhaps the deepest reason of all--you have formed your own
ideas of Divine truth, and of the possible Christian life. And having formed
your own conception of the true ideal of Christianity, you have thenceforth
lived within the limitations of your ideal, which is bounded by human
wisdom and human thought. And so you never come to a thorough
knowledge of the indwelling of Christ, or what He is prepared to do for you;
or, catching a glimpse of it from afar, you are not sufficiently delivered from
the reasonings and workings of your mind to give Him that opportunity for
which He waits and yearns. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

O Lord . . . leave us not.

A universal prayer
 I. For all seasons.
1. Times of joy. Our prosperity will ruin us, if God be not with us.
2. Times of adversity.
3. Times of labour.
4. Times of perplexity.

II. For all saints.

1. All need to pray thus. For all deserve to be abandoned.
2. All must pray thus. For all desire continuance of His presence.
3. All will pray thus. For all know the bitterness of soul consequent upon His
withdrawal

III. Always answered.

1. For it is according to His will.
2. For it honours His name. (R. A. Griffin.)

JER 14:10-16
Thus have they loved to wander, they have not refrained their feet; therefore the
Lord doth net accept them.

Jehovahs refusal to allow intercession to prevail

I. The Lords answer to the prophets prayer.

1. He points to the backsliding of the people, for which He now punishes them.
2. He refuses the prophets prayer because He loathes the peoples soulless
fastings and sacrifices.
3. He specifies the means by which He will destroy this backsliding people.
Battle. Famine. Pestilence.

II. The prophet renews his endeavours to entreat Gods favour.

1. He lays stress on the fact that they had been deceived.
2. But they are not excused on that account; for they gave credit to lies.
(1) God had not commissioned these prophets.
(2) Their easy and willing dupes are condemned to ignoring.
3. Seducers should perish with those they seduced. (C. Keil.)

JER 14:12
When they fast, I will not hear their cry.
Pasting rendered offensive

I. Pious demeanour is not what God desires, but faith.

1. God abominates a double and false heart; and the greater the fervour
hypocrites display in external rites, the more they provoke Him.
2. Fasting is observed as giving intensity to prayer.
3. They who fast professedly avow that they deprecate Gods disfavour.
4. But God values not outward appearance.

II. Fasting is not in itself a religious duty, but a mere index to a humble spirit.
1. What is intended by fasting?
(1) That there may be greater alacrity in prayer.
(2) That it may be an evidence of humility in confessing sins.
(3) Indicative of a purpose to subdue lust.
2. What is fasting, apart from these intents?
(1) A frivolous exercise.
(2) A profanation of Gods worship.
(3) A superstition, provoking Gods wrath.

III. No value in fasting to merry Gods favour.

IV. Mocking profanation was intolerable, and should be punished.

1. God shows Himself armed with various kinds of punishment.
2. He forewarns that they who had provoked Him should surely suffer.
3. God does not disregard or reject religious signs; but when what they signify is
separated from them, there is then an intolerable profanation. (J. Calvin.)

JER 14:13
I will give you assured peace.

Assured peace

I. Human life wants it.

1. Uncertainty troubles our life.
2. Delusions embitter our heart.
3. Misgivings weary our soul.

II. God alone can give it.

1. Peace is not a human commodity, but a Divine boon.
2. Peace comes only to Divinely-prepared hearts.
3. Peace is specifically the Saviours benefaction.
 III. Lying voices offer it.
1. False prophets preach peace still.
(1) In our churches, promising ceremonies righteous works it through etc.
(2) In pleasures scenes, assuring the gay and frivolous of satisfaction, etc.
2. Beguiled dupes are ensnared still.
3. Yet assured peace is available still. May be found by all (Mat 11:28-30). (W. H.
Jellie.)

Peace
Peace is various and versatile. Peace is not mere pleasure, yet there is a pleasure in
peace. When there is no longer any offers to be happy, nor any dread of care,
pleasure settles to its repose, as a frame that lolls and turns on a luxurious couch by
and by folds itself to motionless and dreamy comfort; or as the mountain peak that
shot and shafted to its height sublime falls softly off and folds away into the gentle
slope, the nooks where lights and shadows play, the curve that modulates the
majestic summit to the meek swell of the landscape lowlands, and invests the valley
with the mountain grandeur, and mountain grandeur with the placid secret of the
lowly vale; the breast that heaved with pleasure in its confirmed rapture comes to
rest. Pleasure is not peace, but in Its realisation and fulfilment there is a peace of
pleasure. See a little further. Joy is not peace, nevertheless there is a peace of joy in
which the mind and heart take counsel with each other. This is delight arriving at
repose. Thus, when a strain of music dies away upon the ear, the harmony thrills
memory still--the noise ceases, the notes linger and serenade the silence, the silence
returns the serenade. Again, pain might be reckoned as the foe of peace, and still
there is a peace of pain. Some tranquilities are gendered by adversity alone. The
peace found in pain cannot be otherwise discovered nor elsewhere known. When
one has borne excruciating pang or undergone sore struggle, and can say, It is
familiar now; I have been through the worst of it, and have survived; or where one
can even set out about such an undertaking, and although outwardly the infliction or
affliction has yet to be encountered, that moment takes on its own radiance, and the
mind has upon effective grounds prepared itself for all, anticipated all, looked
through all resolutely, braced now and nerved, knitted and compacted; the resolve is
half the readiness, the readiness is all the conflict--the endurance is the victory, as of
one whose valour makes his foes to tremble, as the Spartan band or the Royal Guard
by their very presence put the enemy to flight. When the heart and soul are set in
resolution, like a regiment kneeling with fixed bayonets, and so the onset is taken
with a will, and the triumph is anticipated in advance, there ensues a serenity which
is of itself a triumph, a fortitude which is in itself a conquest and a coronation. It is
thus that there can come into the heart the peace of pain. It has distinct varieties.
The peace of suffering in physical endurance must not be undervalued. There is such
a thing as is indicated by the words, to suffer and be strong, whereby that which in
another would enforce an outcry or insist upon a groan--that which even to the same
sufferer, at another time, coming by stealth or startling, would utterly unman the
nature, has become a manageable trial, to be confronted, to be endured, and to be
looked through and through, it may be with bated breath and set teeth, but still at
bay, until the paroxysm faints away into the peace, and the strong mastery of the
resolve carries the torture of the flesh, and rules the throb of the nerves by its
volition. There is a pain peace not to be despised--it may be the peace of peril.
Presence of mind is power of help. The war horse stands motionless while the guns
emit their bloody blasts and the carnage overflows. The young hero leaps upon the
ramparts, the veteran holds the fort. The peace of peril is the opposite of peril panic.
Panic huddled the fleeing, frightened throng, so that none could escape from the
blazing building; peace would have found the fire escape; peace would have opened
the back stairs. And thus it is in life at large: panic is perils peril, but peace is perils
protection--perils safe control. And of pain peace another branch is peace of sorrow,
peculiar to itself. It does not neutralise the grief, it softens and enchants it. When
sorrow has undergone its first wild shock, when cries are stilled and tears are dried,
a hush that sinks to softer sorrow, as a gale dies to a zephyr breeze, comes in upon
the gloomy void, and sorrow in its silence, sorrow in its sanctity, can find sorrow
peace--the very peace of pain. And so it is that in all these varieties, and under all
vicissitudes like these, the grace within enkindles peace without. And when the
Finite is in treaty with the Infinite, the creature in reconciliation with his Maker, the
soul, possessed of peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, can prove that
paradox of life and earth--the peace of God which passeth all understanding. (H. S.
Carpenter.)

JER 14:20
We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness.

Frank acknowledgment of guilt

Next to the merit of not sinning is confessing sin. A learned man has said, The
three hardest words in the English language are--I was mistaken. Frederick the
Great wrote to the Senate: I have just lost a great battle, and it was entirely my own
fault. Goldsmith said, This confession displayed more greatness than all his
victories. Such a prompt acknowledgment of his fault recalls Bacons course in
more trying circumstances. I do plainly and ingenuously confess, said the great
Chancellor, that I am guilty of corruption, and so renounce all defence. I beseech
your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed. (A. T. Pierson.)

True repentance avails with God

When a man undertakes to repent towards his fellowmen, it is repenting straight
up a precipice; when he repents towards law it is repenting in a crocodiles jaws;
when he repents towards public sentiment, it is throwing himself into a thicket of
brambles and thorns; but when he repents towards God, he repents towards all love
and delicacy. God receives the soul, as the sea the bather, to return it again, purer
and whiter than He took it. (H. W. Beecher.)

JER 14:21
Do not abhor us.
Marks of a people in danger of the Divine abhorrence

I. The leading indications of a people exposed to that alarming condition which

the prophet here so pathetically deprecates.
1. Unfruitfulness under the means of religious and moral improvement (Luk
13:6). When the recipients of so many favours, instead of being fruitful, bring
forth no good fruit at all, or fruit that is positively bad; when, instead of
acting suitably to such high advantages, they shew that they are insensible of
them; when, instead of being devout, they are impious; when, instead of
standing in awe of God, they profane His holy name; when, instead of
regarding His ordinances, they despise them; when, instead of being humble,
meek, and merciful, they are proud, overbearing, and injurious; and, instead
of ascribing to the bounteous Giver of all good, the glory that is due to Him
for His liberality towards them, by a holy, reverential, and submissive
deportment, they disregard His authority:--most assuredly, if there is any
justice in the Divine nature, and any discernment in the Divine
administration, such a people are nigh unto cursing, and are rapidly
advancing towards that state which is deprecated in the text.
2. A public and general contempt of religion. All things go well so long as God
and Him service are reverenced; because there is a firmness, an energy, and
a greatness in every effort put forth for the public weal, which, through the
blessing of God, can scarcely fail to render it effectual. But, on the other
hand, when God is despised; when His existence and authority are treated as
merely ideal; when no influence is produced upon human agency by the
greatness and purity of His character, or the rectitude and perfection of His
counsels; when it acknowledges no higher principle than self-interest, or the
gratification of the inferior appetites of our nature--then all things run into
confusion. In confirmation of this, we have the remarkable testimony even of
the heathen Polybius, one of the most judicious historians of ancient Rome.
When the Romans, says he, left off consulting the gods, when they began
to disregard the institutions of religion, or to laugh at things sacred, then fell
the glory of the empire. The wisdom of the senator forsook him, and the
heart of the soldier melted at the face of the foe. The State had no friend,
because every man was a friend only to himself, and the gods forsook them
because they were despised.
3. Levity and insensibility under the Divine judgments. How natural to
conclude, when a child continues thoughtless, perverse, and obstinate, under
the frowns of an indulgent parent, that he is fast approaching to destruction:
and how just, as well as natural, is the conclusion; since the parent having
tried all means, but in vain, to reclaim him, seems in a measure compelled to
throw him off, and since the child himself seems bent on renouncing
parental protection, were it even forced upon him. And no less just and
natural is it to draw a similar conclusion in the case of nations, when they
despise the chastenings of Omnipotence. To these He has recourse, only
when all other means have proved ineffectual. If, then, when He strikes they
feel it not, and instead of being brought to repentance, obstinately persist in
their folly and inconsideration, what is to be looked for but their perdition?
 II. How suitable the language and temper of the prayer in the text is to us, O
Lord, do not abhor us for Thy names sake.
1. It is expressive of that temper of mind, which is most suited to the guilt which
we have contracted, and the dangers to which we are exposed.
(1) It supposes, that as children, who have long resisted the kind intentions
of our heavenly Father, trifled with His goodness, and abused His grace,
we see ourselves about to be cast off by an awful exertion of His justice;
and that, deeply alarmed at our situation, sensible of our unworthiness,
and that the very fate which we dread, is what we actually merit, we run
to Him at the very moment, and cry, O Lord, abhor us not; cast us not off
forever. We deserve it, but stay Thy hand. Foolish, and rebellious, and
perverse as we have been, we cannot bear the frowns of Thine
indignation, or to be finally excluded from Thy favour.
(2) It implies the utmost earnestness, and the very feeling of present and
immediate repentance. It supposes that the individuals who use it are
actually lying low in the dust, under the sense of immediate danger, and
calling out for immediate relief. And most assuredly there is no room for
procrastinating.
2. It also peculiarly becomes us, because it is enforced by the only argument fit
to be urged by guilty creatures, and the only argument which we can urge
with effect.
(1) Review all the circumstances in your case. Single out what you conceive
to be the most alleviating, and the most favourable--and then say, is
there one of these which you can use as an argument why a pure and holy
God should not abhor you?
(2) But beware of using this language in a cold and formal manner, and
without those distressing apprehensions of danger, and those bitter
feelings of repentance, which Jeremiah so evidently cherished when he
uttered it. This, instead of appeasing the Divine wrath which has gone
forth against us, will rather provoke it more than ever; and instead of
averting the Divine judgments, will rather accelerate their
accomplishment. (J. Somerville, D. D.)

JER 14:22
Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain?

Impotence of idols
Remember it was a time of dearth. The question turned upon the presence of
grass; there was no grass, and therefore the hind calved in the field and forsook its
own offspring, that it might abate its own hunger, seeking grass in some far-away
place. Natural instincts were subdued and overcome, and the helpless offspring was
left in helplessness, that the poor dying mother, hunger smitten, might find a
mouthful of green herbage somewhere. And the ground was dust; the ploughmen
were ashamed, they resorted to that last sign of Oriental desperation and grief, to
cover their heads, because there was no rain, no grass; and now the prophet asks,
Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles than can cause rain? What can
the idols do? If they can give rain, let them give it now. Can the heavens themselves
give showers--the blue heavens that look so kind--can they of themselves, and as it
were by their own motion, pour a baptism of water upon the earth? No. This is the
act of the living God, the providence of the redeeming Father, the miracle of love.
Thus we are driven in various ways to pray. You never know what a man is
religiously, until he has been well tried, hungry a long time, and had no water to
drink, until his tongue is as a burning sting in his mouth, until it hardens like metal,
and if he can then move his lips you may find the coward trying to pray. (J. Parker,
D. D.)

Rainmakers among the heathen

In Burmah the inhabitants have a novel form of the sport that elsewhere is
commonly called a tug-of-war. In the Burmese game there is a rain party and a
drought party, who pull one against the other, the victory of either party being
considered to have immediate results as regards the weather. The drought party,
however, obtain few victories, for the kind of weather they represent is commonly
not so much desired as rain. In the face, therefore, of a strong public opinion the
rain party are nearly always allowed to win, the palpable roping, in the popular
notion, being generally followed by a fertilising downpour.
Prayer is the most potent means of obtaining rain, as shown in the case of Elijah..

JEREMIAH 15

JER 15:1
Though Moses and Samuel stood before Me, yet My mind could not be towards
this people.

Righteousness, the strength of nations

It is of great importance that we distinguish between communities, and the
individuals of which communities are composed. When the whole human race shall
be gathered before the tribunal of Christ, every man will receive the recompense due
to his actions whilst on earth. But nations cannot be judged or punished as nations;
so if God is to mark His sense of the evil wrought by communities in their collective
capacity, it must be by present retribution. Accordingly we have full testimony given
from Scripture and from experience, that although, in the ordinary course of Divine
judgment, individuals are not in this life dealt with according to their actions, yet
communities may expect to prosper or decline according as they resist or submit to
the revealed will of God. The national character must be determined by the
character of the majority; and when this character is so debased that the national
punishment can no longer be delayed, there may be numbers influenced by a holy
and unaffected piety, and warm love of God. And can these faithful ones be
instruments in averting or mitigating wrath? Or if they cannot prevail for the
deliverance of others, will they not at least be saved from all share in the coming
disaster? These are interesting questions; and the best answer can be drawn from
the words of our text. Moses and Samuel are supposed to stand forth as pleaders for
the land; they are too late--pleading is in vain. Still it is evidently implied that at a
less advanced stage in national guilt the intercession would have been of avail. Then,
moreover, a distinction is evidently drawn between a guilty people and such
advocates as Moses and Samuel. The people are to be cast out; but we are left to
infer that such as Moses and Samuel would not share to the full extent in the
national disaster. Let us look more closely into these points. Call to mind that
remarkable portion of Holy Writ in which Abraham is represented as pleading for
Sodom. If the city would have been spared had these ten righteous lived within its
walls, there is incontrovertible proof that godly men are the salt of the earth, and
may often be instrumental in preserving communities from utter desolation. It was
not without a very emphatic meaning that Christ styled His disciples the salt of the
earth. By their mere presence in the midst of ungodly men, and yet more, by their
prayers and intercessions, may the righteous often arrest vengeance and prevent the
utter ruin of a country. The wicked know nothing of their obligations to the
righteous. In general, they despise or hate the righteous--either accounting them
fools, or galled by the reproof conveyed by their example. If they had what they wish,
they would remove the righteous from amongst them, reckoning that they should
then have greater freedom in pursuing their schemes, or enjoying their pleasures.
And little do they think that these very objects of their scorn and dislike may be all
the while their best guardians and benefactors; turning aside from them evils by
which they might be otherwise rapidly overtaken, and procuring for them a
lengthened portion of Divine patience and forbearance. Little do they think that the
worst thing possible for their country and themselves is when there is a rapid
diminution in the number of the righteous; every good man who dies and leaves no
successor being as a practical withdrawal from that leaven which alone stays the
progress of the universal decomposition. Now we have reached the point at which
piety ceases to have power in averting evil from others. What does it, then, do for the
pious themselves? Intercession time has gone--the judgment time has come; and
every man must be dealt with according to his own character. But if righteousness
then lose its power to avail with God for others, besides its possessors; and if on this
account the righteous may well shrink from such seasons, yet it appears certain that
righteousness is as acceptable as ever to God, and that therefore the righteous have
nothing to fear individually for themselves. Come plague! come depopulation! if
thou art indeed a devoted, consistent servant of God, they shall not touch thee till
the time has come which has been fixed by thy merciful Father! A thousand shall
fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.
The funeral procession may wend often from their doors, bearing away (it is
melancholy to think) those for whose salvation they have long prayed, and for whom
they have daily sought a further day of grace; but they themselves shall be
unassailed till the day which, in any case, God had fixed for their entry into rest; and
thus shall the pestilence, whose ravages in their households did but fit them for
higher glory, do only the part of common sickness in freeing them from a corruptible
body. And, therefore, may those in whose hearts is the fear of the Lord, hear
without trepidation what God says about bringing His sore judgments on a land.
There are two very important considerations suggested by the subject we have thus
endeavoured to discuss.
1. We wish you to observe that he who serves God, serves his country best.
2. We ask you to observe that whatever the advantages which a man derives
 from having pious relatives, there is a point at which those relatives can
afford him no help. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

Intercessory prayer

I. Intercessory prayer is an exercise of great value.

1. As developing our love to man. Interesting ourselves in his trials, seeking to
save him from his sins.
2. As carrying out the Divine precepts. In the spirit of Christ, in the fellowship of
life.
3. As following after noble examples.
4. As obtaining great blessings for others.

II. Intercessory prayer can be offered only by good men.

1. He must not be under the sin against which he prays.
2. He should know by experience the value of the blessing he craves for another.
3. He must be willing to join effort with prayer.

III. Intercessory prayer has some limitations even when offered by the best of
men. This is evident--
1. From Scripture.
2. From observation.

IV. Intercessory prayer is a grand distinction and provision of the Gospel. We

have--
1. The best of intercessors (Heb 7:25). In office, sympathy, work, influence.
2. Praying for the best of blessings. Salvation, preservation, comfort, glory.
3. Taking up the ease of every soul that trusts Him.
4. Always successful. (W. Whale.)

Intercession rejected
The Hebrews had justly a very high opinion of Moses. How proudly they boasted,
We are the disciples of Moses! As the late Dr. R.W. Dale has pointed out, More
than Luther is to Germany, more than Napoleon is to France, more than Alfred, or
Elizabeth, or Cromwell, or William

III. is to England, Moses was to the Jewish people--prophet, patriot, warrior,

lawgiver, all in one. Yet even so great a servant of God as Moses together with the
famous seer Samuel, would avail nothing in intercession for the Jews at this time.
My mind, saith the Lord, could not be toward this people.

JER 15:6-9
 Thou hast forsaken Me.

God forsaking and God forsaken

I. A GOD-FORSAKING PEOPLE. Conviction by God Himself of this great folly and sin.
In Jer 2:13, the charge is more complete. Creation is called upon to express surprise
at a folly so conspicuous.
1. Thou--who oughtest to have been unto Me a loyal and loving people,
testifying of My power and grace, and proving by separation from the nation
your preference for the living and true God.
2. Hast forsaken--not simply forgotten, or disobeyed, but of deliberate choice
hast taken other gods, and disregarded Jehovah.
3. Me--who called Abraham, etc.

II. A God-forsaken people.

1. Always retrograde. Unless they repent and obey God, there is no way forward
and upward.
2. Always in danger of destruction. If we forsake the mercy, we inherit the
misery.
3. Always exposed to terrors and disasters.
4. Always drifting into languor, premature decline, shame, and death. (W.
Whale.)

How men forsake God

A rule I have had for years is to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. It
is not a creed, a mere empty doctrine, but it is Christ Himself we have. The moment
we receive Christ we should receive Him as a friend. When I go away from home I
bid my wife and children good-bye; I bid my friends and acquaintances good-bye;
but I never heard of a poor backslider going down on his knees and saying, I have
been near You for ten years. Your service has become tedious and monotonous. I
have come to bid You farewell. Good-bye, Lord Jesus Christ! I never heard of one
doing this. I will tell you how they go away; they just run away. (D. L. Moody.)

JER 15:6
I am weary with repenting.

The Almighty weary with repenting

I. GOD REPENTING. God condescends to designate His conduct by that name. The
expression may be inadequate and defective, but still language had nothing better to
describe the idea, nor human experience to represent the fact. When God is pleased
to speak of Himself as pitying, repenting, grieving for mans sake, what is evidently
intended is, that so intense is His love for man, that were His infinite nature capable
of these creature passions, His love would show itself in these very forms.

II. GOD PROVOKED TO A DEGREE THAT HE CAN REPENT NO MORE. He is weary with
repenting: worn and tired out with having to cancel threatened sentences so often--
as a potentate of earth might be at finding that every fresh display of patience in his
subjects masked but deeper hatred to his rule, and every amnesty he declared was
but a signal for raising the standard of rebellion anew. What can man do, to move
the Author of his being to regard him in this way? We must not speculate; we must
let the great God speak for Himself; we must try to gather out of other Scriptures
what those things are which are said to weary God, wear out His patience, make
Him tired of His forgivenesses, reprieves, and revoked sentences.
1. Among these provocations we may note hypocrisy and allowed formality in
religious duty (Isa 1:13-14).
2. We may make God weary by presumptuous and unwarranted calculations
upon His mercy (Mal 2:17).
3. Another thing Scripture teaches us wearies, puts God out of patience, is
unbelief, a restoring to creature trust and dependencies, a want of simplicity
and unreservedness in accepting His promises, as if we thought He would
not pay them in full, or did not mean them to be taken by us, in all their
length and breadth, and depth and worth.
4. The awful limit prescribed in the text may be reached, and the Divine
forbearance tasked one step too far, by provocations after mercies. (D.
Moore, M. A.)

Jehovah weary with repenting

The fact that God is weary of repenting shows--
1. That God had often turned from His threatenings, and dealt in mercy with the
people.
2. That the Divine mercy had been frequently abused, and the people had gone
back again to their sins.
3. That not a change in His being, but only a change of relationship, is expressed
by the word repent.
4. That judgment is alien to Gods heart, whereas mercy is His delight.
5. That when God is met with persistent ingratitude, and men relapse
continually into sin, He must eventually punish them.
6. That the operations of the Divine mind can only be expressed in human
language with difficulty and limitation.
7. That we should be careful not to trifle with or abuse, the patient long-suffering
of God. (W. Whale.)

Divine judgments and mans relation to them

Famine, pestilence, revolution, war, are judgments of the Ruler of the world. What
sort of a ruler, we ask, is He? The answer to that question will determine the true
sense of the term--the judgment of God. The heathen saw Him as a passionate,
capricious, changeable Being, who could be angered and appeased by men. The
Jewish prophet saw Him as a God whose ways were equal, who was unchangeable,
who was not to be bought off by sacrifices but pleased by righteous dealing, and who
would remove the punishment when the causes which brought it on were taken
away; in other words, when men repented God would repent. That does not mean
that He changed His laws to relieve them of their suffering, but that they changed
their relationships to His law, so that, to them thus changed, God seemed to change.
A boat rows against the stream; the current punishes it. So is a nation violating the
law of God, it is subject to punishment, judgment. The boat turns and goes with the
stream; and the current assists it. So is a nation which has repented and put itself
into harmony with Gods law; it is subject to a blessing. But the current is the same;
it has not changed, only the boat has changed its relation to the current. Neither
does God change--we change; and the same law which executed itself in punishment
now expresses itself in reward. (W. Brooke.)

JER 15:9
Her sun is gone down while it is yet day.

Beautiful, but brief

I. Her life was like the sun in its shining.

1. Gloriously bright with faith and joy.
2. Blessedly useful in diffusing light.
3. Constantly comforting, by its warmth of love and hope.
4. Christianly generous, always giving.
5. A centre of attraction, in the house, in the class, in the social circle, and in the
Church.

II. Her death was like the sun in its setting.

1. Gradual
2. Beautiful.
3. Peaceful.
4. To rise again.

III. Her sunset was early in the day of life.

1. In the prime and beauty of being.
2. In the midst of work.
3. It seems unnatural, and suggests questions.
4. It is an interposition of God in His providence, doubtless wise and loving.
5. It leads us from the creature to the. Creator.
6. It suggests that we be all ready, always ready. (W. Whale.)

Premature sunset
 I. In nature.
1. Would be unnatural.
2. Would be injurious to all life.
3. Would make us less confident as to the unerring regularity of natures law.

II. IN HISTORY. Many cases in which nations have fallen, not with decrepitude of
age, but through early and self-wrought ruin.

III. IN INDIVIDUAL LIFE. The young, the immoral, the unprincipled in character
generally. Obedience to God gives a long day and beautiful sunset. (W. Whale.)

The Christians sun

I. THE CHRISTIAN HAS A SUN. A Sun is a globe which keeps other globes in
connection with it in their proper spheres and at their assigned work, and which
imports light and heat to them and to all the creatures which inhabit them. In a
sense, all men have a sun to which they look for present and future good. But it
differs with different men. With some it is nature; some, the traditions of their
fathers; some, fancied superior morality; and the portion of good to every man, with
regard to its character and intent, is determined by the capability and quality of his
sun. Oh, how miserably off must be all who depend on the finite! The Christian does
not. His sun is Jesus as set forth in Holy Writ. From Him every true believer has the
light and heat of spiritual life, and through Him he gets into his place, and is put to
his appropriate work in creation (Joh 1:1-14; Joh 8:12; Joh 12:46). Receptivity is the
beginning of that state of mind which, if rightly followed up, issues in the likeness,
love, and enjoyment of God; and as Jesus, the source to which the Christian looks
for lasting, ennobling good, is infinite, his felicity and glory will be forever enlarging.

II. THE CHRISTIAN IS SUNNIFIED BY HIS SUN. He is a retainer, as well as a receiver,

of its beneficent outflow. All the colours, and all the shades of colours, and every
form of animal and vegetable life, are owing to the retention and appropriation of
solar rays. The wealth, and beauty, and blessed activity of earth arise in this way. In
like manner, the rays of the worlds spiritual Sun--the divinely inspired record of the
history of incarnate Deity--must be kept and fittingly used if His fruits are to be
enjoyed.

III. THE CHRISTIAN SUNNIFIES OTHERS. He is a reflector and spreader of the

brightness and goodness of his sun. Ye are the light of the world. The globes which
emit light and heat as well as have them, the animals which add usefulness to life,
and the flowers which are fragrant besides being beautiful, are highest in the scale of
existence and of greatest worth. To those Christians who are active besides being
pious, who spread the Gospel in addition to living it, who enrich and bless others as
well as seek to be enriched and blessed themselves, are the most like Jesus, the most
dear to the Father, the most useful to men, the most honoured in the Church. Their
death is a calamity to others, but auspicious to themselves. Apply the subject--
1. To sinners. Get spiritual light and life while you can.
2. To saints. Prize and make good use of your privileges. Diffuse your light.
 3. To Christian workers.
Be not weary in works of faith and labours of love. The more light you spread, and
the more men you illumine, the greater your joy now, the greater your blessedness
hereafter. (W. J. Stuart.)

Death the setting of the sun

I. The sun, in setting, DISAPPEARS FROM VIEW. As the great central orb is lost to
our part of the world as he sinks beneath the horizon, so man is lost to the view of
earth as he descends to the grave. The places that knew him know him no more.

II. The sun in setting OBEYS ITS LAW. The sun knoweth his going down. Death is
a law of nature. It is as natural for the body to die as for the sun to go down.

III. The sun in setting is OFTEN GORGEOUS. Often have we seen the monarch of
the day ride down in a chariot of glittering gold. Many a man has died under a halo
of moral splendour. Like Stephen, they have seen the heavens open, and reflected
the celestial rays as they came down.

IV. The SETTING SUN WILL RISE AGAIN. So with man in death. He does not go out
of existence: he only sinks from view, and sinks to rise again in new splendour.
Conclusion--Let us fulfil our mission as the sun does his, move in our little circle in
harmony with Divine law, enlightening, vivifying, and beautifying all, and then
death need have no terror for us. Our path will be as a shining light, etc.
(Homilist.)

Sunset at noonday
These words are illustrative of death in lifes meridian. They remind us of--

I. PREMATURE DARKNESS. Sunsetting is the harbinger of night.

1. In nature. We do not expect sunset until eventide.
2. In morals. The departure of moral integrity. This sun should never set.
3. In physical life. Death is sunset to the aged, at night; to the young, at noon.
4. Unexpected darkness is unanticipated sorrow to community, family,
individual.

II. UNCOMPLETED WORK. Man goeth forth unto his work. Ordinarily, man has
work enough to last all day; when called away prematurely, he leaves part
untouched. So in lifes aggregation. In lifes morning his work is largely preparatory
for mightier accomplishments of his post meridian.

III. FRUSTRATED DESIGN. Man lives in the future--

(1) intellectually,
(2) socially,
(3) religiously.
 Setting suns of life. Permanently overwrought powers. Commercial disasters.
Succumbing to evil. In each case failure to realise the hope.

IV. A SPEEDIER ENJOYMENT OF REST. Darkness suggests night; night suggests

repose. As in the physical, so in the souls life. Blessed are the dead, etc. There
remaineth therefore, etc. (Homiletic Monthly.)

Death in the midst of life

I. THE SUN AS AN EMBLEM OF THE SAINTS OF GOD. When we contemplate the great
orb of day we are impressed--
1. With his greatness and elevation. This greatness and elevation fitly represents
the true character of the Christian, contrasted with what he was, with what
others are around him. Knowledge makes a man great. Grace of God elevates
and lifts up to heaven. I will set him on high, etc.
2. Natural glory and magnificence. The most glorious of all the heavenly bodies.
The kings daughter, etc. (Psa 45:13). See this strikingly set forth (2Co
3:18).
3. As the great diffuser of light and beauty. The Christian is first the recipient of
light, and then he is called to shine. Arise, shine, etc. So let your light
shine, etc.
4. As the chief source of fertility and fruitfulness. Where Christians live there is
knowledge, benevolence, happiness, and life. Look at all our institutions of
temporal and moral goodness.

II. The setting of the sun as a striking representation of the morality of the
Christian.
1. The going down of the sun is a usual and therefore expected event. So sure as
he arises we know he will go down. Man is born to die, etc. I know that Thou
wilt bring me to death, etc. The living know, etc.
2. The period of the going down of the sun is very diversified. Look at the short
winters day and the long summers day. So in life,--every age is alike mortal,
etc. But the text speaks of the sun going down while it is yet day--
prematurely. How often is this the case.
3. The going down of the sun is often peculiarly splendid and beautiful. How
characteristic of the good mans death!
4. The sun goes down to arise and shine on another horizon. (J. Burn, D. D.)

JER 15:10
A man of strife.

Men of progress, men of strife

I. BECAUSE OF NONCOMPLIANCE WITH POPULAR SINS. Always some interested in

doing wrong, and maintaining evil among the people. Those who will not conform,
especially such as speak and labour against sin, are considered men of strife.

II. BECAUSE THEY ARE IN ADVANCE OF THE AGE. They look at all matters from a
more elevated standpoint, and seek to bring the people up to their level.

III. BECAUSE THEY ARE EARNEST AND ENERGETIC. Some can be indifferent; true
souls cannot be.

IV. BECAUSE ALL GOOD WORK CAUSES STRIFE. Evil has to be conquered, the devil to
be cast out. No curse will peaceably give place to a blessing.

V. BECAUSE THE FIELD OF BATTLE IS THE PATH OF GLORY. Salvation is finally for
him that endureth to the end. Fight the good fight of faith. (W. Whale.)

JER 15:12
Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel?

The northern iron and steel

In order to achieve a purpose there must be sufficient force. The weaker cannot
overcome the stronger. In a general clash the firmest will win. You cannot cut
granite with a pen knife, nor drill a hole in a rock with an anger of silk. We shall
apply this proverb--

I. To the people of God individually.

1. Many Christians are subjected to great temptations and persecutions;
mocked, ridiculed, called by evil names. Persecuted one, will you deny the
faith? If so, you are not made of the same stuff as the true disciple of Jesus
Christ; for when the grace of God is in them, if the world be iron, they are
northern iron and steel.
2. We are frequently called to serve God amid great difficulties. Will you say,
there is no converting these dark and obdurate souls? Is the iron to break the
northern iron and steel? Look at Mont Cenis Tunnel, made through one of
the hardest rocks; with a sharp tool, edged with diamond, they have pierced
the Alps. As St. Bernard says: Is thy work hard? set a harder resolution
against it; for there is nothing so hard that cannot be cut with something
harder still.
3. To labour with non-success, and to wait, is hard work. It is a grand thing for a
Christian to continue patiently in well-doing.

II. Applicable to the cause of God in the world--TO THE CHURCH. What power,
however like to iron, shall suffice to break the kingdom of Jesus, which is
comparable to steel?
1. We hear it said that Romanism will again vanquish England; that the Gospel
light, which Latimer helped to kindle, will be extinguished. Atrocious
 nonsense, if not partial blasphemy. If this thing were of men, it would come
to nought; but if it be of God, who shall overthrow it?
2. Others foretell the triumph of infidelity. That the gates of hell are to prevail
against the Church; that the pleasure of the Lord is not to prosper in His
hand. Who but a lying spirit would thus lay low the faith and confidence of
Gods people?

III. Apply the principle to the self-righteous efforts which men make for their
own salvation.
1. The bonds of guilt are not to be snapped by a merely human power.
2. Yet that were an easy task compared with a man renewing his own heart.
3. Do you think you can force your way to heaven by ceremony? Come, sinner,
with thy fetters; lay thy wrist at the cross foot, where Christ can break the
iron at once.

IV. Applicable to all persons who are making SELF-RELIANT EFFORTS FOR THE
GOOD OF OTHERS.
1. Our preaching--we try to make it forcible--how powerless it is of itself! We
plead, reason, seek goodly words, etc., but the northern iron and steel
remain immovable. Though all the apostles reasoned with them, they would
turn a deaf ear.
2. The best adapted means cannot succeed. A mothers tears, as she spoke to you
of Jesus; the pleadings of a grey-headed father over you--no power to change
your heart! The Gospel, though put to you very tenderly by those you love
best, leaves you unsaved still! You have been sick, near death, within an inch
of doom; yet even the judgments of God have not aroused you.

V. THIS TEXT HAS A VERY SOLEMN APPLICATION TO ALL THOSE WHO ARE REBELS
AGAINST GOD. Fight against God, would you? Measure your adversary, I charge you.
The wax is about to wrestle with the flame, the tow to contend with the fire. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Nothing more to be done

It is impossible to explain these words to the satisfaction of all. The general
explanation, according to a large consensus of opinion, is that the prayer of the
prophet cannot break the inflexible purpose of Jehovah. Jeremiah is still concerned
for his countrymen, and he will still pray, though he has been told that if the
mightiest intercessors that ever lived were to lift up their heads in devoutest
argument they would not be listened to, for heaven was offended, and mighty in just
indignation. Now the question is put, not by Jeremiah, but by another: Shall iron
break the northern iron and the steel? Is there any iron in the south that can stand
against the iron of the north? Has not the iron of the north been proved in a
thousand controversies, and has it ever failed t Who will smite that northern iron
with straw? Who will break it with a weapon of wood? Who will set his own frail
hand against an instrument so tremendous? The argument, then, would seem to be-
-Why pray to me for these people? It is as iron applied to the iron of the north,
which has been seen to fail in innumerable instances: all the prayers that can now be
offered to heaven would be broken upon the threshold of that sanctuary and fall
back in fragments upon the weary intercessor; the day has closed, the door is shut,
the offended angel of grace has flown away on eagle pinions, and the sister angel of
mercy can no longer be found: pray no more for Jerusalem. Thus the Lord
dramatically represents Himself; and in all this dramatic reply to the interrogations
and pleadings of earth there is a great principle indicated; that principle is that the
day closes--My Spirit shall not always strive with men. These are awful words. If a
man had invented them, we should have denied their truthfulness and their force;
but when we hear them as from above we confirm them, we say, It is right, we do not
deserve to be heard; if we had to assign ourselves to a fate, we dare not plant ha the
wilderness of our solitude one single flower; we have done the things we ought not
to have done, we have left undone the things we ought to have done; all we like
sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 15:15
Remember me and visit me.

The desire to be remembered

Jeremiah desires many things; but the thing he asks first, as including all the rest,
is that God would not let him drop out of sight and thought.

I. The perpetually recurring phrase, God knows, expresses a mood of thought

common to rational creatures.
1. A craving everywhere to be remembered. From the lips of the dying, from
friends of whom we are taking farewell, fall the words, Remember me.
Ambitious minds, not content that their memorial should be kept in a few
hearts, labour that their names may be remembered by multitudes. Oblivion
appalls us.
2. The moralist can easily show the vanity of this desire, and the emptiness of
the end. What good will it do you, he asks, to be remembered when out amid
Australian wilds or on parched Indian plains? or what harm to be forgot?
3. Enough for us, that God so made us that, by the make of our being, we desire
to be kindly remembered.

II. THE PROPHET SHOWS US THE RIGHT DIRECTION IN WHICH TO TRAIN THIS DESIRE.
Pointing to the heaven above, he bids us seek to be remembered there.
1. The thought that such a prayer may be offered to God, teaches us a great deal
of His kindliness, condescension, thoughtful care.
2. It was while looking on the kindly human face of Christ, that the whole hearts
wish of the poor penitent thief went out in the Lord, remember me!
3. It was in special clearness of revelation of Gods love, that the Psalmist was
emboldened to say, I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me.

III. The encouraging view of the hearer of prayer implied in the words of the
prophets petition.
 1. He was not staggered, as he drew near in prayer, by intruding doubt whether
the Almighty would listen to his poor words or consider his hearts desires.
2. It is not presumption, but faith, that speaks here.
3. Ponder for your comfort that God thinketh upon you knoweth your frame,
etc.

IV. IN SUCH INDIVIDUALITY OF PRAYER THERE IS NO SELFISHNESS. It is not the wish

to be distinguished above, but to be remembered even as the other members of the
family. It is but that when Christ, the great Intercessor, speaks to Almighty God for
Himself and His brethren of mankind, saying, in name of all, Our Father, the poor
sinner should not be left out.

V. Mark what simple trust in Gods wisdom and kindness is implied.

1. Everything is asked in that. Enough, just to put oneself under Gods eye, just
to get God to think of one at all.
2. It is assumed that if God remembers us, it will be in love.
3. Gods remembrance is practical. He comes to our help.
4. Doubtless there is a season in the history of the unconverted man in which he
can have no real desire that God should remember him: he rather desires to
keep out of Gods sight and remembrance.
5. Yet the prayer expresses the first reaching after God of the awakened soul (A.
K. H. Boyd, D. D.)

Jeremiahs prayer

I. The prophets prayer.

1. Remember me, O Lord!
(1) There is a sense in which God may be said to remember His people so as
to take particular knowledge of them, and all that pertains to them. He
remembers their persons, knows their exact number, and not one of
them shall be lost (Isa 44:21-22; Isa 49:14-16). He remembers their
frailties and infirmities, how unable they are to bear affliction without
His support, and hears the gentle whisper and the secret groan with
parental tenderness (Jer 2:2-3). He remembers all their endeavours to
serve and please Him, however weak and imperfect they have been; and
in instances where they pitied and relieved any of His needy and afflicted
ones, without the prospect of reward, and from love to Him, He will
bring it to remembrance, and return it all into their bosom (Heb 6:10).
All the prayers of His people are come up as a memorial before Him, and
shall not be forgotten. Sooner or later they shall all be answered, whether
they live to see it or not; for God sometimes answers the prayers of His
people, after they are gone to their graves, in blessings on their
connections and posterity.
(2) The Lord not only remembers His people so as to know and notice them,
as He does His other works; but in a special manner, so as to delight in
them to do them good, and feel a satisfaction in them. He taketh pleasure
 in the prosperity of His servants, and will exert Himself on their behalf.
He will so remember them as to direct them in their difficulties, succour
them in their temptations, guard them when in danger, and bring them
out of trouble.
2. And visit me. This implies that where God graciously remembers anyone,
He will also visit them. Of the Lords visits to His people, it may be observed-
-
(1) They are promised, and He will fulfil His word. Thus it was with respect
to that long-expected and much-desired one, at the incarnation (Luk
1:54-55; Luk 1:78-79). The same may be said of all His visits to His
people: they are not casual, but determined. And as they are at a fixed
time on Gods part, so they are most seasonable on ours: they are made
when we most need them, and when He shall be most glorified by them.
(2) They are free and voluntary and on our part wholly undeserved: they are
what we seek, but cannot claim.
(3) Divine visits are often short and transient, like the sheet that was three
times let down from heaven while Peter was praying upon the house top,
and almost immediately taken up again. The manifestations of Divine
love are often like a land flood--sudden, overflowing, and soon spent; but
the love itself is a boundless ocean, an ever-flowing stream.
(4) However short the Divine visits are, they are often repeated, and are
peculiar to the favourites of heaven. They impart life to our graces, vigour
to our services, and comfort to our souls.
(5) They are powerful and influential, always bringing peace and comfort to
the soul.

II. Concluding remarks.

1. Though God hath promised His presence with His people, yet He may for a
time withhold the manifestation of it (Job 23:8-9; Lam 1:16). Such
departures are very distressing, though but temporary; and those who have
been most indulged with the Divine presence are most affected with its
withdrawment; while those who have never experienced the former are
insensible and unconcerned about the latter.
2. When God forbears His visits, His people are apt to think that He has
forgotten them (Psa 31:12; Psa 88:14-15).
3. To be remembered and visited of God is a blessing infinitely to be desired;
and those especially who fear they are forgotten by Him feel it to be so (Psa
73:25).
4. Those who desire Gods presence must seek it by earnest prayer. (B.
Beddome, M. A.)

Prayer

I. Divine knowledge is no hindrance to prayer.

1. Thou knowest--
(1) My character.
 (2) My condition.
(3) My need.
2. Yet, though Thou knowest, yea, because Thou knowest, I pray to Thee.

II. Divine condescension an encouragement to prayer.

1. Remember me.
2. Visit me.
3. Vindicate me.

III. HUMAN NEED A STIMULUS TO PRAYER. Poor, persecuted, and in peril, where
could he go for help? He is driven to God by trouble, and drawn by loving kindness.

IV. THE VICISSITUDES OF LIFE SUGGEST TOPICS FOR PRAYER. Poverty, weakness,
affliction, persecution, temptation--the sins and sorrows of others.

V. Conscious sincerity gives freedom in prayer. I have suffered for Thy sake.

VI. The mediation of Christ gives efficacy to our prayer. (W. Whale.)

Take me not away in Thy long-suffering.

The long-suffering of God

I. The nature of this long-suffering.

1. It is part of the Divine goodness and mercy, yet differs from both. The Lord is
full of compassion, slow to anger.
(1) Long-suffering differs from mercy in respect to the object; mercy respects
the creature as miserable: patience, or long-suffering, respects the
creature as criminal; mercy pities him in his misery; long-suffering bears
with the sin, and waits to be gracious.
(2) Long-suffering differs also from goodness, in regard to the object. The
object of goodness is every creature, from the highest angel in heaven to
the meanest creature on earth; goodness respects things in a capacity, or
in a state of creation, nurseth and supporteth them as creatures. Long-
suffering considers them as already created and fallen short of their duty;
goodness respects persons as creatures; long-suffering, as transgressors.
2. Since it is a part of goodness and mercy, it is not insensibility. Gods anger
burns against the sin, whilst His arms are open to receive the sinner.
3. As long-suffering is a part of mercy and goodness, it is not constrained or
faint-hearted patience.
4. Since it is not for want of power over the creature, it is from a fulness of the
power over Himself.
5. As long-suffering is a branch of mercy, the exercise of it is founded on the
death of Christ.
 II. How this long-suffering or patience is manifested.
1. His giving warning of judgments before they are commissioned to go forth.
2. In His unwillingness to execute His threatened judgments, when He can delay
no longer.
3. In that when He begins to Send out His judgments, He doth it by degrees.
4. By moderating His judgments. He rewardeth us not according to our
iniquities.
5. In giving great mercies after provocations.
6. When we consider the greatness and multitude of our provocations.

III. The ground and reason of this long-suffering to us-ward.

1. As a testimony of His reconcilable and merciful nature towards sinners.
2. That sinners may be brought to repentance.
3. For the continuance of His Church (Isa 65:8-9).
4. That His justice may be clear when He condemns the impenitent.
5. In answer to the prayers of His people, His long-suffering is exercised towards
sinners.
To conclude--
1. How is the long-suffering of God abused?
2. Is the Lord long-suffering? How much better, therefore, is it to fall into the
hands of God, than into the hands of man; the best of men.
3. We may infer from the Lords long-suffering towards sinners, the value of the
soul; He not only died to redeem it, but waits with unwearied patience and
forbearance to receive it.
4. If the Lord be thus long-suffering to us-ward, who have so long and
repeatedly rebelled against Him, ought not Christians to exercise
forbearance and long-suffering one towards another? (Eph 4:1-6.) (Pulpit
Assistant.)

A promise of better things

Thomas Scott, the commentator, tells the following incident: A poor man, most
dangerously ill, of whose religious state I entertained some hopes, seemed to me in
the agonies of death. I sat by his bed for a long time, expecting to see him expire; but
at length he awoke as from a sleep, and noticed me. I said, You are extremely ill. He
replied, Yes, but I shall not die this time. I asked the ground of this strange
confidence, saying that I was persuaded he would not recover. To this he answered,
I have just dreamed that you, with a very venerable-looking person, came to me. He
asked you what you thought of me. What kind of tree is it? Is there any fruit? You
said, No; but there are blossoms! Well, then, I will spare it a little longer. This
dream so exactly met my ideas as to the mans state of mind, and the event so
answered his confidence by recovery, that I could not but think there was something
peculiar in it. I have since learned that after many backslidings the man became a
decidedly religious character--and his case furnishes a most striking instance of the
long-suffering and tender mercy of our God!
 JER 15:16
Thy word was unto me the Joy and rejoicing of mine heart.

The souls discovery and use of the words of God

I. The souls discovery of the words of God. Thy words were found.
1. In their truth. He that believeth hath the witness--i.e., the thing witnessed,
the testimony--in himself. He feels the reality of the words of God. They are
substance, not shadow, to him.
2. In their meaning. The words of God are not designed to act upon us as an
ignorant charm. They are necessarily full of the mind of God. Sympathy with
the mind of God is therefore indispensable for understanding them.
3. In their immense importance.
4. In their intense applicability.
5. In their impressive power. Demonstration of the Spirit.

II. THE SOULS USE OF THE WORDS OF GOD. I did eat them. As the mouth receives
food for the body, so faith for the soul.
1. The believing soul loves the words. With its regenerated taste it relishes them
keenly, finds them to be bread of God, better even than angels food.
2. The believing soul dwells on the words; meditates upon them day and night.
3. The believing soul turns the words into the nourishment of the spiritual life.
For its appetite is wholesome. It desires the sincere milk of the Word, that it
may grow thereby. And it does.

III. The delightful effect of the souls discovery and use of the words of God. Thy
word was unto me the joy, etc. This is owing to--
1. The suitableness and comprehensiveness of its provision.
2. The preciousness of its grace.
3. The grandeur of its discoveries. Of God, His attributes, providence, Church,
heaven.
4. The elevated piety and purity of its tone.
Conclusion--Would you be able to express yourselves thus? Remember, then, that
Gods words are spread before your eye, and spoken to your ear, like any other
words, to be inquired into, if you would understand them; to be attended to and
detained in your memory, if you would experience their intended and beneficial
effects. But remember also, that they are but the textbook of the heavenly Teacher;
and do not fail to implore His gracious teaching. (H. Angus, D. D.)

The secret food and the public name

It was good advice of a venerable divine to a young man who aspired to be a
preacher, when he said to him, Dont become a minister if you can help it. The
man who could very easily be a tradesman or a merchant had better not be a
minister. A preacher of the Gospel should always be a volunteer, and yet he should
always be a pressed man, who serves his King because he is omnipotently
constrained to do so. Only he is fit to preach who cannot avoid preaching, who feels
that woe is upon him unless he preach the Gospel, and that the very stones would
cry out against him if he should hold his peace.

I. In the description of Jeremiahs SECRET LIFE, which consists of his inward

reception of the Word of God (which description will answer for ourselves), we have
three points.
1. The finding of it--Thy words were found.
(1) We read the Word. Here it is: Gods Word is all here, and, if we would
find it, we must read it earnestly. As the habit of having a time for prayer
is good, so also is the habit of reading the Scriptures. Yet it is a
mischievous practice to read a great deal of the Bible without time for
thought; it flatters our conceit without benefiting our understanding. The
practice of always reading the Bible in scraps is also to be deprecated.
(2) But we have not found Gods Word when we have read it, unless we add
to it an understanding of the Word. Marrow bones, who can feed on
them? Split them, take out the marrow, and then you have luscious food.
Merely verbal utterances, even though they be the utterance of the Holy
Spirit, cannot feed the soul. It is the inward meaning, the truth that is
revealed, which we should labour after.
(3) To find Gods Word means sometimes the discovery of select and
appropriate words to suit our case. Thy words were found. You know
when you have lost your key, and your cupboard or your drawer cannot
be opened, you send for a locksmith, and he comes in with a whole bunch
of keys. First he tries one--that does not fit; then he tries another--that
will not do; and the good man perseveres, perhaps with twenty keys, it
may be with fifty. At last he gets the proper key, which springs the lock,
and he opens your treasure for you. Now Scripture to us is much of the
same nature. We have many promises in the time of trouble, and it is a
great blessing to find the promise that suits our case.
(4) Thy words were found; that is, I felt I had got a hold of them; I knew I
had got them; I had discovered them--they were Thy words to my inmost
soul. They have come to us with a power that no other words ever had in
them, and we cannot be argued out of our conviction of their superlative
excellence and Divine authority. We have found the words of our
heavenly Father: we know we have, for children know their own fathers
voice.
2. A second view of the inner life must now be considered. Thy word was found,
and I did eat it.
(1) By that term is signified, first, the prizing of Gods Word. When Jeremiah
received a sentence which he knew came from Gods mouth he prized it,
he loved it so that he ate it; he could not lay it aside; he did not merely
think of it; he loved it so that he put it into his very self.
(2) The term eating implies, moreover, that he derived nourishment from it.
It is delightful to sit down and suck the soul out of a text, to take it and
feel that not the letter only but the inner vitals of the text are our own,
and are to be received into the very nature of our spirit, to become
 assimilated with it.
(3) But the figure of eating means more, it sets forth an intimate union. That
which a man eats gets intertwined with his own self, his own personality.
The diligent believer when he knows the Word, learns it so well that he
assimilates it into his own being. Let me illustrate this by a fact which is
notable in a lower sense in certain natural persuasions. When Galileo was
convinced that the world moved, they put him in prison for it, and in his
weakness he recanted, and said he believed it stood still and that the sun
moved, but the moment, he got away from his persecutors he stamped
his foot, and said, But it does move, though. And so he who knows the
truth as it is in Jesus has even a higher persuasion than that which ruled
Galileo. He cannot belie the truth: he has got it so into himself that he
cannot give it up.
3. Notice, then, the third glimpse into the inner life. It was unto me the joy and
rejoicing of mine heart. Nothing makes a man so happy as the Word of God.
Nothing makes him so full of delight and peace of soul as feeding upon the
Word.

II. THE CHRISTIAN IN HIS OUTWARD LIFE, as he is mentioned here--I am called by

Thy name, O Lord God of hosts.
1. The condition of Jeremiah was one which he had attained by his conduct. He
was so continually preaching about Jehovah, so constantly insisting upon
Jehovahs will, and going upon Jehovahs errands that they came to call him
Jehovahs man, and he was known by Jehovahs name. Now the man who
loves Gods Word, and feeds on it, and rejoices in it, will so act that he will
come to be called a Christian. He will not only be so, but he will be called so.
Men will take knowledge of him that he has been with Jesus. To be called
Jehovahs man was an honour to Jeremiah; and to be called by any of these
nicknames, which signify that we belong to God, is an honour to aspire after
and not to be regretted. May we all win some opprobrious name, and wear it
as our title of holy chivalry.
2. But this is a name, in the second place, which is involved in the profession of
every Christian. I am called by Thy name, O Jehovah, God of hosts. Of
course you are so called, if your profession be true. Oh, that we remembered
always that we are Christians, and therefore must always act up to the name
that is named upon us. God grant you, friends, that, in the power of the
eating of Gods Word, you may be constrained to act ever as becometh those
upon whom the name of Christ is named.
3. Once more, this word may be used in the sense which arises out of the Gospel
itself. I am called by Thy name, O Lord God of hosts. I belong to Thee.
When they gather up the nations, and they say, This man belongs to
Babylon, and that man to Assyria, and that man to Egypt, I belong to Thee,
and am called by Thy name, O Lord God of hosts. What a comfort this is--we
who believe in Christ belong to God. We are His portion, and He will never
lose us. They shall be Mine, saith the Lord, when I make up My jewels.
You are poor: but you are Christs. Does not that mitigate your poverty? You
are sick: but you are Gods. Does not that comfort you? The poor lamb lies in
the cold field, but, if it belongs to a good shepherd, it shall not die. The sheep
 is sick, or it has wandered; but, if it belongs to an Omnipotent Shepherd, it
shall be healed and it shall be brought back. The name of Christ being named
upon us is the guarantee of our present comfort and of our future security.
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

Gods Word found and eaten

I. WHAT WAS THE PRIZE WHICH JEREMIAH DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS HAVING FOUND? It
was the Word of God. Thy words, says he, were found--just as a man, on digging
in the ground, might find beyond his hopes a treasure there; or as a merchantman,
seeking goodly pearls, might find unexpectedly one of greater price than any he was
looking for. When men find the Word of God, they find also their duty and calling.
They make a grand discovery of the will of God concerning them.

II. WHAT USE HE MADE OF THIS DISCOVERY. Thy words were found, and I did eat
them. So then he made the words of God his food--he made a meal of them--not
only did he hear, read, mark, and learn, but he inwardly digested them. It is
dealing with them as the hungry man does with food. It is converting the Word of
God into wholesome nourishment. The Word is thus hid in the heart, as the food
we eat is in the body, and becomes, as it were, a part of us--the very life blood of the
soul.

III. THE HAPPINESS WHICH HE ACQUIRED IN CONSEQUENCE. Thy Word was unto
me the joy and the rejoicing of my heart. A noble testimony this to the efficacy of
Gods Word. How sweetly it went down (Song 7:9); how blessed its effects upon the
prophets heart, when joy and rejoicing were the consequences! David also ate
Gods words; and what is his account of it! (Psa 119:103; Psa 19:10.) Hear what is the
voice of the whole Church without exception (Song 2:3). Not a single member of
Christs Church but is ready to declare with the prophet that the precious Word of
God, when fed upon by faith, is the joy and the rejoicing of his heart--his songs in
the house of his pilgrimage. (A. Roberts, M. A.)

Divine revelation

I. AS A DIVINE WORD. What is the Word? Not the book we call the Bible, that is but
the record of the revelation. Jesus Christ is emphatically the Logos. The fullest,
brightest, strongest Word of God is this. A true word answers two purposes.
1. By it the speaker reveals his own soul.
2. By it the speaker exerts his influence.

II. As a Divine Word APPROPRIATED.

1. Something more than to possess its record.
2. Something more than the mere understanding of its contents.
3. Something more than the mere transfusion of it into the realm of emotions.
It is to convert it into the ruling spirit of life.
 III. As a Divine Word ENJOYED.
1. The joy of moral satisfaction.
2. The joy of renewed strength.
Conclusion--Thank God for His Word. Study it in nature, history, consciousness,
and especially in Jesus Christ. Peruse, ponder, and prize this wonderful Book,
containing the pearl of great price. (Homilist.)

The influence of the Bible conducive to personal happiness

The Bible may be compared to a medicine: man is the patient, misery is the
disease, and the Scriptures are presented to us as a remedy. Are they such?

I. The truth of this proposition.

1. The Scriptures received into the mind remove the misery arising from
remorse and the apprehension of punishment, and introduce into the heart
the feeling of delight connected with reconciliation with God, a peaceful state
of conscience, and the hope of everlasting life. A missionary was discoursing
in one of the South Sea Islands to some of the inhabitants of those benighted
regions, and this was his text, God so loved the world, etc. The attention of
one of the islanders was arrested: he began to interrogate the preacher.
What! said he, is that true? Is it so? Read that again! The missionary read
it a second time. (I heard the statement from his own lips.) What! God so
love us, as to send His Son to die for us! and are we to have everlasting life in
the world to come--is that true? It is true, replied the preacher: there is
no ground whatever to question it. The mans mind was filled with
amazement, and with sensations of repentance on account of sin, and
wonder and joy on account of his salvation occupied his breast: he retired to
weep, he retired to meditate, he retired to pray to God, and to praise his
Creators name. What happiness comes into the soul when the soul is
assured of eternal life?
2. The Bible preserves us from the state of misery arising from bad and
ungovernable passions, and introduces the delights connected with a holy
state of heart.
3. The Bible received into the heart by faith turns the afflictions of life into real
mercies, and renders them at once bearable and beneficial.
4. The Bible welcomed into the soul by faith removes the sting of death, and
turns the monster from a dreadful curse into a blessing of no small
magnitude. I was acquainted with a gentleman, many years ago; he was of a
sceptical turn of mind, and, as a consequence, not very attentive to religion.
He was following a very lucrative profession, and unexpectedly exhibited the
symptoms of a fatal disease. He fully expected he should die in the course of
a few months. He found no support in scepticism; none whatever. And the
lash of conscience began, for having neglected the Scriptures, and not having
fairly and candidly investigated their claims. This filled him with great
remorse; for he felt that if the Bible should be true, he would certainly be
condemned for his negligence and his want of candid examination. He
resolved, as long as life should last, that he would study the sacred volume,
and inquire into its claims. His health was restored to him, and after
devoting all his leisure time, for about twelve months to reading the
 Scriptures, and books connected with them, and explanatory of them, and
pointing out their claims and their evidences, the result was a firm
conviction, that the Bible was from God. He was induced then to begin to act
upon it. He went abroad; he was one night in the river Ganges, and suddenly,
while fast asleep, a cry was raised that the boat was sinking; and so it was--
there were holes in the keel, and the stern of the boat was brought under
water in the night season by the men, who went and slept, and the boat was
gradually filling, and in a few minutes more all would have sunk like a stone
or lead to the bottom of the river. His first impression was, I have not an
hour to live. There was a tumultuous feeling in his mind, yet had he
sufficient composure to reflect upon the difference of his feelings then, and
what they were when he anticipated death some years prior. His impression
and conviction was, that he should be in heaven in an hour; and oh! the
support of the Gospel in that moment. Subsequently, he was seized with the
Asiatic cholera, and life was in suspense. Similar support was again
experienced. A Brahmin was by his side; and he took occasion to say, Now
you see the support, that the Christian experiences in the season of
extremity: my life is in suspense: for me to live is Christ; for me to die is
gain.

II. SOME OBJECTIONS WHICH STAND IN THE WAY OF ITS PRACTICAL ADOPTION. There
are some who will not, like Jeremiah, eat the words of God--that will not receive
Him into their heart; therefore they do not share in this holy joy. Some will say, I
cannot wholly satisfy my mind that this book is from God: I have doubts, and doubts
which amount to what is considerable; so that I cannot enjoy the book in
consequence of these sceptical ideas. How should I get rid of them? I would say, in
order to get rid of these doubts act conscientiously: do not act in a manner
inconsistent with what you believe to be the will of God: do not live in wilful sin. If
any man will do the will of My Father, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of
God. So said Christ. Act according to your own conscientious views of holiness, and
you will find scepticism disappear. Let me entreat you to read the Bible, read the
whole of it, if you are troubled with sceptical thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that no
honest man could be a deist, if he had had opportunity to study the evidence: if he
read through the evidence, and through the Bible, he could not continue a deist, as
the evidence was so clear and so conclusive. Humes name was mentioned to him,
that he disbelieved the Bible. Dr. Johnson replied, Hume, I know, made the
confession to a clergyman in the bishopric of Durham, that he had never read the
New Testament carefully. There are some sceptics who read a little here and a little
there; but they do not get a complete view of the subject; and they read rather to find
something to object to, something they may lay hold of. The conduct of such men
has been compared to that of the Athenian, who had a palace to be sold by auction:
he took a brick out of one of the walls of the palace, and at the auction mart he said,
Here is a sample of my palace. How absurd! A brick out of the wall to be a sample.
But so some men take here a text and there a text--a brick taken out of the wall--and
what do they know about the entire edifice? Give the Bible throughout a candid and
complete perusal; and read books which are explanatory, written in a spirit of
candour and intelligence. But let me add, to put your sceptical thoughts to flight, I
think you will find prayer to be the most powerful thing of all, and the most rapid
way to scatter your doubts. He hath the witness in himself. When a man begins to
pray to God, God answers him, if he prays sincerely, and God gives him a new heart
and makes him a new man. Then he begins to argue in this way, Why the Bible has
changed my heart, the Bible has made me holy, the Bible has made me happy; what
want I with further witness? (H. Townley.)

Hidden manna

I. A MEMORABLE DISCOVERY. What is meant by finding Gods words?

1. A thing found has usually to be sought for. Happy is he who reads or hears the
Scriptures, searching all the while for the hidden spiritual sense (Pro 2:4-5).
2. To find Gods Word means that we have been made to understand them (1Co
3:14). The Bible is a dull book till illuminated; a tantalising riddle till you get
the key; but, the clue once found, it absorbs our attention, delights our
intellect, and enriches our heart.
3. Means to appropriate it as belonging to yourself. Reading a will is not
interesting till you find you have a part in it.

II. AN EAGER RECEPTION. What is meant by eating them?

1. An eager study. Greedy for the truth. My soul hungered even to ravenousness
to be fed upon the bread of heaven.
2. Cheerful reception. My soul was in love with the Word.
3. An intense belief. Not questioning it, but living upon it.
4. The language means, besides, both the diligent treasuring up of the truth, and
the inward digestion of the same.

III. The happy consequences.

1. Hold the truth in its entirety and harmony, and then it will be joy to your
heart.
2. The Word of God would have given no joy had he not been obedient to it.
3. Yet there are certain choice truths in Gods Word, especially joy giving: the
doctrine of election, to know that you are called and predestinated; and of
the immutability of Divine love.

IV. A distinguishing title.

1. The name of the Lord of hosts was reviled in Jeremiahs day, yet he felt it an
honour to be associated with the Lord in this contempt. Oh ye who love the
Lord Jesus, never shun the scandal of the Cross!
2. Some do not count it a fair thing to bear the name of the Most High. It is a
disgrace to any man that his Lord should die for his soul on Calvary and yet
he be afraid to wear His livery. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Enjoying Gods Word

I. A HIGH VALUATION FOR THIS WORD. Prized as Gods Word, and sought under
that character. Love to the Word of God is a sure sign of a gracious heart.
 1. It partakes of the Divinity of its Author.
2. It is adapted to the nature of its subject; suited to man.
3. It has produced most astonishing effects.
(1) Have you found this Word?
(2) Has it found you?

II. A personal experience of its power. I did eat it.

1. Religion is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body. Truth is the
sustenance of the moral man. Divine truth must be incorporated with the
elements of the intellectual nature, or we perish.
2. When you come to the Word, remember that Divine influence alone can make
it effectual. As you say grace before meat, let your reading be preceded by
prayer.

III. A CONSCIOUS PARTICIPATION OF THE HAPPINESS IT PRODUCES. It was the

rejoicing of my heart. How does it promote joy?
1. By the light it imparts to the understanding. It gives decision to the judgment;
fully occupies the mind upon the noblest subject; engages faculties and
powers in Gods service.
2. By the relief it gives to the conscience. In the hope of pardon and acceptance.
3. By the exercise it affords to the best affections of the heart. The pleasures of
benevolence are genuine pleasures; allied to the happiness of God Himself.
4. By the consolations and hopes under sorrow.

IV. A SENSE OF CONSECRATION. I am called by Thy name. Improvement--It

reproves--
1. Those who never seek.
2. Those who are content with knowledge without experience.
3. Those who are strangers to religious peace and joy.
4. Those who neither own Gods name, nor are owned of Him. (S. Thodey.)

Gods Word found, eaten, and enjoyed

I. Gods word found.

1. It comes to us through nature.
2. It comes also through our own spiritual being, in its instinctive yearnings.
3. In the fullest sense, it has come through Christ.
4. Also through prophets and apostles--in the written Word.

II. Gods word eaten.

1. This is more than to possess its record. To have a full larder will not sustain
life nor give strength.
2. It is more than an intellectual understanding of the contents of Scripture. The
mere analysis of food will not give sustenance.
 3. Positively, it is to turn it into the principle of life by assimilation.

III. Gods word enjoyed.

1. The joy of satisfaction.
2. The joy of strength renewed. (John Oswald.)

Found, eaten, and enjoyed

I. An important discovery was made.

1. Words are the representatives of thought. Have great power to move mens
minds.
2. Words derive much of their power from the mind which utters them. Gods
words are a hammer, a fire, a sword, a balm, a saving and sanctifying power
to men who receive and obey them.
3. That which is found must previously have existed. Gods Word exists, whether
men find it or not. He who finds it is wise, rich, happy.

II. A peculiar method of appropriation was made.

1. It implies soul hunger. Caused by stress of duty, pressure of persecution, and
multiplied sorrows.
2. It affirms that Gods words are soul food. Wholesome, nourishing, savoury,
saving.

III. A delightful experience was realised. Joy and rejoicing--

1. In what the Word revealed of God.
2. In the way that revelation met his utmost need.
3. In the knowledge of salvation there unfolded.
4. In the prospects to which the attention of Gods servants was directed.

IV. An emphatic public testimony was given. I am called by Thy name, etc.
1. Gods name was called upon him. As the saving power, and source of hope and
joy, the name of Christ has been called upon us.
2. He was called by Gods name. We, by Christs.
3. He was strengthened by God in all his works.
Application--
1. The Word discovered--a treasure.
2. The Word in the heart--a joy.
3. The Word on the lips--a message.
4. The Word in the hand--a weapon. (W. Whale.)

Feeding on Gods truth

Understandest thou what thou readest? That is the main point. The butterflies
flit over the garden, and nothing comes of their flitting; but look at the bees, how
they drive into the bells of the flowers and come forth with their thighs laden with
the pollen and filled with the sweetest honey for their hives. This is the way to read
your Bible: get into the flowers of Scriptures, plunge into the inward meaning, and
suck out that secret sweetness which the Lord hath put there for your spiritual
nourishment. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

How to make the Bible our own

Thy words were found, and I did eat them. In the absence of his father, a little
boy attended the Sabbath School of a Dutch Reformed minister. On the fathers
return he went upstairs and finding his son reading the Word of God, he asked him,
What book are you reading? He replied, The Bible. Where did you get it? In
yonder Sabbath School. He then took the Bible from him and committed it to the
flame, saying, If you ever go to the Sunday School again, Ill give you such a
thrashing as you have never had. Having ascertained that the Bible was burned, his
son said to him, Father, you have burned my Bible; but you cannot burn out of me
those chapters I have committed to memory from the Gospel of John. (W.
Baxendale.)

Joy in Gods Word

I have many books, says Mr. Newton, that I cannot sit down to read; they are
indeed good and sound, but, like halfpence, there goes a great quantity to a little
amount. There are silver books, and a very few golden books; but I have one book
worth more than all, called the Bible, and that is a book of bank notes.

JER 15:17
I sat not in the assembly of the mockers.

Christians delight not in godless company

It is better and safer to ride alone than to have a thiefs company; and such is a
wicked man, who will rob thee of precious time, if he do thee no more mischief. The
Nazarites, who might drink no wine, were also forbidden to cut grapes whereof wine
is made, so we must not only avoid sin, but also the causes and occasions thereof,
among which is bad company. (J. Spencer.)

The difficulty of maintaining purity in evil company

That is a sound body that continues healthful in a pest house. It is a far greater
wonder to see a saint maintain his purity among sinners, than it is to behold, a
sinner becoming pure among saints. Christians are not always like fish, which retain
their freshness in a salt sea; or like the rose, which preserves its sweetness among
the most noisome weeds; or like the fire, which burns the hottest when the season is
coldest. A good man was once heard to lament, that as often as he went into the
company of the wicked he returned less a man from them than he was before he
joined with them. The Lords people, by keeping evil company, are like persons who
are much exposed to the sun, insensibly tanned. (T. Seeker.)
 JER 15:18
Why is my pain perpetual?

The function of pain

This piteous lament may fitly represent the anguished cry of suffering humanity,
from age to age. In all lands, under all skies, in all times, the same mournful wail is
heard,--a ceaseless dirge of woe, day and night, from ten thousand times ten
thousand hearts, struggling with adversity, battling with disease, staggering under
the weight of sorrow or suffering. Why is my pain perpetual? It would almost seem
that men had abandoned the attempt to solve these problems; for by common
consent, pain and disease, suffering and sorrow, are called mysteries,--dark and
inscrutable mysteries. But they are not all darkness and incomprehensibility. These
mysteries are also masteries--masterful forces in the education and exaltation of
humanity. Have you ever considered what kind of a world this would be if there
were no pain here, no sick beds, no sorrow-stricken homes? Have you ever reflected
that these inscrutable mysteries are the chosen instrumentalities for fashioning
the highest types of character, both in the sufferer himself and in those who minister
to his suffering? Pain and disease did, it is true, come into the world as the
attendants and servants of sin; but it is pity indeed if we have not learned that the
Lord has made them His ministers and His servants, even as He made the thorns
and thistles, the labour and the sweat, which resulted from the Fall, the means of the
development of the faculties and powers of man, the fountains of progress and
civilisation. The earth was once a stranger to pain, and it will be again; but in the
former case sin had not entered, and so perhaps pain was not needed; and in the
latter, sin will be abolished because the lesson of pain will have been fully learned.
Had there never been pain and suffering, what a different world it would have been!
All marsh and meadow; all plain and prairie; no towering cliffs and yawning
chasms; no heaven-kissing Mont Blanc; no thunderous Niagara; no valley of the
Yosemite--a dead-level world! Those lofty heights of heroism and patience which
now delight the eye in the retrospect of the past, would sink into monotonous
stretches of commonplace lives. Those names writ large by the pen of history, and
made radiant by the light of self-forgetting devotion, would disappear with the pain
or the suffering or the calamity that made them great. We may, therefore, thank God
for pain, for suffering, for sorrow. Whichever has been our lot, depend upon it we
arc, or if not, we ought to be, the better, the wiser, the richer, for it. If we take it
patiently, as the good will of our good God, then will it prove a blessing. Then will
sorrow be the crucible in the hands of the Divine Master, wherein the dross of the
soul will be purged away, and the gold refined. But let us not make the mistake of
supposing that tribulation--this threshing of the soul--in any of its forms necessarily
produces the results which I have described. These are the peaceable fruits which
the gracious Father desires and designs that they should bring forth. These are what
they are fitted to produce. But we must remember that the material to be fashioned
in this case is a free, self-determining human soul, whose freedom cannot be
violated without destroying its very essential fibre. The effect, then, of trial and
affliction, whether bodily or mental, depends upon the way in which it is received. It
may embitter, instead of sweetening, the spirit. It may harden, instead of softening,
the heart. And then the gracious purpose of Him who chasteneth not in wrath, but in
mercy, will be frustrated and turned aside by the perversity of man. To strengthen
our faith, then, let us recall some of the utterances of those holy men of old who
spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,--passages in which the casual
connection between suffering and holiness is distinctly stated. Saith the wise man,
The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts.
Saith the afflicted patriarch, Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. When He
hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. Saith the prophet in the name of the Lord,
I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined,
etc. Our Lord said, I am the Vine, ye are the branches, and added, Every branch
that beareth fruit, He purgeth it, etc. St. Peter, the foremost of the apostles, writes,
Though now for a season . . . ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations, it
is that the trial of your faith, etc. St. James bids us etc., giving as the reason, that
chastisement produces the peaceable fruits of righteousness. Side by side with
their words let us place the deeds, the examples, of these holy men of old. One can
see in the mirror of their writings, as well as in the record of their lives, that these
chosen ones were, like their Divine Master, made perfect through suffering, or at
least that their sufferings and afflictions had led them far up the path whose goal is
perfection. The intensity of their conviction glows and burns on every page. When
they assert the purifying effect of suffering, we feel that they are testifying out of the
fulness of a personal knowledge. They speak that they do know, and testify that they
have seen and felt in their own hearts and lives. But not these holy men of old alone.
Men and women of our time, too, a noble army, have ascended with Jesus into the
holy mount by the same arduous path, leaving us an example that we should follow
their steps. How often have we seen the purifying power of pain and loss, of sorrow
and trial! How often have we marked in the life of some patient sufferer the gradual
unfolding of the Christlikeness, till at length the crown of thorns has been changed
into a mitre of glory, on which we could trace the words, Perfect through suffering!
You may, therefore, strengthen your wavering faith, O sufferer! in the beneficent
purpose of this, Gods strange economy, by lifting your eyes to the great cloud of
witnesses who have trod the same rough and thorny path. Your suffering, whatever
its form, whatever its intensity, is not without your Father. You are in His hands.
He does not forget you; He will never leave or forsake you; He only designs thy
dross to consume, and thy gold to refine. Look intently, O sufferer! and you will see
pain slowly transfigured before your gaze till it takes on the very features of Him of
whom the prophet said, He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. You are
suffering, moreover, it may be, not for your own benefit alone, but for that of others.
There is a principle of vicariousness in human suffering. Let me illustrate. A poor
traveller falls ill of fever all alone in the South American swamps. There he lies for
days in a wretched hut, quenching his thirst with the waters of a pool close at hand.
At last this pool dries up; and with extreme difficulty, the sick man crawls to
another, half a mile distant. Its water is so bitter he can scarcely drink it; but he
must drink it, or die of thirst. That afternoon he could not think why he felt stronger
than for many weeks. Next day he drank more abundantly of the bitter pool; and
still, the more he drank, the stronger he grew, till he was entirely restored; then he
found that a tree had fallen into the water, which gave it its bitterness, and gave it
also its power of cure. And this is the way in which one of the most important
medicines now in use was discovered,--a medicine which has saved thousands and
thousands of lives which must else have perished. Even so hath God appointed that
some of us should drink the bitter waters of affliction or of pain, that others may be
given spiritual health and salvation. (R. H. MKim, D. D.)
Uses of pain
Some plants owe their medicinal qualities to the marsh in which they grow; others
to the shades in which alone they flourish. There are precious fruits put forth by the
moon as well as by the sun. Boats need ballast as well as sail; a drag on the carriage
wheel is no hindrance when the road runs downhill. Pain has, probably, in some
cases developed genius, hunting out the soul which otherwise might have slept like a
lion in its den. Had it not been for the broken wing some might have lost themselves
in the clouds, some even of those choice doves who now bear the olive branch in
their mouths, and show the way to the ark. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Blessing of pain
Above all things let us learn this lesson from the example of Princess Alice--the
quickening, purifying, bracing power of pain. In every trial that she had to undergo--
and perhaps these trials were more than ordinarily severe and frequent--we see how
her character developed and strengthened. To her each trial was as an April storm to
a young plant or tree, lending new vigour to the roots, new power to its growth, so
that when the sun shines the buds are seen to expand and blossom--those same
buds which, without the rain cloud, would have shrivelled and died. Every time she
was called upon to give up what she most deeply cherished, she counted, with faith
and gratitude, the blessings that remained to her. Thus do we learn humility, she
said with quivering lip. God has called for one life, and has given me back
Chronic fain
Pascal, the great mathematician and moralist, said, From the day I was eighteen,
I do not know that I ever passed a single day without pain.
Wilt Thou be altogether unto me as a liar.--
God misjudged
Here the prophet overfreely expostulateth with God as less faithful, or less
mindful, at least, of the promised preservation. This was in a fit of diffidence and
discontent, as the best have their outbursts, and the greatest lamps have needed
snuffers. The Milesians, saith the philosophers, are not fools, yet they do the things
that fools use to do. So the saints do oft as wicked ones, but not in the same manner
and degree. (John Trapp.)

JER 15:19-20
If thou shalt take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as My mouth.

The personal factor in our thought of God and man

If Jeremiah at the time he wrote these words had been asked our modern
question, Is life worth living? he would have returned a negative answer. For here
you have the significant spectacle of a prophet of the Lord cursing the day of his
birth. He finds that he is a man of strife and contention to the whole earth; everyone
curses him, he says, though he has not given men cause to do so. And God is not
keeping His word with him either. Why is my pain perpetual? he cries, and my
wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? Wilt Thou, he says to God, be
altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail? The prophet cries out for
revenge upon his persecutors. Let us admit at once that he was plunged deeply into
disappointments. The sense of the Divine pressure in life had come to him early.
When he first felt that he must do some great work for God he was very young, and
he felt his youth as an objection to undertaking the work. The consciousness of duty
and the consciousness of unfitness were there together as they have often been in
men. Great geniuses have often begun to show themselves very early, but it is also
true that in going on they have had much to unlearn and much to cancel, and they
have had to bear the shattering of many dreams. A youth inspired from such heights
must needs be bitterly disappointed on the planes of practical life. It was so with
Jeremiah. What it was that brought him under the pressure of the higher things so
early we do not know. It has been conjectured, and Professor Cornill favours the
conjecture, that he had descended from Abiathar, the high priest of David, whom
Solomon banished to Anathoth. Jeremiah was brought up there, we know, and his
father was a priest. If the conjecture is right, the tale of banishment, the story of the
hardship, would come down from sire to son, and the old family virtues and
heroisms would be told the children of each generation. In young Jeremiah these
found responsive soil, and his enthusiasm was kindled. The lad set out to be a
reformer; he was going to put the world right! Now it is certain beforehand that he
will meet with terrible disappointments, and not at all unlikely that they will
sometimes be so severe that he will curse the day of his birth. That is what befell
Jeremiah, as it has befallen others since. In these verses he is in the depths of
misery. He notes the sins he has not been guilty of: he has not exacted usury, for
example; he recalls how zealous he had been for God: he had found the Divine
words and eaten them, assimilated them and made them his own, and had found joy
in them. But all to no purpose; everybody was against him; everyone cursed him.
But now, here is the significant thing: in the midst of all this, just when he was
seeing all men and God in the worst possible light, another thought struck him--the
thought that, after all, perhaps it was he himself who was most at fault. Thus saith
the Lord: If thou becomest again Mine, thou shalt be My servant, and if thou wilt
separate thy better self from the vile, thou shalt still be as My mouth. What had
Jeremiah been doing in his pessimism? He had been allowing the personal factor
too much room. Listen: Revenge me upon my persecutors; take me not away in Thy
long-suffering--as if he said: Do not be so merciful and patient with them as to let
them kill me; take care of me even if they be killed. Pull them out like sheep for the
slaughter, and prepare them for the day of throttling, he once said. This was not
Jeremiahs character, not his better self; this was his mood when stung with
disappointment. And this mood was bad; it was what my text calls the vile. The
personal factor was so large that it cast men and God into deep shadow. Jeremiah
saw so much of himself, his own virtue, his own failure, that he saw men worse than
they were, and God almost as a gigantic untruth. But a great character conquers
such moods, and Jeremiah conquered them. It was through his better self that the
word of the Lord came to him, and Jeremiah saw that he, in thinking so much of
himself, had ceased to be his true self, and had lapsed out of Gods service, and that
if he wanted to speak again as the mouth of God, and to do Gods work, he must
separate the precious from the vile, the better self from the baser self in his own
nature. Now we are living in an age when pessimism is said to be very prevalent;
men take gloomy views of things. I think it is true that when we are pessimistic
about things in general the fault is mostly in ourselves. Unreasonable selfishness in
some form or other is at the bottom of most pessimism; we allow the personal factor
to make a larger claim than the universe is prepared to acknowledge, and we grow
sullen at the refusal.
1. This may be the case, and often is in the nobler form of intellectual pursuits,
and often in the greaser form of material pursuits. Through philosophy we
see some men become pessimistic. They think, and think, they tell us, but the
mystery increases, and they despair of thought altogether: the universe is a
riddle, and no one can guess its meaning. Now, it is a fine thing to see a man
in quest after truth, and it is very honourable in him to make the fullest and
frankest inquiry into the nature of things. But, nevertheless, the pessimism,
the despair, the wretchedness even here is due to an unreasonable claim on
the part of the individual. Is it not rather irrational to suppose that you can
uncover the final secret? If that privilege were granted to you, what interest
would there be in the world to you or to anyone else? It is the glory of the
Lord, said an old writer, to conceal a thing, and there was more
philosophic insight in the saying than in any number of moderns who
whimper and cower before the Great Unknown. Cut down your demands to
something like what is reasonable, and then your inquiries will give you
much-prized gains--things to rejoice and sing over, and not to break your
heart about. There is a peace of mind to be got from knowing what is not
possible to us, and accepting the fact like men. Ii man could fully understand
God, he would be God. Let him know his own place and fill it like a man.
2. But it is through the material pursuits many grow pessimistic. Many peoples
thought of God and their neighbours is gloomy simply because they claim too
much room for themselves in the world. There are men who are very
prosperous in money matters, and in getting position and power, and yet
who are always dissatisfied, only because self is their God--the greatest
tyrant in the world, never satisfied. It is astonishing how much adversity and
disappointment men can bear when they are thinking of another, or others,
and how little when thinking of themselves.
3. And out of this arises one other truth--namely, that you must take yourself in
hand, and separate the precious from the vile, the better from the baser, in
order to be again the servant of the living God, and the exponent of Divine
truth. Whenever you see all the world in shadow, all men bad, and doubt
even God, be sure it is you who need reforming. There is badness in the
world, badness in men, and circumstances may be very trying, but if you are
rightly minded, and rightly hearted, you can hope and conquer. It would be a
good thing for each of us in melancholy or in bitter moods to stop speaking
of the faults of others, and the wrongs of the world, and the problems of God,
and ask, Whats wrong with me? Every mans biggest problem is himself.
Not that the circumstances were not trying--they were very trying; not that
others had no faults--they had, perhaps, great faults; but faith in God is
possible in the worst of situations, so long as we are humble, and in manly
relation to our sorrow. When unworthy feelings come in, separate the vile,
release the better self, and you will yet be Gods servant, and speak for Him.
A clean personal life will give you a strong hold on truth, even in the midst of
trouble; a pure mind will give you access to Divine reality, though your
circumstances might be terribly hard, and though all men reviled you. Mark:
Jesus does not say that the circumstances will change; and all that God says
to Jeremiah is that he shall be His servant again, and speak for Him. If you
 separate the better self from the vile, it does not follow that you will create
outward success, but you shall go on with your work, and your work shall be
a speech for God. I believe that God speaks to us in nature, but I grant that I
do not always understand. The notes of the speech are discordant. In the
world of man, too, there is much that staggers one. But there is one fact in
which I always read the mind of God--this act of separating the precious
from the vile in man. Whenever I make an effort to expel something bad, I
know I am acting for God; whenever I seek to put down anything that is
unworthy, to overcome any animosity or uncharitableness, to make my
better nature supreme, I have no doubt of God then. There we find His mind,
there we get the beatific vision, and there we equip for the worlds work. Will
you remember that God says to each one of us, If thou wilt separate the
precious from the vile, thou shalt again be My servant? Pure life is a clear
vision of God for you, and a definite speech for God by you. Nothing speaks
like it. A clean soul reflects God as a clear river reflects the sky. You will be
yourself an exponent of the eternal in separating the good from the bad in
your own life. They mingle strangely--the base with the noble, the false with
the true; and their persistent separation speaks of the eternal purpose of
redemption. And I am glad of another word in this text. It is the little word
again--If thou becomest again Mine. We know what it is to lapse--to feel
the relation to God gone; indifference holds us in its icy grasp, where all was
once enthusiasm. Let me emphasise this little word--again. It opens a door;
it marks a possibility; it is a Fathers voice coming out after you into the
darkness. There is a restoring power at work; you may be reunited
consciously to God; you may feel Him again to be the Greatest Reality in
your life. (T. R. Williams.)

The essential distinction between saints and sinners

I. There is an essential distinction between saints and sinners.

1. The inspired writers divide all mankind into two, and but two classes, and
distinguish them by very different and opposite appellations. They call the
saints the precious, but sinners the vile. They call saints the godly, but
sinners the ungodly. They call saints the children of God, but sinners the
children of the wicked one. They call saints the elect, but sinners the
reprobate. They call saints vessels of mercy, but sinners vessels of wrath.
2. God does that for saints which He does not do for sinners; He regenerates
saints, but not sinners; gives a new heart to saints, but not to sinners; softens
the hearts of saints, but hardens the hearts of sinners; and gives a spiritual
discerning of spiritual things to saints, but not to sinners; so there must be
an essential distinction between them.
3. God has made promises of good to saints, but none to sinners; which proves
they are essentially different in their moral characters.
4. God has threatened that evil to sinners, which He has not threatened to
saints.

II. Why ministers should, in their preaching, constantly exhibit and keep up this
great moral and essential distinction between those who have, and those who have
not the love of God in them.
1. This is necessary, in order to preach the Word of God intelligibly to their
people.
2. It is necessary, in order to give pertinent and profitable instruction to their
hearers.
3. Ministers must distinguish saints from sinners, in order to preach faithfully,
as well as profitably.
Application--
1. It is utterly a fault in ministers, either designedly or undesignedly, to keep the
essential distinction between saints and sinners out of sight.
2. In the view of this subject, we may see how easy it is for ministers to lead
people insensibly into great and fatal errors. They may do so, by not
mentioning or not explaining the essential distinction between saints and
sinners; or by not mentioning or not explaining the peculiar doctrines of the
Gospel which flow from this distinction; while, at the same time, they preach
some valuable truths.
3. If there be an essential distinction between saints and sinners, then sinners
are very liable to be fatally deceived and corrupted by those who lie in wait to
deceive and destroy. Saints have an antidote against the poison of error, that
sinners are entirely destitute of. Saints are lovers of God and of His Word;
they desire the sincere milk of the Word, that they may grow thereby in
grace, and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. The hearts of all good
men are attached to Divine truth. But sinners are lovers of their own selves,
and haters of God, and equally haters of His Word.
4. The best way the ministers of the Gospel can take to guard their people
against every species of error and errorists, is to make and keep up the
essential distinction between saints and sinners.
5. The people may easily discover the real sentiments of ministers by their
preaching.
6. There may be a great deal of good preaching in the land, and at the same time,
a great want of good preaching. How many ministers do not take forth the
precious from the vile, nor cause their hearers to see and feel the difference!
7. This subject calls upon saints to walk worthy of their high and holy calling.
They are called the precious, the holy, the godly, the excellent of the earth.
(N. Emmons, D. D.)

Unsullied character
The degree of impurity in any precious stone is just the measure of its
depreciation. The initial act of their formation is separation. The dark drift of the
inland river, or stagnant slime of inland pool and lake, divides or resolves itself, as it
dries, into layers of its several elements: slowly purifying each by the patient
withdrawal of it from the anarchy of the mass in which it was mingled. Thus begin
both the crystallisation of the gem and the life of the Christian. Come out, and be
separate! Take forth the precious from the vile, is the call of the Lord to His saints.
For our call is to saintliness; and as the unseen foundations of the New Jerusalem
are of as precious stones as the dazzling walls, so the part of our life and character
which is hidden from the eyes of the world is to be as clear and unsullied as that
which all see and admire. Keep thyself pure, thou child of God. (W. Y. Fullerton.)

Righteous zeal encouraged by Divine protection

I. GODS DIRECTION TO THE PROPHET, AND IN HIM TO ALL EAT DO HIS WORK IN SUCH
A SEASON AS THIS DESCRIBED. Let them return to thee, return not thou to them.
Plausible compliances of men in authority, with those against whom they are
employed, are treacherous contrivances against the God of heaven, by whom they
are employed.
1. It cannot be done but by preferring the creature before the Creator, especially
in those things which are the proximate causes of deviation. Two principal
causes I have observed of this crooked walking.
(1) Fear.
(2) That desire of perishing things, which hath a mixture of covetousness
and ambition.

II. THE SUPPORTMENT AND ASSISTANCE PROMISED. I will make thee to this people
a brazen and a fenced wall. Now the Lord will do this--
1. Because of His own engagement.
2. For our encouragement.

III. THE OPPOSITION WHICH MEN CLEAVING TO THE LORD IN ALL HIS WAYS SHALL
FIND, WITH THE ISSUE AND SUCCESS OF IT. They shall fight against thee, but shall not
prevail. The words may be considered either as a prediction depending on Gods
prescience of what will be; or a commination from His just judgment, of what shall
be. In the first sense the Lord tells the prophet, from the corruption, apostasy,
stubbornness of that people, what would come to pass. In the second, what for their
sins and provocations, by His just judgment, should come to pass. I shall take up the
latter only, namely, That it is a commination of what shall be for the further misery
of that wretched people; they shall judicially be given up to a fighting against Him.
Now the Lord doth this--
1. To seal up a sinful peoples destruction. Elis sons hearkened not, because the
Lord would slay them (1Sa 2:25).
2. To manifest His own power and sovereignty in maintaining a small handful,
ofttimes a few single persons, a Moses, a Samuel, two witnesses against the
opposing rage of a hardened multitude.
Use--
1. Let men, constant, sincere, upright in the ways of God, especially in difficult
times, know what they are to expect from many, yea, the most of the
generation, whose good they intend, and among whom they live; opposition
and fighting is like to be their lot; and that not only it will be so because of
mens lusts, corruptions, prejudices; but also it shall be so, from Gods
righteous judgments against a stubborn people; they harden their hearts that
it may be so, to compass their ends; and God hardens their hearts that it
shall be so to bring about His aims; they will do it to execute their revenge
upon others, they shall do it to execute Gods vengeance upon themselves.
 2. Let men set upon opposition make a diligent inquiry, whether there be no
hand in the business, but their own? whether their counsels be not leavened
with the wrath of God, and their thoughts mixed with a spirit of giddiness,
and themselves carried on to their own destruction? (J. Owen, D. D.)

The ministry of the Word

1. A ministry of Divine authority.
2. A ministry of Divine revelations.
3. A ministry of wise discrimination.
4. A ministry often opposed by those to whom it is sent.
5. A ministry requiring much courage.
6. A ministry which will be Divinely vindicated.
7. A ministry which lifts up Christ as the Saviour of men. (W. Whale.)

The power of rebuke

I. THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY INCLUDES AN OFFICE OF COMMINATION. If the

messengers of heaven, when among the outcasts of mankind, who, in ignorance of
God, have gone astray from virtue, speak more of virtue than of wrath; when they
stand among those who, being well informed in matters of religion, use the grace of
the Gospel to palliate their vices, the messages of wrath must be most on their lips.

II. The tendency of the Christian ministry is to move down from its remedial
functions to become an office of delectation.
1. Furnishing intellectual entertainment; uttering, as matters of gorgeous
eloquence, the appalling verities of eternal justice. Nature forbids such an
incongruity, and the renovating Spirit refuses to yield the energy of His
power to the sway of a mere minister of public recreation.
2. Affording spiritual entertainment; by exhibiting the conceits and ingenuities
of mystic exposition; by painting in high colours the honours and privileges
of the believer, and allowing professors of all sorts to appropriate the
fulsome description; or by pealing out thunders of wrath against distant
adversaries, rather than at the impure, unjust, rapacious and malicious
around.

III. IT BEHOVES PREACHERS TO BEWARE OF THE INDURATING EFFECT OF

ACCUSTOMED PHRASES AND FORMS OF WORDS. Such conventional phrases conceal
from the mind the ideas they should convey; hence preachers should continually
endeavour to break up the mental incrustations which are always spreading
themselves over the sensitive surface of the sails. This is especially necessary in
reference to matters wherein the drowsy formalities of language tend directly to
augment the stupefying influence that belongs to all vicious indulgences.

IV. It is a pressing duty of the minister of religion to maintain in vigour the spirit
he needs as the reprover of sin and guardian of virtue. It is easy to teach the articles
of belief, to illustrate the branches of Christian ethics, to proclaim the Divine mercy,
to meet and assuage the fears of the feeble and sorrows of the afflicted. But to keep
in full activity the power of rebuke, demands rare qualities. To speak efficaciously of
the holiness and justice of God, and of its future consequences; to speak in modesty,
tenderness, and power of the approaching doom of the impenitent, must be left to
those whose spirits have had much communion with the dread Majesty on high.

V. Three indispensable qualifications for the vigorous exercise of the Christian

minister for this power of rebuke.
1. Such a conviction of the truth of Christianity as shall render him proof against
assaults from within and without. Fatal to his influence as a refuter of sin
must be a lurking scepticism in the preachers breast. The infection of his
own doubts will pass into the heart of the hearer, and will serve to harden
each transgressor in his impenitence.
2. A resolute loyalty to the Divine administration. Such loyalty will break
through the mazes of much sophistry, will support the servant of God when
assailed by more fallacies than he can at the moment refute, and enable him
to cleave under all obloquies and embarrassments to what he inwardly
knows must in the end prove the better cause.
3. An unaffected and sensitive compassion towards his fellow men. The end of
all reproof is mercy. If there were no redemption at hand, it were idle or
cruel to talk of judgment. (Isaac Taylor, LL. D.)

Ministerial obligations
My text refers us to three distinct characters of the pastoral office--to be the
servant of God; to be the mouth of God; and to be the guide whom the people shall
follow. And these involve three several duties, in which the pastors own personal
responsibility is closely linked with the solemn responsibilities of his office--that of
preparing his own heart to seek the Lord; that of discriminating the precious from
the vile in his instruction and conversation; and that of guarding himself and his
flock against all declension after the ways of them who depart from God.

I. A DIVINE ADMONITION AS TO PERSONAL RELIGION. To stand before, implies the

office of one who stands in the presence of his sovereign, ready to execute His
commands. It is the highest order of dignity and of service to which a subject can be
called. He enjoys the privilege of constant access to the presence of majesty, a
knowledge of the high affairs of government, and a share in the splendours of
courtly life. Such is the relation in which a minister of true religion stands to the
court of Heaven, in order that he may bring near a people prepared for the Lord, to
whom, when they have received his message, he may say, Ye are a chosen
generation, etc. See, then, the unspeakable importance of personal religion in one
who shall perform such a ministration. He that would cause the people to hear the
words of God must habitually listen to the voice of God in his own conscience, as
often as he turns aside--and who is not conscious of too frequently doing so?--
saying, If thou return, then will I bring thee again, and thou shalt stand before Me.
And then with confidence--the confidence of one who comes from a nearer access to
the throne on high--he may go forth to his charge, and say, having the words of God
in his mouth, Turn ye, turn ye at My reproof.
 II. A DIVINE DIRECTION. If thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt
be as My mouth. The prophet may seem to have been charged with having, in some
respect, mistaken his duty. In the view he took of his personal trials he had lost sight
of the principal object of his ministry, namely, to cause the precious to come out
from the vile. In times like the present, there may be an undue regard to the trials of
the Church at large. From a just and pious jealousy of the dangers to which it is
exposed, or by which it has been affected as a community, we may lose sight of the
especial end of our ministry. In our reasonable remonstrance with unreasonable
foes, and from just indignation at the treachery or declension of pretended friends,
we may overlook the faithful use of the word for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness. In our zeal to mark an open enemy, or to discriminate
an unsound adherent, we may forget the true flock of Christ; or in our eager
cooperation with mere defenders of our Church polity, we may put aside from our
own view, and obscure from the view of others, the real distinction which must ever
be admitted in the doctrine of visible Church communion between the precious and
the vile.

III. A DIVINE CAUTION: Let them return unto thee; but return not thou unto
them. No object or consideration must induce the prophet to identify himself with
their apostasy: he must take a decidedly contrary course. He must so order his life
and conversation, his doctrines and his admonitions, that those who desire to return
unto God may see in him the way and pattern. In this, as in every age of the Church,
no inconsiderable portion of those who profess themselves its members are yet
under the influence of that love of the world which is opposed to the love of God. To
counteract the tendency of this spirit, rests greatly with the clergy. It is their duty
more strictly to define the Christian character by precept and example, and more
clearly to exhibit Christian truth, than to allow those who pursue so inconsistent a
course to indulge in vain confidence as to their religious state. The clergy at least
ought to define the boundary between the world and the people of God. If they are
negligent in doing so, it cannot but be obscured. If they pass the boundary, they lead
many across it who probably never return. The clergy are preeminently the salt of
the earth; but if the salt have lost its savour, woe to the Church, and woe to them
by whom the offence cometh; Let them return unto Thee; but return not Thou
unto them. (W. Wilson, D. D.)

A ministry of discrimination

I. What is supposed.
1. The vast importance and responsibility of the work assigned to ministers with
a view to the welfare of their people. Ministers are to take the precious from
the vile; to separate the wheat from the weeds; to distinguish the dross from
the gold.
2. That there are some essential distinctions between right and wrong, good and
evil, truth and error.
3. That there is a standard of truth. As the office of a judge is not to make but
declare the law, so that of a minister is not to burden the ears of people with
his own doubtful disputations, but to declare the whole counsel of God.
4. That these characters are closely intermingled, and that there is a great
 disinclination in mankind to have the truth fully told them, and to be
brought to the decisive test.
5. That it is of the utmost consequence to both parties that the separation should
be made. Take forth the precious from the vile, and the most advantageous
results will immediately accrue to each.
(1) Is it not desirable to the children of God to know that they are so--that
they are heirs according to the promise--that they are precious in His
sight and honourable?
(2) If the distinction be valuable to the precious, it would be scarcely less
advantageous to the vile themselves. To be robbed of the cloak of a false
profession would be no loss, for we know it does them no honour and
brings them no peace.

II. What is demanded of ministers with a view to this solemn discrimination?

1. A plain and decisive exhibition of the truth as it is in Jesus. We are to contend
earnestly for the faith--to vindicate it from the blasphemies of the infidel, the
perversions of the worldling, the mistakes of the Pharisee, and the
corruptions of the Antinomian.
2. A fearless application of Scripture truth.
(1) To the careless and thoughtless.
(2) To the apostate.
(3) To the young.
(4) To the aged.
(5) To the precious.
(6) To the vile.
3. To point ourselves and our hearers to the only Agent who can make the Word
effectual.

III. WHAT IS PROMISED? Thou shalt be as My mouth. The accredited and

approved servant--to speak in accordance with His will--be the organ of His
clemency--all His authenticated messages crowned with success. Mighty and blessed
such a ministry. (S. Thodey.)

I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee.--

Divine assistance promised to Church governors

I. Gods qualification of Jeremy to be an overseer in His Church. I will make thee

a brazen fenced wall.
1. A wall implies enclosure. God did not think fit to leave His Church without
enclosure, open like a common, for every beast to feed upon and devour it.
Commons are always bare, pilled, and shorn, as the sheep that feed upon
them. And our experience has shown us, as soon as the enclosures of our
Church were plucked up, what a herd of cattle of all sorts invaded it. It
contained, as commons usually do, both multitude and mixture.
2. A wall imports fortification. No city can be secure without it. It is, as it were, a
 standing inanimate army; a continual defence without the help of defenders.
Something must encircle the Church, that will both discriminate and protect
it. And the altar must be railed in, not only for distinction, but defence. And
such a thing is a church governor, a well-qualified bishop. Which title that he
may make good and verify, there are required in him these three
qualifications--
(1) Courage, which leads the way to all the rest. A wall, nay, a brazen wall,
will not sometimes prove a defence if it is not well manned. Every
churchman should have the spirit of a soldier.
(2) Innocence and integrity. A brazen wall admits of no cracks and flaws.
The enemies of the Church may fear your power, but they dread your
innocence. It is this that stops the open sepulchre, and beats back the
accusation upon the teeth of the accuser.
(3) Authority; it is to be a fenced, as well as a brazen wall. The inward
firmness of one must be corroborated by the exterior munitions of the
other. Courage is like a giant with his hands tied, if it has not authority
and jurisdiction to draw forth and actuate its resolution.

II. The opposition that the Church governor, thus qualified, will be sure to meet
with in the administration of his office.
1. They will assault their governors with seditious preaching and praying. To
preach Christ out of contention is condemned by the apostle; but to preach
contention instead of Christ, certainly is most abominable.
2. Their second way of fighting against the officers of the Church will be by
railing and libels.
3. They may oppose the governors and government of the Church by open force:
and this is fighting indeed; but yet the genuine, natural consequent of the
other: he that rails, having opportunity, would rebel; for it is the same malice
in a various posture, in a different way of eruption; and as he that rebels
shows what he can do, so he that rails does as really demonstrate what he
would do.

III. That, as in all fights, we see THE ISSUE AND SUCCESS, which is exhibited to us
in these words, But they shall not prevail against thee.
1. Moral causes will afford but a moral certainty but so far as the light of this
shines, it gives us a good prospect into our future success. For which is most
likely to prevail, a force marshalled into order, or disranked and scattered
into confusion? A force united and compacted with the strength of
agreement, or a force shrivelled into parties, and crumbled into infinite
subdivisions?
2. But besides the arguments of reason, we have the surer ground of Divine
revelation. God has engaged His assistance, made Himself a party, and
obliged His omnipotence as a second in the cause. (R. South, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 16
 JER 16:14-15
I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers.

Larger providences
Thus epochs are made; thus new dates are introduced into human history; thus
the less is merged in the greater; the little judgment is lost in the great judgment,
and the mercy that once appeared to be so great seems to be quite small compared
with the greater mercy that has healed and blessed our life. This is the music, and
this is the meaning of the passage. What is experience worth? It is worth exactly
what we make of it; it will not follow us, and insist upon being looked at and
estimated and applied; it is, so to say, either a negative or a positive possession; we
can make it either, according to the exercise of our will and inclination. How often
we vow not to forget our experience; yet it is stolen from us in the night time, and we
awake in the morning empty-handed, empty-minded, beggared to the uttermost
point of destitution. We write our vows in water; who can make any impression on
the ocean? whole fleets have passed over the sea, not a track is left behind where the
waves were sundered; they roll together again, as if with emulous energy they seek
to obliterate the transient mark of the intrusive ships. It is so with ourselves. Let no
man think he has sounded the whole depth of Gods providence in this matter of
punishment or of benediction and blessing. History has recorded nothing yet;
history is getting its pen ready for the real registration of Divine ministry in human
affairs. No judgment has yet befallen the world worth naming, compared with the
judgment that may at any moment be revealed. Do not mock God; do not defy Him
or tempt Him: what you have had is but the sting of a whip; He could smite you with
a thong of scorpions. Rather say, God pity us, God spare us; remember that we are
but dust; a wind that cometh for a little time and then passeth away: smite us not in
Thine hot anger, O loving One; in wrath remember mercy. We do not know what
plagues God could send upon the earth. Be not presumptuous against the Divine
government; do not say, God cannot do this, or send down that judgment; if He
forbear, it is because His mercy restrains, not because His judgment is impotent. By
a natural accommodation of the passage, we may be led into quite another line of
thinking and illustration: Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no
more be said . . . but; and between these words we may put in our own experience,
and our own commentaries upon life and destiny. Thus: Behold, the days come that
it shall no more be said that we have a Creator, but we have a Redeemer. Men shall
not talk about creation. There are some men who are content to talk about one
infinitesimal speck of creation; they have not learned the higher philosophy, the
fuller wisdom, the riper, vaster law. They are gathering what they can with their
hands; they are first the admirers, secondly the devotees, and thirdly the victims of
the microscope. They have made an idol of that piece of glazed brass; they who mock
the heathen for worshipping ivory and stone and tree and sun, may perhaps be
creating a little idol of their own. Behold, the days come when men shall no longer
talk about the body, but about the soul. It is time we had done with physiology. If we
have not mastered the body, what poor scholars we have been! And yet how far men
are from having mastered it in the sense of being able to heal it! Behold, the days
come, saith the Lord, when men shall no more talk about human deliverance, or
deliverance from human extremity, but they shall talk about liberation from diabolic
captivity; they shall say they have been loosed from their sins, they have been
disimprisoned and set at liberty as to the dominion of their passions and desires and
appetences; they shall speak about the higher emancipation, and everywhere men
shall be eloquent about the Deliverer who drew the soul from Egyptian and
Chaldean tyranny, and gave it liberty and joy in the Holy Ghost. The whole subject
of human speech shall be changed; men shall not talk about Egypt, but about
Canaan; they shall not talk about the law, but about the higher law; they shall not
talk about the outward, but about the inward. Thus dates are introduced into human
history. The time will come when men will not speak about being born, but about
being born again. Your birthday was your deathday,--or only the other aspect of it.
Date your born-again day from the beginning, the morning of your immortality.
Drop the lower theme, seize the higher; dismiss the noise, and entreat the music to
take full possession of your nature. Behold, the day is come, saith the Lord, when
men shall no longer talk about prayer, but about praise. The old prayer days will be
over; they were needful as part of our experience and education, but the time will
come when prayer will be lost in praise; the time will come when work will be so
easy as to have in it the throb and joy of music; the time will come when it will be
easy to live, for life will carry no burden, and know the strain of no care; the days of
anxiety will be ended, solicitude will be a forgotten word, and the companionship of
God and His angels shall constitute our heaven. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Gods care over His people

A crew of explorers penetrate far within the Arctic circles in search of other
expeditions that had gone before them--gone and never returned. Failing to find the
missing men, and yet unwilling to abandon hope, they leave supplies of food
carefully covered with stones, on some prominent headlands, with the necessary
intimations graven for safety on plates of brass. If the original adventurers survive,
and on their homeward journey, faint, yet pursuing, fall in with these treasures, at
once hidden and revealed, the food, when found, will seem to those famished men
the smaller blessing. The proof which the food supplies that their country cares for
them is sweeter than the food. So the proof that God cares for us is placed beyond a
doubt; the unspeakable gift of His Son to be our Saviour should melt any dark
suspicion to the contrary from our hearts. (W. Arnot.)

JER 16:16
I will send for many fishers;. . .I will send for many hunters.

Fishers and hunters

These refer to the successive invaders of Judea. As to hunters, see Gen 10:9.
Nimrod, the mighty hunter, the first founder of an empire on conquest. The
Chaldees were famous in hunting, as the Egyptians, the other enemy of Judea, were
in fishing.
(1) Fishers expresses the ease of their victory over the Jews as that of the
angler over fishes.
(2) Hunters indicates the keenness of their pursuit of them into every cave
and nook. It is remarkable the same image of fishers and fish is used
 in a good sense of the Jews restoration, implying that just as their
enemies were employed by God to take them in hand of destruction, so
the same shall be employed for their restoration (Eze 47:9-10). So,
spiritually, those once enemies by nature (fishermen many of them
literally) were employed by God to be the heralds of salvation, catching
men for life (Mat 4:19). (A. R. Fausset, M. A.)

Verses 18. And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin
double.

The double effect of sin

We may illustrate the evil of sin by the following comparison. Suppose I am going
along a street, and were to dash my head through a large pane of glass, what harm
would I receive? You would be punished for breaking the glass. Would that be all
the harm I should receive? Your head will be cut by the glass. Yes! and so it is with
sin. If you break Gods laws, you shaft be punished for breaking them; and your soul
is hurt by the very act of breaking them. (F. Inglis.)

JER 16:19-21
O Lord, my strength, and my fortress.

What God is to His people

One of the Puritans was accustomed to describe prayer as the flight of the lonely
man to the only God. There is such prayer here. This man is very lonely. He is like a
speckled bird, set on by all the birds of the flock. He looks right and left, but there is
no man to care for his soul; then he addresses himself to God in these touching
words:

I. MY STRENGTH. The Psalmist spoke of God as the strength of his life. The Apostle
of love said that little children could overcome the world, because He that was in
them was greater and stronger than he that was in the world. God is the strength of
my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

II. MY STRONGHOLD. A stronghold is what holds strongly. A keep is that which

keeps. We keep Gods deposit, which is His Gospel: God keeps our deposit, which is
ourselves. And none, man nor devil, can snatch us away.

III. MY REFUGE IN THE DAY OF AFFLICTION. The night darkening the sky drives the
chicks to the hens wings; so affliction drives us to God. In the shadow of Thy wings
will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. Do you wish to know Him
thus? See that you do not burden yourself by your endeavours. Be still and know.
Enter into the still and peaceful land of inward spiritual fellowship. Commune with
your own heart. Be a child before Him, innocent, unaffected, unrestrained. (F. B.
Meyer, B. A.)
Safe from trouble
Travellers tell us that they who are at the top of the Alps can see great showers of
rain fall under them, but not one drop of it falls upon them. They who have God for
their portion are in a high tower, and thereby safe from all troubles and showers. (G.
Swinnock.)

The Gentiles shall come unto Thee from the ends of the earth.--
Heathenism and its prospects

I. THE CONFESSION WHICH THE GENTILE NATIONS ARE HERE PROPHETICALLY

DESCRIBED TO MAKE. Surely our fathers have inherited lies, etc. Need I say, that the
produce of lies must be vanity and things wherein there is no profit? It may be
granted, that if we only esteem things by the partial and short-sighted standard of
this present world, falsehood may sometimes bring its gain; there are pleasures of
falsehood and gains of falsehood. But then the pleasures of sin are but for a
moment; the day is shortly coming, when falsehood shall be found as a rope of sand,
as a quicksand on which any structure may have been based; and therefore if it be
true that the heritage of the heathen is a heritage of lies, it follow that it is a
heritage of vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.

II. THE PURPOSES OF GOD RESPECTING THESE IDOLATERS. You have here the
repetition of Gods purpose. He is not satisfied with stating once, I will cause them
to know, but He adds a second time, I will cause them to know My hand and My
might; and they shall know that I am the Lord. There is a distinctness and a
certainty upon this matter which is most refreshing to a humane and considerate
mind. The intimation of this design is here presented to us as the distinct purpose of
God. Therefore--since man admits that he has inherited lies, since he sees that he
is destitute of any resources in himself, and since the allotment which father has
given to son during many an elapsing century, since all the property that could
descend from sire to son as ages rolled away was only falsehood, vanity, and things
wherein there is no profit--since all that this accumulated mass of human skill and
industry bestowed, was based on falsehood--now that the confession is made,--I
will cause this people to know My hand and My might. And how was the hand of
God to be known? Was it to be the hand of power, crushing to perdition the sinner
whose heart was disaffected and his intellect degraded? No; He was to stretch out
His hand to heal and to save. There is no power so great, and no power so beautiful
in nature, as this hand of God, when it is stretched out to heal. There are needful
accompaniments of this wonderful accomplishment of Divine mercy and love to
man. There are the ministers of His Gospel. By the instrumentality of these human
communications, does the Spirit of God act; and when therefore God says, And they
shall know that I am Jehovah, it is meant that to these nations shall be sent the
records of the Scriptures; that to them shall go the heralds of peace; that among
them shall the voice of mercy be heard; that amidst their thronged population shall
the accents of salvation come forth, from lips which He has touched with a coal from
the altar, and made to be the bearers of kind sayings to their poor suffering and
degraded sinners. This is Gods declaration.

III. The generous consolation which the mind of the prophet derives from this
knowledge of Gods gracious design in favour of these Gentiles. O Lord, my
strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction. When beat down
by sorrow, when prostrate in calamity, when standing amidst the decay of national
comforts, and amidst the manifestation of Gods righteous judgments, he turned for
rest to God; God was his strength, God was his fortress God opened to him an
asylum whither the wicked could not follow him, whither Satan could not follow
him. (G. T. Noel, M. A.)

Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?--
God-making
Is not that impossible? From a certain point of view it is utterly impossible, and
yet from another point of view it is the very thing men are doing every day in the
week. Questions cannot always be answered literally. There may be a moral
explanation under the literary definition. Who does not make himself gods as he
needs them?--not visible god, otherwise they might bring down upon themselves the
contempt of observers, and the contempt of their very makers; but ambitions,
purposes, policies, programmes, methods of procedure,--all these may be looked
upon as refuges and defences and hidden sanctuaries into which the soul would go
for defence and protection when the tempest rages loudly, and fiercely. A subtle
thing is this god-making. Every man is at times a polytheist--that is, a possessor or a
worshipper of many gods. The Lord could never bring the mind of His people
directly and lovingly to the reception of the One Deity. It would seem to be the last
thought of man that there can be, by metaphysical necessity, only one God. There
cannot be a divided Deity. Yet it is this very miracle that the imagination of man has
performed. He has set all round the household innumerable idols which he takes
down according to the necessity of the hour. He knows he is intellectually foolish,
morally the victim of self-delusion, practically an utterly unwise and impracticable
man; yet somehow, by force not to be put into equivalent words, he will do this again
and again, yea he takes to himself power to fill up vacancies, so that if any clay god
or imagined idol has failed him he puts another in the place of the one that did not
fulfil his prayer. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 17

JER 17:1
The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond.

The deep seated character of sin

I. WHAT IS SIN? If you ask the Pharisee of old what sin was--Well, he said, it is
eating without washing your hands; it is drinking wine without having first of all
strained out the gnats, for those insects are unclean, and if you should swallow any
of them they will render you defiled. Many in these days have the same notion, with
a variation. We have read of a Spanish bandit, who, when he confessed before his
father confessor, complained that one sin hung with peculiar weight upon his soul
that was of peculiar atrocity. He had stabbed a man on a Friday, and a few drops of
the blood of the wound had fallen on his lips, by which he had broken the precepts
of holy Church, in having tasted animal food on a fast day. The murder did not seem
to arouse in his conscience any feeling of remorse at all--not one atom--he would
have done the same tomorrow; but an accidental violation of the canons of mother
Church excited all his fears. Singular, indeed, are the ideas which many men have of
transgression. But such is not Gods view of sin. Sin is a want of conformity to the
will of God; sin is disobedience to Gods command; sin is a forgetfulness of the
obligations of the relation which exists between the creature and the Creator. This is
the very essence of sin. Injustice to my fellow creature is truly sin, but its essence lies
in the fact that it is sin against God, who constituted the relation which I have
violated. It is a great and intolerable wrong that, being created by God, we yet refuse
to yield to His will. It is right that He who is so good to us should have our love: it is
sin that, living upon Gods goodness, we do not return to Him our hearts affection.
It is right that, being sustained by Divine beneficence from day to day, we should
give to Him constant thankfulness; but, being so sustained, we do not thank Him,
and herein lies the very soul of sin. Now, in the light of this truth, let me ask the
believer to humble himself very greatly on account of sin. That I have not loved my
God with all my heart; that I have not trusted Him with all my confidence; that I
have not given to Him the glory due unto His name; that I have not acted as a
creature should do, much less as a new creature is bound to do; that, receiving
priceless mercies, I have made so small a return--let me confess this in dust and
ashes, and then bless the name of the Atoner who, by His precious blood, hath put
even this away, so that it shall not be mentioned against us any more forever.

II. HOW IS THE FIXEDNESS OF SIN WHICH IS DECLARED IN THE TEXT PROVED? The
prophet tells us that mans sinfulness is as much fixed in him as an inscription
carved with an iron pen in granite. How is this fixedness proved? It is proved in two
ways in the text, namely, that it is graven upon the table of their heart, and secondly,
upon the horns of their altar. It clearly proves how deeply evil is fixed in man, when
we reflect that sin is in the very heart of man. When a sin becomes intertwisted with
the roots of the affections, you cannot uproot it; when the leprosy eats deep into the
heart of humanity, who can expel it? It becomes henceforth a hopeless case, so far as
human power is concerned. Since sin reigns and rules in mans affections, it is deep
ingrained indeed. The second proof the prophet gives of the infixedness of human
sin is, that it was written on the horns of their altars. These people sinned by setting
up idols and departing from Jehovah: we sin in quite another way. When you get the
unconverted man to be religious--which is a very easy thing--what form does the
religion take? Frequently he prefers that which most gratifies his taste, his ears, or
his sight. If your heart is touched, that is the worship of God; if your heart is drawn
to God, that is the service of God; but if it is the mere ringing of the words, and the
falling of the periods, and the cadence of the voice that you regard, why, you do not
worship God, but on the very horns of your altars are your sins. You are bringing a
delight of your own sensuous faculties and putting that in the place of true faith and
love, and then saying to your soul, I have pleased God, whereas you have only
pleased yourself. When men become serious in religion, and look somewhat to the
inward, they then defile the Lords altar by relying upon their own righteousness.
Man is much like a silkworm, he is a spinner and weaver by nature. A robe of
righteousness is wrought out for him, but he will not have it; he will spin for himself,
and like the silkworm, he spins, and spins, and he only spins himself a shroud. All
the righteousness that a sinner can make will only be a shroud in which to wrap up
his soul, his destroyed soul, for God will cast him away who relies upon the works of
the law. In other ways men stain the horns of their altars. Some do it by
carelessness. Those lips must be depraved indeed which even in prayer and praise
still continue to sin. The horns of our altars are defiled by hypocrisy. You may have
seen two fencers practising their art, and noticed how they seem to be seeking each
others death; how they strike and thrust as though they were earnestly contending
for life; but after the show is over, they sit down and shake hands, and are good
friends. Often so it is in your prayers and confessions; you will acknowledge your
sins, and profess to hate them, and make resolutions against them, but it is all
outward show--fencing, not real fighting--and when the fencing bout is over, the
soul shakes hands with its old enemy, and returns to its former ways of sin. Oh, this
foul hypocrisy is a staining of the horns of the altar with a vengeance!

III. WHAT IS THE CAUSE OF THIS? First, we must never forget the fall. We are none
of us today as God made us. The human judgment is out of balance, it uses false
weights and false measures. It puts darkness for light and light for darkness. The
human will is no longer supple, as it should be, to the Divine will; our neck is
naturally as an iron sinew, and will not bow to Jehovahs golden sceptre. Our
affections also are twisted away from their right bent. Whereas we ought to have
been seeking after Jesus, and casting out the tendrils of our affections towards Him,
we cling to anything but the right, and climb upon anything but the true. The whole
head is sick, and the whole heart is faint. Human nature is like a magnificent
temple all in ruins. In addition, however, to our natural depravity, there come in, in
the second place, our habits of sin. Well may sin be deeply engraven in the man who
has for twenty, forty, fifty, or perhaps seventy years, continued in his iniquity. Put
the wool into the scarlet dye, and if it lie there but a week, the colour will be so
ingrained in the fabric that you cannot get it out; but if you keep it there for so many
years, how shall you possibly be able to bleach it? You must recollect, in addition to
this, that sin is a most clinging and defiling thing. Who does not know that if a man
sins once, it is much easier to sin that way the next time, nay, that he is much more
inclinable towards that sin? I may add that the prince of the power of the air, the evil
spirit, takes care, so far as he can, to add to all this. He chimes in with every
suggestion of fallen nature. He will never let the tinder lie idle for want of sparks,
nor the ground lie waste for want of the seeds of thorns and thistles.

IV. WHAT IS THE CURE FOR ALL THIS? Sin thus stamped into us, thus ingrained
into our nature, can it ever be got out? It must be got out, or we cannot enter
heaven, for there shall by no means enter within those pearly gates anything that
defileth. We must be cleansed and purified, but how can it be done? It can only be
done by supernatural process. Your only help lies in Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
who became the Son of Man that He might lift the sons of men up from their natural
degradation and ruin. How does Jesus Christ then take away these deeply-inscribed
lines of sin from human nature? I answer, He does it first in this way. If our heart be
like granite, and sin be written on it, Christs ready method is to take that heart
away. A new heart also will I give you, and a right spirit will I put within you. Next
to that, inasmuch as the guiltiness of sin is as permanent as sin itself, Jesus Christ is
able to take our guilt away. His dying upon the Cross is the means by which the
blackest sinner out of hell can be made white as the angels of God, and that, too, in a
single instant. The Holy Spirit also comes in: the new nature being given and sin
being forgiven, the Holy Ghost comes and dwells in us, as a Prince in his palace, as a
God in his temple. Do I hear any say, Then, I would to God that I may experience
the Divine process--the new nature given, which is regeneration, the washing away
of sin, which constitutes pardon and justification, and the indwelling of the Holy
Ghost, which insures final perseverance and complete sanctification. Oh, how can I
have these precious things? Thou mayst have them, whoever thou mayst be, by
simply believing in Jesus. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The iron pen recording sins

When Bishop Latimer was on trial for his life, a trial which ended in his being
burned at the stake, he at first answered without duly considering how much a
single unguarded word might cost him. Presently he heard the pen of a secretary,
who was seated behind the tapestry, taking down every expression which fell from
his lips. It would be well for us all to remember that there is a pen now recording
behind the curtain of the skies, our every evil deed and word and thought and that
for all these things God will bring us into judgment. The iron pen suggests two
thoughts.
1. The record which it makes is deep and indelible. So, also, with the items which
are filling up page after page in the book of Gods remembrance. A wealthy
English landlord was once guilty of an act of tyrannical injustice to a poor,
helpless widow, who rented a small cottage from him. The widows son,
whose blood boiled with indignation when he witnessed this, grew up to be a
distinguished painter, and he portrayed the scene, and placed it where the
eye of the cruel landlord must rest upon it. When the hard-hearted oppressor
saw it, he turned pale, and trembled, and offered any sum for it, that the
terrible picture might be destroyed.
2. The iron pen with its diamond point does not wear out. Be the record of ones
sins as long as it may, that record will assuredly be made. It is a moment of
profound interest in the life of an antiquarian, when he drags forth from the
sands of Egypt some ancient obelisk, on which the iron pen has engraved, so
many ages ago, the portraits of those who, in the shadowy past, acted their
part on the crowded theatre of a bustling world. This, however, is as nothing,
compared with the disclosures of that day, when, from the stillness and
silence of the grave, shall be brought out into the dazzling light of noon,
tablets covered with the sculptured history of the soul; a history which no
power nor skill can then erase. And thus the prophet would teach us, by the
striking figure of the iron pen with its diamond point, that sin is no trifling
thing; that one single violation of the Divine law does not pass unnoticed;
and that they who die with the guilt of sins unrepented of, and unpardoned,
resting on their souls, have nothing to expect but the outpouring of Gods
terrible wrath. Vainly do we apologise for our shortcomings, on the ground
of our natural bias to sin; or that the power of temptation proved too strong
for us to resist. Forewarned, we ought to have been forearmed. Alas! who can
contemplate his own sins against light and knowledge, against the strivings
of conscience and the earnest pleadings of the Holy Spirit; who can count up
his broken vows, and his contradictions of solemn confessions before God,
and not tremble at the thought of the black catalogue which the iron pen has
 been writing down against him! When the great plague raged in London, in
1666, it was common to write over every infected house, Lord, have mercy
upon us! Should the same inscription now be made over every abode where
the plague of sin has entered, which of our habitations would not require to
be thus labelled? (J. N. Norton, D. D.)

The inward registrar

Manton says: If conscience speaketh not, it writeth; for it is not only a witness,
but a register, and a book of record: The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron,
and the point of a diamond (Jer 17:1). We know not what conscience writeth, being
occupied and taken up with carnal vanities, but we shall know hereafter, when the
books are opened (Rev 20:12). Conscience keepeth a diary, and sets down
everything. This book, though it be in the sinners keeping, cannot be razed and
blotted out. Well, then, a sleepy conscience will not always sleep; if we suffer it not
to awaken here, it will awaken in hell; for the present it sleepeth in many, in regard
of motion, check, or smiting, but not in regard of notice and observation. Let those
who forget their sins take note of this. There is a chiel within you taking notes, and
he will publish all where all will hear it. Never say, nobody will see me, for you will
see yourself, and your conscience will turn kings evidence against you. What a
volume Mr. Recorder Conscience has written already! How many blotted pages he
has in store, to be produced upon my trial. O Thou who alone canst erase this
dreadful handwriting, look on me in mercy, as I now look on Thee by faith. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Sin ineradicable
The mind of man has been compared to a white sheet of paper. Now it is like a
white sheet of paper in this, that whatever we write upon it, whether with distinct
purpose or no, nay, every drop of ink we let fall upon it, makes an abiding mark, a
mark which we cannot rub out, without much injury to the paper; unless, indeed,
the mark has been very slight from the first, and we set about erasing it while it is
fresh. In one of the grandest tragedies of our great English poet, there is a scene
which, when one reads it, is enough to make ones blood run cold. A woman, whose
husband had made himself King of Scotland by means of several murders, and who
had been the prompter and partner of his crimes, is brought in, while in her sleep,
and continually rubbing her hands, as though she were washing them, crying ever
and anon, Yet heres a spot . . . What! will these hands neer be clean?. . .heres the
smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. In
these words there is an awful power of truth. We can stain our souls; we can dye
them, and double dye them, and triple dye them; we can dye them all the colours of
halls rainbow; but we cannot wash them white. All the perfumes of Arabia will not
sweeten them, all the fountains of the great deep will not wash one little spot out of
them. The usurping Queen of Scotland had been guilty of murder; and the stain of
blood, it has been very generally believed, cannot be washed out. But it is not the
stain of blood alone; every stain soils the soul; and none of them can be washed out.
Every little speck of ink eats into the paper; every sin, however small we may deem
it, eats into the soul. If we try to write over it, we make a deeper blot; if we try to
scratch it out, the next letters which we write on the spot are blurred. Therefore is it
of such vast importance that we should be very careful of what we write. In the
tragedy which I was quoting just now, the queen says, Whats done cannot be
undone. This amounts to the same thing as what I have written, in the sense in
which I am now calling upon you to consider these words. Whats done cannot be
undone. You know that this is true. You know you cannot push back the wheels of
time, and make yesterday come again, so as to do over afresh what you did wrongly
then. That which you did yesterday, yesterday will keep: you cannot change it; you
cannot make it less or greater; if it was crooked, you cannot make it straight. You
cannot turn back the leaves in the book of life, and read the lesson you have grabbed
over again. That which you have written, you have written: that which you have
done, you have done; and you cannot unwrite or undo it. (J. C. Hare.)

Sin leaves its marks

Even pardoned sins must leave a trace in heavy self-reproach. You have heard of
the child whose father told him that whenever he did anything wrong a nail should
be driven into a post, and when he did what was good he might pull one out. There
were a great many nails driven into the post, but the child tried very hard to get the
post cleared of the nails by striving to do right. At length he was so successful in his
struggles with himself that the last nail was drawn out of the post. The father was
just about to praise the child, when, stooping down to kiss him, he was startled to
see tears fast rolling down his face. Why, my boy, why do you cry? Are not all the
nails gone from the post? Oh yes! the nails are all gone, but the marks are left. That
is a familiar illustration, but dont despise it because of that. It illustrates the
experience of many a grey old sire, who, looking upon the traces of his old sins, as
they yet rankle in his conscience, would give a hundred worlds to live himself back
into young manhood, that he might obliterate the searing imprint of its follies. Have
you never heard of fossil rain? In the stratum of the old red sandstone there are to
be seen the marks of showers of rain which fell centuries and centuries ago, and they
are so plain and perfect that they clearly indicate the way the wind was drifting, and
in what direction the tempest slanted from the sky. So may the tracks of youthful
sins be traced upon the tablet of the life when it has merged into old age,--tracks
which it is bitter and sad remorse to look upon, and which call forth many a bootless
longing for the days and months which are past. (A. Mursell.)

JER 17:5-8
Cursed be the man that trusteth in man.

The difference between trusting in the creature and the Creator

I. THE FOLLY AND EVIL OF TRUSTING IN MAN. To trust in man, in the sense of our
text, is to expect that from creatures which can only come from the Creator: to
confide in them, not as mere instruments, but as efficient causes; to look to them so
as to look off from God; to cleave to them so as to depart from Him.
1. Idolatrous in its principle.
2. Grovelling in its aim. It looks no higher than present good, and things
altogether unworthy of an immortal spirit.
 3. Unreasonable in its foundation. It supposes that man can do what God
cannot.
4. Destructive in its issue. He shall be like the heath in the desert,--worthless,
sapless, fruitless; he shall not see when good cometh,--shall not enjoy it;
but he shall inhabit the parched places, etc.
He shall prosper in nothing.
(1) The frustration of his projects and hopes.
(2) The melancholy state of his soul.
(3) The unhappy end of his career.

II. THE WISDOM AND BENEFIT OF TRUSTING IN THE LORD. Jehovah is his hope. He
seeks and expects his all from Him. To know, love, and enjoy Him,--behold his chief
good,--the object of his hopes,--his highest and ultimate end. Now this conduct is
the complete contrast of the other.
1. It is pious in its principles.
2. Elevated in its aim.
3. Rational in its foundation.
4. Glorious in its issue.
Blessed is the man, etc. For he shall be like a tree, etc.
(1) The success of his enterprises.
(2) The settled comfort and satisfaction of his soul.
(3) The loveliness and dignity of his character.
(4) The usefulness of his life.
(5) His eternal felicity.
Application--
1. It is a great mistake to suppose the rich and gay happy; the poor and pious
miserable.
2. An entire renunciation of creature confidence, and an unreserved dependence
on God, can alone secure the Divine favour and our own felicity. (Sketches of
Four Hundred Sermons.)

Trust-right and wrong

I. Man, as a ground of trust.

1. In what consists this dependence upon man for the salvation of the soul?
(1) In being led by the example of others to the commission of sin and
neglect of God.
(2) In looking for that rest in the creature which is only to be found in God.
(3) In depending on our own good works, in part, for our justification before
God.
(4) In taking our religion from the opinions of men, instead of the Word of
God.
(5) In resting in the means of grace.
 2. See the consequences of trusting in man. Cursed, etc. He that does so shall
be--
(1) Useless as the heath in the desert.
(2) Miserable. Shall not see when good cometh.
(3) Solitary, or forsaken of God. Shall inhabit a salt land not inhabited.
(4) Cursed by Jehovah Himself. Lord, is it I?

II. Jehovah, as a ground of trust.

1. What is meant by trusting Jehovah? With the light of this dispensation, we
may safely say it embraces dependence on the atonement of Christ; and
implies--
(1) Knowledge of it, as a fact and doctrine of Scripture.
(2) Approval of it, as adapted to our circumstances.
(3) Personal reliance on it for salvation;--a confident venture of our souls
upon it.
2. The blessedness of trusting in Jehovah.
(1) Nourishment. Planted by the waters. A Christians source of strength is
out of himself.
(2) Stability. Spreadeth out his roots.
(3) Comfort. Shall not see when heat cometh. Shall not be careful in the
year of drought.
(4) Adornment. His leaf shall be green. Beauty of the woods in early
spring. A Christian is the highest style of man (Tit 2:10; 1Pe 3:4).
(5) Fruitfulness. Neither shall cease from yielding fruit. (Edward
Thompson.)

The blessing and the curse

Two contrasted types of experience, or laws of life, are brought before us--the one
a life of trust in man, and the other a life of trust in God. These two types of
experience are contrasted with each other--not primarily, with respect to their
outward moral characteristics. The thought that our attention is first of all called to
is, that these two lives stand in a contrasted relation to God. The man who lives the
first of the two lives that are described here is represented as assuming and
maintaining an attitude of independence of God; and the man who leads the second
of these two lives is represented as living in a state of consciously recognised
dependence upon God. The one finds his resources in self; the other finds his
resources in Deity. Now these two lives are not only contrasted with each other, first
of all, as to this their essential characteristic, but they are also contrasted as to their
result in respect to the personal happiness and enjoyment which belongs to each.
The one is represented as a life lived under a curse, and the other as a life lived
under a blessing. Either your experience may be described, in the words of Paul,
The life that I live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me
and gave Himself for me; or else you are living a life of which nothing of the kind
can be affirmed, and, therefore, a life in which you are practically cut off from all
direct communication with your Maker by sin and unbelief. And if the latter be your
condition, you are at this moment, in spite of all your privileges, actually under the
ban of Gods curse and the frown of His wrath: one or other of these two cases you
may be sure is yours. You will observe that in the first sentence of our text the
prophet utters a curse on the man that trusteth in man; and he says this before he
goes on to speak of the heart departing from the living God. This trust in man
renders it impossible for the man who entertains it to trust in the living God; and it
is, I am persuaded, just because, before we can really and honestly trust in the
Father through the Son, it is absolutely necessary for us to turn our back upon all
other forms of confidence, that so many lose the enjoyment of this blissful life of
faith, and make proof in their own miserable experience of the blight and desolation
of a life of practical unbelief. We are not prepared to strip ourselves of our false
supports and of our fatal self-confidence, and thus we are not in a position to trust
ourselves to the living Father through the Son. Consider some of these various forms
of false confidence which it is absolutely necessary for us to abandon before we can
enter upon the enjoyment of this life of faith. First, if I am to live by faith in God, I
must make up my mind to have done with living by faith in the world. If I am to
trust God at all, my trust in God must be exclusive of all other confidence. Or, again,
it is possible that our confidence is reposed upon human systems--perhaps it may
even be religious systems--which, practically, are allowed to take the place that
belongs to God in the heart. How many a man one meets with who will tell us that
he has opinions of his own. That may be, my brother, but the point is whether those
opinions of yours coincide with Gods facts; for opinions of our own may be the
cause of mortal injury to us, if it should so happen that those opinions of our own
are in direct opposition to facts. Or perhaps it is that we base our confidence on the
opinions of other people. Some will tell you that they are earnest Church folks,
others will state that they are conscientious Nonconformists; some that they are
strong Catholics; some that they are decided Evangelicals. God calls upon us to trust
to Himself, and to nothing but Himself; and when we substitute for personal trust in
the living God confidence in any kind of system, whatever that system may be, or in
any mere doctrine, whatever that doctrine may be, we are cut off by that attitude of
heart from the possibilities of the life of faith. Perhaps you will ask, Well, but why
should my trust in doctrine, or my trust in ritual, or my trust in churchmanship,
preclude me from trusting in God too? Just because these things are not God; and,
as I said a few moments ago, you cannot trust God and not-God at the same time.
But we must consider yet another and still more frequent ease. There are a large
number of persons who are strangers to the life of faith--not so much because they
are wedded to any particular system on which they have based their confidence, as
because they are reluctant to renounce their confidence in themselves. Now, we
never really begin with God till we come to an end of ourselves. A considerable
number of persons trust in their own quiet, even respectability. They really cannot
see that they do anything to be distressed or alarmed about. What means all this hue
and cry--this red-hot excitement or attempt to get up a red-hot excitement--these
frequent services going on hour after hour all day long--these after meetings--these
invitations to earnest inquirers? What does it all mean? The explanation of it all lies
in the fact that you ask for an explanation. Let a man be dissatisfied with himself, let
a man have a low opinion of himself, and then he will be ready to receive good from
any kind of instrumentality, and a very commonplace sort of instrumentality will
probably be used to bring that man to the attainment of that spiritual benefit which
his ease requires. But let a man be sunk in the sleep of self-complacency--let a man
be going on leading a calm, quiet, easy, regular life; but, observe, a life which is not a
life of conscious, personal faith in God, but, on the contrary, a life of self-reliance,
and therefore a life of self-complacency; and he is as much under the power of the
great deceiver as it is possible for a man to be. And of all the undertakings which lie
before the Divine Spirit, it seems to me that the very hardest undertaking which
even God Himself can engage in is that of penetrating this impervious armour of
self-complacency, and of bringing such an one to feel his need of salvation, and to
seek and to find that salvation on Gods own terms. If these, then, are some of the
barriers to our leading a bright and happy life of faith, we shall perhaps, by Gods
blessing, be the more disposed to avoid or have done with them as we dwell for a
little on the contrast offered between these two forms of life. Let us look at these
pictures. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is;
for he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside, that spreadeth out her roots by
the river. Observe, the tree is dependent, not upon a chance shower, but upon a
perennial supply. The river is always flowing, and the tree has stretched out its roots
beside the river, and so is in a position continuously to draw for itself from the river
all the sustenance and all the moisture which it requires. Christian, if thou art a real
Christian, here is thy picture. Thy roots are struck down into God. Thou art
dependent upon no mere casual visitation of Divine mercy. It may be very advisable,
from time to time, that extraordinary efforts should be made to reach the careless
and to awaken the unconcerned, but thou, true child of God, art not dependent upon
these for thy life and health. Thou hast struck down thy roots into the river, and
there thou standest--uninjured by prevalent drought, unscathed by the fiery rays of
the sun, thy leaf green, thy fruit never failing. Is this your ease! Are you drawing
your life supplies from God? There are two ways in which the Christian grows. He
grows in personal holiness of life and conversation, but he only grows in outward
conduct, because he also grows in the knowledge mad love of God. Upon the depth
and reality of his relation with God, his moral and religious character will depend.
As God becomes more and more to him a living, bright reality, so his personal life
and character become more fully developed, and the beauty of the Lord will be
exhibited in his conduct. As the result of the establishment of these relations with
God, the supply of all the necessary wants of the soul is insured, and it has nothing
to fear from the trials and disappointments of life: the tree planted by the waters
shall not see when heat cometh. Observe, the prophet does not say that it shall be
exposed to no heat, but that it shall not be injured by it. Let us ask ourselves, Are we
growing in the knowledge of God? Are we getting fresh revelations of His character
and His ability to meet and satisfy our every spiritual need? Oh, how vast is our
spiritual wealth in Him, and how many a fear and misgiving might not be saved, if
we would only acquaint ourselves with Him and be at peace. And this leads us on to
the second feature mentioned here, it shall not be careful in the year of drought.
Happy the Christian man who realises his full privileges in this respect, and lives in
the enjoyment of them! Happy the man of business on our own Stock Exchange,
who, in the midst of all the vicissitudes of a commercial life, can leave himself calmly
in the hands of God, and while the year of drought which has so long been affecting
our own and other lands fills others with despair, enjoy a blessed immunity from
anxiety, because he knows that he is planted by the waterside. Happy the mother
who can cast all the cares of her family upon Him who careth for her, and leave them
there, not fretting and fuming when things do not go as she would wish them, not
cankered by cares or worried by troubles, but trusting Him in whom she finds the
true calm of life to draw her ever the nearer to Himself by all its changeful
circumstances! But further, the leaf of such a tree is described as being always green.
The leaf of the tree shows the nature of the tree, and just so the profession we make
should show what our religious character is. Now, it is a grand thing to have a fresh
and green profession, so to speak! Once again we read, Neither shall cease from
yielding fruit. The Christian will always be a fruitful tree, because he is planted by
the water. There will be no lack of fruitfulness when living in full communion with
God. Some of us, perhaps, have had an opportunity of looking at that wonderful and
famous vine at Hampton Court. A more beautiful sight you can scarcely see in all
England than that vine when it is covered all over with the rich, luscious clusters of
the vintage. Report attributes its extraordinary fertility to the fact that the roots,
extending for a very considerable distance, have made their way down to the
Thames, from whence it draws continuous moisture and nourishment. Such a sight
is presented to the eyes of God by the Christian who lives in God, planted by the
riverside. The fruits of good works will manifest themselves, not one here and
another there, but in a rich and lifelong vintage that will not fail. God Himself reaps
a harvest from such a life which redounds to His own glory, and is productive of
blessed consequences to mankind. Such is the one picture; now let us glance at the
other. Cursed is the man that trusteth in man. We have left the grapes of Eshcol
behind us now--we have turned our backs upon the land that flows with milk and
honey. We are making our way towards the bare stretch of arid, desert waste. The
smile of Gods favour rests no longer upon the miserable being, but the frown of His
wrath broods over him; and the thunder of Gods curse is sounding in his ear,
Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart
departeth from the Lord. Departeth from God! Ah, it all lies there! As the
satisfaction of the saint arises from the closeness of his relations with God, so the
want and wretchedness of the sinner arise from his separation from Him. The
wilderness begins where conscious fellowship with God ceases. He shall be like the
heath in the desert. As you wander over the dreary waste of barren sand, your eye
falls upon a poor, miserable-looking, half-withered, half-dead thing, that still
struggles to maintain its woe-begone and sickly existence. There it lingers on
wretchedly, cut off from all surrounding vegetation, scarcely living and yet not
finally dead, but devoid of all the freshness and luxuriance of life, shrivelled and
parched and desolate looking in a salt land and not inhabited. Tar away in the
distance there you can see the green tree that is planted by the waterside only just in
sight; but here there is no kindly river, no kindred forms of vegetation, in solitude
and drought it measures out its dreary existence. In this miserable object, man of
the world, see a picture of yourself. Solitude and thirst! in those two characteristics
of this woeful picture, you have faithfully represented to you the characteristic
elements of your own present experience, and the dread foreshadowing of what its
end must be. Thirst and solitude, yes, thou knowest something of that even now, for
is there not already within thee a desire that nothing earthly can satisfy--a sense of
inanity and want? Verily thou dwellest in a parched and salt land. A mighty famine
reigns within thy soul, and thou hast begun to be in want. An irrepressible, an
urgent desire now goads thee on from one effort to another, if, haply, thou mayest
escape from thy own miserable self-consciousness and lose the sense of thy own
want amidst the excitements of thy life. But it is there all the time--this inward
thirst, and thou canst not escape from it; and remember the salt land which thou
now inhabitest is but the way to, and the dread anticipation of, that salt land of
doom to which the sinner is to be banished; and the thirst which even now tortures
thy agonised heart is but the prelude to the thirst of hell. Thirst and solitude! yes,
and thou knowest something of this last also. How solitary and lonesome already is
that poor heart of thine. The plain, simple truth is, that in his inner life the man of
the world is always alone--the solitude which sin brings with it has already
commenced, and already you are shut out from the true enjoyments of social
intercourse; you are lonely, even in the very midst of numbers, and desolate even in
the very heart of your family. And in that loneliness you have a prelude to the utter
loneliness which lies beyond--the desolation, the solitude, the loss of all, when he
who has wandered from the love of God is shut out from the world of love, and given
over to that dark region where love cannot come; the loneliness of him who leaves
the society of heaven behind him, and finds instead only the weeping and the
wailing and the gnashing of teeth. (W. Hay Aitken, M. A.)

The sin of trusting in man

I. When we may be charged with this.

1. When we fortify ourselves in sin, by human refuges and supports (Isa 28:15-
16; Isa 30:1, etc.; Ob 1:3-4).
2. When we look for that rest in the creature, which is only to be found in God
(Jer 9:23-24).
3. When we seek to please men more than God. Not as Moses, Daniel, Peter.
4. When we use unlawful means to rid ourselves of trouble (Jon 1:2-3).
5. When we form our religion by the opinions of men instead of Gods Word
(Mat 15:1-9; Gal 2:11-13).
6. When we lean on ourselves instead of Jesus Christ (Php 3:3-7).

II. The wretchedness of such a disposition and conduct.

1. God will take out the enjoyment of what he possesses (Ecc 6:1-2).
2. The object of his hope shall be removed, or turned against him (Psa 41:9).
3. God will leave him to his own corruptions and Satans temptations (Hos 4:17).
4. Guilt shall make him a torment to himself. Judas.
5. When blessings come, he shall not perceive them (Luk 19:41-44; Act 13:38-
41).
6. Death shall snatch him from his enjoyments (Luk 12:1, etc.; Act 12:1, etc.) (H.
Foster.)

The danger of trusting in man

1. He that trusts in man is cursed in the weakness on which he relies. The
strong shall be as tow. In general, God employs weak and inconsiderable
ones to break the arm of flesh; thus, the shouts of the Israelites, and the
blowing of horns, brought down the walls of Jericho, and reduced it to the
dust: the Midianites, and the Amalekites, and the children of the east, lay
along the valley of More like grasshoppers for multitude, and yet the sudden
display of only three hundred lamps, and the sounding of as many trumpets,
put them all to flight: the champion of the Philistines defied the whole army
of Israel, yet a shepherd boy overcame him with a sling and stone. So with all
earthly strength on which man builds himself up; the moment God speaks
the word it melts away.
 2. He that maketh flesh his arm is cursed also in the short-lived nature of his
ground of confidence. How often does man, in the very noonday of his
journey through life, feel his heart sink within him on finding that the distant
places, which in the morning of life he had looked forward to as fresh and
beautiful, are but as the parched heath or thirsty sand; he thinks of the days
of boyhood, when an untried world promised happiness and security, and
sighs on learning the hard lesson, that neither is to be had on this side of the
grave.
3. Deceitfulness is moreover part of that curse which those may expect to reap,
and that abundantly, who trust in man and make flesh their arm. Put God
out of the question; let there be no recognition of any other than human
obligations, and you have no security in the faithfulness of the nearest or
dearest friend.
4. There is a curse also in the bitterness of disappointment. This is what makes
the wretched old worldling like the parched heath; friends, or children, or
other relatives, have either died or forsaken him, or his riches have slipped
out of his hands and flown away; all his worldly plans and schemes have
failed; he has no love of God in his heart to bear him up against so many
cruel disappointments, and the bitterness of his spirit has therefore
increased day by day, till he is completely soured; he feeds on his morose
temper, and in turn it preys upon him; the curse eats into his vitals, drying
up every little show of better feeling which would have kept his heart still
green and salt; he hates and suspects everyone; the world is looked upon by
him as one great lie, and of the truth he knows nothing; or the things
wherein he foolishly expected to find happiness, have proved incapable of
affording it, even while he had them in his possession. (C. O. Pratt, M. A.)

The folly of trusting in any creature

As a traveller overcome by a storm, having sought the shelter of some fair-spread
oak, finds relief for some time, till suddenly, the fierce wind tears some strong
branch, which, falling, hurts the unsuspecting traveller; so fares it with not a few
who run for shelter to the shade of some great man. Had I served my God, said
poor Wolsey, as faithfully as I served my king, He would not have forsaken me
now.
He shall be like the heath in the desert.

The heath in the desert

I. Against whom this curse is denounced.

1. Those who do not realise their dependence on God for all true happiness, but
think it lies in worldly gain.
2. Those who trust in man and make flesh their arm, and neglect to fix all
dependence on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
3. Those who depend on a form of godliness without the power, and, excepting a
little animal sympathy, remain cold as ever.

II. How these resemble the heath in the desert.

 1. In barrenness and deformity.
2. In being desolate, forsaken, and unblest.
3. While the holy land is refreshed with dew from heaven, the desert remains
parched as before.
4. Showers falling on desert heath only promote the growth of deformed shrubs;
and the influence of heaven falling on this class calls forth a more fatal
resistance of the Holy Spirit.
5. The heath cannot be made fruitful; and all Gods visitations fall unregarded
on many.
6. It is plain that, while many obey the Gospel call, others remain desolate and
uncheered by any heavenly influence. (E. Griffin, D. D.)

The heath in the desert and the tree by the river

The prophet puts before us two highly-finished pictures. In the one, the hot desert
stretches on all sides. The fierce sunbeams like swords slay every green thing. Here
and there a stunted, grey, prickly shrub struggles to live, and just manages not to
die. But it has no grace of leaf, nor profitableness of fruit; and it only serves to make
the desolation mere desolate. The other carries us to some brimming river, where
everything lives because water has come. Dipping their boughs in the sparkling
current, and driving their roots through the moist soil, the bordering trees lift aloft
their pride of foliage and bear fruits in their season. So, says Jeremiah, the two
pictures represent two sets of men; the one, he who diverts from their true object his
heart capacities of love and trust, and clings to creatures and to men, making flesh
his arm and departing from the living God; the other, a man who leans the whole
weight of his needs and cares and sins and sorrows upon God. We can make the
choice which shall be the object of our trust, and according as we choose the one or
the other, the experience of these vivid pictures will be ours.

I. THE ONE IS IN THE DESERT; THE OTHER BY THE RIVER. The poor little dusty shrub
in the desert, whose very leaves have been modified into prickles, is fit for the desert,
and is as much at home there as the willows by the water courses with their rush
vegetation in their moist bed. But if a man makes that fatal choice, of shutting out
God from his confidence and his love, and squandering these upon earth and upon
creatures, he is as fatally out of harmony with the place which he has chosen, and as
much away from his natural soil as a tropical plant amongst the snows of Arctic
glaciers, or a water lily in the Sahara. You, I, the poorest and humblest of men, will
never be right, never feel in native soil, with appropriate surroundings, until we have
laid our hearts and our hands on the breast of God, and rested ourselves on Him.
Not more surely do gills and fins proclaim that the creature that has them is meant
to roam through the boundless ocean, nor the anatomy and wings of the bird
witness more surely to its destination to soar in the open heavens, than the make of
your spirits testifies that God, none less or lower, is your portion. As well might bees
try to get honey from a vase of wax flowers as we to draw what we need from
creatures, from ourselves, from visible and material things. Where else will you get
love that will never fail nor change nor die? Where else will you find an object for the
intellect that will yield inexhaustible material of contemplation and delight? Where
else infallible direction for the will? Where else shall weakness find unfailing
strength, or sorrow adequate consolation, or hope certain fulfilment, or fear a safe
hiding place?

II. THE ONE CAN TAKE IN NO REAL GOOD; THE OTHER CAN FEAR NO EVIL. (See R.V.,
verse 8.) He cannot see when good comes. God comes, and I would rather have
some more money, or some womans love, or a big business. So I might go the whole
round. The man that cannot see good when it is there before his nose, because the
false direction of his confidence has blinded his eyes, cannot open his heart to it.
You are plunged, as it were, in a sea of possible felicity, which will be yours if your
hearts direction is towards God, and the surrounding ocean of blessedness has as
little power to fill your heart as the sea to enter some hermetically sealed flask
dropped into the middle of the Atlantic. Turn to the other side. He shall not fear
when heat cometh, which is evil in these Eastern lands, and shall not be careful in
the year of drought. The tree that sends its roots towards a river that never fails
does not suffer when all the land is parched. And the man who has driven his roots
into God, and is drawing from that deep source what is needful for his life and
fertility, has no occasion to dread any evil, nor to gnaw his heart with anxiety as to
what he is to do in parched times. Troubles may come, but they do not go deeper
than the surface. It may be all cracked and caked and dry, a thirsty land where no
water is, and yet deep down there may be moisture and coolness.

III. THE ONE IS BARE; THE OTHER CLOTHED WITH THE BEAUTY OF FOLIAGE. The
word translated heat has a close connection with, if it does not literally mean,
naked, or bare. Probably it designates some inconspicuously leaved desert shrub,
the particular species not being ascertainable or a matter of any consequence.
Leaves, in Scripture, have a recognised symbolical meaning. Nothing but leaves in
the story of the fig tree meant only beautiful outward appearance, with no
corresponding outcome of goodness of heart, in the shape of fruit. So I venture,
here, to draw a distinction between leafage and fruit, and say that the one points
rather to a mans character and conduct as being lovely in appearance, and in the
other as being morally good and profitable. This is the lesson of these two clauses--
Misdirected confidence in creatures strips a man of much beauty of character, and
true faith in God adorns soul with a leafy vesture of loveliness. Whatsoever things
are lovely, and of good report lack their supreme excellence, the diamond on the
top of the royal crown, the glittering gold on the summit of the Campanile, unless
there be in them a distinct reference to God.

IV. THE ONE IS STERILE; THE OTHER FRUITFUL. The only works of men worth
calling fruit, if regard be had to their capacities, relations, and obligations, are
those done as the outcome and consequence of hearts trusting in the Lord. The rest
of the mans activities may be busy and multiplied, and, from the point of view of a
godless morality, many, may be fair and good; but if we think of him as being
destined, as his chief end, to glorify God, and (so) to enjoy Him forever, what
correspondence between such a creature and acts that are done without reference to
God can there ever be? At the most they are wild grapes. And there comes a time
when they will be tested; the axe laid to the root of the trees, and these imperfect
deeds will shrivel up and disappear. Trust will certainly be fruitful. There we are
upon pure Christian ground which declares that the outcome of faith is conduct in
conformity with the will of Him in whom we trust, and that the productive principle
of all good in man is confidence in God manifest to us in Jesus Christ. (A. Maclaren,
D. D.)

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord.--

The felicity of Divine trustfulness

I. He is blessed WITH A VITAL CONNECTION WITH THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. His soul is
rooted in the fountain of life.
1. His intellect is rooted in Gods truths.
2. His sympathy is rooted in Gods character.
3. His activity is rooted in Gods plan.

II. He is blessed WITH MORAL FRESHNESS AT ALL TIMES. He has permanent beauty.
There are two reasons why the most beautiful evergreen tree in nature must fail.
1. Because it is limited in its own essence. No tree has unbounded potentialities;
though it live for centuries it will grow itself out, exhaust all its latent force.
Not so with the soul. It has unending powers of growth.
2. Because it is limited in its supplies. The river at its roots may dry up; the
nutriment in its soil it may exhaust. Not so with the soul; its roots strike into
the inexhaustible fountain of life. Its leaf shall be green,--ever green.

III. He is blessed WITH MORAL CALMNESS IN TRYING SEASONS. The position of such
a tree is independent; its roots have struck deep into the eternities, and it defies the
storms of time.

IV. He is blessed WITH MORAL FRUITFULNESS WITHOUT END (Gal 5:22). A good
man is ever useful, an ever productive tree to the hungry, an ever welling fountain to
the parched, an ever burning lamp to the benighted. (Homilist.)

The blessedness of trust

I. LOOK AT MAN AS FITTED FOR TRUST. He is simply the most dependent creature in
the world. In a hundred ways man is more dependent than any other animal that
lives. Of all creatures he comes into the world the most utterly helpless, as if his
weakness should be impressed upon his earliest being. By far the greater part of all
other living things are at once able to take their place and care for themselves. See
the child in its mothers arms unable to do anything for itself, needing continual care
and tenderest pity and constant provision. See, too, how in the case of man this
dependence is prolonged immensely beyond that of any other being. The child of
three or four years is vastly more helpless than any other creature of three or four
months, and for many years after that the child needs to be provided for in a
thousand ways. It is not too much to say that of the allotted span of human life one-
quarter is spent in complete dependence upon others for food and clothing and
shelter and teaching. Again, in the case of every other creature this dependence is
quickly forgotten. Nature makes haste to sever the tie that binds the parent to the
offspring, but in the case of the man it is prolonged until the reason can perceive it
and the memory of it is made imperishable. Why this helplessness? Does it not
involve a heavy burden upon the busy and toiling? Where, then, is the
compensation? It is this, that out of this dependence grows the Divine relationship
of father, mother, and child,--that blessed trinity in unity. So out of his littleness is
born his nobility; and he is fashioned in helplessness that he may learn the blessed
mystery of trust. Look at a further unfolding of this truth. The dependence of which
we have spoken does not end with childhood. Strange as it may seem, yet it would be
true to say that the man is more dependent than the child. Increased knowledge
brings increased care. Greater strength brings greater need. The dependence of the
child becomes the dependence of the man upon his brothers. Contrast man for a
moment with the other creatures in his need of organisation, combination,
cooperation. What thousands of hands must toil for us that our commonest wants
may be met. To how many am I debtor for a crust of bread! And here again, let us
ask, What is the purpose of this dependence? Is not man often hampered by it? Does
it not open the door for arrogance and pride, for cruel bondage and slavery? But do
you not see how by this very dependence man is to learn further the mystery and
blessedness of trust? And dependence is to develop the further nobleness that binds
men into a brotherhood. But the needs of childhood which are met by the parents,
and the needs of man which are met by his fellow man, are not all nor even most of
all. Besides these are a thousand wants, deep, mysterious, and pressing more heavily
than any others. No other creature has a future. Of all else a present want is the only
suffering; a present supply is the satisfaction. But to us the future is ever most of all.
The past is gone away behind us; the present is ever slipping from us; the future only
seems to be ours. For the very food he eats man is compelled ever to be looking
forward. What is reason but a clearer sight of our helplessness? The forward-looking
creature, looking whither? Who can help him here? Only man has a sense of death.
All roads lead to the grave. Here no parent can help the child: no man can help his
neighbour. What then can he make his trust? Again, only man has a consciousness
of sin. A whole worlds altars and temples and sacrifices are its doleful confession:
we have sinned! Now for these greater needs, is there no remedy,--no rest? What is
the good of all else if here the man is to be forsaken?

II. AND HERE IS GOD REVEALED THAT HE MAY BE TRUSTED. Blessed is the man that
trusteth in the Lord. Does trust need power? Here is the Almighty. Lo, He sitteth
upon the throne of the universe and all things serve Him. Does trust demand the
unchanging, the everlasting? Does trust need wisdom? Here is all that my want can
ever desire. But these attributes, whilst trust demands them all and whilst they make
trust blessed, do not win my trust. My heart needs more. And blessed be God, a
great deal more is given. Trust needs love. And yet one thing more is needful to
perfect trust. Trust is born of fear: and fear is born of sin. How can I who have
sinned against God draw near to Him? Till that question is answered God is but a
terror to me. Love may pity: love may weep: but true love cannot hush up and hide
my sin. Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. My sin is
not hidden. It is brought out into the very face of heaven and hell: and there its
penalty is met and satisfied. Have you found this blessedness? (M. G. Pearse.)

Trusting in the Lord

I. What it is.
1. The object.
 (1) He who always was.
(2) He whose being is in and of Himself (Act 17:25-28).
(3) He who gives being and fulfilment to His Word (Ex 6:1-4; Jer 23:7-8).
(4) He who is our kinsman by incarnation (Jer 23:5-6; Isa 28:16; 1Ti 3:16).
2. The disposition of the heart toward this object. Trusteth Me, i.e.--
(1) Knows.
(2) Approves.
(3) Relies on.
(4) Waits for.

II. The blessedness, or privileges, of such a man.

1. He shall lay faster hold on God and religion.
2. He shall not feel the weight of trials.
3. He shall hold fast his profession when others drop off.
4. He shall be sustained in old age and death.
5. He shall not cease from yielding fruit--
(1) Under trials;
(2) In death;
(3) To eternity. (H. Foster.)

Trust in God

I. Trust in God is an honour we owe to the supremacy of the Divine nature, and it
is a degree of idolatry to place it on any other being.
1. This duty implies positively an entire resignation to the wisdom, a dependence
on the power, and a firm assurance of the goodness and veracity of God.
2. Negatively this duty implies that we should withdraw our confidence from all
inferior beings; and in order to this we must begin at home, put off all trust
in ourselves, our parts, abilities or acquisitions, how great or how many
soever they may be.

II. CONSIDER WHEN THIS TRUST IS GROUNDED AS IT OUGHT TO BE, or what

conditions are required on our part to assure our confidence in the favour and
protection of God. The most important qualification for a successful performance of
these duties, is a sincere obedience to the laws of God, an unfeigned devotion of the
heart to His service, a steady adherence to the faith, and a purity and holiness of life
agreeable to the precepts of our religion.

III. THE BLESSEDNESS OF HIM WHO CAN THUS TRUST AND HOPE IN THE LORD. He
relies on a wisdom who sees the utmost consequence of things, on a power which
nothing can obstruct, on a goodness of infinite affection to his happiness, and who
has bound Himself by promise never to fail these who trust in Him. If this God be
with us, who or what can be against us? But if He be angry, all our other
dependencies will profit us nothing, our strength will be but weakness, and our
wisdom folly; every other support will fail under us when we come to lean upon it,
and deceive us in the day when we want it most. (John Rogers, D. D.)

On trust in God

I. WHAT IS A JUST CONFIDENCE IN GOD? This duty implies an humble dependence

on Him for that protection and those blessings which His supreme perfections both
enable and incline Him to bestow on His creatures; a full conviction of His goodness
and mercy; and a steady hope, that that mercy will, on all occasions, in all our
dangers and necessities, be extended to us, in such a manner as to His wisdom
appears most conducive, if not to our tranquillity in this life, to our everlasting
felicity in the next. This duty can hardly be so far misapprehended as to repress the
efforts of industry, or be supposed to supersede the necessity of due care and
application to the employment and duties of our respective stations. For we have no
grounds to expect that God will provide for our interests, if we are improvident
ourselves; or that he will, by a particular interposition, favour the idle and the
negligent. Let the duty and business of today be our concern; the event of tomorrow
we may trust to God.

II. WHEN OUR CONFIDENCE IN GOD IS WELL GROUNDED. Our confidence must rise
or fall, according to the progress or defects of our obedience. Conscious of right
intentions, and approved by our own heart, we may approach the throne of grace
with superior assurance. If our heart in some degree condemn us, we may have our
intervals of diffidence and apprehension; but, if, unreclaimed, we go on still in
wickedness, and persist in determined disobedience; should we then trust in God, it
were, in the most literal and criminal sense, to hope against hope. Till we repent,
and return to duty, we can have no expectations of favour, no confidence in our
Maker; nor can we lift up our eyes to heaven with any hopes of mercy and
forgiveness there.

III. THE HAPPINESS RESULTING FROM A WELL-GROUNDED DEPENDENCE ON GOD. He

whose conscience speaks consolation, and bids him confide in his God, confides in a
wisdom which sees the remotest issues of all events, on a power which ordereth all
things, and on a goodness which ever consults the well-being of His creatures. And
though this gives him no absolute insurance against evils, no privilege of exemption
from calamities and afflictions; yet he feels the weight of them much abated by
internal consolations. He acquiesces in all the dispensations of heaven, submits with
humble resignation to the severities of providence; assured that God alone can know
what is best, what is most expedient in his present circumstances, and what most
instrumental to his future felicity. In the darkest night of affliction, some light will
spring up, some beam of joy dart upon his mind, from this consideration, that the
God whom he serves is able to deliver, and in His own good time will deliver him out
of all his troubles, or reward him with joys unspeakable in His own blissful presence.
(G. Carr.)

Making God our trust

I. The souls right and only trust.

 1. We owe it to the supremacy of the Divine nature.
2. Entire resignation to Gods wisdom and will.
3. Entire withdrawal of our trust from all inferior things.
4. Sincere acceptance of Christ as our Saviour.
5. Sincere effort to live a holy and pious life.

II. THE BLESSEDNESS WITH WHICH GODLY TRUST IS CROWNED. This may be seen by
contrast with the unbeliever.
1. The objects of the unbelievers trust are uncertain and insignificant; the
believers, certain and glorious.
2. The one inadequate and perishing; the other, all-sufficient and abiding.
3. The one bears a burdened conscience and a character ill at ease; the other
enjoys peace and rest.
4. The one regards God as his foe, and resembles the inferior objects of his trust;
the other regards God as his friend, enjoys His protection and fellowship and
resembles Him.
Learn--
1. Not to be deluded by inferior things.
2. Seek this blessing by submission to Gods will in a crucified Saviour. (E.
Jerman.)

Shall not God be trusted

Manton says, If a man promise, they reckon much of that; they can tarry upon
mans security, but count Gods Word nothing worth. They can trade with a factor
beyond seas, and trust all their estate in a mans hands whom they have never seen;
and yet the Word of the infallible God is of little regard and respect with them, even
then when He is willing to give an earnest of the promised good. It is noteworthy
that in ordinary life small matters of business are transacted by sight, and articles
valued by pence are paid for over the counter: for larger things we give cheques
which are really nothing but pieces of paper made valuable by a mans name; and in
the heaviest transactions of all, millions change from hand to hand without a coin
being seen, the whole depending upon the honour and worth of those who sign their
hands. What then? shall not the Lord be trusted? Ay, with our whole being and
destiny. It ought to be the most natural thing in all the world to trust God; and to
those who dwell near Him it is so. Where should we trust but in Him who has all
power and truth and love within Himself? We commit ourselves into the hands of
our faithful Creator and feel ourselves secure. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 17:8
Shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green.

Verdure in the midst of desolation

 I. THE FACT ITSELF. Meets us everywhere in the natural world. So also in the
kingdom of grace. Spiritual health depends not only or mainly on our circumstances,
but on the temper and state of our souls. In cottage, in palace; in want, in affluence;
in retirement, on busy Exchange; in youth, in age; in health, in disease and sickness,
Gods Enochs have walked with God. Look, then, within for source of weakness,
decay, low spiritual state.

II. The explanation.

1. He lives in constant believing communion with God.
2. He improves what advantages he possesses.
3. He retains the good he receives.
4. He sedulously improves and turns to account the grace he has. (Islay Burns.)

The continuousness of true progress

True religion takes such a thorough hold upon all the deeply seated principles of
our nature--so fastens itself upon the entire soul, that the high probability is, that
where it has once commenced it will continue.

I. The principle of inquiry is an influential force in human nature and true

religion is suited to maintain a master hold upon that. Does religion proscribe any
field of thought? Does it bolt any of the golden gates of science? No; it throws open
the whole domain of truth, and spreads it forth, not only in all its amplitude to the
mind, but in lights and colours of special fascination and charm. The mere
speculative theist looks through nature up to natures God; but the truly religious
thinker feels that God is both philosophically and emotionally nearer to him than
nature, and he looks through God down upon natures mighty realms, and thus
increases the charms of nature a thousandfold. Does not the picture appear in new
beauties, after love for the artist has risen in the heart of the spectator? And does not
the universe burst into new glories upon the vision of that man in whose heart
supreme love for the Creator has been produced? But it may be said, granting that
religion lays open all the realms of science, and heightens, incomparably, its charms;
may it not be, that in the course of time the intellect may become so conversant with
all truth, as to have neither need nor motive for future inquiry, and thereby religion
would lose this master hold upon man? We think not. Who shall count the number
of Gods works, or describe the vastness of His universe?

II. THE PRINCIPLE OF LOVE IS A MIGHTY POWER IN HUMAN NATURE AND TRUE
RELIGION IS SUITED TO MAINTAIN A MASTER HOLD UPON THAT. Love is the spring and
spirit of the universe. And, thank God, it is, notwithstanding our depravity, the
strongest force in our nature still. Now, religion calls out this powerful element in
our nature in its two most powerful forms, namely, gratitude and admiration. How
powerfully does gratitude bind us to our benefactors. The language of the heart to
such is, entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following after thee.
Kindness is might of the highest order; by it we can take hold of mens strength
grasp their very souls and bind them to us by indissoluble bonds Nor is love, in the
form of admiration, a weaker force. When it is directed to artistic beauty, it is
powerful; when it is directed to natural beauty, it is more powerful still; but when it
is directed to moral beauty, it is most powerful of all. Beauty carries captive the soul.
The fine painting is attractive; the magnificent landscape more attractive still; the
true hero, the embodiment of the highest moral qualities, is most attractive of all. So
long, therefore, as the supreme love of gratitude and admiration are directed to God,
the soul must, from its very nature, be vitally allied to Him. And is not this love,
where it has once been awakened, likely to continue?

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF RIGHTNESS IS A POWERFUL FORCE IN HUMAN NATURE AND

TRUE RELIGION IS SUITED TO MAINTAIN A MASTER HOLD UPON THAT. Men under the
influence of conscience have voluntarily braved the greatest perils, endured the
greatest sufferings, and made the greatest sacrifices. Looking at the power and
history of this element of our nature, there is a high probability that those
attachments and enterprises will be lasting which secure its entire sympathy and
sanction. And are not such preeminently the attachments and enterprises of a truly
religious life? Does not conscience, this monarch energy of the soul, not only
sanction supreme love to God, and entire consecration to His service, but
imperiously demand it?

IV. THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE IS A STRONG FORCE IN HUMAN NATURE AND TRUE
RELIGION IS SUITED TO MAINTAIN A MASTER HOLD UPON THAT. The best and choicest
blessings are ever in the region of hope--a region all flowers and fruit, and sunshine;
across whose beauteous landscapes there never sweeps the withering blight or the
furious storm, and whose suns and stars are never dimmed by cloud nor mist. Now,
the probability of a mans continuance in any enterprise, depends greatly upon its
connection with hope. Half the working world toil on in their respective lines of
action, not for the sake of present results, but for the sake of what hope has
promised them in the future What connection has the religious life with this hope?
Does the religious enterprise hold out any bright prospect? If in connection with
religion there should ever come a time when there was nothing more to expect,
religion would lose much of its power over man, and there would be a strong
probability of a relapse. But if the prospect widened and brightened as the man
advanced, would not the chances of a retrogression decrease with every successive
step? This is just the fact in a religious life; the more actually attained, the more
prospectively appears.

V. THE PRINCIPLE OF HABIT IS A POWERFUL FORCE IN HUMAN NATURE AND TRUE

RELIGION IS SUITED TO MAINTAIN A MASTER HOLD UPON THAT. The power of this
principle is universally acknowledged, and in some eases is felt invincible. In the
history of sin its force is the most striking. All the crimes in the long black narrative
of human guilt you may trace, in a great measure, to habit. Every sinful act is
another cord woven into that mighty cable of habit, which binds the spirit to the
throne of darkness--a fresh momentum added to the falling soul. Now, if habit is so
powerful in binding to sin, our position is, that it becomes more powerful in binding
to holiness.
1. Because, in the one case, the mans conscience--the very root of his spiritual
nature.
is in favour of his present course, and against change; in the other case, the
whole force of his conscience perpetually against the present mode of life,
and is demanding reformation.
2. Because, in the one case, Divine influence is ever present to stimulate and to
 cheer the spirit on; but in the other, the whole tide of this influence rolls in
powerful opposition.
3. Because, in the one case, there are no unquestionable instances of change; in
the other, instances abound on every hand; every conversion to God is an
example. (Homilist.)

The triumph of trust

The laurel, saith King, is never thunderstruck. Sure it is that he who trusteth in
God taketh no hurt; his heart is fixed and immovable to endure things almost
incredible. True trust will certainly triumph at length. (John Trapp.)

Fruit expected from the Church

A church is like a great tree in the desert which holds out the promise of fruit, and
towards which all the spiritually hungry turn. There can be few sadder things in this
world than a church, promising by its very name, by its spire pointing to heaven, by
its open doors, by its songs and services, by its bells of invitation, to give food to the
hungry, refreshment to the weary, comfort to the sorrowing, and then failing to keep
its promises to the souls that come expecting. (J. H. Miller.)

JER 17:9
The heart is deceitful above all things.

The deceitfulness of the human heart

I. WE ARE TO CONSIDER WHAT IS IMPLIED IN SINNERS KNOWING THEIR OWN HEARTS.

They know that they have hearts, which are distinct from perception, reason,
conscience, and all their intellectual powers and faculties. But this knowledge of
their hearts is not that which is intended in the text. For in this sense they may
perfectly know their own hearts, while they remain entirely ignorant of them in
other important respects.
1. Their knowing their hearts in the sense of the text, implies the knowledge of
their selfishness. Saints love those who do not love them; but sinners love
those only who do love them; and all the criminality of their hearts consists
in their partial, interested affections. They may love all the objects that saints
love, and hate all the objects that saints hate; and yet all their affections be
different, in their nature, from the affections of saints. Whether they love or
hate good or bad objects, still their love and hatred are entirely sinful,
because they are altogether selfish. This they are not apt to know, nor
believe.
2. The knowledge of their hearts implies the knowledge of their desperate,
incurable wickedness. There is no hope of their ever becoming better from
any motives that can be set before them, or from any means which can be
used with them. And until sinners see their hearts in this light, they are
unacquainted with them, and know not the nature and depth of their own
depravity.
 3. Their knowing their own hearts implies their knowing their extreme
deceitfulness.

II. Why it is so extremely difficult for them to gain this knowledge.

1. They are unwilling to know their own hearts. This is true of all sinners. He
that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds
should be reproved.
2. Another thing which renders it still more difficult for them to know their own
hearts, is what the Scripture calls the deceitfulness of sin. All sin is
selfishness, and all selfishness is deceitful. They love or hate all objects, just
as they view them as having a favourable or unfavourable aspect, in respect
to themselves. In particular--
(1) They love or hate God, just as He appears friendly or unfriendly to them.
(2) They love or hate Christ, accordingly as He appears to be their friend or
their enemy.
(3) They love or hate good men, just as they appear for them or against
them.
(4) They love and hate one another, just as they appear to promote or
obstruct their interest. Herod and Pontius Pilate.
(5) They love or hate the world in which they live, accordingly as it smiles or
frowns upon them.
(6) They love and hate their own hearts, as they appear to promise good or
threaten evil to them.
(7) Their hearts lead them to love or hate the means of grace, accordingly as
they appear to do them good or hurt.
(8) They love or hate convictions, accordingly as they appear to have a
favourable or unfavourable aspect upon their future happiness.
(9) They love or hate heaven according to the views they have of it. When
they view it as a place of perfect and perpetual happiness, they love it,
and desire to take up their everlasting residence in it. But when they view
it as a place of pure and perfect holiness, they hate it, and prefer to run
the risk of everlasting separation from it, rather than to enter into the
presence--of a holy God, and into the society of perfectly holy beings.
Improvement--
1. We learn that there is but one way for men to know their own hearts; and that
is, to inquire why they love or hate, rejoice or mourn, hope or fear, or why
they exercise submission, patience and confidence.
2. We learn that saints may more easily ascertain their true character, than
sinners can theirs. They sincerely desire to know their own hearts; and they
are willing to take the only proper way to discover their true character.
3. It appears that all the changes that mankind meet with in the course of life,
are trials of the heart. All changes in mens circumstances, whether great or
small, whether from prosperity to adversity, or from adversity to prosperity,
try their hearts, and give them opportunity every day to know whether they
are in a state of nature, or in a state of grace.
4. It appears from the wickedness and deceitfulness of the human heart, that it
 is not strange that religious apostasy has prevailed so much in the world.
5. It appears that those are unwise who trust in their own hearts.
6. We learn that sinners are never under genuine convictions until they see the
desperate wickedness and deceitfulness of their hearts. (N. Emmons, D. D.)

The deceitfulness of the heart

The ancients supposed the soul to reside in the heart; and when they spake of the
heart, they meant the soul which resided there. In the passage before us the prophet
means the thoughts, the will, the desires, the affections of the soul of man.

I. THE INCONSTANCY OF THE HEART. To a certain extent, the inconstancy of the

heart is perhaps natural and unavoidable. Everything around us is shifting,
changing. Our judgment, our views, our feelings, our passions seem subject to
perpetual vicissitude. A good resolution has been formed; but the fervour has soon
abated; and the poor heart, which loves to change, has but too quickly followed its
natural inclination. This propensity may be referred, in a measure, to the union of
the soul with the body. But the chief reason is to be found in the darkness and
uncertainty of the mind as to its real good.

II. THE UNFAITHFULNESS OF THE HEART. Eagerly do we make promises in the hour
of affliction--but we forget them in prosperity! In sickness we have made a thousand
resolutions--in health, we have forgotten them all!

III. THE SELF-LOVE WHICH OUR HEARTS EXHIBIT. Here a man is full of what he
calls zeal for religion, and sees not that his supposed zeal for religion is only zeal for
his own party, and that it is only exercised from a wish to gain attention and respect
from men. Another is full of zeal for correctness of opinion and sees not that it is the
manifestation of unholy passions. But oh, who can say by how many various
methods men cover themselves from themselves!

IV. THE ILLUSIONS THE HEART IS CAPABLE OF PRACTISING ON ITSELF. It imposes on

the understanding: it embellishes the scene around: it arrays every object in
deceptive charms. The interest of man sways his understanding, and every object
assumes a different shape and colour. And is it not so in religion? (T. F. Denham.)

Deceitfulness of the human heart

I. The extreme deceitfulness of the human heart.

1. Its misrepresentation to us of outward objects. The seductive influence of the
world around us is felt by all, and complained of by many; but yet it is to be
remembered that this influence is nothing more than the feeling which we
entertain in regard to it; it is nothing less, nor more, than our loving these
outward things, our delighting in them, as though they were a real good.
Now, is such a mew just and right? The influence that is grafted so deep
upon us is after all nothing more than a delusion as to the sentiments which
we hold in reference to the whole world, its fashions, its pleasures, its joys,
and its gains.
 2. Its perversion of the truth. How is it that there can be such different
sentiments in respect to the Deity of the Messiah; in respect to the reality of
free and sovereign grace as the only source and means of salvation; in regard
to the truth and reality and necessity of the atonement; of our acceptance
before God--the Holy and the Just? Who does not see that there must
somewhere lurk some secret wish that the truth should be either as the mind
imagines it, or perceives it to be? Who is not aware that there is deception at
the bottom?
3. The false estimate which it teaches us to form of ourselves. You need not to be
informed how it will magnify our excellences to our own view, and how it will
diminish our defects.
4. Its repeatedly enticing us to that which we have so many times condemned
and seemed to abhor. The heart may still be in love with that sin from which
the conscience recoils. Oh, how sin will undermine the conscience; how sin
will dissipate all our holy resolutions and desires!

II. THE WICKEDNESS OF THE HUMAN HEART. Let it be remembered that the
deceitfulness of the heart, of which we have before been speaking, is a part of its
wickedness. The wickedness of the human heart is here spoken of as being
desperate. It is a disease which has gone to the last degree, which has spread itself
through all the powers of the mind, through all the vitals of the soul. Its
desperateness, then, is extreme, and its hopes of improvement from any human
remedy, desperate also. As it grows older it will not necessarily grow better; but, if
left to itself, it will rather become worse. Nature seems to have some self-rectifying
provision within her, so as to subdue some partial disorders of our constitution; but
this is not the case in radical defects and fatal diseases. So it is here. There may be
some propensities even in human character which may go to counteract the
operation of certain others, yet these do not reach the innate character of the heart,
and never will they tend to purify it. We shall not, therefore, be improved merely as
we advance in knowledge--as we receive merely the chastisements of Divine
providence--as we merely come under the instruction of the Word of God. No
affliction would sanctify, no outward means would purify--the grace of God alone is
adequate to the work.

III. LET US ENDEAVOUR TO ANSWER THE QUESTION, WHO CAN KNOW IT? This is
merely a strong negative in regard to human knowledge. No human being knows the
heart of his fellow man, nor his own heart. He knows not the deep recesses of
iniquity which are there. Much has been developed through the history of life, but
there remains much more. None can know it. We dwell not on this, but we answer
according to the intimation of the next verse, God only knows it. God knows it, and
He has His eye upon it. All your thoughts have been known to Him, and the effect of
all your wilful perversions of the truth, all your attempts to put away from you the
power and the effect of the impressions of His Holy Word, all your trifling with the
obligations under which you have been laid, the feelings with which you have come
to His house, and been listening to His Word; whether there has been a resolution to
turn to God, or whether there has still been a wilful continuance in estrangement
from Him. He has seen it all; and if He has seen it all, He knows it, and He will deal
with it as it deserves. Oh, what an awful consideration, that sinners are in the hands
of an Omnipotent Being, who will give to every man according as his work has been!
But there is another thought--that is, He can deal with us according to the necessity
of the case. He has grace in abundance, and he is able to do exceeding abundantly
above all that we can ask or think. (J. Griffin.)

Deceitfulness and wickedness of the heart

I. The heart is deceitful.

1. The heart denotes the inner man, his thoughts, his will, his inclinations, and
his affections; or the human soul with its faculties and operations.
(1) It is deceitful with relation to God; for we often promise Him what we do
not perform, and endeavour to put Him off with external homage, and
with a partial obedience.
(2) It is deceitful with respect to other men; we industriously conceal from
them what passeth within us, and is not fit to show itself openly, and we
study to cheat them with false appearances.
(3) It is deceitful with regard to ourselves; and our passions often delude us,
pervert our judgment, and impose upon our reason.
2. Many causes may be assigned for it.
(1) We are changeable by that connection which the soul hath with the body,
and with the state of the body which is subject to perpetual alterations.
(2) We are inconstant on account of the connection that we have with
external objects by our senses. Everything that presents itself before us
makes an impression upon the mind. The manners, the opinions, and the
passions of those with whom we often converse have no small influence
upon us. They work upon our imagination, and produce the like
dispositions in us which we behold in them.
(3) Another cause of inconstancy is from the soul itself in its present
situation; it loves novelty and variety.

II. THE HEART OF MAN IS DESPERATELY WICKED. To be sensible how men in general
are depraved, we need only consult history, and consider the common state of the
world. These will give us a hideous representation of human disorders and
iniquities, both public and private, national and personal. The desperate wickedness
of many is such, that nothing but rigour, nothing but jails and gibbets can keep civil
society in tolerable order. Who can number up the sins which men are perpetually
committing? and all these proceed from an evil heart, as our Saviour says. To give
some check to this inundation of evil, the providence of God hath provided various
remedies; as the voice of conscience, the advantages of education, the instructions of
the wise, the assistance of human laws, the example of the good, the desire of
reputation, the fear of infamy, the light of reason, the profitableness of virtue, the
pernicious nature of vice, and, lastly, the revealed Word of God. Yet,
notwithstanding these correctives, we see and feel how moral evil abounds, even
where the Gospel is professed.

III. THE HEART OF MAN IS INSCRUTABLE. Who can know it? says the prophet. That
is; No man can know it; or rather, It is no easy matter to know it. There is a general
knowledge which we have of the human heart, and a way of judging concerning it,
which in the main is tolerably sure. The tree, says our Lord, is known by the fruits;
and, in like manner, the heart is known by the actions. When a mans behaviour is
vile, and his conversation profane, we may pronounce his heart to be bad; and we
are not obliged to put out our own eyes, and renounce our own senses, and to call
evil good, and good evil, rather than to censure such a person, or entertain a bad
opinion of him. Yet in judging of others much caution and candour are requisite. But
the discernment which each person should have of his own heart is the most
important. And here one would think that such skill is easily acquired, and doth in a
manner obtrude itself upon us. And yet it is certain that in a religious sense it is
often hard to know ones self. There are two sorts of self-knowledge, the one a
knowledge of feeling and perceiving, the other a knowledge of reflection and
discernment. As to the first, we all of us have it without question. It informs us only
of what we are thinking or doing, but not of the nature, causes, and effects of our
thoughts and deeds. As to the second and true kind of self-knowledge, which is the
result of consideration and examination, we have it seldom, and we cannot acquire it
without attention and care. It is strange how little we know practically either of our
body, or of our understanding, or our heart. As to the body, its defects are usually
overlooked by us, unless they be very remarkable, or painful. As to our
understanding, we flatter ourselves that we have a due share of it, and observe how
deficient our neighbours are in that respect; how one is stupid and silly, another
ignorant, a third prejudiced, injudicious, and conceited. Thus he who hath a wrong
judgment and a heated imagination decides upon every point with more confidence
than persons of a far greater capacity. He who is rough, peevish, and intractable,
knows nothing of it, whilst others can hardly tell how to bear with him. So true it is
that we know not ourselves. A man owns himself guilty of this or that fault, but,
however, he says that his heart is good and honest at the bottom. Weak illusion I
since it is from the evil which lurks in the heart that these irregular actions proceed.
The difficulty of knowing our hearts appears from those repeated commands in
Scripture to consider and search our ways. And, indeed, it is no small task to review
our knowledge, our opinions, our judgments, and our beliefs; to recollect our past
actions, and the use which we have made of Gods blessings, and to compare our
practice with our duty. This difficulty also appears from the character which God
gives to Himself, that He alone is the searcher of hearts. But observe that God, when
He calls Himself the searcher of hearts, means two things; that He alone knows the
hearts of all creatures, and that He alone knows them without any mixture of error.
We know but little of the heart of other men, and, therefore, should be cautious in
judging of them; and as to our own, though we shahs never know it exactly, with all
our endeavours, yet as far as we can, we are obliged to acquaint ourselves with it.
Inferences--
1. We should entertain a sober diffidence of ourselves.
2. We should not be much surprised or concerned when men use us ill, or
disappoint us. We cannot rely upon ourselves, much less upon others.
3. We should take care to give good principles and a good example to those
young persons whom Divine or human laws have placed under our guidance
and protection.
4. We should be ready to confess our offences to God, and be as strict in
censuring our own defects as we often are in condemning those of others.
5. Since the heart of man is deep and close, we should betimes endeavour to get
acquainted with our own. But if it be hard to know ourselves, how can we
 acquire such skill in a tolerable degree? By humility and consideration, by
consulting the Holy Scripture, that lamp of God which will give us light in
searching into the recesses of the heart; and by imploring the Divine
assistance. (J. Jortin, D. D.)

Deceitfulness of the heart

That is properly called deceitful which presents objects in a false light, or leads to
a misconception of the nature of things within us and around us. And that is
properly called deceitful which conceals its own true character, and assumes the
appearance of what it is not.
1. One of the ways in which the deceitfulness of the heart manifests itself is in its
tendency to blind the understanding in regard to religious truth. To have the
mind darkened with ignorance, or perverted by error, is inconsistent with
the exercise of holiness, or the practice of true virtue. Evidence is always on
the side of truth; but that evidence may be overlooked, or so distorted, that
the truth may not be perceived, and instead of it error may be embraced and
defended as truth. The reason why the minds of men reject the truth is, the
depravity of the heart. Infidelity, and every species of dangerous error, may
be traced to the deceitfulness of the heart. If men possessed good and honest
hearts, they would search diligently for the truth, and would be disposed to
judge impartially of its evidence; and, as was said, evidence being on the side
of truth, and the truth congenial with the moral feelings of the upright mind,
it would always be embraced. Atheism itself is a disease rather of the heart
than of the head. And idolatry, which darkens with its portentous shadows a
large portion of our globe, owes its origin to the deceitfulness and
wickedness of the human heart.
2. The exceeding deceitfulness of the heart appears in the delusive promises of
pleasure, which it makes, in the indulgence of sinful desires. This is so
uniformly the fact, that it is a common remark that men enjoy more pleasure
in the pursuit of the objects of the world, than in their possession. This
delusion of pleasure in prospect, particularly affects the young. With them
experience is wanting, which serves to correct this error of the imagination;
but even experience is insufficient to cure the disease. In this matter, the
world does not become wiser by growing older. There is another deception of
the heart which has relation to the indulgence of natural desires. The person
may be apprehensive at first, from former experience, that some evil to soul
or body may arise from unlawful indulgence. A pause is produced, and
hesitation is felt; but appetite, when strong, pleads for indulgence, and is
fruitful in pleas; among which none is more false and deceitful, than that if
gratified in this instance, it will never crave indulgence any more. And this
false promise often prevails with the vacillating sinner; and he plunges into
the gulf, which is open to receive him.
3. Under the influence of an evil heart, everything appears in false colours. Not
only does error assume the garb of truth, but piety itself is made to appear
odious. Indeed, there is nothing upon earth which the carnal mind hates so
truly as holiness. But as that which appears good cannot be hated, one art of
the deceitful heart is, to misrepresent the true nature of piety and devotion.
The fairest face when caricatured, becomes deformed, and appears
 ludicrous.
4. The deceitfulness of the heart is also exceedingly manifest in the false
pretensions which it makes, and the delusive appearances which it assumes.
And this deceitfulness not only imposes upon others, but upon the person
himself. Under this delusion, men persuade themselves that they are not
wicked, but that their hearts are good. Their virtues, or semblance of virtues,
are magnified, when seen through the false medium of self-love; and their
vices are so diminished, that they are either not seen, or appear as mere
peccadilloes, scarcely deserving notice. Such persons are also deceived as to
their own wisdom. But the most dangerous form of this deceit is, when
persons, never converted or renewed, are induced to believe that they are
saints.
5. The deceitfulness of the heart is manifest in the good which we promise
ourselves that we will do in future. But the true test of character is, what we
are actually doing at the present time. Do we now, from day to day, do all the
good which is in our power? Do we now improve our time and talents to the
utmost? If we do not, then does our heart deceive us, as to its own real
disposition?
6. Another way in which our hearts deceive us is, by leading, us to judge of
ourselves, not by a strict scrutiny into our real motives, but by viewing our
character through the medium of public opinion, or through the favourable
sentiments of our partial friends.
Reflections--
1. If the heart be so exceedingly deceitful and wicked, we should be deeply
humbled before God that we have hearts so evil.
2. If the heart be so deceitful, we should place no confidence in it.
3. If the heart be so deceitful, it should be watched with care.
4. From the state and character of the heart here given, we may infer the
necessity of a change of heart; and everyone should be led to cry to God for
renewing grace.
5. We should come often to the fountain which is opened for sin and
uncleanness
6. If any of us have been made sensible of the deceitfulness and wickedness of
our hearts, and have, in some degree, been delivered from this great evil of
our nature, this change, we are sure, has not proceeded from ourselves. (A.
Alexander, D. D.)

The deceitfulness of the heart

Unless we are affected, permanently and practically, with the corruption of our
nature, all other points of Christian doctrine connected with it, supposing we even
admit their truth, must be mere speculation, unaffecting in their influence,
unprofitable in their results.

I. THE UNPARALLELED DECEITFULNESS, AND DESPERATE WICKEDNESS OF THE HEART.

This appears from the following considerations: That it is able to evade the most
pointed applications of Divine truth, to resist the most powerful convictions of the
Divine Spirit, and to violate the most serious resolutions of the awakened
conscience.
1. One might imagine that the unprofitableness and danger of living in a spirit
and temper so much below the spirit and temper of real Christians would,
when faithfully disclosed, have the effect of awakening solicitude in the
minds of those persons whose everlasting condition is so deeply involved.
But how often would these expectations be disappointed! Every person
makes the application for his neighbour, saying, Thou art the man; and
with great dexterity evades it himself.
2. When the devotional spirit, the heavenly temper, the holy conduct of the
Christian are faithfully described; when his motives and principle, his
affections, his objects, and his aims, are disclosed, it is natural to suppose
that worldly men, by contrasting all this with their own spirit and temper
and conduct, with their own motives and principles and affections, with their
own objects and aims so directly the reverse, would be humbled and
confounded. But how often are men satisfied with admiring the beauty of
holiness, without imitating it; or with pronouncing holiness impracticable,
without endeavouring to practise it!
3. In order to give power and efficacy to the Gospel, the Holy Spirit accompanies
it to the heart and conscience, and causes men to see its vast importance, and
to feel its mighty influence on the soul. Who can think of death, judgment,
and eternity; of heaven and hell; of glory, honour, and immortality; and of
the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched; in connection
with his own sins; with redemption; with that newness of heart and newness
of life which are taught as necessary to prepare him for the inheritance of the
saints in light, without either believing that all these are idle speculations, or
concluding that religion is no vain thing? Who has not had the conviction so
natural, so true, and so awful, that if he is not prepared to come to the table
of the Lord, he is not prepared to meet his God? Have you not the conviction
that your life is inconsistent with the piety required of communicants? But
how deceitful is the heart which is able to resist these convictions, and to
allow you from time to time to go on in the same course of negligence,
disobedience, and ingratitude!
4. How little the heart is to be trusted in the things that belong to our peace, is
evident from the many resolutions to serve God, which almost every heart
has violated, that has been influenced by the truth as it is in Jesus. When we
are most determined against iniquity, most shocked with the idea of
committing it, and most persuaded that we are stedfast, then we are most in
danger. Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing? is language which
is seldom used without being followed by the commission of the very sin of
which we thought ourselves utterly incapable.

II. The necessity of being aware of its deceitfulness and wickedness.

1. It is the most difficult knowledge. There are so many mixtures in the motives
of the heart, so many windings, so much duplicity and insincerity, so much
false profession and false appearance, that it is impossible thoroughly to
comprehend it. Not only can no man trust the heart of another, but no man
can trust his own.
 2. It is the most disagreeable knowledge. Nothing is so mortifying to our pride.
Hence, instead of searching for the deceitfulness and wickedness of our
hearts, we feel a strong temptation to let it lie concealed, to shut our eyes
against the light, and to avoid the disquietude arising from the discovery of
what is so humbling.
3. It is the most desirable knowledge which we can obtain. It is the knowledge of
our own deceitful and desperately wicked hearts that renders us careful of
our own souls; that humbles us; that leads us to the Saviour; that makes
Jesus Christ precious to us; that constrains us to seek the sanctifying
influences of the Holy Spirit; that sends us to our Bible, to the throne of
grace, and to the table of the Lord. (M. Jackson.)

The central principle in man

Few men are acquainted with themselves. With the principles of commerce,
political economy, scientific investigation, classical criticism, theologic research,
ecclesiastical history, they are more familiar than with the secrets of their own
nature, and features and motives of their own character. The source of every evil, the
secret of all felicity, is not touched until the heart is reached and scrutinised.

I. Unregenerate human nature is entirely untrustworthy. Deceitful above all

things.
1. It distorts the character of God. God is merciful--often a plea for
continuance in sin.
2. It misrepresents the means of human felicity. Young persons flatter
themselves that they have but to drink fully of the cup of earthly pleasure to
be really happy. No greater mistake. Others seek it in the acquisition of
wealth, settling it in their mind that he who has most gold has most
happiness.
3. It perverts the way of salvation. Rites, penances, frames, and conditions are
piled up until the Saviour is either hid or barely seen.
4. It misrepresents the nature and excellence of true religion. Does religion
include humbleness of mind? The deceitful heart declares that it is a silly
weakness. Does religion include meekness of disposition? The deceitful
heart stigmatises it as foolish fastidiousness. A spirit of forgiveness is
despised as unmanly. Tenderness of conscience is condemned as ridiculous
precision. Spirituality of mind is designated canting hypocrisy, and purity of
heart and life a thing impossible.
5. It disguises the true character of sin. Vice is first pleasing, then delightful,
then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the sinner is
independent, then obstinate, then he resolves never to repent; then he dies,
then he is damned.
6. It deceives itself and endeavours to deceive God (Mal 1:14).
7. It surpasses in treachery everything else. The mossy swards, the ocean, the
desert mirage, the morning bright with sunshine, are all deceitful; but not
more so than the human heart. Inconstant as the wind, uncertain as riches,
ever betraying and betrayed, who would trust it?
 II. Unrenewed human nature is fearfully depraved--desperately wicked.
1. Its corruption is desperate. Wicked to desperation. Hence the deeds of
violence and despair which prevail.
2. Its corruption is unsearchable. Who can know it? Think of Pharaoh
insolently rejecting the commands of Jehovah, in spite of plagues and
pestilence. Think of Manasseh, Saul, and Peter boasting, then denying his
Saviour with oaths and curses. Learn--
1. The necessity of regeneration. Nothing but a new heart will meet the
requirements of the case, Hence David: Create in me a clean heart, O God.
Hence the promise in Ezekiel: A new heart will I give unto you.
2. The necessity for self-distrust. He that trusteth his own heart is a fool. Treat
it as you would a man who had deceived you in every possible way. Always
act upon the supposition that it is concealing something wrong. Keep thy
heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. (W. H. Booth.)

The deceitfulness of the heart

I. MEN IMPOSE ON THEMSELVES RESPECTING THEIR OWN CHARACTER. The human

heart is a great deep: a deep so turbid by sin and agitated by passion that we cannot
look into it far; a deep which no line yet has been long enough to fathom. The
account in the history of the Bible of the depravity of man is not more humiliating
than is the account in Tacitus and Sallust, in Hume and in Gibbon; the account in
the Sacred Poets is substantially the same as in Shakespeare and Byron; the account
given by Paul is the same that you will find in the books of every traveller who has
penetrated the dark regions of the heathen world. You admit the account to be true
of the world at large, of other men; you take securities of others; you put padlocks
and bolts on your stores; you guard your houses, as if you believed it were true.
Others believe the same of you; and the Bible holds all to be substantially alike--all
fallen and ruined. And yet it is evident that men do not by nature attribute to
themselves the character which is given of the human heart in the Bible. Who will
bear to be told, though you may go with all the influence of the tender relations of
friendship, and all the influence that you can take with you from any official
relation, that his mind is enmity against God; that in his flesh there dwelleth no
good thing; that he is a hater of God; that he is a lover of pleasure more than a
lover of God; that he is living without God and without hope; that his heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked? You will hear it from the desk--
for you believe that it is our official duty to make the statement; and the statement is
of necessity so general that no one feels himself particularly intended. But would
you hear it from me, if I should come to you alone, and if I should make the
statement with all the tenderness that I could assume? Is it not possible that your
heart has deceived you on this point? Let me suggest few things for your
consideration. One is, that if the Bible be true, there is no such native excellence of
character as you suppose you possess; for in the most solemn manner the Bible
declares the whole race to be guilty, and ruined, and lost; and the Bible has such
evidences of its truth and its Divine origin as should lead you to suppose it possible
that its account of the human character is correct. Another consideration is, that
multitudes of men who once had the same view of themselves which you have, have
been convinced of their error, and have been led to accord with the account in the
Bible. I allude to those who are now Christians. Another consideration is, that there
is nothing easier than to deceive ourselves in this matter. You have certain traits of
character which are in themselves well enough, and which may be commendable,
and you exalt them in the place of others which God requires. You have a disposition
that is naturally amiable and inoffensive. So has a lamb and a dove. Is this the love
of God? Is that what the law requires? You are honest and upright towards men. Is
this the love of the Creator, and is this to be a substitute for repentance and faith?
Are you not deceived in your estimate of your own character in regard to the love of
virtue? Let me ask a few plain questions. You say you love truth. Why then resist the
truth as designed to bear on your own heart and to show you what you are? You are
amiable. Why not then love the Lord Jesus Christ? Has there been anyone among
men more amiable or lovely than He? You love purity. Why not then love God? Is
there anyone more pure than He? You are aiming to do right. Why then do you not
pray in the closet, and in the family, as you know you ought to do?

II. MEN DECEIVE THEMSELVES IN REGARD TO THEIR REAL ATTACHMENTS. You think
you have no undue attachment to a child. When the great Giver of life takes this
child back to Himself, are you willing to part with it? You think you have no undue
attachment to wealth. How do you feel when you are embarrassed and when others
are prospered? When wind, and tide, and fire, and tempest are against you, and
when others grow rich? When your property takes to itself wings and flees away,
while others are enjoying the smiles of Heaven? You think you have no undue
attachment to the world, and that in the influence which that world has over you,
you are showing no disrespect to the commands of God. Let me ask you, is any
pleasure abandoned because He commands it? Is any place of amusement forsaken
because He wills it? You suppose you have some attachment to Christians, and to
the Christian religion. You admit the Bible to be true, and mean to be found among
the number of those who hold that its doctrines are from Heaven. Yet does the heart
never deceive you in this? Is not this the truth--for I make my appeal to your own
consciousness? You admit the doctrines of the Bible to be true in general; you deny
them in detail. You think you have no particular opposition to the duties of religion.
But is not this the truth? You admit the obligation in general; you deny it in detail.

III. THE HEART IS DECEITFUL IN REGARD TO ITS POWER OF RESISTING TEMPTATION.

In the halcyon days of youth and inexperience, we think that we are proof against all
the forms of allurement, and we listen with no pleasurable emotions to those who
would warn us of danger. We flatter ourselves that we are able to meet temptation.
We confide in the strength of our principles. We trust to the sincerity of our own
hearts. Professed friends meet us on the way and assure us that there is no danger.
The gay, the fashionable, the rich, the beautiful, the accomplished, invite us to tread
with them the path of pleasure, and to doubt the suggestions of experience and of
age. We feel confident of our own safety. We suppose we may tread securely a little
farther. We see no danger near. We take another step still, and yet another, thinking
that we are safe yet. We have tried our virtuous principles, and thus far they bear the
trial. We could retreat if we would; we mean to retreat the moment that danger
comes near. But who knows the power of temptation? Who knows when dangers
shall rush upon us so that we cannot escape? There is a dividing line between safety
and danger. Above thundering Niagara the river spreads out into a broad and
tranquil basin. All is calm, and the current flows gently on, and there even a light
skiff may be guided in safety. You may glide nearer and nearer to the rapids,
admiring the beauty of the shore, and looking on the ascending spray of the cataract,
and listening to the roar of the distant waters, and be happy in the consciousness
that you are safe. You may go a little farther, and may have power still to ply the oar
to reach the bank. But there is a point beyond which human power is vain, and
where the mighty waters shall seize the quivering bark and bear it on to swift
destruction. So perishes many a young man by the power of temptation.

IV. THE HEART DECEIVES ITSELF IN ITS PROMISES OF REFORMATION AND

AMENDMENT. Permit me to ask of you, how many resolutions you have formed to
repent and be a Christian--all of which have failed! How many times have you
promised yourself, your friends, and God, that you would forsake the ways of sin
and live for heaven--all of which have failed? How often have you fixed the time
when you would do this? And yet that time has come and gone unimproved. At
twenty, at thirty, at forty, at fifty years of age you may have resolved to turn to your
Maker should you reach those periods--but on some of you the snows of winter have
fallen, and yet a deceitful and a deceived heart is pointing you to some future period
still. It deceived you in childhood; it deceived you in youth; it deceived you in
manhood; it deceives you in old age. It has always deceived you as often as you have
trusted it, in all circumstances of life--and yet you trust it still. It has deceived you
oftener than you have been deceived by any and all other things--oftener than we are
deceived by the false friend; oftener than the traveller is deceived by his faithless
guide; oftener than the caravan is deceived by the vanished brook; oftener than the
bow deceives the hunter; oftener than you have been deceived by any and all other
men. There is no man whom you have not trusted more safely than your own heart;
no object in nature that has been as faithless as that:--and I appeal to you if it is not
deceitful above all things. Conclusion:
1. There is danger of losing the soul.
2. The heart of man is wicked. You have a heart which you yourself cannot trust.
It has always deceived you. You have a heart which your fellow men will not
trust. They secure themselves by notes, and bonds, and mortgages, and
oaths, and locks, and bolts;--and they will not trust you without them. You
have a heart which God regards as deceitful and depraved, and in which He
puts no confidence, and which He has declared to be desperately wicked. I
ask whether that heart in which neither God nor man, in which neither we
nor our friends can put confidence, is a heart that is good and pure? Is it
such a heart as is fitted for heaven? I answer no--and you respond to my own
deep conviction when I say it must be renewed.
3. I would conjure you to wake from these delusions to the reality of your
condition. I would beseech you to look at truth, and be no longer under the
control of a deceived and a deceitful heart. (A. Barnes, D. D.)

The deceitfulness of the heart

It appears--

I. FROM MENS GENERAL IGNORANCE OF THEIR OWN CHARACTER. They think, and
reason, and judge quite differently in anything relating to themselves, from what
they do in those cases in which they have no personal interest. Accordingly, we often
hear people exposing follies for which they themselves are remarkable, and talking
with great severity against particular vices, of which, if all the world be not mistaken,
they themselves are notoriously guilty. In vain do you tender to them instruction or
reproof, for they turn away everything from themselves, and never once imagine
that they are the persons for whose benefit these counsels and admonitions are
chiefly intended. If we trace this self-ignorance to its source, we shall find that it is
in general owing, not only to that partiality and fondness which we all have for
ourselves, but to the prevalence of some particular passion or interest, which
perverts the judgment in every case where that particular passion or interest is
concerned. And hence it happens that some men can reason and judge fairly
enough, even in cases in which they themselves are interested, provided it does not
strike against their favourite passion or pursuit. Thus the covetous man will easily
enough perceive the evil of intemperance, and perhaps condemn himself if he has
been guilty of this sin in a particular instance. But he is altogether insensible to the
dominion of his predominant passion, the love of money. It has become habitual to
him. His mind is accustomed to it, so that in every case, where his interest is
concerned, his judgment is warped, and in these instances he plainly discovers that
he is totally unacquainted with his own character. The same observation applies to
other particular vices.

II. FROM MENS GENERAL DISPOSITION ON ALL OCCASIONS TO JUSTIFY THEIR OWN
CONDUCT. If we cannot justify the action itself, we attempt to extenuate its guilt from
the peculiar circumstances of the case. We were placed in such and such a particular
situation, which we could not avoid; our temptations were strong: we did not go the
lengths that many others would have gone in similar circumstances; and the general
propriety of our conduct is more than sufficient to overbalance any little
irregularities with which we may sometimes be chargeable. Men even learn to call
their favourite vices by softer names. Intemperance is only the desire of good
fellowship; lewdness is gallantry, or the love of pleasure; pride, a just sense of our
own dignity; and covetousness, or the love of money, a prudent regard to our
worldly interest. Besides these single determinate acts of wickedness, of which we
have now been speaking, there are numberless cases in which the wickedness cannot
be exactly defined, but consists in a certain general temper and course of action, or
in the habitual neglect of some duty, whose bounds are not precisely fixed. This is
the peculiar province of self-deceit, and here, most of all, men are apt to justify their
conduct, however plainly and palpably wrong. To give an example: There is not a
word in our language that expresses more detestable wickedness than oppression.
Yet the nature of this vice cannot be so exactly stated, nor the bounds of it so
determinately marked, as that we shall be able to say, in all instances, where rigid
right and justice end, and oppression begins. In like manner, it is impossible to
determine how much of every mans income ought to be devoted to pious and
charitable purposes: the boundaries cannot be exactly marked; yet we are at no loss
in the ease of others to perceive the difference betwixt a liberal and generous man,
and one of a hard-hearted and penurious disposition.

III. FROM THE DIFFICULTY WITH WHICH MEN ARE BROUGHT TO ACKNOWLEDGE
THEIR FAULTS, EVEN WHEN CONSCIOUS THAT THEY HAVE DONE WRONG. We wish always
to entertain a favourable opinion of ourselves and of our own conduct, and are
displeased with those who endeavour in any instance to change this opinion, though
it be done with the best, and most friendly intention. But how unreasonable is this
degree of self-love! Were we alive to our true interests, we would wish to become
better acquainted with our follies and our faults, and would esteem our faithful
reprovers our best friends.

IV. FROM THE DISPOSITION WHICH MEN DISCOVER TO REST IN NOTIONS AND FORMS
OF RELIGION, WHILE THEY ARE DESTITUTE OF ITS POWER. Hence it is that so many are
hearers of the Word only, and not doers also, deceiving their own selves. Hence it is
that so many shew great zeal about small and unimportant matters in religion, who
are shamefully deficient in some of its plainest and most essential duties; that so
many are punctual in their observance of religious institutions, who are unjust and
uncharitable in their conduct towards their fellow creatures. Hypocrisy in all its
forms and appearances flows from the deceitfulness of the heart for in general men
deceive themselves before they attempt to deceive others.

V. When men overlook the real motives of their conduct, and mistake the
workings of their own corruptions for the fruits of the Spirit of God. We are greatly
shocked when we read of the dreadful persecutions which in different ages have
been carried on against the faithful servants of Christ; yet these men pretended zeal
for the glory of God: nor is it improbable, but that many of them might so far deceive
themselves as to imagine that they were doing God service, while shedding the blood
of His saints. This is indeed the highest instance of the extreme deceitfulness and
desperate wickedness of the human heart, and the most awful proof of being given
up of God to a reprobate mind. But, in a lesser degree, men frequently practise this
kind of deceit upon themselves, ascribing to the Word and to the Spirit of God what
is evidently the effect of their own ignorance, wickedness, and depravity. (D. Black.)

The natural characteristics of the heart

I. The unparalleled deceitfulness of the heart.

1. The false views which it leads men very generally to adopt respecting the
safety of their state.
(1) It leads some to conclude that they are in a safe state, merely because
they are free from the commission of gross sins, and not inattentive to
the performance of many moral and social duties.
(2) If, in addition to the external decorum just mentioned, and which, as far
as it goes, is certainly commendable, there be found also a merely formal
attention to some religious duties: then, in too many cases, the deceitful
heart prompts the idea that there can be no doubt of the safety of the
person in question; nay, that assurance is thus rendered doubly sure.
(3) The deceitful heart of others will lead them to rest satisfied with a
general reliance on the mercy of God; a reliance this, which may be found
even in those whose lives are stained with the grossest immoralities.
(4) A fourth class is led by the deceitfulness of the heart to rely for safety on
the adoption of a new set of religious opinions, and on a bare and empty
profession of the real truths of the Gospel.
2. The delusions which it practises upon us in reference to those sins to which
 we are most prone.
(1) If it fail to persuade us that they are no sins at all, though this is an
energy of delusion which it is mighty to practise, it will at least represent
them to us as sins of a very venial nature.
(2) It would represent to us that one single repetition of the indulgence may
not be attended with any such dreadful consequences.
(3) Notwithstanding the promise of effectual aid to all who sincerely ask for
it, and the assurance that the Christian shall be enabled to do all things
connected with his duty through Christ strengthening him, it would
suggest the idea that resistance to the commission of the beloved sin is
utterly vain (Jer 18:12).
(4) Before the commission of our favourite sin, it would dreadfully abuse the
mercy of God, and lead us to expect that He will never condemn us to all
eternity for a little irregular pleasure or gain; but, on the contrary, be
ever ready to pardon us: while, after the commission of the sin in
question, it would endeavour to secure our destruction by driving us to
despair and by representing to us that our opportunity is gone forever,
and our day of grace closed.

II. Its desperate wickedness.

1. Every part of it, every one of its faculties, partakes of this depravity.
(1) Even the understanding itself, however equal its powers may be to make
progress in every department of literature and science, is yet on the most
important of all subjects utterly blinded (Eph 4:18).
(2) The judgment, however accurate in forming its estimate of matters
relating to the present life, is yet so completely perverted in reference to
the grand concerns of religion, that even the wisdom of God is
unhesitatingly deemed by it to be nothing better than absolute
foolishness (1Co 1:18; 1Co 1:21; 1Co 1:23; 1Co 2:14).
(3) The will, the faculty by which we make our selection out of the various
objects presented to our choice, is altogether averse to what is really
good; holiness being the object of its unmitigated aversion: while there is
in it a perpetual and violent inclination to what is evil.
(4) The affections are set either on unlawful objects; or, if on lawful ones, yet
in an unlawful and sinful degree.
(5) The conscience is either mistaken in its decisions, or weak in its
influence.
2. The seeds at least of every evil are invariably found there.
(1) There dwells pride, swelling at the thought of every circumstance which
serves in any way to elevate man above his fellow.
(2) There is found that impatience which rises against God and man, when
our will is crossed by them, or our expectations disappointed that anger,
which is ready to break out on the slightest provocation, or even on no
provocation at all; that envy, which is ever ready to repine at the superior
prosperity or excellence of another; and that hatred, which often conceals
its hostile projects under the mask of apparent reconciliation. There are
 the seeds of that malice which delights in the misfortunes of the objects
of its dislike; and of that revenge which, arrogantly assuming the
prerogative of God (Rom 12:19), takes the work into its own hands.
(3) It is the heart, too, in which among a host of other evils every sin of
impurity is conceived and cherished (Mar 7:21-22); and which is the seat
also of that unbelief which, disregarding alike the Divine promises and
threatenings, is the root of every sin, of every imaginable departure from
the living God (Heb 3:12).
3. Its wickedness will further appear, if we reflect on the aggravating
circumstances under which it will prompt to the commission of our darling
sin.
(1) A man shall be thoroughly convinced of the sinfulness of the action on
the commission of which he is bent; shall be thoroughly convinced that
those who do such things are worthy of the Divine condemnation: and
yet his heart shall urge him to commit it in defiance of such conviction.
(2) It would urge a man to sin, notwithstanding the most solemn vows and
resolutions: notwithstanding, as in the case of the profane swearer, his
sin be attended with neither profit nor pleasure: in defiance, too, of every
means which God in mercy makes use of to restrain him from the
commission of it.

III. INSCRUTABLE. Who can know it?

1. But when we speak of the impossibility of thoroughly penetrating the inmost
recesses of the heart, we speak in reference to created beings only. With
regard to the omniscient God, He is one who searcheth all hearts, and
understandeth all the imaginations of the thoughts (1Ch 28:9): nay, He
understandeth our thoughts afar off (Psa 139:2), knows them before they
are conceived.
2. Neither, when we say that the heart is inscrutable, do we mean to deny that a
very considerable knowledge of it, a knowledge which is sufficient for all
practical purposes, is attainable by man. With regard to merely worldly
characters, indeed, however they may boast of their penetration into the
schemes and designs of others, they commonly have scarcely taken the first
step in the knowledge of the unparalleled deceitfulness and desperate
wickedness of their own hearts: on this subject they know next to nothing.
3. It is the real Christian alone who attains any adequate and useful knowledge
of this kind: and who makes this attainment by means of the influences of
that Spirit, who was promised by our Lord for the purpose of convincing the
world of sin; by means too of the diligent and humble study of that Worn of
God which, when accompanied by that Spirit, proves itself to be quick and
powerful, etc.
4. Yet even the measure of knowledge which he is thus enabled to attain, is not
acquired without the greatest difficulty: a difficulty which arises from the
nature of that deceitfulness which he is endeavouring to detect; and from the
power of that self-love which would still lead him to view his own heart with
a partial eye.
 IV. Inferences.
1. How great the folly of trusting to our own hearts!
2. How important the duty of watchfulness!
3. The necessity of earnest prayer.
4. In what urgent need we stand of Gods mercy in Christ.
5. The indispensable necessity of that great change of heart, which, under a
variety of appropriate images, is so repeatedly insisted on in the Bible: which
is represented at one time as a being born again; at another as a new
creation; at a third, as a spiritual resurrection to a life of holiness. (John
Natt, B. D.)

The deceitfulness of the heart

1. Man discovers this corrupt principle by adopting or maintaining a profession
of religion hypocritically. Those who are conscious of hypocrisy may adopt
and maintain a religious profession merely in some degree to pacify
conscience. When this is alarmed by a sense of sin, they are fain to lull it, if
possible, by the semblance of holiness. Others may assume a cloak of
religion, that in this way they may display their natural abilities, and gain the
affection or admiration of the religious: or they may design the advancement
of their temporal interests. They use religion just as it serves their own
purposes. Some throw aside the cloak of a profession as being too
cumbersome, as soon as their purposes are served by it; or perhaps when
they find themselves disappointed in their expectations. Others continue to
wear it to the end, and will never be discovered, till the Son of Man shall
send His angels to separate the precious from the vile.
2. The deceitfulness of the heart appears when men discover greater zeal about
matters of indifference, or, at least, of comparatively less importance than
about those of the greatest moment. They are perhaps regular in the
observation of secret, private, and public ordinances, but in a great measure
negligent of relative duties. They are undutiful husbands or wives, parents or
children, masters or servants. You can have little dependence on their word,
or confidence in their uprightness in civil dealings. Perhaps they carry on a
practice of deceit, extortion, and oppression in so secret a manner, that
although suspected by all around, no one can prove it. There are others who
go still farther. They place the greatest part of their religion in scrupulosity
about matters of mere indifference. The smallest deviation from a common
form, which has no other sanction than that of custom, and it may be, not
even that of common sense, will be esteemed a grievous defection. The most
innocent and necessary recreations will be reckoned unlawful freedoms.
Notwithstanding all this warmth of zeal, you may perhaps find some of this
character, if carefully watched, almost strangers to a principle of common
integrity. They will make conscience a plea for all their impositions on
others. But they more generally arise from the deceitfulness of the heart than
from any tenderness of conscience.
3. The short continuance of religious impressions, whether on saints or sinners,
is another evidence of this deceitfulness.
(1) Unrenewed men, when they have heard an awakening sermon, or been
 visited with some severe affliction, set about external reformation, and, it
may be, endeavour to cleanse their hearts and mortify their lusts by
prayer and fasting; but the first temptation that assails them effaces all
these serious impressions, and plunges them into those sins that they
pretended to forsake. Now, as the leading reason of this is that they have
not undergone a saving change in regeneration, it argues the great
deceitfulness of their hearts, that all their zeal for God and religion, for
the purification of their hearts and reformation of their fives, is
dissipated by the first blast of temptation.
(2) The deceitfulness that also prevails in the hearts of the Lords people,
appears by the short duration of their religious impressions. Often, after
enjoying the most comfortable communion with God, and resolving to
walk always with Him, they find that the duty in which they have been
engaged is scarcely ended ere their warmth of affections and holy
resolutions are vanished.
4. This deceitfulness appears by the many delusions of the imagination, in
forming great hopes of earthly riches, honour, or pleasure. How often does
the poor man build himself up, and regale his fancy with the empty prospect
of great riches. How often does the mean man amuse his imagination with
the delusive hope--we can scarcely call it hope, for it hath not probability
sufficient to constitute hope--with the idea, with the supposition of honour
and dignity, to which it is possible he may yet be advanced. If one of his
acquaintance has been unexpectedly exalted in his situation in fife, he will
consider this as a strong argument for the probability of his own
advancement. And is not this vanity of imagination, which all must feel in
some degree, because of the natural folly of all, a decisive proof of the
deceitfulness of the heart?
5. The extreme reluctance of the heart to believe its own deceitfulness, is a great
evidence of its power. So great is this reluctance, that sinners, instead of
crediting what they hear from the law and testimony, are apt to take offence
at the servants of Christ, when they insist on the evils of the heart; as if they
had a pleasure in magnifying the wickedness of man, and in representing
human nature as vastly worse than it really is.
At any rate, they deny the applicableness of the doctrine to themselves, and
proudly say, with the vain-glorious Pharisees, Are we blind also? Learn:
1. The origin of hypocrisy in a religious profession. Of this the natural
deceitfulness of the heart is the parent.
2. The only cure of hypocrisy. This is the destruction of the principle of deceit.
3. The danger of this course. (J. Jamieson, M. A.)

Self-cheating
The greatest cheat a man has is his own heart.

I. HIS HEART CHEATS HIM OF A TRUE ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF. It tells him that he is
morally what he is not, that he is rich, increased in goods, and needeth nothing;
whereas he is poor, blind, and naked.
 II. His heart cheats him by false promises of the future.
1. It promises him a longer life than he will have.
2. It promises him greater enjoyments than he will ever have. To all it paints a
Canaan; but most find it, not a Canaan but a painful pilgrimage in the
wilderness.
3. It promises him greater opportunities of improvement than he will ever have.
It always holds out to him a more convenient season; but the convenient
season seldom comes. (Homilist.)

The hearts deceitfulness towards itself

I. IT ABOUNDS IN CONTRADICTIONS, so that it is not to be dealt with on any constant

rule.
1. The frame of the heart is ready to contradict itself every moment. Facile now,
then obstinate; open, then reserved; gentle, then revengeful.
2. This ensues from the disorder wrought upon our faculties by sin.

II. Its deceit lies in its full promisings upon the first appearance of things.
1. Never let us think our work in contending against indwelling sin is ended. The
place of its habitation is unsearchable. There are still new stratagems and
wiles to be dealt with. Many conquerors have been ruined by their
carelessness after a victory.
2. The fact that the heart is inconstant calls for perpetual watchfulness. An open
enemy, that deals by violence only, always gives some respite; but against
adversaries that deal by treachery nothing but perpetual watchfulness will
give security.
3. Commit the whole matter, therefore, to Him who searcheth the heart. Here
lies our safety. There is no deceit in our hearts but He can disappoint it.
(John Owen, D. D.)

The deceitfulness of mans heart

I. A difficult subject to deal with.

1. The examination is made by the guilty party into his own character.
2. Nothing more humiliating and painful to mans pride.

II. No deception like that of the heart.

1. It is the fountain of deceit.
2. It deceives its owner and best friends often.
3. Its deceit is in a large measure voluntary.
4. Its deceitfulness is insidious in its growth.
5. Will be terrible in its consequences.

III. THE EXAMPLES OF SCRIPTURE BEAR THIS OUT (1Ki 13:11-18; 2Ki 5:22-27; 2Ki
8:7-15; Act 5:5-10).
 IV. The heart deceives its possessor continually. With regard to--
1. Its motives.
2. Its inclinations.
3. Its safety amidst temptations.
4. Its power of reformation.
Learn:
1. To distrust and watch it.
2. To trust in Christ and His Word. (E. Jerman.)

And desperately wicked.--

Wickedness of the heart
1. The universal prevalence of wickedness in the world, in all countries, and in
all ages. A great part of the business of the world has relation to the existence
and prevalence of crimes; either to prevent, to guard against, or to punish
them. Our laws, our courts, our prisons and penitentiaries, our locks and
bars, our munitions of war on sea and land, are all evidences of the
wickedness of man. No nation legislates on the principle, or with the
expectation, that men will not be found wicked. Indeed, civil government
itself owes its origin to the necessity which exists of guarding against and
coercing the wickedness of the people. Heathen writers, as well as Christian,
give testimony to the fact that men are desperately wicked. What is history,
but a record of the crimes of men? And not only historians, but poets and
satirists among the heathen, paint the depravity of man in the most frightful
colours. And all modern travellers of veracity, and especially missionaries,
unite in testifying that the picture of human nature, drawn by Paul in his
epistles, is an accurate delineation of the present condition of the whole
pagan world. And alas! nominal Christians are but little better. Indeed,
considering their light and privileges, their guilt is much greater.
2. The desperate wickedness of the heart will appear also, if we consider its
aversion to God and holiness. Do men, generally, who have the opportunity
of knowing the true character of God, love it as the angels do in heaven? Do
they love it at all? If they do, would they not all be found zealously engaged
in glorifying God by worshipping Him in His earthly temples? Would they
not be found in constant and cheerful obedience to His will?
3. Another evidence of the desperate wickedness of the human heart is, that it
never grows better, or makes any true reformation of itself; but, on the
contrary, grows worse and worse, as long as it is left to the influence of its
own corrupt principles.
4. The heart of man, left to itself, not only never grows better, but this disease
may well be called desperate, because it yields not to the most powerful
remedies which human wisdom has ever invented; but increases in virulence
under them all.
(1) Early discipline and careful education have been considered by some
sufficient to reach the seat of the disease and to bring about a radical
cure; but the result of impartial examination, is that all the discipline and
 careful training which have ever been used, can do no more than skin
over the foul ulcer of human depravity.
(2) Philosophy also tried her power, and has boasted of great achievements;
but, while the streams from the fountain of human depravity may have
been diverted into a more refined. And secret channel, so as to conceal
the turpitude of its character, yet its poisonous nature has not been
changed.
(3) The desperate wickedness of the heart, not only manifests itself by
resisting the influence of all human remedies; but that which exhibits its
inveterate malignity in the strongest light is, that it does not even yield to
the means of reformation which God has appointed.
5. When the heart appears to be converted, and a visible reformation takes place
in the life, after a while these promising appearances, which, like blossoms in
the spring, gave ground to hope for abundant fruit, are nipped by the severe
frost, or blasted by the chilling wind, and all our hopes are disappointed. The
soul was impressed by Divine truth, and the affections for a season warmly
excited, but the bitter root of iniquity was not eradicated.
6. No severity nor continuance of pain will ever conquer or remove the depravity
of the heart. Many have resorted to self-inflicted tortures, as great as human
nature can endure, and have spent their lives in crucifying the desires of the
flesh; and they may have, to a certain degree, succeeded in diminishing the
ardour of those passions which are connected with the animal frame, by
emaciating the body; but this did not reach the real seat of the malady. It lies
far deeper than the flesh.
7. Another argument of the desperate wickedness of the human heart is the
power of indwelling sin in the regenerate. (A. Alexander, D. D.)

Sin
To know our sin is the first lesson that a child of God must learn. Salvation is
sweet, because of the danger in which sin puts us. The Saviour lived, and bled, and
died, to atone for it.

I. The NATURE of sin is twofold--as it exists in the heart, and as it is seen in the
act.

II. The EFFECTS of sin are twofold, as the nature of sin was; there is the guilt of
sin, and there is its power.

III. The CURE of sin is twofold likewise; its guilt is washed away in the blood of
Christ, and its power is broken down by the Holy Ghost. Why, then, should we be
afraid to look at our sin, when we have a perfect cure for it? Have you learned to
hate sin? It is not enough to hate the sins of others; but you must learn to hate your
own, however pleasant they may be to you, and however long you may have
practised them. Nor is it enough to fear the punishment of sin, unless you mourn
under its guilt, and seek to be freed from its power (E. Garbett, M. A.)

The heart is a grand impostor

 It is like a cheating tradesman who will put you off with bad wares; the heart will
put a man off with seeming grace, instead of saving. A tear or two shed is
repentance, a few lazy desires is faith; blue and red flowers that grow among the
corn look like good flowers, but they are beautiful weeds. The foolish virgins lamps
looked as if they had had off in them, but they had none. Therefore to prevent a
cheat, that we may not take false grace instead of true, we had need make a
thorough disquisition and search of our hearts. (T. Watson.)

The heart deceitful

The dank, mossy sward is deceitful; its fresh and glossy carpet invites the traveller
to leave the rough moorland tract, and at the first step horse and rider are buried in
the morass. The sea is deceitful; what rage, what stormy passions, sleep in that
placid bosom and how often, as vice serves her used-up victims, does she cast the
bark that she received into her arms with sunny smiles a wreck upon the shore. The
morning is oft deceitful; with bright promise of a brilliant day it lures us from home;
the sky ere noon begins to thicken; the sun looks sickly; the heavily laden clouds
gather upon the hill tops; the lark drops songless into her nest; the wind rises
moaning and chill; and at last tempest storm and rain thicken on the dying day. The
desert is deceitful; it mocks the traveller with its mirage. Deceitful above sward, or
sea, or sky, or enchanting desert, is the heart of man; nor do I know a more marked
or melancholy proof of this than that afforded by our light treatment of such weighty
matters as sin and judgment. (T. Guthrie.)

The impurity of the heart

In a vessel filled with muddy water the thickness visibly subsided to the bottom,
and left the water purer and purer until it became perfectly limpid. The slightest
motion, however, brought the sediment again to the top; and the water became thick
and turbid as before. Here, said Gotthold, when he saw it, we have an emblem of
the human heart. The heart is full of the mud of sinful lusts and carnal desires; and
the consequence is, that no pure water--good holy thoughts--can flow from it. Many
a one, however, is deceived by it, and never imagines his heart half so wicked as it
really is, because sometimes its lusts are at rest, and sink to the bottom. But this
lasts only so long as he is without opportunity or incitement to sin. Let that occur,
and worldly lusts rise so thick that his whole thoughts, words, and works show no
trace of anything but impurity.
The difficulty of knowing the heart of man
Who can know it? The heart is deep, and, like Ezekiels vision, presents so many
chambers of imagery, one within another, that it requires time to get a considerable
acquaintance with it, and we shall never know it thoroughly. It is now more than
twenty-eight years since the Lord began to open mine to my own view; and from
that time to this almost every day has discovered to me something which, till then,
was unobserved; and the farther I go the more I seem convinced that I have entered
but a little way. A person that travels in some parts of Derbyshire may easily be
satisfied that the country is cavernous; but how long, how deep, how numerous, the
caverns may be, which are hidden from us by the surface of the ground, and what is
contained in them, are questions which cannot be fully answered. Thus I judge of
my heart, that it is very deep and dark and full of envy; but as to particulars, I know
not one of a thousand. (John Newton.)
 JER 17:10
I the Lord search the heart.

God, the inspector of the heart

I. The description given of the human heart.

1. The heart is deceitful above all things. There is scarcely a truth, for instance,
revealed in the Bible, which it has not, at one time or other, led some men to
call in question. But the deceitfulness of the heart appears nowhere, perhaps,
so striking as in the case of many who sit under the faithful ministry of the
Gospel, or are visited with some severe attack of sickness. How many are
there who, in these circumstances, form the most serious resolutions of
repentance and reformation! Their goodness is as a morning cloud, and as
the early dew it passeth away.
2. The heart is desperately wicked. We must take the heart as it is to the
Physician of souls, or remain forever without a cure.
3. Who can know it? Its deceitfulness is an ocean which we cannot fathom, its
wickedness a worm which we cannot explore.

II. The Divine conduct in reference to the heart.

1. He searches the heart, and tries the reins. He is acquainted with our
principles and motives, our dispositions and affections. However small the
measure of good, or the measure of evil, which may be lurking within, He
must instantly see it. Though it should be only as a grain of mustard seed
sown in a garden, or as a grain of wheat sown in a field, His piercing eye
cannot fall to discover it.
2. The object which He has in view in doing this, or the important reason which
He assigns for thus searching the heart and trying the reins;--even to give
every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.
(1) The ways of men, in some respects, are various as the leaves of the forest;
but in the sight of God they are all either good or bad, righteous or
wicked, godly or ungodly and according as their ways answer to this
character will men be rewarded or punished by the Judge of quick and
dead.
(2) There is scarcely anything we do or say but is attended with either a
beneficial or an injurious effect upon others as well as ourselves; and in
settling our everlasting destiny, God will not fail to take into account the
good or the evil which may thus have resulted from our actions: for He
will give every man, not only according to his ways, but also according to
the fruit of his doings.
Conclusion--
1. If the heart is deceitful above all things, let us learn to distrust it for evermore.
2. If the heart is desperately wicked, let us see the necessity of having a new
 heart created within us.
3. Though we cannot fathom all the depths of deceit and wickedness contained
in the human heart, we may yet obtain a much more extensive knowledge of
these things than we generally possess.
4. Since God searches the heart, and tries the reins of the children of men, let us
know the utter impossibility of imposing upon Him.
5. Since God will give every man according to his ways, and according to the
fruit of his doings, what manner of persons ought we to be in all holy
conversation and godliness! (D. Bees.)

God searching the human heart

Taken by the gardener into a gentlemans garden, I saw long rows of beautiful
chrysanthemums, preparing for a flower show. Each one of those has to be
examined every day, said he, lest earwigs get into the tender tops and eat out the
young buds. And while I watched I saw the under-gardener going from one to
another, gently opening the top shoots, and seeing that no hidden evil lurked within.
Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part Thou shalt
make me to know wisdom (Psa 51:6). What earwigs of thought, desire, imagination
get into the heads of the Lords plants, their best parts! How jealous Paul was of
young converts, lest earwigs of false doctrine, or evil practice, should destroy his
labour. The head Gardener sees to this. I the Lord search the heart (Jer 17:10).
(Footsteps of Truth.)

To give every man according to his ways.--

Gods rule of judgment

I. The preparation God is making for the future judgment.

1. He continually marks the ways of men.
(1) Actions.
(2) Words.
(3) Thoughts.
2. He records everything in the book of His remembrance.

II. The rule by which the judgment shall be determined.

1. The sentence will be according to every mans works (Gal 6:7-8; 2Co 9:6).
2. Rightly understood, this strongly declares the equity of Gods future
judgments. Everything that can affect the quality of an action will be taken
into account. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

JER 17:11
As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches,
and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days.
Riches gotten not by right
The illustration is taken from natural history. Some think it refers to an ancient
practice still maintained amongst the Arabs, of driving the mother birds from place
to place till they become exhausted, and are easily captured: in which case, of
course, the poor partridge never has the joy of seeing her own progeny. Patiently has
she sat for weeks in her nest, over eggs which another than herself is to hatch. I do
not think this is the intended idea at all. On looking into the Septuagint, I find the
rendering of the verse somewhat different, but practically the same as many of you
will find in the margin of your Bibles. As the partridge gathereth young which she
has not herself brought forth. That is more plain and natural. The partridge is in
the habit of stealing eggs from the nests of other birds of a different species, and of
sitting upon them: and then, shortly after these eggs are hatched, the young,
forsaking their false parent, and associating with birds of their own order, make the
old partridge look very foolish, as all her promising brood desert her.

I. THE BIBLE HAS NOTHING TO SAY AGAINST A MANS GETTING RICH BY JUST AND
HONOURABLE MEANS. A fine healthy sight it is we may see every morning in London,
the thousands of young men pressing in to the city on bus or car, or better still, on
their own two feet, eager for business, and determined to get on. Diligence in
business is one of the prime virtues of human life upon the earth, but the motive
power which impels it is the expectation of gain. To be altogether indifferent to
material profit, so far from being a recommendation, betokens an unmanly and
defective character. It is all very well to moralize on the duty of being contented with
our lot, bug there is a certain contentment with our lot that simply means
indolence, and stupidity, and the lack of enterprise. The wish to get riches is not a
sinful wish; nay, it may be a most laudable one, and, as I have said, a useful stimulus
to industry. Hence, it is by no means a good thing for a man to have been born with
a silver spoon in his mouth; it may, indeed, make him the envy of others, but his
moral dangers are enormously increased thereby. I dont pity you in the least, my
young brothers, if you have had to begin life without a halfpenny; so long as you
have good brains, sound health, high principle, and a fair opening, I have no fear of
you; stick to your work; push on; go ahead; and may God prosper you!

II. RICHES UNRIGHTEOUSLY GOTTEN ARE NO BLESSING. There are many ways in
which you may violate the spirit of the eighth commandment, without robbing the
till, or forging a cheque, or making a false entry in the cashbook. Do let me entreat
you to be straightforward and open in everything; let your conduct and character be
above the shadow of suspicion; let truthfulness and honesty be a very law of your
being; condescend to nothing which conscience does not thoroughly approve; have
an instinctive horror of everything approaching duplicity or equivocation; hate a lie
as you hate death; and let your whole action in business be such that you can invite
the eye of God to search you through, confident that all is straight and right. Ah!
believe me, such a character is the grandest capital in the long run: as John Bright
wrote to a young man who applied to him for advice:--In my judgment the value of
a high character for strict honour and honesty in business can hardly be estimated
too highly and it will often stand for more in the conscience, and even in the ledger,
than all that can be gained by shabby and dishonest transactions. It seems to the
rogue, wrote Thomas Carlyle, that he has found out a short northwest passage to
wealth, but he soon discovers that fraudulence is not only a crime but a blunder. Sin
never pays. Said a pawky Scotch farmer to his son, John, honestys the best policy;
Ive tried both ways mysel. There is a great deal of money made in trade, which, it
must be confessed, is gotten not by right. Too often there is one code of virtue for the
home circle, and another code for the factory or shop. One system of morals for the
Sunday, another for the weekday. Violations of rectitude, which would be severely
condemned in the family, are winked at in business. When we come to the strict
standard of Gods law, we shall find a vast deal more unrighteousness in the
mercantile world than most of us are willing to allow. Strange as it may seem,
thousands of men are far more ready to be benevolent than just. Mr. Gladstone, in
one of his speeches, sagaciously observed, I would almost dare to say there are five
generous men for one just; man. The passions will often ally themselves with
generosity, but they always tend to divert from justice. I am quite in a line with the
text when I advise you to practise frugality. Dont spend all our earnings; cultivate
thrift. However small the sum, it will grow; and the tendency will be to develop in
you self-denial, economy, and forethought. Then I would also suggest to you the
wisdom, nay, the duty, of effecting, at as early a date as possible, an insurance on
your life. When Jacob was bargaining with Laban about terms, he showed the
sagacity that has ever been characteristic of his posterity; he was not going to remain
in Labans service without fair wages; and now, he added, when shall I provide for
mine own house also? I would almost go so far as to say that the small yearly sum it
will now involve is not your own; if you spend it on unnecessary comforts, you may
leave them in the midst of your days, and at your end may be a fool.

III. THE PENALTY ON THE ACQUISITION OF UNRIGHTEOUS GAIN GENERALLY FOLLOWS

EVEN IN THIS LIFE. Perhaps this does not hold so markedly in our times as under the
old dispensation, because immortality, with its just retribution, is now more clearly
revealed. Still, no thoughtful person can fail to see how often a terrible Nemesis
pursues the fraudulent man, even in the midst of his days, and how, at his end,
even the world styles him a fool. Some unexpected turn comes, some monetary
crisis, some commercial disaster, and lo! all his hoarded gains take wing and fly
away, and the unprincipled man is left like the silly partridge, to sit disconsolate in
an empty nest! But though the money abide with him, there may be wretchedness
untold, and he is ready to curse the gold that promised so much happiness, and now
yields so little. Ill-gotten wealth will never make its owner really happy. There are
plutocrats in this city whose tables are covered with silver plate, who drink their
sparkling champagne, and roll along the streets in their sumptuous carriages, whose
lives are unutterably miserable. A worm is gnawing at the root. Their fortune has
been built upon a basis of deception, bringing with it deep, unutterable remorse;
and though friends may flatter, an upbraiding voice from the unseen is ever
whispering in their ear one little word of four letters--and two of them the same--
Fool! Do not forget that your best possessions, even now, are things which cannot
be weighed in a scale, nor measured by a rule; they are treasures which rust cannot
tarnish, nor thieves carry away. It was a noble declaration of Marcus Aurelius, My
dominions are greater within than without; and if this was the utterance of a
heathen monarch, what ought a Christian to feel? Only let a living faith in the Lord
Jesus Christ put you into connection with the riches of His grace, and let there burn
within you the hope of a glorious immortality; then, I hesitate not to say, your
fortune is made; you have the guarantee of peace and plenty here, and the promise
of a blessed inheritance hereafter! (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)
Riches that escape from a man
Allusion is here made to a well-known fact in natural history. If a partridge or a
quail or a robin brood the eggs of another species, the young will not stay with the
one that happened to brood them, but at the first opportunity will assort with their
own species. Those who have been brought up in the country have seen the dismay
of the farmyard hen, having brooded aquatic fowls, when after a while they tumble
into their natural element--the water. So the text suggests that a man may gather
under his wings the property of others, but it will after a while escape; it will leave
the man in a sorry predicament. (T. De Witt Talmage.)

Commercial morality

I. THERE ARE MANY WRONG WAYS OF GETTING RICHES, or seeking, at least, to get
them, even where there is no violation of right or equity in a mans transactions with
his fellow men.
1. What right-minded man would rush into the strife and scramble for them in
the headlong way that many do?
2. Can that man be said to be getting riches rightly who is scraping them
together, and hoarding them up, without regarding the urgent necessities,
not to say anything of the desirable comforts, of others?
3. Is it right to get riches in an irreligious way, by habitually neglecting God and
putting our duty to Him out of the account altogether?
4. It is one thing to get riches in a way that is not right--that is, unworthily,
hard-heartedly, and irreligiously--and another thing to get them and not by
right,--that is, unrighteously, by downright dishonesty, by the violation of
the law of equity, by the rupture of the bond of uprightness in the conduct of
man to man. It is this latter way of getting riches which is expressly
mentioned here, emphatically condemned, and threatened with an inevitable
and appropriate punishment.

II. THERE IS A REMARKABLE CONNECTION BETWEEN WHAT IS SAID ABOUT THE HUMAN
HEART in verse 9, and what immediately follows. The heart is deceitful, etc. Here is
a challenge. Fathom the depth of depravity, obscured and complicated by the
deceitfulness, who can. There is only One who can accept the challenge; and He
does. I the Lord search, etc. His judgment is ever according to truth. He stamps all
human character with its proper die; calls all human conduct by its proper name;
and will infallibly lead all human conduct, be it good or bad, to its appropriate issue.
Not by right are riches gotten--
1. If by the deceptions of merchandise.
2. By the unfair remuneration of labour.
3. By the artifices of commerce.
Conclusion--Be industrious: seeking, by the hand of diligence, if it be Gods will,
even to be rich. But beware of being carried away from moral principle, from a
religious life, by the prevailing furor of business, the almost terrific money rage.
One thing is needful. All things are ours, if we are Christs, for Christ is Gods. (H.
Angus, D. D.)

JER 17:12-14
A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary.

Our sanctuary
This book of Jeremiah is a very thorny one--it might be called, like his smaller
work, The Book of Lamentations. Our text is as a lily among thorns, as a rose in
the wilderness; the solitary place shall be glad for it, and the desert shall rejoice. The
words sound like sweet music amid the crash of tempest. The bitter tree yields us
sweet fruit. The weeping prophet wipes away our tears.

I. THE TRUE PLACE OF OUR SANCTUARY. It is not at Jerusalem, nor yet at Samaria; it
is not at Rome, nor yet at Canterbury. The place of our sanctuary is our God
Himself. God is our refuge and strength. Lord. Thou hast been our dwelling place
in all generations.
1. He is viewed under the aspect of a sovereign reigning in majesty--A glorious
high throne is the place of our sanctuary. Many refuse to worship God as
reigning: they have not yet grasped the idea that the Lord is King, so that
they cannot understand the song, The Lord reigneth: let the earth rejoice.
For that includes, first, Divine sovereignty, and some men grow black in the
face with rage against that truth; they cannot endure it. He will make His
own election, and He will distribute His mercy as seemeth good in His sight.
Now this God whose sovereignty is so much disputed is our God; a glorious
high throne for absolute dominion and sovereignty is the place of our
sanctuary. To Him whose sovereign grace is the hope of the undeserving we
fly for succour. Besides sovereignty, of course, His glorious high throne
includes power. A throne without power would be but the pageantry of
vanity. There should be power in the King who ruleth over all: and is there
not? Who shall stay His hand, or say unto Him, What doest Thou?
2. Forget not that the Lord reigns in exceeding glory. The excellence of His
dominion surpasses all other, for He is the blessed and only Potentate. Every
act of His empire exhibits His glorious character, His justice, His goodness,
His faithfulness, His holiness.
3. It says, A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our
sanctuary. It is a very blessed thing to come back to the fact that the Lord
has not newly assumed a throne, from which He has newly cast out some
former king. As His is the most potent of empires, so is it the most ancient.
God is never taken by surprise; He has foreseen all things, and worked them
into His grand plan. God is working evermore for a glorious purpose, which
shall one day make the universe and all eternity to sing with rapturous joy
that ever God determined to do what He is now doing.
4. When the prophet alludes to the place of our sanctuary, our mind is naturally
led to feel that there must be some kind of place where God especially reveals
Himself. The place where He mainly revealed Himself among men was the
temple, to which I have said Jeremiah somewhat alludes. Now, where was
 the temple built? It was built upon that mountain whereon Abraham took his
son Isaac to offer him up as a sacrifice. A ram caught in the thicket was the
substitute for Isaac; but there was no substitute for Jesus, the Son of God. He
died, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. But there, where the most
instructive of all types of the heavenly Fathers love was exhibited, there
must be the temple wherein God would converse with men and make for
men a place of sanctuary. The temple itself was built upon that site, and
there it was that God dwelt visibly between the wings of the cherubim, above
the ark of the covenant, over that golden lid which was called the mercy seat.
What was that ark of the covenant, but a type of our Lord Jesus Christ in a
most instructive way. The sacrifice of Isaac and the ark of the covenant were
only types of that greater sacrifice, when He who is the Wonderful, the
Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,
went up to the Cross, and on Calvary it pleased the Lord to bruise Him. It
is natural that the Lord should meet with us in grace in the place where He
put His Son to grief. There, where He made His soul an offering for sin, the
Lord becomes well pleased with us. Now, then, the place where we worship is
God Himself revealed in the person of His dear Son. I pray you, never try to
worship anywhere else. Christ is the one altar, the one temple, the one
sanctuary.
5. In addition, the Lord God is our refuge; for a sanctuary was a place to which
men fled in the hour of peril Is not Jesus our refuge from present guilt and
from the wrath to come?

II. I am to speak concerning WHOSE WHO DEPART FROM GOD. Alas, that there
should be such!--men who leave the river for the desert, the living for the dead! Who
are they? The text says, All that forsake Thee, and they that depart from Me. See,
then, that this text has a bearing upon us, because these people of whom we are now
going to speak were not an ignorant people who did not know God, or how could
they be said to forsake Him? At one time, evidently, these people had something to
do with the Lord, but after awhile they forsook Him. What did they do? They no
longer sought unto the Lord as once they did, but ceased to be fervent in their
service. At first they ceased to worship Him, they took no delight in His ways; they
tried to be neutral, they were lukewarm, careless, indifferent, they forgot God. After
thus declining in zeal, and refusing outward worship, they went further; for he says
they had departed from Him--they could not endure the Lord, and therefore went
into the far country. They said unto God, Depart from us; we desire not the
knowledge of Thy ways. They went into open sin; they disowned their God and
broke His commands: some of them even dared to blaspheme Him. The course of
sin is downhill. The man who once forgets his God soon forgets himself; and then he
throws the reins on the neck of his lusts and goes from sin to sin, forgetting his God
more and more. The most hardened of sinners will one day be ashamed, saying, I
acted unprofitably to myself. Such shame will come over you forgetful ones one of
these days. It may not come upon you till you die, but it is very probable that it will
assail you then. When in your dying hours, what a dreadful thing it will be to be
filled with shame at the remembrance of the past, so as to be afraid to meet your
God, ashamed to think that you have lived a whole life without caring for Him! What
will it be to wake up in the next world and to see the glory of God around you--the
glory of the God whom you despised! Oh, the shame that will come over the ungodly
in judgment! They shall wake up to shame and everlasting contempt. Great men
and proud men will be small enough ere long; and careless and profane persons will
be miserable enough when that word shall be fulfilled--All that forsake Thee shall
be ashamed. And then it is added that they shall be written in the earth; that is, if
they turn away from God they may win a name for a while, but it will be merely from
the earth, and of the earth. O worldlings, you have your riches in this poor country
which is soon to be burned with fire. Your pleasures and treasures will melt in the
fervent heat of the last days. Your lifes pursuits are a short business, ending in
eternal misery. The text tells us that there shall come something besides this: they
that forsake God shall one day be sore athirst even unto death, because they have
forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters. There is for the soul but one
fountain of water, flowing, cool, clear, ever refreshing. All my springs are in Thee,
said David; and so may we say, for our only source of supply is the Lord our God. If a
man turns away from God, then he forsakes the cool fountain, he goes to broken
cisterns that hold no water, and he will perish of thirst.

III. Let us look at THE COMERS TO GOD. Those who come to God--how do they
come? They come away from all the world. O soul, if thou wouldst have peace, come
away to your God. Never take your place with those who shall be written in the
earth. How did believers come to God of old? Jeremiah came sick and needing to be
saved, for he cried, Heal me, O Jehovah, save me. That is the way to come. But
come to God with faith. It was grand faith of Jeremiah which enabled him to say,
Heal me, and I shall be healed. Sick as I am, if Thou wilt act as physician to me I
shall be cured: if Thou save me, lost as I am, I shall be saved. Come along, poor
sinner. Where, sir? say you. To God in Christ Jesus. And come with this
acknowledgment on your tongue,--For Thou art my praise. We have a good God, a
loving God, a tender God, a gracious God, a God full of long-suffering and mercy and
faithfulness to us poor sinners. This is good argument in prayer--I have made my
boast in Thee, O God, I pray Thee let not my glorying be stopped. Be to me as I have
declared Thou wilt be. But suppose you cannot say so much as that, then put it this
way--Heal me, O Lord; heal me this morning; save me, O Lord; save me at once,
and Thou shalt be my praise. Lord, I promise that I will never rob Thee of the
honour of my salvation; if Thou wilt but save me Thou shalt have all the glory of it.
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

God our sanctuary

The godly soul has a sure defence and aid in his living, loving Father and God. In
every time of earthly need and trouble this is his chief consolation, and the source of
serene and abiding joy

I. THY NECESSITY OF A DIVINE REFUGE. Times come when the hardiest and most
self-reliant is made to feel that he is but feebleness, vanity, and dust. Protection,
comfort, and settledness for the soul can alone be found in God.
1. We are victims of moral evil.
2. Of mental and physical sorrows.

II. The nature of the refuge afforded.

1. Lofty and glorious in position. There we may obtain--
 (1) Mercy.
(2) Grace.
(3) Pardon.
(4) Strength.
2. All-sufficient in resources. Help for every circumstance, need, age.
3. Perpetual and abiding in duration. (James Foster, B. A.)

Mans refuge-A glorious high throne

The word sanctuary at first meant anything separated and set apart for a holy
purpose; later it came to designate a place used exclusively for sacred services; and
then we find it used to express one chief end of a sacred place--an asylum--a place of
refuge to which the guilty may fly and be safe.

I. MANS REFUGE. No creature so much needs the shelter and defence of a safe
hiding place as man. His sources of danger are more than can be numbered. Beset
with foes, he is in constant need of shelter, and often cries out for deliverance. What
so welcome to him as a refuge! Physically regarded, as possessed of a body over
which disease and death reign, how often does he sigh for some asylum, which may
furnish a defence against these invaders of life! How is he to escape the feeling of
terrible desertion and unimaginable dangers, how help crying out for some refuge
from the fightings without, the fears within, and the foes on every side? And,
looking still deeper, when we see that he is the subject of a disease deceitful above
every other--a disease which pertains to his whole nature--an incurable
wickedness, and when we hear him cry out in anguish of soul, O wretched man
that I am, who shall deliver into from this body of sin and death,--who does not
rejoice at the very idea of refuge? How hard it is not to complain against God, and to
demand wherefore He has made man in vain! How still harder to believe that
there is a refuge for man which has been set up from the beginning! But in all times
of deepest trouble, when human helpers fail and the hour of extremity comes, the
strange thing is that the universal instincts of mans nature do lead him to look for
help, and though he passes away apparently unhelped, he does so looking for help.
You may have stood among a crowd, upon the shore, watching some vessel tossed
on the tempestuous billows which threatened to overwhelm her until at length a
mighty wave washed over her and swept her clean of every living soul. And as that
sea overwhelmed her there arose from the breast of everyone of the gazing crowd,
God help them! Was that prayer an unconscious self-delusion in that moment of
agony, or is there help for man in all times of his need? Or you may have listened to
a judge passing the awful sentence which doomed a fellow creature to death--and
whilst telling him there was no longer mercy or hope for him on earth, pointing to
heaven and assuring him of hope and help in God. Was that judge dishonouring his
judicial robes, and deceiving that poor wretch by this solemn mockery of pretended
mercy, or is there an open door of hope in heaven for the poor outcasts from earth?
And we have all read of the poor thief upon the Cross, turning, whilst paying the last
penalty of the law with his life, in penitence to the Saviour and praying, Lord,
remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom; and we know the gracious
answer he received, This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise. Was our Lord
deceived in this promise, or did He knowingly deceive the miserable victim of crime
in the moment of his extremity? Oh no--there is help for the helpless, help for the
hell-deserving, shelter for the defenceless, a refuge for the outcasts. The just God,
who is also a Saviour--oh, how I love that combination--hath said, Look unto Me
and be ye saved, all ye ends of the earth; for I am God and there is none else.

II. MANS REFUGE IS A SANCTUARY. A place which is only a refuge furnishes but a
temporary shelter. To the shipwrecked, a naked rock jutting out of the sea would be
a glad refuge from the devouring waves; but it would not be a refuge long. But a
refuge, which is also a sanctuary, a Divine house, affords not only shelter, but rest,
repose, and satisfaction for all we need or can desire. The house of God may well be
a home for man. And he who enters such a refuge soon discovers that it will be to
him all his desire.

III. MANS REFUGE IS NOT ONLY SACRED, BUT ROYAL. A glorious high throne is the
place of our sanctuary. The house of God, the dwelling place of the Most High is
also the seat and source of all rule, authority, and power. Under the shadow of the
Almighty, man finds a sure defence for the whole breadth of his nature, in the
midst of every possible circumstance, throughout the whole course of his history.
The security and defence vouchsafed to him are of the highest character, and
inseparable from the nature of the throne, which has become his refuge. The
sanctuary-refuge-throne is holy, and the holiness of the throne is its defence and
security. The power of the throne is the defence of mans refuge. But the throne,
which has become mans refuge, is not merely a symbol of power, but also of power
surrounded with becoming glory. There is the pomp which surrounds a throne.
The throne gathers up and crowns every excellency.

IV. THIS SANCTUARY-REFUGE-THRONE IS SPOKEN OF AS AN EXALTED THRONE. It is

high enough to embrace not merely mans individual nature, in all its integrity of
body, soul, and sprat, but the whole race--the earliest sons in all the height and
might of their experience, together with the latest born in the feebleness of
beginning life. And not merely the race of man, for, under its exalted height is
gathered together, in one unity of blessed life, all the elect, from the archangel
before the throne to the weakest and meanest of the sons of men.

V. THIS EXALTED THRONE IS GLORIOUS IN THE HISTORY OF ITS EXALTATION. Its

exaltation has not been by might but by right. Righteousness has been pleased and
the law magnified throughout the holy pathway of ascent from a humble refuge to
the glorious high throne. In becoming a refuge for the destitute, the abandoned, the
lost, the throne has revealed the charms of the holy order and eternal righteousness
by which triumphant conquests are made over every form of disorder and
wickedness. Fugitives from the consequences of violated law, as they enter the
refuge become obedient to law; the wicked become righteous; the sinful are made
holy.

VI. IT HAS BEEN SET UP FROM THE BEGINNING. The provision for the requirements
of mans fallen nature was no afterthought but a forethought. The refuge was ever
latent in the unbroken depths of the throne, and, for the revelation of its
fundamental glory, needed to be opened up. The history of man unfolds the eternal
purpose, and will be no mean history when complete. It was the joy of the Eternal
Wisdom, whose delights were with the sons of men ere ever the earth was; it will
be His joy when the earth is no more. The discords of human history lie between two
harmonies, the one in which they have no place, the other in which they have been
resolved. In mans nature is struck the keynote of those pre-established harmonies,
the melody of which is being written out in his history as a fitting song with which to
celebrate the close of his earthly career, and the reconciliation of all things.

VII. THE PERSONALITY OF THIS REFUGE. An impersonal refuge could never afford
shelter and defence for man against his personal foes. Moreover, the impersonal
could never afford rest to, nor become a home for man. Man needs man, a human
security, a human joy, a human home, a warm maternal bosom on which to rest; not
even God as God, but God as man. Is there such a person? One who is a refuge for
man and a sanctuary for God? One who is also a throne, a throne exalted by a
glorious history, and yet set up from the beginning? Oh joy of all joys, that God has
revealed to us One possessed of all these attributes! We make our first acquaintance
with Christ as a refuge. We seek in Him deliverance, shelter, and safety. Having
made the experience of Him as a refuge, we begin to find He is more than a refuge,
that He is a Divine house, a blessed home, a home in the house of God. Then, as we
enlarge our acquaintance with our home, we find it a house of many mansions,
opening up out of each other height above height, until a very throne is displayed to
us--the throne of God, rising out of the refuge for man--and that the refuge is lost in
the throne. And then as we gaze upon the throne which has hidden the refuge in its
glory, the humanity in the Divinity, we begin to discover the refuge again in its
deeper depth, something human in the depths of the Divine, and that it gives its own
lustre to the central glory of the throne. And we perceive that this eternal humanity
in the depths of Deity which gives a lustre to the eternal glory is the humanity which
is the Alpha and Omega of mans earthly history. And seeing this we refuse to it all
dates and proclaim it to have been ever from of old, and that it became the eternal
Son in the bosom of the Father, nay, behoved Him to be in all things made like unto
His brethren that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things
pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people; nay, more, that
it must needs have been that He might enter into His glory! Hallelujah! God has
made Himself one with us in our necessities that we may partake of His glory. (J.
Pulsford, D. D.)

Adoring exclamations of a soul gazing on God

I. A WONDERFUL VISION OF WHAT GOD IS. There are three clauses. They all seem to
have reference to the temple in Jerusalem, which is taken by a very natural figure of
speech as a kind of suggestive description of Him who is worshipped there. The
Sublime Porte is properly the name of a lofty gateway which belonged to the palace
in Constantinople, and so has come to mean the Turkish Government--if
government it can be called. So we talk of the Papal see. Or, again, the decision of
the Chair in the House of Commons. So the prophet takes outward facts of the
temple building as symbolising great and blessed spiritual thoughts of the God that
filled the temple with His own lustre.
1. A glorious throne--that is grand, but that is not what Jeremiah means--A
throne of glory is the true rendering. In the Old Testament, where glory is
ascribed to God, the word has a very specific meaning, namely, the light
which was afterwards called the Shekinah, that dwelt between the
 cherubim, and was the symbol of the Divine presence, and the assurance that
that presence would be self-revealing, and would manifest Himself to His
people. The throned glory, the glory that reigns and rules as King in Israel, is
the idea of the words before us. It is the same throne that a later writer in the
New Testament speaks of when he says, Let us come boldly to the throne of
grace. We all can draw near, through the rent veil, and walk rejoicingly in
the light of the Lord; this glory is grace; this grace is glory. This, then, is the
first of Jeremiahs great thoughts of God, and it means--The Lord God
omnipotent reigneth, there is none else but He, and His will runs
authoritative and supreme into all corners of the universe.
2. High from the beginning. It was a piece of the patriotic exaggeration of
Israels prophets and psalmists that they made much of the little hill upon
which the temple was set. Jeremiah felt it to be a material type, both of the
elevation, and of the stable duration, of the God whom he would commend to
Israels and to all mens trust. High from the beginning, separated from all
creatural limitation and lowness, He whose name is the Most High, and on
whose level no other being can stand, towers above the lowness of the loftiest
creature, and from that inaccessible height He sends down His voice, like the
trumpet from amidst the darkness of Sinai, proclaiming, I am God and there
is none besides Me. Yet while thus holy--that is, separate from creatures--
He makes communion with Himself possible to us, and draws near to us in
Christ, that we in Christ may be made nigh to Him.
3. He is the place of our sanctuary. That is, as though the prophet would point
as the wonderful climax of all, to the fact that He of whom the former things
were true should yet be accessible to our worship; that, if I might so say, our
feet could tread the courts of that great temple; and we draw near to Him
who is so far above the loftiest, and separate from all the magnificences
which Himself has made, and who yet is our sanctuary, and accessible to
our worship. Ay! and more than that--Lord! Thou hast been our dwelling
place in all generations. In old days the temple was more than a place of
worship. It was a place where a man coming, had, according to ancient
custom, guest rights with God. God Himself, like some ancestral dwelling
place in which generation after Generation of fathers find children have
abode, whence they have been carried, and where their children still live, is
to all generations their home and their fortress.

II. THE SOUL RAPT IN MEDITATION OF THIS VISION OF GOD. To me, this long-drawn-
out series of linked clauses without grammatical connection, this succession of
adorning exclamations of rapture, wonder, and praise, is very striking. It suggests
the manner in which we should vivify all our thoughts of God, by turning them into
material for devout reverence; awestruck, considering meditation. We should be like
ruminant animals who first crop the grass--which being interpreted means, get
Scripture truth into our heads--and then chew the cud, which being interpreted is,
then put these truths through a second process by meditation on them that may turn
into nourishment and make flesh.

III. THE MEDITATIVE SOUL GOING OUT TO GRASP GOD THUS REVEALED, AS ITS
PORTION AND HOPE. O Lord! the hope of Israel. I must cast myself upon Him by
faith as my only hope; and turn away from all other confidences which are vain and
impotent. So we are back upon that familiar Christian ground, that the bond which
knits a man to God, and by which all that God is becomes that mans personal
property, and available for the security and the shaping of his life, is the simple
flinging of himself into Gods arms, in sure and certain trust. Then, every one of
these characteristics of which I have been speaking will contribute its own special
part to the serenity, the security, the Godlikeness, the blessedness, the
righteousness, the strength of the man who thus trusts. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

All that forsake Thee shall be ashamed.

A backslider ashamed of his conduct

A London City missionary writes: One Sunday afternoon, when out visiting, I
noticed a soldier. He was in a great hurry, but I soon caught him up, gave him a
tract, and, walking with him, spoke to him about his soul. In reply he said, I only
wish I was the same as I used to be. For four and a half years I was a Christian. I
worked for Christ with all my heart, and was never so happy as when so engaged. I
made up my mind to enlist. I thought I should get on all right, but when my
companions knew I was a Christian, they made it so hot for me I could not stand it,
and gave in. But, said I, what would your country think of you if you were a
coward in the face of an enemy? And should you fear to face the foes of Jesus Christ?
When the greatest danger surrounds you, then it is your duty to be most faithful, not
only to King Edward, but to King Jesus. The young soldier was deeply moved, and
said, I do thank God for meeting you. I will give my heart to Jesus again, and by
Gods help I will be true to Him. I will not be a coward again, but will confess Him
tonight in the barrack room.
Shall be written in the earth.--
Where is our name being written
Prudentius rightly saith, that their names that are written in red letters of blood in
the Churchs calendar, are written in golden letters in Christs register in the book of
life; as on the contrary, these idolaters whose sin was with an iron pen engraven on
tables of their hearts (verse 1) are justly written in the earth. (John Trapp.)

JER 17:14
Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved.

The Lords healing

I. THE PROPHETS CRY. Sin is the sickness of the soul. It has seized upon all its
powers. Not one single faculty has escaped; all are polluted, all diseased. Its very
vitals are affected by sin. The understanding is darkness (1Co 2:14). The will is
stubborn; the conscience is impure (Tit 1:15). The very memory is impure. But the
chief seat and residence of sin is the heart (Jer 4:18). Oh, how little do we know its
deep defilement (1Ki 8:38). The leprosy of the law was a type of it. It is poison (Psa
140:3). It is the mire in which the sow wallows, the vomit of dog (2Pe 2:22). One
sin has in it all enmity, rebellion, distance from God, all deceitfulness, hardness; and
yet, how slight are our deepest views; how poor and feeble our most heartfelt
repentance; how unfeeling our most touching sorrow. Sin is by all human skill and
human power incurable (Jer 2:22).

II. Is this so? Then no one but Jesus the Lord can heal our spiritual diseases.
1. It requires omniscience to know them. There is in all sin, in every one sin, a
depth which human wisdom can never fathom--a depth of baseness,
ingratitude, contempt (Psa 19:12).
2. It requires omnipotence to subdue them. It requires the same putting forth of
Divine omnipotence to bring light into the darkened soul as to bring light
into this darkened world (2Co 4:6).
3. It requires infinite patience to bear with these soul-diseases.
4. It requires an infinite sympathy, and a boundless love.

III. His healing.

1. The means whereby He heals are various. Indeed, there is not a single
circumstance which He does not employ for this very end. By things
pleasant, things painful; comforts and crosses; by what He gives, by what He
takes away; by friends, by foes; by saints, by sinners; by the Church, by the
world; by sickness, by health; by life and by death; He heals the sin-sick soul.
2. The character of His healing.
(1) Most wise healing. How infinite that wisdom which suits His skill to
every individual case. Some are confident, He checks them; others
depressed, He cheers them. Some love nothing but high cordials, He
brings them down to that hunger that makes every bitter thing sweet.
(2) Most tender healing. His is the tenderness of Him who in all our
afflictions is afflicted, a friend, a brother, a nurse. Is the medicine bitter?
He administered it with His own hand.
(3) Most mysterious healing. He makes us wise by discoveries of our own
folly, strong by unfolding our own weakness.
(4) Most efficacious healing. He blesses His own remedies.
(5) Most holy healing. All this healing is to conform to the Divine image.
Conclusion--
1. Our wisdom is to be willing to have our spiritual maladies discovered, yea,
thoroughly searched.
2. Our wisdom is to be willing to have them thoroughly cured, honestly to wish
this, cost what it may, Heal me.
3. To expect no cure but what is promised.
4. To put ourselves fairly into His hands.
5. Above all, to trust not only in Him, but in the blessed confidence of a simple
faith that He is able to heal, and will heal, to come to Him with the prophets
cry, Heal Thou me. (J. H. Evans, M. A.)

A cry for healing and saving grace

 I. Sin is the disease of the soul and is so felt.
1. Loss of rest.
2. Deprivation of taste.
3. Loss of sight.
4. Loss of hearing.

II. Christ is the only Physician.

1. The infinite efficacy of Christs atonement, as showing Gods readiness as well
as ability to pardon.
2. Since God requires forgiveness without bounds of us, will not He extend the
same to sinners?
3. The direct statements of Scripture.
4. Great instances of mercy.

III. PRAYER IS OUR ONLY REFUGE. The appointed means. Has never failed.

IV. Praise should be our truest delight. (S. Thodey.)

A prayer for salvation

1. These words express a deep concern about salvation, and an earnest desire to
obtain it.
2. A firm persuasion that God alone can save.
3. A heartfelt application to God for salvation through the medium of prayer.
4. An unwavering confidence that the salvation which God bestows in answer to
prayer will be a salvation suited to the wants of fallen man. (G. Brooks.)

The penitents prayer

I. AS EXPRESSING A DEEP CONCERN ABOUT SALVATION AND AN EARNEST DESIRE TO

OBTAIN IT. He not only cherishes a lively aversion to all that stings him with remorse,
or that fills him with alarm; he mourns also the loss of those positive blessings of
which his apostasy has deprived him, and thirsts for their recovery.

II. The true penitent being thus awakened to a sense of his need of salvation, and
to unfeigned and anxious concern about obtaining it, HE APPLIES FOR IT TO ALMIGHTY
GOD. Save me, O Lord. The nature and exigency of his situation compel him to
have recourse to God as alone able to deliver him. The Divine mercy exhibited in the
Gospel encourages him to put his confidence in God, as perfectly willing to bestow
the deliverance he is so anxious to attain. Every new proof that he discovers of Gods
kindness gives him a more forcible impression of the heinousness of his guilt and of
the folly of his conduct, and shows him still more clearly how much he must lose by
remaining in a state of alienation and impenitence, and thus adds a fresh and double
impulse to the anxiety that he feels, and the desire that he cherishes, for pardon and
reconciliation.
 III. THE TRUE PENITENT APPLIES TO GOD FOR SALVATION THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF
PRAYER. Save me, O Lord. The moment that the sinner feels the real burden of his
transgressions, and is made fully sensible of his need of Divine mercy, that moment
he as naturally, and as necessarily, cries to God, for the requisite communications,
as the hungry child craves bread from its bountiful parent, or as the condemned
criminal supplicates pardon from his compassionate sovereign. And the penitent
transgressor not only feels his heart naturally lifted up to God in prayer, when
convinced that it is He from whom cometh his aid, he also applies in that way, in
conformity to the Divine institution. He knows that prayer is the appointed method
of seeking for and of obtaining the blessings of salvation.

IV. The confidence which the true penitent feels, that if the salvation which he
asks be granted, it will be altogether such as his circumstances require, and such as
will more than gratify his utmost wishes. It is as if the penitent said to God whom he
is addressing, Were any other being to undertake my salvation, I should not be
saved. There would be some imperfection in the achievement. It would be an
attempt, but not attended with success. But if Thou Thyself save me, I shall be saved
indeed. There will be no feebleness in the purpose; no inadequacy in the power; no
deficiency in the means; no failure in the result. The perfection of Thy nature must
reign in all Thy works; and that provides a security that nothing can occur to
frustrate or to impair the work of my salvation. (A. Thomson, D. D.)

Prayer for healing and salvation

These are great biblical words: heal and save. We all know what it is to get a
wound healed. The man with the gift of healing is sent for, and he binds up the
wound and anoints it with the ointment. But Gods healing goes far deeper than
bodily wounds. Each heart is here its own interpreter. And then, save. That means
more than heal. We shall have to wait till the hereafter to know all that is meant by
that great word. Now the prayer implies a helpless condition, in which we can only
cry to God for healing and salvation. There is a place sometimes called the back o
beyond, another name for it being wits end (Psa 107:1-43). With regard to the
soul, it is well to find ourselves there, and the sooner the better; for it is not a
hopeless place by any means. The Help of the helpless is ready there at the call of
distress. He can do little for us indeed till we thus learn that really there is no other
help but He. The Earl of Aberdeen tells how on one occasion, going up the Nile in his
yacht, he saw a little steamer coming puffing rapidly down. He was told it was
Gordons steamer, who was Governor of the Soudan at the time. On hearing that, he
was anxious to speak with Gordon, if possible; but the question was how to
accomplish it, for in a few minutes the steamer would be past. Suddenly a brilliant
idea struck the earl. He gave orders to his men to hang out signals of distress. He
was sure Gordon was not the man to pass by heedless a signal of distress. The ruse
proved successful. The steamer began at once to veer round, and in a very short time
was alongside the yacht. Now we all know that the helpful spirit was very
characteristic of Gordon, but where was it he learned it? Just by sitting at Jesus feet.
And we may be sure that the disciple is not greater than the Master in that readiness
to heed and help at the call of need, and that what Jesus was in the days of His flesh,
He is now and ever will be. One thing more is implied in the text--the assurance that
the help will be all-sufficient. The prophet is sure that God will perfect His work of
healing and saving. And that is a great matter, to know that it is something that
lasts. Our soul shall be restored and shall bless the Lord who healeth all its diseases.
Yea, and so will the world in the good time coming, when all lands shall be healed,
and Gods saving health shall be known among all nations. (J. S. Mayer, M. A.)

Thou art my praise.

God the believers praise

I. The nature of true effectual healing.

1. Spiritual healing is a gradual and progressive thing. It begins with a sinners
principles, for if the principle of our actions be not a part of Gods holy
teaching, and grafted by the Spirit of Christ into those who are the children
of His adoption, it is one of the unsanctified impulses of nature. It is the
souls worst enemy, a wandering, faithless state, that will never lead us to
Bethlehem, and as the seed of the bond woman must be utterly cast out.
When this terribly diseased principle is healed, the Spirits work is in
operation; and we begin to apprehend what that unearthly life is, which leads
every other life that is worth possessing after it. From the principle the work
of healing is carried forwards to the various actions that branch from it; the
wild grape is no longer the curse of the vineyard. When the husbandman
takes the plant itself in hand, it yields naturally to the superior excellency of
the graft, and partakes of its very character and condition. We cannot now
indulge the senses as we did; we were once their slaves, they are now our
handmaids, and enter freely with us into the liberty of the Gospel.
2. It is free and unpurchaseable by any creature who has the heart and
disposition of a sinner. There is no buying the skill and medicines of our
Physician. When He heals, it is without money and without price. Nay, He
was Himself compelled to purchase at the hands of justice, the power of
stopping the ravages of corruption, and drawing a line, beyond which the sin
of leprosy should not spread. No one, neither man nor angel, will ever be
capable, I say not of estimating, but of imagining, the greatness of that
purchase.
3. It is an effectual and everlasting healing. Christs balm goes down to the very
depth of the diseased places; He sifts, and tries, and searches the wound
before He closes it.

II. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HEALING AND SALVATION. Both of these blessings
are the precious and enduring treasures of redemption; though one of them is but a
mean to an end; if I am not healed I cannot be saved; my earthly heart must not only
be emptied of its enmity and rebellion, and deceivableness of unrighteousness, but
of whatever hinders it, on its way to glory. Yea, and it must be refilled, with that
measure of Divine love which will spur it forward, and strengthen and advance it on
its journey towards Zion. When I am healed, my bosom glows with delight that I
shall not go down in my natural uncleanness to the grave: my self-interest has quite
wrapped itself up in the sweet security of the blessing; the depths of a wounded
spirit are fathomed by the only hand that can get to the bottom of them. I have lost
the distress, and pain, and poignancy of guilt; the scars are indeed mercifully left
upon me, to be my remembrancers of what a gracious and loving Jesus has done for
my sick soul, but the killing sickness is gone, and I seem to apprehend the wonderful
reality of my being plucked as a brand out of the burning. The act of healing may,
perhaps, with more propriety belong to the office of the Holy Spirit, than to the
incarnate Son,--but salvation is that chariot of fire which exclusively holds the
triumphs, the royalties, the priceless riches of Christ. We identify salvation with
conquests and suffering, and a vesture stained with blood; it calls us, in special
language, to draw near, and kiss the Son, and to support our everyday trials, by
giving our thoughts to that surpassingly severe trial which He passed through as a
Conqueror upon the Cross.

III. IN WHAT WAY THE LORD IS GLORIFIED AS THE BELIEVERS PRAISE. It is no

question of conjecture in this place, whether God, under every one of His
providences, in dark and clouded clays, as well as in clear bright sunshine, is worthy
to be praised; for that will admit of no discussion, if we believe that He is the
perfection of wisdom, and goodness, and love; but this is a matter for individual,
experimental inquiry, and so is limited to a narrower space. Have you, and have I
the right apprehension of our God as a Father? and of ourselves as His children? to
be able to go down deep into the spirit of the text, and to say, Thou art my praise?
1. If the Lord is your praise, your hearts will be full of desire to honour Him in
every act of your lives; and your continual longing will be to plead with Him,
that every fresh song you sing to His glory may savour of this unselfish spirit.
2. If God be our praise we shall labour to be conformed to His likeness.
3. If God be our praise, all the heart springs must be so full of it as to throw the
precious living water into the life. (F. G. Crossman.)

JER 17:17
Be not a terror unto me: Thou art my hope in the day of evil.

Divine wrath an object of fear

I. The petition.
1. Gods majesty is in itself an object of fear and dread (Heb 12:21; Isa 6:5; Hab
3:16; Hos 3:5).
2. Divine chastisements are to be feared (Jer 10:24; Psa 6:1; Job 9:34).
3. Gods wrath is still more dreadful.
4. The prophet prays for support and comfort in the time of trial.

II. The expression of confidence.

1. The grace exercised is hope.
(1) God is the object of His peoples hope (Psa 71:5; Psa 78:5).
(2) God is the end of their hope. They need no more (Psa 16:11; Psa 17:15).
2. The time when this grace is exercised. Day of evil.
(1) Sin and sorrow make every day an evil day; stiff let us hope (Psa 62:8;
Psa 71:14).
 (2) Yet there are peculiar days of evil. National calamity; reverses in
business; disappointments; affliction; old age (Psa 73:26; 2Ti 1:12).
Learn--
1. That hopes and fears are blended together in the experience of the godly (Psa
147:11).
2. If God is sometimes a terror to His own people, how much more to the
wicked? (B. Beddome, M. A.)

JER 17:19
Whereby the kings of Judah come in.

Courage and fearlessness before kings

When King Don Pedro was unexpectedly brought into the hall in Chicago in which
Moody was speaking on Accepting Christ, the obsequious usher, after showing the
king to a seat on the platform, whispered to Moody, King Don Pedro is on the
platform. Moody took no notice, but at the end of his powerful appeal turned to the
king and said, And that is a question that kings cannot postpone, for on their
decision depends what God will do with the king. The king afterwards spoke of him
as a man to be heard and believed. (G. Campbell Morgan.)

Preaching before the greatest King

Latimer, while preaching one day before Henry VIII, stood up in the pulpit, and,
seeing the king, addressed himself in a kind of soliloquy, thus, Latimer, Latimer,
take care what you say, for the great King Henry VIII is here. Then he paused, and
proceeded, Latimer, Latimer, take care what you say, for the great King of kings is
here.

JER 17:22
But hallow ye the Sabbath day.

Cheating God out of Sunday

An old Christian, living at Salem, was much annoyed by the conduct of some of his
neighbours who persisted in working on the Sabbath. One Sabbath, as he was going
to Church, his Sabbath breaking neighbours called out to him sneeringly from the
hayfield, Well, father, we have cheated the Lord out of two Sundays anyway! I
dont know that, replied the old gentleman, I dont know; the account is not yet
settled.
The design of the Sabbath
The true spirit of the Sabbath appointment is, not that we should condense the
religion of the week into the Sabbath, but that we should carry forth from the
Sabbath its hallowed impulses and feelings into the other days of the week, to
elevate and sustain us amid its wearisome secularities and depressing cares. The
Lord has given us the Sabbath, not to relieve us of out religion, but so to revive our
religion on that day as to impel its healthy tide into the remotest nook and corner of
everyday duty. (Andrew Thomson.)

JEREMIAH 18

JER 18:1-10
Go down to the potters house.

The potter and the clay

(with Rom 9:19-24):--The potter and the clay! Is not that parable the germ of all
that is most oppressive in the terrible decree of Calvinism? Does it not justify the
Moslems acceptance of the will of Allah as a destiny which he cannot understand,
but to which he must perforce submit? Is not this the last word of the apostle, even
when he is most bent on vindicating the ways of God to men, in answer to the
question which asks now, as Abraham asked of old, Shall not the Judge of all the
earth do right? Why doth He yet find fault, for who hath resisted His will? I do
not purpose entering into the thorny labyrinth into which these questions lead us.
We shall do well to trace the history and to note the bearings of this parable. Does it
really teach what men have imagined that it taught--the powerlessness of man and
the arbitrary sovereignty of God? or does it lead us to acknowledge a wisdom and
righteousness and mercy in the history of men and nations? Does it simply crush us
to the ground with the sense of our own impotence? or does it rightly take its place
in that noble argument which makes the Epistle to the Romans, more than any other
art of Scripture, a true Theodicaea, a vindication of the ways of God to man?

I. IT WAS IN A DARK AND TROUBLOUS TIME THAT JEREMIAH WAS CALLED TO DO HIS
WORK. The purpose and promises of Jehovah to His people Israel seemed to fail
utterly. It was in this mood that there came to him an inner prompting in which,
then or afterwards, he recognised the Word of the Lord. Acting on that impulse he
left the temple and the city, and went out alone into the valley of Hinnom, where he
saw the potter at work moulding the clay of the valley into form and fashioning it
according to his purpose. The prophet looked and saw that here too there was
apparent failure. The vessel that he wrought was marred in the hands of the
potter. The clay did not take the shape; there was some hidden defect that seemed
to resist the plastic guidance of wheel and hand. The prophet stood and gazed--was
beginning, it may be, to blame the potter as wanting in his art, when he looked again
and saw what followed. So he returned, and made it another vessel, as seemed good
to the potter to make it. Skill was seen there in its highest form--not baffled by
seeming or even real failure--triumphing over difficulties. And then by one of those
flashes of insight which the world calls genius, but which we recognise as
inspiration, he was taught to read the meaning of the parable. Then the Word of the
Lord came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith
the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potters hand, so are ye in Mine, O house of
Israel. Did the thought which thus rushed in on his soul crush it as with the sense of
a destiny arbitrary, supreme, not necessarily righteous, against which men struggled
in vain, and in whose hands they had no freedom and therefore no responsibility?
Far otherwise than that. To him that which he saw was a parable of wisdom and of
love, working patiently and slowly; the groundwork of a call to repentance and
conversion. When he passed from the potter and his wheel to the operations of the
great Work-Master, as seen in the history of nations, he saw in the vessels that were
being moulded, as on the wheel of providence, no masses of dead inert matter. Each
was, as it were, instinct with a self-determining power, which either yielded to or
resisted the plastic workings of the potters hand. The urn or vase designed for
kingly uses refused its high calling, and chose another and less seemly shape. The
Supreme Artificer, who had determined in the history of mankind the times before
appointed and the bounds of mens habitations, had, for example, called Israel to be
the pattern of a righteous people, the witness of truth to the nations, a kingdom of
priests, the first-fruits of humanity. That purpose had been frustrated. Israel had
refused that calling. It had, therefore, to be brought under another discipline, fitted
for another work: He returned, and made it another vessel. The pressure of the
potters hand was to be harder, and the vessel was to be fashioned for less noble
uses. Shame and suffering and exile--their land left desolate, and they themselves
weeping by the waters of Babylon--this was the process to which they were now
called on to submit. But at any moment in the process, repentance, acceptance,
submission might modify its character and its issues. The fixed unity of the purpose
of the skilled worker would show itself in what would seem at first the ever-varying
changes of a shifting will. True it was that a little later on in the prophets work he
carried the teaching of the parable one step further, to a more terrible conclusion.
The Word of the Lord came to him again, Go and get a potters earthen bottle, and
take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests; and go forth
unto the valley of the son of Hinnom (Jer 19:1), and there in their sight he was to
break the bottle as a witness that, in one sense, the day of grace was over, that
something had been forfeited which now could never be regained. But not for that
was the purpose of God frustrated. The people still had a calling and election. They
were still to be witnesses to the nations, stewards of the treasure of an eternal truth.
In that thought the prophets heart found hope and comfort. He could accept the
doom of exile and shame for himself and for his people, because he looked beyond it
to that remoulded life.

II. THE AGE IN WHICH ST. PAUL LIVED was like that of Jeremiah, a dark and
troublous time for one whose heart was with his brethren, the children of Abraham
according to the flesh. Once again the potter was fashioning the clay to high and
noble uses. To the Jew first, and also to the Gentile, was the law of all his work.
But here also there was apparent failure. Blindness, hardness, unbelief, these
marred the shape of the vessels made to honour. Did he for that cease to believe in
the righteousness and faithfulness of God? Did he see no loving purpose behind the
seeming severity? No, the vessel would be made for what men held dishonour--exile
lasting through centuries, dispersion over all the world, lives that were worn down
with bondage--but all this was in his eyes but the preparation and discipline for the
far-off future, fitting them in the end for nobler uses.

III. THE HISTORY OF NATIONS AND CHURCHES HAS THROUGH ALL THE AGES BORNE
WITNESS OF THE SAME TRUTH. Each has had its calling and election. Dimly as it has
been given to us to trace the education of mankind, imperfect as is any attempt at
the philosophy of history, we can yet see in that history that the maze is not without,
a plan. Greece and Rome, Eastern or Latin or Teutonic Christendom--each nation or
Church, as it becomes a power in the history of mankind, has been partly taking the
shape and doing the work which answered to the design and purpose of God, partly
thwarting and resisting that purpose. So far as it has been faithful to its calling, so
far as the collective unity of its life has been true to the eternal law of righteousness,
it has been a vessel made to honour. Those who see in history, not the chaos in
which brute forces are blindly working from confusion to confusion, but the
unfolding of a righteous order, can see in part how resistance, unfaithfulness,
sensuality, have marred the work,--how Powers that were as the first of nations have
had written on them, as it seemed, the sentence passed of old on Amalek, that their
latter end should be that they should perish forever. Spain, in her decrepitude and
decay; France, in her alternations of despotism and anarchy; Rome, in the insanity
of her claims to dominate over the reason and conscience of mankind--these are
instances, to which we cannot close our eyes, of vessels marred in the potters hands.
Each such example of the judgment of the heavens bids us not to be high-minded,
but to fear. We need to remember, as of old, that the doom which seems so far from
us may be close at hand, even at our doors, that that which seems ready to fall on
this nation or on that, Turk or Christian, Asiatic or European, is not irreversible. At
what time soever, now as in the prophets days, a nation shall turn and repent,
and struggle over the stepping stones of its dead self to higher things, there is the
beginning of hope. The Potter may return and mould and fashion it, it may be to
lowlier service, perhaps even to outward dishonour, but yet, if cleansed from its
iniquity, it shall be meet for the Masters use.

IV. THE PARABLE BEARS UPON THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE OF EVERY CHILD OF MAN, and it
is obviously that aspect of its teaching which has weighed most heavily upon the
minds of men, and often, it would seem, made sad the hearts of the righteous whom
God has not made sad. Does it leave room there also for individual freedom and
responsibility? Did the inspired teachers think of it as leading men to repentance
and faith and hope, or as stifling every energy under the burden of an inevitable
doom? The words in which St. Paul speaks of it might be enough to suggest the true
answer to that question. To him even that phase of the parable which seems the
darkest and most terrible does but present to mans reverential wonder an instance
of the forbearance of God enduring with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath
fitted for destruction. The Potter would fain return and mould and remould till the
vessel is fit for some use, high or humble, in the great house of which He is the
Supreme Head. By the discipline of life, by warnings and reproofs, by failures and
disappointments, by prosperity and success, by sickness and by health, by varying
work and ever-fresh opportunities, He is educating men and leading them to know
and to do His will. Who does not feel in his calmer and clearer moments that this is
the true account of the past chances and changes of his life? True, there is a point at
which all such questionings reach their limit. In the language of another parable, to
one is given five pounds, to another two, and to another one--to each according to
his several ability. But the thought that sustains us beneath the burden of these
weary questions is that the Judge of all the earth shall assuredly do right. Mens
opportunities are the measure of their responsibilities. To whom men have
committed much, of him will they ask the more. The bitter murmur and passionate
complaint are checked by the old words, Shall the thing formed say to Him that
formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus? The poorest and the humblest may find
comfort in the thought that if his work be done faithfully and truly, if he sees in the
gifts which he has received, and the outward circumstances of his life, and the work
to which they lead him, but the tokens of the purpose of the great Designer, he, too,
yielding himself as clay to the hands of the potter, may become in the least honoured
work, a vessel of election. What is required in such a vessel when formed or
fashioned is, above all, that it should be clean and whole, free from the taint that
defiles, from the flaws that mar the completeness of form or the efficiency of use.
The work of each soul of man is to seek this consecration, to flee the youthful lusts,
the low ambitions, the inner baseness, which desecrate and debase. Our comfort is,
that in so striving, we are fellow workers with the great Work-Master. Our prayer to
Him may well be that He will not despise what His own hands have made. (Dean
Plumptre.)

Man in the hands of God

I. Man in the hand of God as MORALLY DEFECTIVE.

1. Humanity throughout all ages and climes has been defective--
(1) In moral judgment;
(2) In moral affections, and
(3) In moral conduct.
2. How this defection occurred is a question that lands us into the mysterious
region whence evil sprang.

II. Man in the hands of God as MORALLY IMPROVABLE.

1. God can improve the marred vessel of humanity.
(1) He can emotionally. He has the heart for it. He is great enough in love to
forgive the past, and bless the future.
(2) He can magisterially. The mediation of Christ enables Him to do so in a
way consistent with the justice of His character, the honour of His
government, and the stability of His throne.
(3) He can reformatively. He has all the moral instrumentality necessary to
reform the soul.
2. The Gospel is the power of God.

III. Man in the hands of God AS MORALLY FREE.

1. Man is responsible for his conduct. The social history of the world, the
universal consciousness of man, and the concurrent teachings of the Bible all
show this.
2. Man is responsible for his destiny. Humanity will be plucked up, and
pulled down by God, or built up and planted according to its conduct.
(Homilist.)

The potter and the day

 I. Every man naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam, is, in the sight of an
all-seeing, heart-searching God, only as a piece of marred clay.
1. As man was created originally after God in knowledge, as well as
righteousness and true holiness, we may rationally infer that his
understanding, in respect to things natural as well as Divine, was of a
prodigious extent: for he was made but a little lower than the angels, and
consequently, being like them, excellent in his understanding, he knew much
of God, of himself, and all about him; and in this, as well as every other
respect, was, as Mr. Collier expresses it in one of his essays, a perfect major:
but this is far from being our case now. Men of low and narrow minds soon
commence wise in their own conceits; and having acquired a little smattering
of the learned languages, and made some small proficiency in the dry
sciences, are easily tempted to look upon themselves as a head taller than
their fellow mortals, and accordingly, too, too often put forth great swelling
words of vanity. But persons of a more exalted and extensive reach of
thought dare not boast. No: they know that the greatest scholars are in the
dark in respect to many even of the minutest things in life.
2. This will appear yet more evident, if we consider the perverse bent of his will.
Being made in the very image of God; undoubtedly before the fall, man had
no other will but his Makers. Gods will, and Adams, were then like unisons
in music. There was not the least disunion or discord between them. But now
he hath a will as directly contrary to the will of God, as light is contrary to
darkness, or heaven to hell.
3. A transient view of fallen mans affections will yet more firmly corroborate
this melancholy truth. These, at his being first placed in the paradise of God,
were always kept within proper bounds, fixed upon their proper objects, and,
like so many gentle rivers, sweetly, spontaneously, and habitually glided into
their ocean, God: but now the scene is changed; for we are now naturally full
of vile affections, which, like a mighty and impetuous torrent, carry all before
them.
4. The present blindness of natural conscience makes this appear in a yet more
glaring light. In the soul of the first man Adam, conscience was, no doubt,
the candle of the Lord, and enabled him rightly and instantaneously to
discern between good and evil, right and wrong. And, blessed be God! some
remains of this are yet left; but, alas! how dimly does it burn, and how easily
and quickly is it covered, or put out and extinguished.
5. Nor does that great and boasted Diana, I mean unassisted, unenlightened
Reason, less demonstrate the justness of such an assertion. The horrid and
dreadful mistakes which the most refined reasoners in the heathen world ran
into, both as to the object as well as manner of Divine worship, have
sufficiently demonstrated the weakness and depravity of human reason: nor
do our modem boasters afford us any better proofs of the greatness of its
strength, since the best improvement they generally make of it is only to
reason themselves into downright wilful infidelity, and thereby reason
themselves out of eternal salvation. Need we now any further witness that
man, fallen man, is altogether a piece of marred clay?
6. But this is not all, we have yet more evidence to call; for do the blindness of
 our understandings, the perverseness of our will, the rebellion of our
affections, the corruption of our consciences, the depravity of our reason,
prove this charge; and does not the present disordered frame and
constitution of our bodies confirm the same also? Doubtless in this respect,
man, in the most literal sense of the word, is a piece of marred clay: for God
originally made him of the dust of the earth.

II. THE ABSOLUTE NECESSITY THERE IS OF THIS FALLEN NATURES BEING RENEWED.
Archimedes once said, Give me a place where I may fix my foot, and I will move the
world; so, without the least imputation of arrogance, with which perhaps he was
justly chargeable, we may venture to say, Grant the foregoing doctrine to be true,
and then deny the necessity of mans being renewed, who can. I suppose I may take
it for granted that all hope after death to go to a place which we call heaven. But
permit me to tell you, heaven is rather a state than a place; and consequently, unless
you are previously disposed by a suitable state of mind, you could not be happy even
in heaven itself. For what is grace, but glory militant? what is glory, but grace
triumphant? This consideration made a pious author say, that holiness, happiness,
and heaven, were only three different words for one and the self-same thing. And
this made the great Preston, when he was about to die, turn to his friends, saying, I
am changing my place, but not my company. To make us meet to be blissful
partakers of such heavenly company, this marred clay, I mean these depraved
natures of ours, must necessarily undergo a universal moral change our
understandings must be enlightened; our wills, reason, and consciences, must be
renewed; our affections must be drawn toward, and fixed upon things above; and
because flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven, this corruptible must
put on incorruption, this mortal must put on immortality. Christ hath said it, and
Christ will stand. Unless a man, learned or unlearned, high or low, though he be a
master of Israel as Nicodemus was, unless he be born again, he cannot see, he
cannot enter into, the kingdom of God. If it be required, Who is to be the potter?
and by whose agency this marred day is to be formed into another vessel? Or in
other words, if it be asked, how this great and mighty change is to be effected? I
answer, not by the mere dint and force of moral suasion. Neither is this change to be
wrought by the power of our own free-will. We might as soon attempt to stop the
ebbing and flowing of the tide, and calm the most tempestuous sea, as to imagine
that we can subdue, or bring under proper regulations, our own unruly wills and
affections by any strength inherent in ourselves. And therefore I inform you, that
this heavenly Potter, this blessed Agent, is the Almighty Spirit of God the Holy
Ghost, the Third Person in the most adorable Trinity, co-essential with the Father
and the Son. This is that fire which our Lord came to send into our earthly hearts,
and which I pray the Lord of all lords to kindle in every unrenewed one this day. (G.
Whitefield, M. A.)

A visit to the potters house

I. MIND ORIGINATES POWER. The work is a work on the wheels; but the power
begins with the workman; it is spirit that presides, it is will that controls; an
intelligent being makes use of the power he has set in motion to fashion his design.
The perfect type is in the mind of the workman, and he must give it form and shape,
and impress it on matter. All power originates with God, and is under His control.
 II. DIVINE PATIENCE IS ASSOCIATED WITH DIVINE POWER. You do not see in the
potter at work what God can do if it pleases Him, but what it pleases Him to do; not
what He may do with the clay, but what His purpose is. We are taught the intention
of the Divine worker to mould men and nations according to a Divine pattern, that
there is nothing arbitrary in His procedure; that every act is regulated by a reference
to His plan, and that Divine patience is constantly and perseveringly at work.

III. DIVINE PATIENCE PERSEVERES IN THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF ITS DESIGN. How

often have you been marred through want of submission to a perfect and loving will,
manifested in Gods providential dealings with you or in His Gospel? The clay may
be broken so often that it loses all its adhesive properties, and when placed on the
wheels may splinter into fragments and become utterly worthless.
Conclusion--
1. There is a fixed and settled plan, an original idea in the Divine mind,
according to which His work is to be conformed. Known unto God are all
His works from the beginning. Man is Gods work. God found in Himself the
pattern of this wondrous creation. He made man in His own image, in His
own likeness. Man was a failure; the world therefore was a failure, and the
flood was brought in, and the work destroyed. There was to be a new
manifestation of humanity. Men were to be distributed into families and
tribes, into nations and kingdoms. We are predestinated to be conformed to
the image of His Son. We are to be like Him: our bodies are to be
fashioned like unto His glorious body. There is a perfect type of society.
There is to be the universal diffusion of truth and righteousness. There is a
perfect type of a Church.
2. God does not make anything for the sole purpose of destroying it. See the
interest God takes in what is going on in the world, and the effect it has on
Him.
3. That there is no waste in life. There is no waste in nature. There was in
Christs miracles no waste of power. There is no waste in human life. That
part of it which is introductory to the rest, which we call childhood, is not
waste; it has its relations to the rest of life. That portion which is tried and
tested, which is subjected to many experiments, is not waste. The sorrows
and tears of life are not the waste of life--toil, strife, agony, are not lost. All
these things that seem to fall from life, are worked up again into new forms.
Life may be a marred and broken thing, but God can work it up into a form
of Divine beauty.
4. Life is a work on the wheels. Character is in the course of formation: it will
come out either marred or perfected, just as you submit to the Divine will, or
resist the influences brought to bear upon you. (H. J. Boris.)

Pottery
Such was the invitation which came to me as I spent a holiday among the potteries
of North Staffordshire.
1. The preparation of the clay. In my ignorance I had thought very lightly of that.
I supposed that the clay was brought from some place or other, and, after
 being kneaded, would be used for the purpose of the potter. But as we looked
over the various processes, several things astonished us very much in this
preparation of the clay. In the first place, we were astonished at the materials
used. There was, of course, the clay as we understand it, but in addition we
found stones of the very hardest description and flints also used. In one
factory some eight or ten mills did nothing else but grind to the very smallest
powder these hard flint stones mixed with the clay. And then these ground
flint stones were further churned with water until it became a fluid mass.
Another interesting feature was the straining, and the use of magnets to
extract any iron that might be there. At last it was run into bags placed under
a press and the water squeezed out, and the clay left behind. It was then
turned out as plastic clay for the potters use. We often speak of the potter
and the clay, and we are warranted by the Scriptures to use this simile for the
sovereignty of God. And, no doubt, we must hold fast the eternal sovereignty
of God. But I am not quite sure that we do not see here the process anterior
to what we speak of as the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God is
shown in the form of the vessel made from the clay, but here we have
something anterior to the making of the vessel--the preparation of the clay.
And while we believe in the sovereignty of God, we also believe that salvation
is perfectly free. Your heart may be as hard as a flint, or without any stamina
as that liquid mass, and yet it is quite possible from that hard flinty rock, or
from that fluid liquid mass, to make the clay which shall be plastic for the
Potters use. Are you willing to be made clay?--willing to be just put into His
hands?
2. The making of the vessels. Nothing could be more beautiful than to watch the
skilful potter mould the clay upon his wheel until it became a beautiful vessel
under his touch. Here I learnt what a great variety of vessels the potter made.
Here were vessels which would adorn the tables of the rich, and also vessels
necessary for the poor; here were vessels which might only be for ornaments,
and others of the greatest practical use. Oh, if you are only willing to be as
clay in the Great Potters hands, He is able to make you vessels meet for the
Masters use. The use may be very varied, and the vessels may differ in form
and beauty, but if you are willing to be as clay in His hands, He will fashion
you so that you may be a vessel for His glory, and for the benefit of those
around you.
3. The varied processes to fix the shape of the vessels. Until the vessel was fired,
the potter could break it up, as he did, and throw it back into the mass, but
when once the vessel was fired, its shape and form were fixed. Two things
about the firing interested me. The one was the gradual preparation that the
vessel had to go through. I asked why it was necessary to dry it so slowly by
steam first, before it was put into the great oven. I received the reply that if it
was put into the oven at once, it would break. There must be the slow process
of drying by steam. Ah! and is it not so with our Great Potter? Does He not
gently train us? He does not put us into the fiery oven all at once. He
prepares us by less difficult temptations for the fiery heat which we must all
go through. Every man must pass through the fire in order that the stability
of his own character may be brought out. God knows the amount of heat
which is necessary, and He will not send one temptation more than we are
able to bear. Another interesting thing in the firing was, that every vessel had
 to be separate from the others. They were packed up in the saggers so that
not one single clay vessel should touch another. And the reason, they told us,
was that the two vessels would be so fused in the fire that both would be
spoilt. Is it not true with the great fiery oven through which the Great Potter
passes us? We must pass through the fire alone.
4. Then we came to the decorative process. First, there was the making of the
pattern. The pattern was made upon a copper plate, and then taken off upon
the tracing paper and placed upon the plate. The pattern in many cases was
very similar. One machine rolled off some millions of patterns. The Christian
has only one pattern--the Lord Jesus Christ. It is His purpose that we should
be conformed to His image. The next thing that struck us was the number of
hands through which the pattern had to pass. An ordinary dinner plate had
to pass through some ten or twelve different hands--one filling in one colour,
and another another colour, until it passed down the whole line; one fining
in a little stroke of blue, another red, another colouring a leaf, until at last the
whole pattern was brought out upon the one plate. Is it not so with the
Christian? The pattern must be the same, but the pattern is variously
brought out. It may be a very different colour. We take our pattern from
those we mix with day by day, and if we are only upon the lookout we may
find many things to colour the pattern of Jesus Christ in our lives. Here we
may colour with a little bit of unselfishness, here a little bit of charity, here a
little bit of self-sacrifice. You may take from one and another impressions
which will bring out the grand pattern. Another interesting thing was the
firing in order to fix these colours. The vessel must be put into the kiln to fix
the colours. There is intense scorching heat in there. And is it not so with the
Great Potter? Does He not often put us Christians into the kiln in order to fix
the colour? How many Christians you see who have had their colours fixed
by adversity! This ones love is brought out by trial; this ones charity by
temptation. Then came the last process. Once more the vessel is put into the
kiln, and the fire brought to bear upon it, and then the colour and pattern
come out still more glorious than before. The glaze is now dry, and the work
of the potter now finished. And so ofttimes the Christian is plunged into
despondency, losing all the evidences of his faith; is plunged once more into
the fire; and in the fire he sees that there is One walking with Him, and His
form is as the Son of God, and he sees the pattern is being brought out by the
great Potter.
5. At last we were taken up to the showroom, and here were displayed all the
triumphs of the potters art, and we could have spent hours in admiring the
work of the potter. So we look forward to the show room when we leave all
the dross of the workshop and the whirl of the factory; and when we ascend
up to the showroom where we shall see the triumphs of the Great Potters
art, we shall simply wonder that out of these stones and liquid clay it is
possible to make such vessels as He has prepared for His glory. (E. A. Stuart,
M. A.)

The teaching of the potter

Divine revelation is a possible thing only because of that great and earliest fact in
the record of human history, And God made man in His image, a fact which
nothing, not even sin, can destroy. Gods words to men are made possible and
meaningful because of the fact that, in spite of rebellion and fall, there is enough
deep, true kinship left to afford resting place for His appeal and interpretation of His
speech. As long as spiritual being lasts, this must be true. Now proceed a further
step. The method of communication is not a matter of essential importance. So long
as I make you understand what I mean, the way in which I do this does not matter
much. We meet with those who do not speak our language, or perhaps any tongue
that we can speak and understand; but we find that some sufficient things can be
said by signs. We can buy this or that by pointing to it, and showing the value in
coin. There is one further step to take, and then we shall arrive at the position from
which I want to look at the words of this text. The activities and occupations of men
are full of resemblances to the activities of God. What we have to do, and are doing
every day, illustrates much more fully than, perhaps, we have ever thought, what
God is doing around us and within us; so that we may rise somewhat to comprehend
His work in its grand patience and victory over hindrance and pauseless triumph, by
means of a fuller understanding of our own. And, significantly enough, this is the
more completely true of those occupations which are simple and manual, most
necessary and least artificial, compelled by the wants which are common to us all,
rather than of those which are the creation of empty social custom and artificial
routine. The Divine word to Jeremiah, both in itself and in the manner of its
communication to him, is strikingly suggestive. What was the word? Jeremiah had
been a very faithful minister and messenger, and yet his endeavours had been
unavailing to stay the torrent of national disaster. As a rock, staunch in midstream,
only adds to the tumult of the waters that dash, and break, and hurry on their way,
this mans obedient and firm obstruction only made him to suffer the fretful wrath
of the people, whose downward rush would not be stayed. It seemed as though he
were a protest and nothing more. For the people there was nothing but hopeless
ruin. God wants to show His servant that such despair is not true. What the people
might have been they refused to be, but they might yet be something. What the
potter does with the clay with which he works, the Lord can do with the men with
whom He deals. What is that? Well, go down to the workmans house and watch
him. See the frame, and the wheels, and the mass of ready clay. See the mans
tutored hands and nimble fingers. He has purpose, ability, design. His power is
complete. He can do what he likes. He can take the lump of clay in his hands and
say, This shall be a fair and stately vase fit to stand on the table of a king; or, This
shall be a thing for common use, one among a thousand like itself, winning no
regard or admiration, to be appraised at no appreciable value. He can bid the clay
be what he chooses. Can he? Let us see. Now the workman has put clay upon the
wheel, and it begins to whirl; the beginning of the design is manifest, some outline
of a shape appears under the touch of his plastic hand. But then comes a pause:
something has gone wrong. Where is the fault? Not in the care and genius of the
workman? Surely not in the clay? Yes, there is a flaw, a rebellious and intractable
mingling of impurities, and the workman cannot do as he had purposed. What will
the potter do? Toss the clay away? Clay is plentiful and cheap. No, not if the
workmans heart is right and his enthusiasm true. A fellow workman may say, I
would not trouble with it. No one can make anything of that piece; it is utterly
useless. But the right-souled man says, I waste nothing, and despise nothing. I can
make something of this clay if you cannot; and I shall make what can be made, if not
what I hoped, at least the very best that is according to its nature possible. So he
made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it (Jer 18:4).
And so can I do, says the cheery word to the prophet, so can I the Lord do with this
apparently hopeless and intractable nation. With them, as with the piece of clay,
there is a resolute, rebellious intermingling. They show themselves unworthy. They
make themselves incapable of the high destiny among the nations to which My call
would lead them. They must lose their crown. My purpose must be fulfilled in other
ways, and by other instruments and ministries. But--and here speaks the heart of
generous, patient love--I have not done with them. I shall do the very best that can
be done with them, and put them in a place which they can fill. This is My pleasure
anything short of it would be anguish. But, to do the possible best, even with the
most unpromising material, is the object and aim of My redeeming hand. The right-
hearted workman is like-minded of God, and, in his sphere, does an identical work.
The man who makes two ears of corn grow where only one would grow before; the
man who shapes wood, or beats and moulds metal into fashions of use, beneficence,
and comeliness, is, besides all the wage-profit that his industry brings, doing a
redemptive work that is akin to Divine. Industry, cleanliness, usefulness, beautifying
labour--these are far more than means of livelihood, they are means of might and
spiritual life. (D. J. Hamer.)

The relation of the will to character and destiny

The figure of the potter is of frequent occurrence in Scripture; and its meaning is
the more easily understood, because there is scarcely any craft of which the principal
tools have been less altered in the lapse of the centuries. The purposes for which the
figure is used in the Bible may be arranged under two chief heads. In every case the
power of the potter over the clay is emphasised. But while some passages stop with
that fact,--that the potters power is absolute, without measure or limit, that he can
do what he likes with the clay,--others teach distinctly that the potter is not ruled by
his fancy or caprice, or by any momentary or arbitrary impulse, but the exercise of
his power is itself determined by something, some quality or fitness, within the clay.
Of these two lessons, the former is most frequent in Isaiah and in Paul, although
other writers adopt or enforce it. That is the most obvious meaning of the figure, to
be found in almost every literature, never to be forgotten by the reverent--the potter
has complete command over the clay. He, at his wheel, is the symbol of power: the
clay, of helplessness and necessary submission. There has probably never been a
man who believed that more thoroughly than did Jeremiah. In this very chapter he
represents God as saying to the house of Israel, Behold, as the clay is in the potters
hand, so are ye in Mine hand. In his account of his own call, the prophet describes a
Divine voice as speaking to him: Before thou earnest forth out of the womb I
sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. He never hesitates
in his ascription to God of the right and power of complete control over man, or to
man of the necessity of submission and the obligation of obedience. But according to
Jeremiah that is not a complete account of the relation, either of God to man, or of
man to God. And in this chapter he uses the figure of the potter to show, on the one
hand, that the potters power is not exercised arbitrarily, and on the other, that its
exercise is determined, and even in some sense conditioned, by the clay itself.
1. With regard to the figure, it is in the particulars of the fourth verse that
Jeremiahs use of it differs from that of most other scriptural writers. As
soon as the potter saw that the clay he was dealing with would not answer
the purpose he had in view, with a slight touch of his hand he crushed it
down into a shapeless heap of mud, began anew, and made it into another
vessel. In other words, the potters treatment of the clay depends upon his
 knowledge or discovery of its qualities, its capability, or its faultiness. Or,
dropping the figure, God does not always act upon and complete His first
apparent design with a man; and any change of design on His part is
determined by some adequate cause, which is always to be found in the man
himself--in the way in which he exercises his freedom of will, or in the
attitude in which he puts himself towards conscience, and duty, and truth.
There has sometimes been a disposition, amongst nations and amongst
individuals, to imagine that some moral character had been stamped
indelibly upon them by God, and was permanent and unalterable, whatever
they did. So far was Jeremiah from believing that, and so far is the Bible
from teaching it, that it represents mans will as in a sense entrusted with the
supreme control over his spirit and over his destiny. The plastic skill and
power of the Great Potter, in themselves immeasurable and without limit,
are yet not applied arbitrarily, under the impulse of fancy or caprice, but
depend at least for their direction upon the clay itself.
2. That truth is sometimes overlooked, or qualified, or even rejected. Some of
the current philosophies deny it in theory, but, when pressed, will reluctantly
acknowledge that consciousness can be quoted in its favour, or, as the
greatest English psychologist of the day puts it, The assumption of the
freedom of the will is in a certain sense inevitable to anyone exercising
rational choice. In the Old Testament it is an especial favourite of
Jeremiahs, though not confined to him; and in this single paragraph he is
not contented with the dubious form it assumes in the figure, but recurs to it
once and again afterwards. When verse 14 is compared with the preceding
verse, it becomes evident that the prophet wanted to point a contrast
between the steadfastness of the phenomena and laws of nature, and the
apparent fickleness of those of morals. To the one the eternal will of God
which knows no change is central; to the other, the uncertain will of man.
The forces that seem to play in the cloud forms and the winds, to move with
slow rhythm in the solid structures of the ages, or with quick inapparent
catastrophe and explosion, the life that modifies the cell and pulsates in a
myriad forms through the universe--all simply fulfil their Sovereigns will;
and the only power, not in the same way subject to His rule, but permitted to
rebel against Him, and to check and alter His purposes, is that of the
personality or will of man. To that extent the Potter renounces His power
over the clay, and the clay is allowed to determine the design of the Potter.
3. The same truth is put in a third way in verses 7-10. The inference evidently is,
that neither Gods threats nor His promises are absolute, in the sense that
they are incapable of diversion or of change. Every word that goes forth from
His lips is of necessity law; but the nations, the individuals, are left at liberty
to choose which of the words shall govern them, and the occasions of choice
are more than one. It appears accordingly that men can actually, by their
choice of evil or carelessness concerning right, frustrate Gods purposes or
grace, just as by penitence and self-reform they can avert a doom that is
impending. That is the word of the Lord by others than Jeremiah (Eze 18:20-
24). Nor does the New Testament reject such a lesson, which is in
accordance further with the teaching of reason and with the fundamental
conception of justice. There is no finality in Gods design for a man, until the
mans will has either frittered itself away, or hardened itself into invincibility.
 But by the attitude towards God into which men put themselves, they
determine the pattern according to which His methods mould them, and
every change of attitude on their part is quickly followed by its appropriate
and necessary change of design. Nor is this modification of Gods design
represented as confined to nations or communities. Jonah himself was called
of God to be a prophet, but the action of his own will made him a sacrifice to
appease the sea, until, when he willed better things, Gods plan for him
changed back again. There is thus cumulative evidence, in Scripture, in
history, in human experience, that God does not always act to the end upon
His original design for a man, but that His designs are sometimes changed
on account of something in the men themselves. What is that something?
This chapter alone, to say nothing of teaching that abounds elsewhere, leaves
no room for doubt. If that nation turn from their evil, is laid down with all
emphasis in the eighth verse as the one condition upon which the
modification of Gods purpose depends; and the most powerful and essential
human factor in every act of moral turning is of necessity the will. The
responsibility for a mans character rests substantially, it would be hardly too
much to say entirely, upon himself. It is a terrible responsibility, of which
men have tried to rid themselves in many ways; but so long as human nature
remains what it is, free to choose the right or the wrong, it is a responsibility
which every man must face and every man must bear. God gives, in the
conscience and by His Spirit, a clear revelation of what is right, and in His
Son a source of strength that is sufficient for every duty. He gives
opportunities, allurements, warnings without number; and having given
those, ceaselessly present with us, His part in the formation of character may
be said to be done. The man has then to determine, by the action of his own
will, whether the law of perfecting or the law of perdition shall work in him.
(R. W. Moss.)

The potter and the day

The whole revealed Word of God takes for granted, appeals to, and proceeds upon
two facts: first, that nothing can proceed from God which is not like God; next, that
man is a co-worker with God in the shaping out of his own destiny. The Bible is all
quick with the great truth that man can escape from evil, and that the work to which
the good God has, more than anything else, set Himself is to help him to escape.
Even the heritage of misery and disease which a bad parent leaves to his child is--in
Gods world--not so potent but that the child may rise above it.

I. EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS, FIRST OF ALL, AN IDEA IN THE MIND OF GOD. The potter is
an artist, and it is the thoughts of his head he embodies in the vessels he makes. He
is thus a likeness to us of God. Such men as Bernard Palissy and Josiah Wedgwood
did not spend their instructive lives only to make clayware for human use, but also
to reveal to us, and enable us to understand, the working of the Divine Artist in the
formation of human lives. Can you recall, you who have read Palissys life, the
passionate eagerness with which he sought out beautiful forms in nature? Do you
remember how his unresting brain toiled to make new combinations of colour and
form? And with what unwearying zeal he sought to bring beauty and strength and
polish into the vessels he made? It is all a far-off portrait of God. The human artist
who never saw a wonderful conjunction of natural objects, of form and colour, in
field or wood, without bringing it in straightway to his workshop in the brain, is but
an outshadowing to us of the Divine Artist, and of the thought, the care, the skill, the
beauty, which God expends on every life He makes. It is true that the Divine Artist
has to work with inferior clay. He has to embody the thoughts of His creative mind
in material that has been soiled by sin--flesh that has corrupted its way, and
transmitted its taints and diseases and weaknesses to the children. But, all the same,
the life and the outshaping of the life are the work of God. The gladsome fact,
therefore, in the teaching of the potter and the clay, is that our lives are not shaped
by accident; nor are the materials of our life combined by blind chance. My
personality, as truly as my body, is the work of His hands. But here is my joy. In this
very fact I have a ground of appeal to God. When my spirit is overwhelmed by the
mysteries of existence, or my way hedged up by moral difficulties, which I have in
myself no strength to overcome, I can go to Him and say: O Maker of my being, O
Planner out of my lot, Thou faithful Creator, I am poor and needy: wilt not Thou
have respect to the work of Thy hands, and make haste to help me?

II. EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS SHAPED FOR A DIVINE USE. When the potter turns a vessel
on his wheel, the first pulse of thought concerning it touches its use. It is the use
which determines the shape. And this holds good in the shaping of human life by
God. Anterior to the infinite variety of shape in our lives is this grand common fact
for all life, We are not driftwood on a tumbling sea. We are created to be vessels for
God and of God, vessels of His sanctuary, set apart to His service, and filled with all
sweet and wholesome things. This great primal purpose of the Creator seeks to fulfil
itself many ways in our lives. But in all ways the Divine intention is that we shall
contain and give forth some fair measure of his own life. One is set to fulfil this
purpose on one level, another on a level higher or lower. One must do it by work,
another by suffering. But for one and all this is the Divine purpose and requirement,
that we be vessels of truth and righteousness, embodiments and manifestations--up
to the measure of our natural capacities and shapes--of the Divine character and life.
It is the sad fact, as we all know, that this primal use intended by our Creator is not
fulfilled in all. But our shortcomings do not alter the fact that we were made for this
purpose. In the fulfilment of this end our happiness consists. He who made us has
linked the right use of life and our personal well-being together.

III. LIVES TRIED IN ONE SHAPE ARE SOMETIMES BROKEN UP AND RESHAPED TO
FULFIL THEMSELVES IN NEW SPHERES OR DIFFERENT CAPACITIES. And He breaks up
Joseph the dreamer and the slave, and forms Joseph the wise statesman,
administrator, and prince of Egypt. That was a strong well formed vessel who went
forth from Jerusalem to Damascus, carrying fiery zeal for God, cruel death for Gods
people. The Divine Artist takes this vessel--formed of good clay, impact of such
energies, such zeal--and breaks it up and puts it on the wheel, and reshapes it for
higher levels and wider ends. Christian biography is full of such instances. Here is
one who was only a timid lad at the outset, shrinking from boisterous companions,
retiring to woods for meditation on Gods Word. The timid lad becomes a fearless
preacher, and the founder of the Society of Friends. Here is another, a poor cobbler,
piecing together little scraps of different coloured leathers to make a map of the
world, and by the black pieces to point out to his friends the extent, of heathenism.
The poor mapmaker becomes William Carey, the founder of Missions to India and
the translator of the Bible into Indian languages. A third is at first a poor piecer in a
spinning factory on the banks of the Clyde. But at last he is the voice of one crying in
a wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord: make a highway in the desert for
God. And so great in this ministry that black men carry his bones, when he dies, a
years journey from the depths of Africa to England; and white men there reverently
bury them in the sepulchres of their kings, because he had done good to God and to
man. God breaks up the first-shaped clay which has promise in it to make better
vessels for His use. Shall we turn aside and look at the Divine Artist at this work of
reshaping? Those awful times in the experience of His people when He comes with a
succession of trials, when He sends whole tides of sorrow into the soul, are the times
when we shall best see God at His work, when He reshapes for higher ends the clay
that was shaped for lower ends before.

IV. GOD HAS LEFT IT TO MAN HIMSELF TO DECIDE WHETHER HE WILL BE A VESSEL OF
HONOUR OR OF DISHONOUR. Hath not the potter power over the same lump to make
one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour?--that is one side of this
mystery. If a man purge himself--from being a vessel unto dishonour--he shall be
a vessel unto honour, sanctified and meet for the Masters use--this is the other.
But the one side does not contradict the other. The Creator has power over the lives
He moulds; but it is never so wielded as to quench the power of choice He has given
to us. In respect of natural capacity, position in society, function, time and place of
birth, joy and sorrow, health and sickness, this power of God is absolute. He
appoints the bounds of our habitation. He alone designs the fashion of our
personality. He alone fixes the doom on sin. But at those points in the development
of life, where the real battle of the soul is waged, where the decisive shocks of the
conflict between righteousness and unrighteousness have to be sustained, and the
burden of responsibility taken up, we are in a region where God leaves man as
absolutely free as He is Himself. The Creator has power over the life; but, as put
forth by God, it is a power tempered with justice and mercy, and quick with all the
goodness of the Divine character.

V. BE TRUE TO THE DIVINE INTENTION AND SHAPING OF YOUR LIVES. Do not lower
yourselves to evil shapes. Do not suffer yourselves to degenerate into vessels set to
vile uses and filled with base, unwholesome things. What the great King desires is
that we should all be vessels for Him, vessels to carry and pour forth His love, His
life, His purity, in all we do and wherever we go. And what He seeks to fill our souls
with is His own life as God, that eternal life which He has poured out for us all in
Christ. And this is eternal wisdom to receive that life of God into the heart. This is
the one grand, informing, outshaping, abiding power for human life. This will
reshape the most unshapely into the very image of God. (A. Macleod, D. D.)

The Divine Potter

Am I clay in the hands of the Divine Potter? The Bible does not say so: yet
apparently this is the very thing that it does say. The context does not teach us that
God is speaking about the individual man, or about personal salvation, or about the
eternal destiny of the individual soul: the Lord is speaking about nations, empires,
kingdoms, vessels which He only can handle. Moreover, He Himself descends into
reasoning, and therefore He gives up the arbitrary power or right, if He ever claimed
it. He bases His action upon the conduct of the nation spoken about. So His
administration is not arbitrary, despotic, independent, in any sense that denies the
right of man to be consulted, or that undervalues the action of man as a moral agent.
The potter did not reason with the clay: God did reason with Israel. The analogy
therefore can only be useful up to a given point; never overdrive any metaphor;
always distinguish between the purpose of the parable, its real substance and its
accessories, its incidental draperies and attachments. Let us take the inquiry in its
crudest and most ruthless form. Can He not do with a man as this man does with the
clay? The answer is in a sense Yes, in a larger sense No. As a matter of power,
crudely defined, God can do with us as the potter does with the clay: but God
Himself has introduced a new element into power; He is no longer in relation to the
soul simply and merely omnipotent, He has made Himself a party. In so treating
Himself He exercised all His attributes. He need not have done so, but having done
so He never shrinks from the conditions which He has created and which He has
imposed. Observe, He does not give up any part of His sovereignty. In the first
instance He created man, devised a great scheme and ministry of things: all this was
done sovereignly; it was not man that was consulted as to his own creation, it was
the Triune God that said, Let us make man. The Lord, then, having thus acted
from the point of His sovereignty, has Himself created a scheme of things within
which He has been pleased to work as if He were a consenting and cooperating
party. When did God say, By the exercise of a potters right I will break you, the soul,
in pieces, although you want to be preserved and saved? When did Jesus Christ ever
say to any man, You want to be saved, but I do not want to save you; I doom you to
everlasting alienation from the throne of light and the sceptre of mercy? Never. May
not a man, changing the level of inquiry, do what he likes with his own? No. Society
says No; law says No; the needful security without which progress is impossible says
No. Yet we must define what is meant by can and may and cannot. Then in the use
of the word can we always come upon the further word cannot at the same time.
You can and you cannot, in one act. Why, how is that? Is not that a simple
contradiction of terms? No, that statement, though apparently paradoxical, is one,
and admits of easy reconciliation in both its members. If it were a question of mere
power or physical ability, as we have often seen in our study of this Bible, we can do
many things: but where are we at liberty simply to use ability or power in its most
simple definition? Power is a servant; power is not an independent attribute that
can do just what it likes: power says, What shall I do? I am an instrument, I am a
faculty, but I am intended by the Sovereign of the universe to be a servant--the
servant of judgment and conscience and duty and social responsibility. Power stands
in an attitude of attention, awaiting the orders of conscience. Mere power therefore
is one thing, mere ability, and it is a faculty that never ought to be exercised in itself,
by itself, for itself. It must be always worked in consent, in union, in cooperation. I
repeat, power--great, self-boasting power--must obey orders. Let no man say when
he is tempted, I am tempted of God. May not a man do what he likes with his own?
What is his own? Not his child. He says, This child is my own; we say, Yes and No.
Once more we come upon the double reply. Every child has two fathers. There is a
little, measurable, individual father, and there is the greater father called Society:
may we not recognise a third, and say, there is the Father in heaven? Your child
cannot speak, and yet you cannot do with it what you like; your child has no will, no
opened judgment, and yet you cannot do with the child as you please. Society has
taken its name, and its age, and the eyes of Society are upon that child night and
day, and if you slew it at midnight you would have to answer for its blood at midday.
Here, then, we rest, in presence of this great doctrine of Divine sovereignty in
relation to man. We may search the Bible from beginning to end to find that the
sovereignty of God ever said to a man, I will not save you when you want to be
saved, and we shall find no such instance in the record. With regard to nations, it is
perfectly evident from the face of things that there is a Power that is placing nations
where they are, and working up the great national unit to great national ends. God
has always had, as it were, a double policy, and it is because we have confounded the
one policy with the other that we have been all our lifetime subject to bondage
through fear lest God may have predestinated us to hell. He never predestined any
man to such a place. He predestined unrighteousness to hell and nothing can ever
get it into heaven; into that city nothing shall enter that is unholy, impure, defiled,
or that maketh a lie. Eternity has never been at peace with wickedness. The infinite
tranquillity of immeasurable and inexpressible duration has never been reconciled
to one act of trespass, one deed of violence, one thought of wrong. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The potters wheel

Does God rule the nations of the earth? When men set themselves in opposition to
what are believed to be the laws of righteousness, will the nation prosper as it would
have done if righteousness had been its aim? That was the question which perplexed
the prophet. Gods work, he believed, was not frustrated by mans sin, only the
nation which set itself against God was broken. Somehow the human mind came to
suspect that each man was in direct and intimate relationship with God, that He was
dealing with him as truly as if there were no other being in the universe. Every word
of Jesus tended to deepen that impression. The very hairs of your head are all
numbered . . . Not one sparrow falleth to the ground without your Heavenly Father.
Are ye not of more value than they?

I. The first thing which attracts our notice is the CLAY. It is of different qualities.
Some of it is very pure and pliable, other is too soft--fat the potter calls it--to be
used in its present state; some is almost white, and will make the finest porcelain,
other has such an excess of iron that it will make only coloured ware; some is
doubtful,--it will form, but it will twist or crack in the firing. The clay of the potter is
human nature, good, bad, and indifferent. Is there any of it so bad that it cannot be
used? Not if it be clay. There is no clay that the potter cannot employ. He cannot use
stone, and he cannot make a vase of water. There are men so hard that they seem to
be stone; there are others so flabby that it seems as if they never could hold together
on the revolving wheel; still, if they be men, something can be done. It may not be
possible to make poets and statesmen of them, any more than it is possible to make
Sevres china of Jersey clay; but they can be moulded and fixed into some form of
usefulness as long as they are men. The difficulty, however, which arises in some
mens minds, even when that is settled, is this: Is not the best what we want? Can we
rest satisfied with any dealing with human nature which leaves the large majority of
the race on a low plane, and exalts only a chosen few? Now, if we cannot, how can
the Creator? Must we not suppose that He too is disappointed in His work, and that
He is limited in His operations? How, then, can we believe in One who is
omnipotent? Is not He too limited by necessity, and are we not right in saying that
that which determines character is the previous condition of the material with which
God works? And does not this lead finally to disbelief, in God? It certainly does lead
to a disbelief in such a God as we have fancied. But it may lead to a belief in a nobler
God than that. The potter puts his hand on a lump of clay. He can never make pure
porcelain out of it. Well, who said that he intended to? Who told us that he tried to
and failed? Did not the potter bring the clay into the house? Did he not know what
he would find there? Not so. The fineness of the pottery is determined by the quality
of the clay, and so is its colour, but not its form. That is the work of the potter alone.
It is in that that we see the power of his genius. And the coarser the material and the
cruder its colour, the more are we led to marvel at the genius and the goodness
which was content to embody itself in such material. The more we study human
nature, the more we become convinced that God never intended all men to be alike.
The more we study sociology, the more we feel convinced that it would be a fatal
thing to have a town with but a single industry, a nation with no variety of
employments, a world perfectly homogeneous. We all admit that it is not possible
for every man to have all the moral qualities in an equal degree. The important thing
in life is that each man should be faithful in the employment of those which he has.
It is with individuals as with nations. We say that we cannot, and God ought not to
be content with anything less than the best. But what is best? Is it best that all the
clay in the world should be turned into Dresden china? By no means. What is best is
that there should be a great variety fitted for different purposes. There are certain
virtues which would be out of place in certain conditions of civilisation--that is, in
certain individuals. Refined sensibility would be as embarrassing to a frontiersman
as a carriage hung on delicate springs. What is needed is that he should be brave and
just. We say that it is not as high a type as the courteous gentleman who would
shrink from profanity as from physical pollution. But the test is to be found not in
the quality of the virtue, but in the faithfulness with which it is used. Two things,
then, ought to be learned from a consideration of the clay in the potters house. The
first is, that God is dealing with men as individuals indeed, yet not as isolated
beings, but as members of a great family. It is to the advantage of the family that
they should differ, and it is to their own advantage too. This difference in the clay, of
which we have many theories, such as the law of heredity, or the influence of
environment, are the conditions which God Himself has ordained. All creation is
self-limitation. God is working in clay. He must make what the clay is capable of
expressing; only, there is no clay which is not capable, on a higher or lower plane, of
being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
2. The second thing which we see in the potters house is the WHEEL. On it the
lump is placed, and the unseen foot presses the treadle, and the wheel
revolves. About the wheel, too, men have formed a theory. First they began
with the clay--the substance of human nature. And there was evolved many a
philosophy. It has produced the spirit of agnosticism. Men, weary with
speculations which lead to nothing, have said there is nothing to be known of
the constitution of the clay nor the mind of the worker. And they are right:
there is nothing to be known by the exclusive study of the human mind. And
so they have turned to the study of the revolutions of the wheel. The clay is
on the wheel, and it turns and turns, and slackens not its speed, still less
stops in answer to curses or groans. If you ask whence came the clay, the
answer is, the wheel made it. If men asked how it took forms of beauty, the
answer was given by pointing out that, if the wheel went slower by one
revolution in a thousand years, the thing of beauty would be marred; that if it
increased its speed but the fraction of a second, the clay would be destroyed.
The wheel never changes. Well, how does the ease stand today? Men have
roused themselves, and asked at length, What moves the wheel? Such a
simple, natural question! But no one can answer it. We do not know, say
the wisest students of nature. Every increase of knowledge only serves to
widen the surrounding abyss of nescience. And what is more, nothing can
ever be known of that secret, for we have learned enough of nature to know
that no study of it will tell us any of those things which we would like to
know. The study of the clay was formulated in metaphysics, and led to
agnosticism. The study of the wheel has done the same. There are, however,
certain impressions which the mind has received from the study of nature
which nothing will ever shake. The first is the universality of law--that
nothing happens anywhere except in accordance with invariable rules, which
are never changed. That is the one thing we have learned from the study of
nature, and almost the only thing we have learned which throws any light on
the great problem which perplexes us. Is this all that can be learned from the
potters house? So many tell us, but as we turn away there comes, we cannot
tell how, & feeling that we have not seen all. And to me that is, after all, the
greatest mystery of life. How did it ever come to pass that man should dream
that there is more to be known than can be seen? That is the mystery. From
what does it arise? How is it that I, a creature of a moment, without power,
an infinitesimal particle in the universe, should come to believe that this is
not the whole story of my life, but that there is a hand upon me fashioning
me and moulding me, making me walk in the paths which I would not, and
comforting me, and filling me with hope? It is because of something else
which is in the potters house. That which the prophet saw first of all: I saw
the potter work a work on the wheels. It is on that that our eyes must be
fixed if we would gain comfort and hope. It is on that that the eyes of
thoughtful men must be fixed before we can have a philosophy of life. The
study of the clay will show us only the limitations of the clay. The study of the
wheel will teach us nothing but the conditions under which the clay is
moulded. The contemplation of the hand alone will yield nothing but
unsubstantial dreams. The result of the first has been formulated in
philosophy; of the second in science; of the third in theology. Should there
ever be a complete philosophy of life, it must be from the combination of
what each thing in the potters house has to teach us. The clay we can
analyse. The wheel we can watch. How can we learn from the hand? Only by
taking the testimony which the clay itself bears to its own experience, only by
noting the effects produced on the human soul by the awful, mysterious
experiences of life. The limitations of your life and mine were fixed long
before we saw the light. We have learned that to begin with. The experiences
which come to you and me are not made to break in upon the course of this
world, violating the law which governs life. They come by rule. There is an
undeviating law which governs life. That, too, we have learned. Where, then,
is Providence? That is to be seen in the moulding of our life. Gods hand is on
us, and in the turn of the wheel which brings joy He lifts us up, and in the
turn which brings calamity He moulds us for some use. That is what men
forget. The race has always believed, that there was overruling, but supposed
that the proof of it was to be found in the events of life, and then was
dumfounded when these events proved different from what had been
expected. It is not in the events, but in the result of them, that we shall find
the proof of the hand of God. That thought frees us at once from the
deadness of spirit which comes with the knowledge of inexorable law. If
there be a hand fashioning, we may be sure that it chose the clay to make
that which it knew the clay could become. If there is a hand moulding our
 souls, it must be that these laws were prepared by it because He knew that no
condition which those laws produce is unfavourable to the development of
the life which He loves. And more than that, if there be laws for the clay and
laws for the wheel, there are likewise, we may be sure, laws for the moulding
hand as well. What are these laws? That we do not know, and that is why
there is so much confusion and fear. There is one thing more to be said, and
that is, that the parable is incomplete in one respect. There are times when
we can speak of humanity as clay in the hands of the potter, but we all know
that this human clay has the power of resistance. It can tear itself from the
moulding hand; it can fatten itself in sin, so as to frustrate the work on the
wheels. So the house of the potter has an exhortation for us, as well as an
object lesson. What it is saying to every man is, Do not resist, but cooperate.
Look at the clay--it is yourself, it has its limitations. Two things are before
you when that truth has entered into your soul. You may despair; you may
throw away your life because it is physically, mentally, or morally incomplete
or marred. Or you may submit. You may learn to be content; you may rise to
thank God that you are what you are. You may be made useful, and in the
eyes of the Master beautiful, because expressing the love of God. Look on the
wheel. It is the revolving life, with all its manifold experiences. They may be
so joyous that we forget that we are here for a purpose, and pass the time in
the enjoyment of things which unfit us for beauty or power. They may be
hard and bitter, and you may upbraid God. You may say, I have been a
religious man, and look at me, old and poor and sad! Are not these laws,
which He established, and which now bear heavy on me, for a purpose? We
may go further, and say, The consolations of God are not small with us. We
may hear the voice of the apostle saying, My brethren, think it not strange
concerning the fiery trial as if some strange thing happened to you; there
hath no trial taken you but such as is common to man. He wrought a work on
the wheels. Let nothing shake that faith. Submit your souls to God. Do not
ask Him to make you great, only to make you useful. The hand of the Potter
is on your life, moulding it in the midst of manifold experiences. It is the
hand of your Father--the same hand which was on Jesus, and moulded that
sweet Jewish boy into the perfect manifestation of His own glory. Remember
that, and He will make you a thing of beauty, fit for the Masters use.
(Leighton Parks.)

The Potter and His clay

You can really see the prophet in his loose flowing robes, walking slowly and softly
out of the temple, and away through the narrow streets of Jerusalem towards the
Eastern Gate. Then selecting his road, he wanders down the slopes into the Valley of
Hinnom. The voice of God is in his ear. The Spirit is directing his steps. Listen! He is
reciting over the pathetic words of his great predecessor, with almost as much
pathos as Isaiah himself. O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments! then
had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea. The
prophet has come forth from a night of sore travail of spirit. The deep thought of his
soul was ever this, How different may have been the course of Israel, and the flow
of their national life, if only Gods rule had been supreme. He had chosen them to
be a light to the Gentiles, but, alas! they were darkness. In their evil choice and
deeds they had foiled the Divine plan, and frustrated the Divine purpose. A father
loves his boy dearly. He conceives a plan unto which to shape his life. The boy is the
one object for which he lives; to carry out his ideal he saves his hard earnings and
seeks to inspire the lad to its lofty attainment. But there is resistance, and the plan is
abortive. Again the father tries to shape the lads life according to another plan, only
to result in another failure. Still the father never despairs, he will try again and
again, until upon some noble model he has shaped the career of his lad. Now, while
Jeremiah was wandering on, he was thinking something like that about Israel.
Presently the prophet reaches the base of the Valley of Hinnom, and pauses in front
of a potters bench. Here he stands and observes. He sees the potter take the clay
that is on his bench, knead it until it is soft and pliable to the touch. What was the
great truth that God forced home upon the prophets heart? Some have thought it
was that men are irresistibly in Gods hand, that He is the absolute Sovereign,
working all things after the counsel of His own will. We do not deny this truth, but
we do not believe that was the lesson God taught Jeremiah by the side of the potters
bench.

I. It is not a discussion of FIXED FATE, FREE WILL, FOREKNOWLEDGE ABSOLUTE.

Gods will had not been absolute in Israel, or there would have been no Divine
pleadings, Turn ye, turn ye, for, why will ye die. But another and more hopeful
lesson came into the prophets heart. When the vessel was marred, the potter did
not throw away the clay, but changed the pattern, and remoulded it. When God first
called Abraham the type was patriarchal, afterwards it was theocratic, when God
governed them by the dispensation of angels, prophets, and judges. After this there
was set up a kingdom, wherein David was Gods viceroy, but now, as the 11th verse
of the 19th chapter makes clear, God was about to change the pattern again, and
ever will, until Shiloh shall come. Israel shall yet be perfected.

II. THE SYMBOLS EMPLOYED. The clay, the worker, the wheels, and the production.
The people are the clay. God made man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into
him the breath of life. Though made in the image of God, man fell; but God lifts man
out of the pit of destruction and from the miry clay, that He may by regeneration
conform him into the image of His Son. That clay is resistant or pliable. It was not
for want of skill on the part of the potter that the vessel was marred, but there was
some hidden defect in the clay itself, that would not yield to the plastic guidance of
wheel and hand. But where the clay is pliable the potter perfects the vessel. The
Worker is plainly God Himself. He is represented as possessing will, intelligence,
and ability to execute. There are two wheels, an upper and a lower, a heavenly
influence and an earthly circumstance. His hand is on the upper, His foot upon the
lower. While the Divine Potter by His Spirit moulds us, He keeps His foot upon the
lower wheel. Providence is under His control as well as grace. The productions are
various. He may mould of the clay a common vessel or a beautiful vase. But we are
all to be vessels for the Kings use, we are all to bear a likeness to His dear Son.

III. GOD HAS DESIGN IN THE LIFE OF EVERY BELIEVER. What is the difference
between the work of an unskilled workman and an artisan? We may define it thus.
The unskilled man creates his design as he proceeds, according as necessity
determines, or his ideal grows. A skilled man designs first, and then constructs
according to plan. The Divine Potter is not shaping our lives indefinitely, but is
moulding our character according to His will and purpose. You cannot understand
the drift of your life, there is so much mystery in it; it often seems chaotic, a mere
tangled skein. But patience! Hope thou in God. Be of good courage. We are not the
creatures of chance, the subjects of a blind force that is whirling us round and round
without purpose or aim. God employs all things to accomplish His will. Gods unique
power is to use all things in our life to His glory, and our highest good. There may be
a full flowing river, with a desert land on either side, but its larger usefulness is lost
until it is skilfully employed to irrigate the land through which it flows. In the
economy of Gods providence, nothing runs to waste. All things are turned to good
account. All defeats, as well as victories, all the blightings of our hopes, as all
fulfillments, are made to work together for good to them that love God. Herein is
the power and the wisdom of the Master Potter. God works wonders out of the most
disappointing lives. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the
knowledge of God!

IV. MUCH DEPENDS ALSO UPON THE MATERIAL. With one piece of wood you may be
able to do much, but with another nothing--it flies off ink chips, and breaks into
fragments at the touch of the chisel. There are some souls that never yield to Gods
moulding; others only when they are melted in the fires of affliction. There our wills
bend. Now see this vessel that is marred in the hands of the potter. But why is it
marred? There is no lack of skill. No, but there is some gritty substance there, some
stubborn resisting quality that will not yield to the deftness of the potters hand.
Human nature is often resistant, rather than pliable, to Gods touch. An evil
disposition in our nature mars the vessel in the hands of the Potter.

V. THE PATIENCE OF THE POTTER. Jeremiah was not particularly impressed with
the fact that the clay was marred in the hand of the potter, but what made the
deepest impression was, that when the clay was spoilt there was no sign of anger
upon the face of the potter. That was the great lesson for Jeremiah, and for us. He
had laboured for Israel, and failed; but had he been as patient as this? Had he not
despaired when he should have commenced afresh? And have not we been
Jeremiahs, and do we feel this rebuke? I have seen a mechanic spoil a piece of
handicraft, and because he spoilt it, in a passion of wrath, dash it to the ground.
That is never Gods way. If Israel has failed to answer to the one mould, He will try
another. There are broken ideals, over which we all mourn. But God is patient, and if
He cannot make us of such a glorious pattern as He first designed, He will go on
shaping our life according to another pattern, and finally perfect us for the palace of
the King.

VI. THE PROCESS TO WHICH THE CLAY WAS SUBJECTED. Had the clay possessed
mental, sensitive being, it might have complained of the method, the pressure of the
kneading hand, the spinning of the wheel. But objection is unwisdom. We are
sometimes whirled round and round upon the wheel of life, until the head is giddy
and the heart sick. But there is not one unnecessary pang. Whom the Lord loveth
He chasteneth. Courage! Trust in God. Gods will is of the highest purpose.
Character can only come by discipline, and through suffering we pass into the
perfect beauty of holiness. (F. James.)

On the potters wheel

 Perhaps this second vessel was not quite so fair as the first might have been, still it
was beautiful and useful. It was a memorial of the potters patience and long-
suffering, of his careful use of material, and of his power of repairing loss and
making something out of failure and disappointment. O vision of the long-suffering
patience of God! O bright anticipation of Gods redemptive work! O parable of
remade characters, and lives, and hopes! Who is there that is not conscious of
having marred and resisted the touch of Gods moulding hands? Who is there that
does not lament opportunities of saintliness which were lost through the
obdurateness of the will and the hardness of the heart?

I. The Divine making of men.

1. The potter has an ideal. Floating through his fancy there is the vessel that is to
be. He already sees it hidden in the shapeless clay, waiting for his call to
evoke. Before the woman applies scissors to the silk, she has conceived the
pattern of her dress; before the spade cleaves the sod, the architect has
conceived the plan of the building to be erected there. So of God in nature.
The pattern of this round world and of her sister spheres lay in His creative
thought before the first beam of light streamed across the abyss. So of the
mystical body of Christ, the Church, His Bride. So also of the possibilities of
each human life. See that mother bending over the cradle where her firstborn
baby son lies sleeping! Mark that smile which goes and comes over her face,
like a breath of wind on a calm summers day! Why does she smile Ah! she is
dreaming; and in her dreams is building castles of the future eminence of
this child--in the pulpit or the senate; in war, or art. If only she might have
her way, he should be foremost in happiness, renowned in the service of
men. But no mother ever wished so much for her child as God for us, when
first cradled at the foot of the Cross.
2. The potter achieves his purpose by means of the wheel. In the discipline of
human life this surely represents the revolution of daily circumstance; often
monotonous, common place, trivial enough, and yet intending to effect, if it
may, ends on which God has set His heart. Many, on entering the life of full
consecration and devotion, are eager to change the circumstances of their
lives for those in which they suppose that they will more readily attain a fully
developed character. Hence, much of the restlessness and fever, the
disappointment and wilfulness of the early days of Christian experience. Do
not, therefore, seek to change, by some rash and wilful act, the setting and
environment of your life. Stay where you are till God as evidently calls you
elsewhere as He has put you where you are. In the meanwhile, look deep into
the heart of every circumstance for its special message, lesson, or discipline.
Upon the way in which you accept or reject these will depend the
achievement or marring of the Divine purpose.
3. The bulk of the work is done by the potters fingers. How delicate their touch!
How fine their sensibility! It would almost seem as though they were endued
with intellect, instead of being the instruments by which the brain is
executing its purpose. And in the nurture of the soul these represent the
touch of the Spirit of God working in us to will and to do of His good
pleasure. But we are too busy, too absorbed in many things, to heed the
gentle touch. Sometimes, when we are aware of it we resent it, or stubbornly
refuse to yield to it. The wheel and the hand worked together; often their
 motion was in opposite directions, but their object was one. So all things
work together for good to them that love God. Gods touch and voice give the
meaning of His providences; and His providences enforce the lesson that His
tender monitions might not be strong enough to teach.

II. GODS REMAKING OF MEN. He made it again. The potter could not make what
he might have wished; but he did his best with his materials. So God is ever trying to
do His best for us. How often He has to make us again! He made Jacob again, when
He met him at the Jabbok ford; finding him a supplanter and a cheat, but, after a
long wrestle, leaving him a prince with God. He made Simon again, on the
resurrection morning, when He found him somewhere near the open grave, the son
of a dove--for so his old name Bar-jonas signifies--and left him Peter, the man of the
rock, the apostle of Pentecost. Are you conscious of having marred Gods early plan
for yourself? Whilst into the soul the conviction is burnt: I had my chance, and
missed it; it will never come to me again. The survival of the fittest leaves no place
for the unfit. They must be flung amid the waste which is ever accumulating around
the furnaces of human life. It is here that the Gospel comes in with its gentle words
for the outcast and lost. The bruised reed is made again into a pillar for the temple
of God. The feebly smoking flax is kindled to a flame.

III. OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE GREAT POTTER. Yield to Him! Each particle in
the clay seems to say Yes to wheel and hand. And in proportion as this is the case,
the work goes merrily on. If there be rebellion and resistance, the work of the potter
is marred. Let God have His way with you. We cannot always understand His
dealings, because we do not know what His purpose is. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

A shattered life restored

Dr. Pope says, When I was in Florence I saw a triumph of restorative patience
and skill. There is a statue there which had been found broken into a thousand
fragments, and a patient man, with fine tact, replaced the shattered particles, and
eventually the broken image was restored; and there it stands in its elastic beauty, as
wonderful and as perfect as in the ancient years. And I say that in Christianity we
have a supreme Artist who can pick up the most shattered life that the philosopher
would cast to the void with the rubbish, and He can hold that life up in moral beauty
and perfectness, and He does do it every day.
Restored manhood
Restored! Men can restore many things. I have read of them restoring pictures,
cleansing them from the dust and filth that have gathered in the course of years, and
restoring them to something like the brilliance and beauty they had when they left
the painters easel. I have read of them restoring old buildings--grand old
cathedrals, monuments of the genius and devotion of past generations--which have
begun to show signs of decay. But there is a restoration work greater far than the
restoration of one of the old masters or the restoration of a cathedral, and that is the
restoration of man himself. For man is a wreck, a ruin; a wreck so complete, a ruin
so utter, that his restoration has seemed hopeless and desperate. The best of men
gave up the task, shook their heads over publicans and sinners, and said, The ruin
is beyond restoration. But Jesus came and looked upon these wrecks of humanity,
and said, These, too, can be restored, and He has justified His word. He found
Zacchaeus a wreck, and restored him; He found Onesimus a wreck, and restored
him; He found Augustine a wreck, and restored him; He found Henry Barrowe a
wreck, and restored him; He found J.B. Gough a wreck, and restored him. Out of
these battered ruins and shattered wrecks of humanity He has made temples of the
living God. (J. D. Jones, M. A.)

O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord.

The answer is Yes-and No

. So far as all physical energy is concerned, the Lord can do with us as the potter
does with the clay; but the Lord Himself cannot make a little child love Him: there is
a point at which the clay lives, thinks, reasons, defies. The potter can only work upon
the clay up to a given point; so long as it is soft he can make it a vessel of honour or a
vessel of dishonour, he can make it this shape or that; but once let him burn it, and
it is clay no longer in the sense in which he can fashion it according to model or
design. A marvellous thing is this, that the Lord has made any creature that can defy
Him; and that we can all defy Him is the testimony of every days experience. Let the
Lord say, Can I not crush the universe? and the answer must be, Yes, in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye; Thou hast but to close Thy fingers upon it, and it is dead,
and Thou canst throw the ashes away. But almightiness has its limits. There is no
almightiness in the moral region. The Lord cannot conquer the human will by any
exercise of mere omnipotence: the will is to be conquered by instruction, persuasion,
grace, moral inducement, spiritual ministry, exhibition of love upon love, till the
exhibition rises into sacrifice and indicates itself in the Cross of Christ. Behold, I
stand at the door and knock. Why does He not go in? Because He has no key of that
door that can open it by force. Why does He not break it with one tremendous blow?
Because then the heart would be crushed and killed, and would not be persuaded
into becoming a guest chamber for the King. We have it in our power to say No to
God, to defy the Lord, to withdraw ourselves from the counsel and guidance of
heaven. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 18:7-8
If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will
repent.

Fast sermon

I. THE BEING AND CONDITION OF COUNTRIES AND COMMUNITIES, OF NATIONS AND

KINGDOMS, ARE UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE MOST HIGH. To suppose Him watchful
of the operations in the universe, and yet not active in the management of them,
would seem irreconcilable with the inefficacy of all laws without His might; with the
appearance of design in most events; with the effects of a sublime power which
many of them display; and with the existence, on peculiar occasions, of some
occurrences which have been departures from the ordinary course of nature. To
believe any affairs to be under the guidance of His providence, and yet to imagine
that the fortunes of whole countries and people are free from His observation and
care, would be inconsistent with the variety and magnitude of the interests which
are in those fortunes always involved. But it may be objected, if it is thus certain that
the events of time are under the superintendence of God, why are there so great evils
both in the natural and political world? To this it would be sufficient to reply, that in
us beings of yesterday, who see but a few links of the vast chain in which the
Almighty hath connected all occurrences in the universe; who with the utmost effort
of our faculties are unable, in this our low position, to perceive the final results of
any of His operations; it is vainly presumptuous to attempt to fathom the counsels
of His mind; and worse than presumptuous, with the evidences which He hath
vouchsafed to give us in His word and works, of His wisdom, goodness, and
rectitude, to doubt that all His arrangements will terminate to the honour of His
government, and the greatest possible benefit of His creatures. As the objection,
however, is plausible, it may be well to observe further, that our estimate of what
appears to be evil may often be erroneous. Somewhere I have seen it with striking
force and beauty asked, whether the insect whose habitation the ploughshare
overturns knows that its motions conduce to that fertility of the earth which is to
sustain many intelligent creatures? In like manner, from the convulsions and
terrible occurrences in the moral world, there may be educed by the Being who
bringeth good out of evil, such results as will advance His purposes, and the general
welfare.

II. The great cause of perplexities and troubles, calamities and ruin, in any
region, is the predominance of corrupt principles and manners. For the evils which
the Divine Providence sends upon the world, there can be no other cause than the
transgressions of the inhabitants thereof. The Scriptures again and again represent
the calamities of a people as the punishment of their sins (Hos 14:1; Jer 5:9; Jer
5:25; Jer 18:9-10; Hab 3:12-13; Psa 75:9-10; 1Ki 9:7-9). Nor is reason less explicit
upon this truth than revelation. Upon a little reflection she perceives that the
Almighty, being perfectly holy, wise, and good, will approve and encourage virtue.
This necessarily implies the condemnation and punishment of vice. In beings
destined to exist hereafter, there is extensive opportunity for the fulfilment of the
Divine intentions. Their immortality opens a wide field for the display of the justice
of God. And hence it is, that in this present state vice does not always in the
individual meet its retribution, nor virtue its reward. But nations and communities,
as such, are not immortal. It should therefore seem reasonable that they should in
their present existence enjoy the rewards due to their virtues, and endure the
punishments which their vices deserve. To place the point beyond dispute,
experience, weeping as she reviews her venerable annals, declares from them that
the indignation of Heaven has frequently been brought upon whole communities by
their sins: that debase inert, calamity, and ruin have resulted to them from the
predominance of depraved principles and manners.

III. BY A TIMELY REFORMATION OF THEIR PRINCIPLES AND LIVES, COMMUNITIES MAY

AVERT THE DISPLEASURE OF THE ALMIGHTY. Contrition is estimable, and acceptable
through the Redeemer, in an individual. It has turned away the wrath of Heaven
from many an offender. But when a community, as one body, is roused by a sense of
danger, or by the calls of the Most High, in alarming occurrences, in foreign
examples, or in His holy Word, or by their own consciousness of a relaxed state of
religion and morals, to consider their ways, and turn with sincerity to God, to
humble themselves before Him, and to express their earnest desire to be made
objects of His forgiveness and favour: if ever He may be said to be taken with holy
violence, it is by such an act. (Bishop Dehon.)

JER 18:11
Return ye now everyone from his evil way.

Return! Return!
My text is all about repentance; it is an exhortation from God, very brief and
sententious, but very earnest and plain: Return ye now everyone from his evil way.
I want you all to notice that this is the call of mercy. God would have you saved, and
therefore He cries to you, Return, because He is willing to receive you, and to blot
out all your sin. But remember that it is equally the call of a holy God, the God who
knows that you cannot be saved except you turn from your evil ways. Thou must be
made to hate thy sin, or else, where God is, thou canst never come.

I. WHAT DOES THE TEXT SAY? The picture is that of a man who is going the wrong
way. He is trespassing, he is on forbidden ground, he is advancing in a dangerous
road, and if he shall continue to go in that direction, he will by and by come to a
dreadful precipice over which he will fall, and there he will be ruined. A voice cries
to him, Return! What does that word mean? It is very simple, and that I may make
it plainer still, perhaps, for practical purposes, let me say that the first thing such a
man would do would be to stop. If I was out in the country, on a road which I did not
know, and I heard a voice crying out to me, Return, I should certainly stop, and
listen; and if I heard the cry repeated, with great eagerness and earnestness,
Return! Return! I should pause, and look round, and try to see who it was that had
called to me. I wish that all of you who are wandering away from God, would stop,
and consider where you are going. In Gods name, I would arrest thee; as Gods
officer, I would put my hand on thy shoulder, and say to thee, Thou must stop; thou
shalt pause; thou shalt consider thy ways. I cannot let thee go on carelessly to thy
ruin, like a sheep into the slaughter house, or a bullock going to be killed. Stop, I
pray thee. Suppose a man did stop, that would not be returning; it is but the
commencement of the return when a man stops, but it will be necessary for him,
next, to turn round. The order for him to obey is, Right about face. There must be
a total, a radical change in you, ii you are really to obey the command, Return. I
think I hear you ask, Who can effect this change? And I am glad to hear that
question, for I trust it will lead you to pray, Turn me, O Lord, and I shall be
turned! There is something done towards returning when a man stops, there is still
more done when he turns round; yet he does not actually return until, with
persevering footsteps, the wanderer hastens back to him from whom he had
departed. What God desires is that all His prodigal children should come home, that
His stray sheep should be brought back to the fold, that the lost pieces of silver
should be put into the treasury again; that, indeed, you who have wandered in sin
should be as they are whom Christ has washed in His precious blood, whom the
Holy Spirit has regenerated, and whom the Father has adopted, and put among His
children.

II. WHEN ARE SINNERS TO RETURN? Return ye now everyone from his evil way.
The voice of God bids you to return now, and I would urge you to do so, because life
is so uncertain that, if you do not return now, you may not live to return at all. He
who would have his estate rightly ordered when he is dead should have his will
made, everybody says that; and he who would have his eternal estate ordered aright
should yield himself at once to the sovereign will of the Most High, for life is
uncertain. Return, now, for the calls of grace may not always come to you. Recollect,
also, that your sin will be increased by delay. If you keep on in the wrong path, not
only will you have sinned the more, but that sin will have taken a more terrible hold
upon you. Habits begin like cobwebs, but they end like chains of iron. Moreover, it is
well for us to return unto our God now, because the sooner we return to Him the
sooner we shall enjoy His favour, and the more delightful will our life become. Peace
with God makes even this life to be a blessed life; and he who has it begins, even
here, to enjoy the felicities of the glorified. Do you not see, too, that God will have
the more service from you? The sooner you are brought to Him, the longer will you
have of life in which to serve Him. If any of you have gone past youth, into manhood,
and to middle age, or even to old age, then the word now should come to you with
a sharp, clear crack, as of a rifle. It comes like a staccato note in music, Now! Now!
Now! Yet once more, return now, because, if ever there is a reason for returning,
that reason points to the present moment. If there is a hope that a man will leave his
sin some time or other, there must be a better hope that he will leave it now than
that he will leave it in a years time. Wisdoms voice cries, Now! It is folly that says,
Tarry.

III. WHO IS THE PERSON THAT IS TO RETURN? Everyone. Many of you have
returned. But every man, every woman, every child who has not returned, should
hear the voice of the Lord repeating this message. Well, says one, perhaps there
will be some people converted through this sermon. Do not talk so, I pray you. Will
you be converted through it? Possibly some of you are like the man we read of in the
papers some time ago. He was walking by the seaside, and trod on a large chain, and
slipped his foot right through one of the links. When he tried to draw it back again,
he could not, for he was held fast. The tide was coming in, and there he was a
prisoner. He had to call long and loud before anybody came; and by the time the
people arrived, he had very much hurt his foot in endeavouring to extricate himself.
He begged them to run for the smith, that he might come, and break the iron. He
came, but he brought the wrong tools with him, so he could not accomplish the task.
It would be some time before he could be back, and, meanwhile, the tide had come
in, and the water was up to the mans feet, so he cried, Run for the surgeon. Let him
come, and cut my leg off; it is the only hope of saving my life. But by the time the
surgeon came, the water was up to the mans neck, so the doctor could not get down
to where his foot was fast in the iron chain, and there was nothing that could be
done for him. There he was, poor fellow, and the tide rolled over him, and he was
drowned. Some of you seem to me to be just like that man, held fast by some
invisible force; yet, when I try to get at the chain, I cannot find out what it is, it is so
far under the water. Perhaps you do not yourself know what it is. I am going to make
a dive to try to get at it, as I ask my last question concerning the text.
 IV. FROM WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE TO RETURN? From his evil way. Then, each
man has a way of his own,--an evil way of his own,--some personal form of sin. What
is your own way? Is it some constitutional sin to which you are prone? Well, asks
one, what do you think is my evil way? I will answer by putting another question to
you, What is the sin into which you most frequently fall? I should think you can tell
that, and that is the evil way from which you have most to fear. It is from that one
way that you are called upon specially to return. Tonight, if you were tempted, to
which temptation would you be most likely to yield? You do not know, you say; well
then, let me put another question to you. When do you get most angry if anybody
rebukes you? What is it in the preaching that makes you say, There, I will never go
to hear that man again; he cuts my hair so short, he comes quite close to the skin?
Well now, that will help you to find out what is your own personal evil way; and it is
from that way that you are to return. Again, what sin of yours eats up the other sins?
Where does your money mostly go? You could have told that Joseph was Jacobs
favourite, because he made him a coat of many colours; and there are some sins that
wear the coat of many colours, and often, as it were, it is dipped in the mans own
blood, for everything goes for that particular sin. But I have not hit on your sin yet,
my friend, have I? You have an evil way which you will not tell to anyone; it is not as
bad as any I have mentioned; it is a very respectable kind of evil way which you
have. Your evil way is this, the evil way of self-righteousness. It makes out that the
death of Christ was a superfluity; it tells God that He is wrong in charging a man
with sin; it raises a clamour against God; it claims as a right every good thing that
God has to give; it does, in fact, uncrown the Saviour, bid the Holy Spirit go His way
as no longer needed, and throws the Gospel, which is the crown jewel of God, into
the mire. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Returning from evil ways

There are two things proper to a man that returneth: first, to go a way clean
contrary to the way he went before; secondly, to tread out and obliterate his former
steps, First, I say, he must go a way clean contrary to his former way. Many men
think that the way to hell is but a little out of the way to heaven, so that a man in
small time, with small ado, may pass out of the one into the other; but they are
much deceived: for as sin is more than a stepping aside, namely, a plain, a direct
going away from God; so is repentance, or the forsaking of sin, more than a little
coasting out of one way into another. Crossings will not serve; there is no way from
the road of sin to the place we seek, but to go quite back again the way we came. The
way of pleasure in sin must be changed for sorrow for the same. He that hath
superstitiously worshipped false gods must now as devoutly serve the true; the
tongue that hath uttered swearings, and spoken blasphemies, must as plentifully
sound forth the name of God in prayer and thanksgiving; the covetous man must
become liberal; the oppressor of the poor as charitable in relieving them; the
calumniator of his brother a tender guarder of his credit: in fine, he that hated his
brother before must now love him as tenderly as himself. (Joseph Mede.)

Repentance useless without amendment

Repentance without amendment is like continual pumping in a ship, without
stopping the leaks. (J. Palmer.)
 JER 18:12
There is no hope.

Hope, yet no hope-No hope, yet hope

There are two phases in spiritual life which well illustrate the deceitfulness of the
heart. The first is that described in my first text (Isa 57:10), in which the man,
though wearied in his many attempts, is not and cannot be convinced of the
hopelessness of self-salvation, but still clings to the delusion that he shall be able
somehow, he knows not how, to deliver himself from ruin. When you shall have
hunted the man out of this, you will then meet with a new difficulty, which is
described in the second text. Finding there is no hope in himself, the man draws the
unwarrantable conclusion that there is no hope for him in God; and, as once you had
to battle with his self-confidence, now you have to wrestle with his despair. It is self-
righteousness in both cases. In the one ease it is the soul content with self-
righteousness; in the second place it is man sullenly preferring to perish rather than
receive the righteousness of Christ.

I. Considering the first text, we have to speak of A HOPE WHICH IS NO HOPE. Thou
art wearied in the greatness of thy way; yet saidst thou not, There is no hope: thou
hast found the life of thine hand; therefore thou wast not grieved. This well pictures
the pursuit of men after satisfaction in earthly things. They will hunt the purlieus of
wealth, they will travel the pathways of fame, they will dig into the mines of
knowledge, they will exhaust themselves in the deceitful delights of sin, and, finding
them all to be vanity and emptiness, they will become sore perplexed and
disappointed; but they will still continue their fruitless search. Carnal minds with all
their might earths vanities pursue, and when they are by ceremonies. If you shall
addict yourself to the fullest ceremonial, if you should be obedient to it in all its jots
and tittles, keeping its fast days and its feast days, its vigils and matins and vespers,
bowing down before its priesthood, its altars, and its millinery, giving up your
reason, and binding yourself in the fetters of superstition; after you have done all
this, you will find an emptiness and a vexation of spirit as the only result. It is only
grace that can enable us to follow Luthers example, who, after going up and down
Pilates staircase on his knees, muttering so many Ave Marias and Paternosters,
called to mind that old text, Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with
God, and springing up from his knees forsook once and forever all dependence
upon outward formalities, and quitted the cloistered cell and all its austerities to live
the life of a believer, knowing that by the works of the law there shall no flesh living
be justified.
2. A great mass of people, even though they reject priestcraft, make themselves
priests, and rely upon their good works. A poor and wretched man dreamed
that he was counting out gold. There it stood upon the table before him in
great bags, and, as he untied string after string, he found himself wealthy
beyond a Croesus treasures. He was lying upon a bed of straw in the midst of
filth and squalor, a mass of rags and wretchedness, but he dreamed of riches.
A charitable friend who had brought him help stood at the sleepers side and
said, I have brought you help, for I know your urgent need. Now the man
was in a deep sleep, and the voice mingled with his dream as though it were
 part of it: he replied, therefore, with scornful indignation, Get ye gone, I
need no miserable charity from you; I am possessor of heaps of gold. Can you
not see them? I will open a bag and pour out a heap that shall glitter before
your eyes. Thus foolishly he talked on, babbling of a treasure, which existed
only in his dream, till he who came to help him accepted his repulse and
departed mournfully. When the man awakened he had no comfort from his
dream, but found that he had been duped by it into rejecting his only friend.
Such is the position of every person who is hoping to be saved by his good
works. You have no good works except in your dream.
3. Many persons are looking for salvation to another form of self-deception,
namely, the way of repentance and reformation. It is thought by some that if
they pray a certain number of prayers, and repent up to a certain amount,
they will then be saved as the result of their praying and repenting. This,
again, is another way of winning salvation which is not spoken of in
Scripture. This is a way by which neither law nor Gospel receive honour. To
repent is a Christians duty, but to hope for salvation by virtue Of that alone
is a delusion of the most fearful kind. Repentance is a part of salvation, and
when Christ saves us He saves us by making us repent, but repentance does
not save; it is the work of God, and the work of God alone. Now wherefore
dost thou weary thyself in this way also? for surely in it there is no hope.
4. Until thou art clean separate from all consciousness of hope in thyself, there
no hope that the Gospel will ever be any power to thee; but when thou shalt
throw up thy hands like a drowning man, feeling, It is all over with me! I am
lost, lost, unless a stronger than I shall interpose. Oh, sinner, then there is
hope for you.

II. We now turn to the second text. Here we have NO HOPE--AND YET HOPE. When
the sinner has at last been driven by stress of weather from the roadstead of his own
confidence, then he flies to the dreary harbour of despair. As if there were nobody in
the world but himself, and as if he were to measure Gods power and Gods grace by
his own merit and power. Hopelessness in self is what we want to bring you to, but
hopelessness in itself, and especially in connection with God, would be a sin from
which we would urge you to escape. If you are sitting down in despair, I want to
speak to you first of the God of hope. His name is God, that is good. He delighteth in
mercy: it is His souls highest joy to clasp His Ephraims to His bosom. But you say,
Wherewithal shall I come before the Most High God? I have sinned, and what shall I
bring as a recompense? If I had a mint of merits, if I had godly impressions, if I had
high moral excellence, I would come with that to God, and hope to obtain a
hearing. But hearken, sinner, dost thou not know the name of the Second Person in
the Trinity? It is Jesus Christ, the Son. Now, if thou wantest merit, has not He
enough of it? Oh, sinner, if thou hast no merit, thou needest not wish for any. Take
Christ in thy hand, for He is made of God unto thee, wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification, and redemption; and all this for every, soul of Adam born who trusts
in Him alone. But I hear you complaining again, Oh, but I have not the power to
repent. You have told me this, and I cannot believe: I cannot soften my heart; I
cannot do anything; I am so powerless. You have been teaching me that. I know I
have; but there is another Person in the Trinity, and what is His name? It is the Holy
Spirit. And do you not know that the Holy Spirit helpeth our infirmity? A great
divine has said--and I think there is some truth in it--that a very great number of
souls are destroyed through the fear that they cannot be saved. I think it is very
likely. If some of you really thought that Christ could save you, if you felt a hope that
you might yet be numbered with His people, you would say, I will forsake my sins, I
will leave my present evil way, and I will fly unto the strong for strength. In the first
place, would it not be wise, even if there were only a peradventure, to go to Christ,
and trust Him on the strength of that? The King of Nineveh had no Gospel message;
he had simply the law preached by Jonah, and that very shortly and sternly. Jonahs
message was, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown; but the King of
Nineveh said, Who can tell? Surely if but on the presumption of Who can tell?
the men of Nineveh went and did find mercy, you will be inexcusable if you do not
act upon the same, having much more than that to be your comfort. Go, sinner, to
the Cross, for who can tell? But, in the next place, you have had many clear and
positive examples. In reading Scripture through you find that many have been to
Christ, and that there never was one cast out yet. Moreover, you have comfortable
promises in the Word of God. Your hearts shall live that seek Him. If you do seek
Him your heart shall live. Leap on the back of that promise, and let it bear thee, as
the Samaritans beast bore the dying man, to an inn where thou mayest rest--I mean
to Christ--where thou mayest have confidence. Whosoever calleth upon the name
of the Lord shall be saved. Now you do call upon His name. There are many others:
they have been quoted in your ears till you know them by heart. Whosoever will, let
him take the water of life freely; and you know that precious one, Come unto Me,
all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Spiritual desperation
One instance of this is related by a well-known religious writer. He says: A
zealous minister went to the house of an aged respectable man, a man who bore an
unstained character, and there addressing him and his family, he told simply of the
salvation that is in Christ, and urged those who listened to a hearty acceptance of it.
The minister finished what he had to say, and when he left the house, his friend
accompanied him; and when they were alone together said something like this:
Spend your time and strength upon the young; labour to bring them to Jesus; it is
too late for such as me. I know, he said, that I have never been a Christian. I fully
believe that when I die I shall go down to perdition.

I. Its causes.
1. One is the judgments of God, especially those severer dispensations with
which the Almighty sometimes visits us. Their real significance, I need
hardly say, is that our heavenly Father still loves us and cares for us--that He
has not forgotten us, nor given us over to destruction--that He still thinks
there is good in us, and a chance for us; and that He is bound by loud and
louder calls to warn us back from ruin, and by heavier and heavier blows, if
necessary, to drive us from the perilous paths in which we tread.
Nevertheless, with the perversity of a chastised child, we put upon them
precisely the opposite construction.
2. The discovery of ones sinfulness, and added to it the realisation of the
jeopardy in which it places the soul, will often bring on a fit of hopelessness.
That was the case with Judas. The author of the Pilgrims Progress has
testified to a similar experience. When conscience had turned the light upon
his life, and sharply reproved him for it, says Bunyan, I had no sooner thus
 conceived, in my mind, but suddenly this conclusion was fastened on my
spirit that I had been a great and grievous sinner, and that now it was too
late for me to look after heaven, for Christ would not forgive me, nor pardon
my transgression.
3. Not only does the discovery of our sins produce this effect, but the same is
also apt to follow upon long and unsuccessful conflict with them. For
instance, if a man has struggled a great while with some besetting fault, with
an appetite that has tyrannised over him--like that for strong drink, to give a
common example, or with some passion, like a hasty temper or an
uncontrollable tongue--if it seems to him that he has never conquered it, and
never can, then there begins to spread over his soul that dark cloud of
despair our text represents.
4. Finally, this feeling of despair may be sometimes accounted for by supposing
it to be simply a satanic suggestion. Dante saw over the portals of hell this
terrible sentence, All hope abandon ye who enter here. It is the devils trick,
his masterpiece of malice and cunning, to copy that inscription and trace it
on the hearts of men--All hope abandon.

II. The progress that this disorder of the soul makes when left to run an
unchecked course.
1. The first stage of it is misery. It must be. There is a very dramatic scene in the
life of Bonaparte, depicted by Guizot. It is the moment when on that solitary
road (to Paris) at the dead of night, the grand empire, founded and sustained
by the incomparable genius and commanding will of one man alone, had
crumbled to pieces, even in the opinion of him who had raised it. It is the
moment when the officers announce to the great General that his capital is
evacuated, and the enemy at its gates; and he realises that nothing is left for
him to do but abdicate. The agony that pierced that dauntless soul who can
paint! Napoleon, it is said, let himself fall by the roadside, holding his head
in his hands and hiding his face. The onlookers stood by, silently
contemplating him with heartfelt sorrow, unable to utter a single word. But
oh! what is the fall of a kingdom to any monarch--what is his despair, what
can it be compared to the anguish which must seize upon one, when the full
conviction rushes over him that he is really doomed--that no chance is left
him to avert damnation--when he must answer in his heart, There is no
hope!
2. The second stage of progress is when insensibility sets in. You know that some
diseases occasion excruciating pain at the start. Then after a while all
disagreeable sensations cease. The patient has got past feeling. Well, so it is
with the soul when attacked by spiritual desperation. From great suffering at
the outset it is liable to pass on into a state of numbness and indifference. It
is a condition worse and more alarming than the first. The individual I was
alluding to a moment since is an instance in point. I mean the one who
begged his clergyman not to waste time upon him, because he had become
persuaded that he was predestined to destruction. I did not quote to you then
all his conversation upon this subject. Let me give it more in detail now. He
said, I fully believe that when I die I shall go down to perdition. But
somehow I do not care. I know perfectly all you can say, but I feel it no more
than a stone.
 3. The third and last stage is when one arrives at recklessness. That was the
stage reached by those Jews who spoke our text. They said there is no hope.
Then they added, But we will walk after our own devices, etc. They sinned
yet more and more, until Nebuchadnezzar came and carried them away
captive. On the deck of a sinking ship, when rescue is impossible, and the
end of all is nigh at hand, a curious scene, it is said, may often be witnessed.
Here is a group weeping over their impending fate; there is another knot
contemplating with utter apathy a watery grave; and yonder, is the strangest
sight of all--men in the very frenzy of despair, cursing and swearing with
their latest breath, and preparing, with wine cup in hand, and senses steeped
in intoxication, to go to their last account. Most singular and dreadful
influence this latter, which unavoidable physical danger exercises over the
minds of men. But it is no more singular or dreadful than the influence of
spiritual hopelessness at times over the soul. The more terrible the doom
hanging over it, the more mad does the soul become to sink itself to lower
and ever lower abysses of guilt and shame.

III. IS THERE ANY FOUNDATION IN FACT FOR SPIRITUAL DESPERATION? Is there any
truth in the feeling, there is no hope? No. It is not true of any living soul that there is
no hope for it. I was reading the other day of an accident that befell an innkeeper of
the Grindelwald. He fell into a deep crevasse in the upper glacier which flows into
that beautiful valley. Happening to fall gradually from ledge to ledge, he reached the
bottom in a state of insensibility, but not seriously injured. What would you say of
that man? Well, you would say of him, if you understood what it was to fall into a
crevasse, that it was all over with him--that there was before him only a lingering
death. In fact, the man himself was at first, when he returned to consciousness of the
same opinion. But no, the event proves you both mistaken. When he awoke from his
stupor he found himself in an ice cavern, with a stream flowing through an arch at
its extremity. Following the course of this stream along a narrow tunnel, which was
in some places so low in the roof that he could scarcely squeeze himself through on
his hands and knees, he came out at last at the end of the glacier into the open air.
So we see a man fallen into the crevasse of terrible sins. There he lies, spiritually
insensible, at the bottom of the awful abyss of iniquity into which, by careless
walking, he has slipped at last. You think there is no help for him, no opportunity or
place of repentance and restoration left. You dare to say there is no hope. And in his
troubled dreams, mayhap (for sinners dream), the poor unfortunate himself repeats
your words, no hope. But it is false. A chance for even him still remains. The fallen
sinner may yet wake from his stupor, and like that innkeeper of the Grindelwald,
creep out on hands and knees into the open air and sunlight of Gods forgiveness
and eternal love. Once, it is said, the servants of Richelieu refused to obey his
dictates. Our Father, they pleaded, it is useless, we shall but fail. The great
Cardinal drew himself up, fixed upon them his piercing eye, and in a tone that left
no place for further parley, replied, Fall! theres no such word! And when I see
anyone today, a servant of the living God, perhaps afflicted, conscience-stricken,
baffled, and mocked by whisperings of the Evil One, stand up and say there is no
hope, I must despair, I hear a voice, loud as the wail of the dying Christ, ring out
through the darkness from Calvary and its blood-stained cross, Despair! theres no
such word! (G. H. Chadwell.)
The sin, danger, and unreasonableness of despair

I. To despair of Gods mercy is sinful.

1. The ancient divines were accustomed to call despair one of the seven deadly
sins It well deserves this character. It is directly contrary to the will of God.
He, we are told, taketh pleasure in them that fear Him, and hope in His
mercy. He must, therefore, be displeased with them that refuse to do this. It
is also a great insult to the character of God. It calls in question the truth of
His word; nay, it gives Him the lie; for He has told us that whosoever cometh
to Him He will in no wise cast out. It calls in question, or rather denies the
greatness of His mercy. It also limits the power of God. He has said, Is
anything too hard for Me? But despair says, It is impossible that He should
renew my heart, subdue my will, and make me fit for heaven.
2. Despair is the cause or parent of many other sins. As hope leads all who
entertain it to endeavour to purify themselves, even as Christ is pure, so
despair leads all under its influence to wander farther and farther from God,
and plunge without restraint into every kind of wickedness.

II. DESPAIR OF GODS MERCY IS DANGEROUS. When a man gives himself up to this
sin, he does, as it were, give himself up to the power and guidance of the devil; for he
voluntarily throws away everything which can protect or deliver him from the
adversary.

III. Despair of Gods mercy is groundless and unreasonable.

1. It is unreasonable to despair of Gods mercy, because He continues to you the
enjoyment of life, and the means of grace. Will you say, There is no hope,
while the walls of Gods house encircle you, while the light of the Sabbath
shines upon you, while the Word of God is before you, and while the Gospel
of salvation sounds in your ears!
2. The character of God, as revealed in His Word, shows that it is unreasonable
for you to despair of His mercy.
3. The grand scheme of redemption revealed in the Gospel, renders it still more
unreasonable to indulge despair.
4. The person, character, and invitations of Christ, show in the most striking and
conclusive manner, that despair of salvation is unreasonable.
5. That it is unreasonable to despair of Gods mercy, is evident from the
characters of many to whom it has already been extended. (E. Payson, D. D.)

Hopelessness condemned

I. Sources of this despair of amendment.

1. Indolence. It is the property of that quality of mind to be always seeking an
apology for leaving things as they are. Sometimes it imagines difficulties, and
sometimes dangers, neither of which have any real existence. There is what
may be termed a vis inertiae, a power of indolence, in mind as well as in
matter; and perhaps at the great day of account it will be found that where
profligacy has slain its thousands, indolence has slain its ten thousands.
 2. The secret love of sin. If we wish to be bad, how ready are we to believe that it
is impossible to be better! The fallen heart is that marsh of corruption in
which all things monstrous and mischievous find their birth and their
dwelling place, and from whence they issue to the destruction of the peace of
the individual and the injury of those around him.
3. A want of faith in the declaration of God. Will a merciful God command
impossibilities? and yet He says, Be ye perfect, as your Father which is in
heaven is perfect: Be ye holy, as God is holy. Will the holy God promise
what He will not perform?

II. Some of the motives for endeavouring to escape from it.

1. This despair of amendment is altogether groundless. Imagine even your case
to be as bad as possible. Suppose not only the spiritual health impaired, but
the soul in a sense dead,--still I am privileged, on the authority of God, to
affirm that this death is not necessarily either final or fatal. It is rather
suspension than extinction. It is a state from which your Redeemer is willing
to raise you.
2. The despair of amendment is irrational. Right reason in every instance
demands an implicit acquiescence in the revealed will of God. But I name the
unreasonableness of this despondency of improvement on purpose to touch
on a particular point. If it be possible that you may fail by the one process, it
is certain that you must fail by the other. If the success of vigilance and
prayer be equivocal, the ruin which must follow despair is inevitable.
3. Such despair of growth in grace and holiness is deeply guilty. There is a sort of
morbid humility on this subject, which leads men to value themselves on
those doubts in the compassionate promises of God, which are in fact
nothing short of a capital offence against Him. Is the earthly parent flattered
by his children refusing to place confidence in his declarations of pity and
love? And can the God of truth and compassion be gratified to find that, in
spite of the language of Scripture, of His past dealings with His creatures,
and in the constant experience of His Church, we should still presume to
question His mercies, and doubt whether He, who spared not His own Son,
but gave Him up for us all, will with Him also give us all things? (J. W.
Cunningham, M. A.)

Desperation dangerous

I. A desperate conclusion.

I. In reference to themselves: despair as to their own amendment or reformation.

There are people desperate in this regard because of--
(1) An absolute indisposition and averseness to all kind of good (Job 21:11).
This proceeds from--a neglect of religious duties and exercises; a
persisting in some loose course of life; a walking contrary to light;
worldliness and too deep an implunging into secular affairs.
(2) An absolute thraldom and subjection to all kinds of evil. Spiritual
laziness, unbelief of Gods promises, carnal confidence, indifference to
 the thing itself.
2. In reference to Jeremiah and his ministry; despair as to the value of preaching
Gods messages amongst them. There are fortifications to this purpose,
which men raise to themselves to hold out against the workings of the
ministry.
(1) Pride and self-conceit.
(2) Cavillings and wranglings against the Word of the ministry.
(3) Prosperity and outward welfare.
3. In reference to God Himself. They despair of the grace of God, and call it in
question.
(1) From the suggestions of Satan.
(2) From the infidelity which is in their hearts.
(3) From a measuring of God by themselves.

II. A peremptory resolution.

1. Simply and absolutely they declare that they will walk after their own devices.
(1) There is implied here that the nature of man is very prone and subject to
evil devices.
(2) There is expressed here that there is in men an affection towards these
devices. Their obstinacy and perverseness. Grounded upon security and
presumption. Proceeding from the power which Satan has over them.
They are not persuaded of the truth of Gods Word. Their conspiracy and
combination. Their wilful transgression and sin against knowledge.
2. Reflexively and derivatively, they said this.
(1) Expressly in so many words.
(2) Practically in that which they did. (T. Horton, D. D.)

The terrors of a despairing heart

Bunyan very aptly pictures Diabolus when he was attacking the town of Mansoul,
as making Captain Past-hope unfurl the red colours which were carried by Mr.
Despair, and he also speaks of the roaring of the tyrants drum, which sounded forth
terribly, especially by night, so that the men of Mansoul had always in their ears the
sound of hell fire. Hell fire and all this to keep them from submitting to their
gracious prince. Thus, for once, the devil craftily cooperates with the law of God and
conscience; these would drive men to self-despair, but Satan would go farther, and
compel them to despair as touching the Lord Himself, so as to believe that pardon
for transgression is quite impossible. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The despair of a man who abandoned his belief in God

Mr. Quint in Hogg tells a remarkable story of an incident which happened quite
recently in a great London club. He was chatting with a friend about a man who had
died by his own hand. His friend spoke rather indignantly of such an ignoble
termination to life, and characterised it--rightly enough--as a cowardly thing for a
man to leave others to meet the troubles and reap the bitter harvest he had sown. A
well-known scientific man, who was sitting close by, turned round and said, I
consider you have expressed a very harsh judgment. I dont consider it the action of
a coward; and for myself, the only rest I can look forward to is the grave. Mr.
Hoggs friend, thinking that perhaps the gentleman had lost some relative by
suicide, qualified his remarks by saying that such crimes were generally committed
with deranged minds, and that, of course, his words did not apply to a man
irresponsible for his acts. There is something worse than derangement, was the
reply, and that is despair. Mr. Hogg says that his friend was very much shocked at
the words and at the tone in which they were uttered, and began to speak to the
scientist as best he could about the love of God. He told him he could not imagine
how those who accepted the help of God could ever despair. Ah, was the sad reply,
I gave up my belief in God long ago, and I have had nothing but a deepening
despair ever since. I repeat that the grave is the only rest I can hope for--the only
home that remains for me. (The Young Man.)

JER 18:14
Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon which cometh from the lock Of the field?

Man severed from the inexhaustible resources

The idea of the text is that a man will cut himself off from the main, will cut
himself away from the eternally feeding snow of Lebanon, and will begin to make
himself a little cistern--ah me, a broken cistern, a cistern that can hold no water. Let
us think of the suicide of isolation, the madness of amputating our life, of leaving the
inexhaustible, the eternal, the infinite--and living little, miserable, self-devouring
lives. Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon and the fountain that rises from the
rock? You would not allow it in business. Shall I tell you what I have heard some of
you business men say? Did not one of you point out a man to me, and say, You see
that man crossing from the Mansion House to the Bank of England? Yes. Very
singular case, you say; that man is living on his capital. I said, What harm is
there in that? Why, he is eating himself up, consuming himself. He ought to have
his capital so invested that it will bring him in revenue day by day, year by year, and
the capital should be kept intact if possible, and still the income should be accruing.
I see! That is the text from a secular point of view. This man is living on his
capital, he has cut himself off from payable, remunerative, compensative agencies,
and he is eating up what he has. The worst thing that can happen in military
operations is for the enemy to get behind and to cut off the supplies. That is the
horrible possibility and the dreadful mischief, that the supplies should be cut off.
Take care how you dwell upon this as an instance of misfortune. I charge you, in the
presence of God and the holy angels, foolish man, with doing this very thing. You
have cut off your supplies, you have dismissed prayer, you are trying to live on your
own miserable individuality and selfhood. Get back to your supplies--back to God,
back to the fountain. Live and move and have your being in God, and then no man
can impoverish you, until he has impoverished God. (J. Parker.)

JER 18:17
 I win scatter them;. . . I will shew them the back.

The sinners doom

I. The cause of the evil threatened.

1. Rejecting the Divine government.
2. Guilty of idolatry.
3. Rejecting the mercy of God.
4. Conduct characterised by the greatest folly.
5. A manifestation of basest ingratitude.

II. The nature of the evil threatened.

1. God sometimes shows His back in a way of mercy (Ex 33:23; Job 25:2).
2. But this threat is expressive of Divine wrath.
3. The wrath of God is retributive.
4. A final departure.

III. The time when the evil shall be inflicted.

1. In the time of adversity.
2. In sickness.
3. When deserted by friends.
4. In old age.
5. In hour of death.
6. At last day. (Helps for the Pulpit.)

East winds
The east winds referred to by the prophets appear to be a violent form of sirocco.
It was the east wind which brought the plague of locusts upon the Egyptians. It was
by an east wind that the ships of Tarshish were broken (Psa 48:7), and the ships of
Tyre (Eze 27:26). Jeremiah takes an east wind as the symbol of Jehovahs
punishment of His people, while references to its withering and scorching properties
are numerous; from the seven thin ears of wheat of Pharaohs vision in Egypt to the
sultry blast which helped to afflict Jonah outside the walls of Nineveh. The east wind
still breaks at times with terrific violence upon the coasts of Palestine, and the
records of victims tell of tents that have been blown away by its fury. (H. B.
Freeman, M. A.)

JER 18:18
Come, and let us smite him With the tongue.

The reformers task difficult and dangerous

If there were a hundred violins together, all playing below concert pitch, and I
should take a real Cremona, and with the hand of a Paganini should bring it strongly
up to the true key, and then should sweep my bow across it like a storm, and make it
sound forth clear and resonant, what a demoniac jargon would the rest of the
playing seem! Yet the other musicians would be enraged at me. They would think all
the discord was mine, and I should be to them a demoniac. So it is with reformers.
The world thinks the discord is with them, and not in its own false playing. (H. W.
Beecher.)

JEREMIAH 19

JER 19:1-13
Go and get a potters earthen bottlez

Dramatised truth
There is a point up to which the potter can do what he pleases with the clay:
he can make the vessel high or low, broad or narrow, shapely or ungainly; he can
play with the wet clay. There was a time when the Lord could do this with man;
when He took the dust out of the ground and shaped it, and prepared it for the
reception of inspiration; He could have broken it, or reshaped it, or done what he
liked with it, but not after He had breathed into man the breath of life, and man
became a living soul. Reverently, then, God conditioned and limited Himself. The
Lord cannot convert the world without the worlds consent. In Almightiness the Lord
still reigneth in the fulness of His power. He can make the nations, and put them
down; but what can He do with a little childs heart when that heart is set in deadly
animosity against Him? He could break the child upon the wheel, but breakage is not
conversion, destruction is not reconciliation. How does He propose to proceed in
this matter of bringing the world to Himself? We find the answer in the music of the
New Testament. What is there? Any hint of omnipotence? Not one. What is the tone
of the New Testament? Reasoning, entreaty, persuasion. Everything depends, then,
upon the state in which the potters vessel is found. Jeremiah is to take a potters
earthen bottle for dramatic uses. He is to go forth, not personally, but officially:
Take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests; and So forth.
Cruelly have these prophets been used, as if they in. tended all the harsh expressions
they used. They had nothing to do with them; they were errand bearers; they were
sent with messages of thunder, and all they had to do was to deliver them. They
themselves trembled under the very burden they carried. The Lord has made men
different. Some men could not read a prophecy aloud without taking out of it all that
is distinctive of its intellectual energy and spiritual dignity. Such men would turn a
denunciation into a kind of lying benediction. Others, again, could not read the
Beatitudes am they ought to be read, with musical tremulousness, with tears, with
infinite suggestiveness of tone, with sympathy that would not irritate a wound. Each
man must operate according to his own gift and function. We need some such
introduction as this to the tremendous sentence which Jeremiah pronounced when
he went unto the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the east gate.
He was there to recite a lesson: proclaim there the words that I shall tell thee, at
the moment. How he must have writhed under the torture! How his lips must have
been made again to speak this molten lava! How he must have lost consciousness in
a certain way for a time, and have become a mere instrument or medium for the
using of Almighty God! Man never conceived these supreme judgments; they bear an
impress other than human. What an awful cataract of judgment what complaining
of neglect and forsakenness what an exhibition of treachery, blasphemy, self-
idolatry, and all shame! And what resources of retaliation what mockery what
taunting! What then happened? Jeremiah, having thus denounced the judgment of
the Lord, took up the bottle and broke it in the sight of the men that went with him.
Then he was to say: Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Even so will I break this people
and this city, etc. Sometimes we need graphic displays of Gods meaning. The Lord
resorts to all manner of exhibition and illustration and appeal, if haply He may save
some. This is the reason why He dashed your fortune to pieces. You remember when
the sum was large, and you said you would die in your nest, how He took you up the
bottle and broke it at your feet, and you started, and wondered as to what was
coming next. It was thus that God broke the bottle of your little childs life; He saw
that this was the only way in which your attention could be excited, for you were
becoming imbruted and carnalised; you were losing all spiritual life and dignity and
value, and were rapidly amalgamating yourself with the dust; therefore He had to
send infinite trouble before your eyes could be opened in wakeful and profitable
attention. Thus the Lord is defeating crafty politicians, and selfish statesmen, and
ambitious kings, and families that are bent on their ruin through their dignity: and
thus, and thus, by a thousand breakages, God is asking man to think, ere it be too
late. Throughout this condemnation there is a spirit of justice. We never have mere
vengeance in the providence of God, any more than we have mere power in the
miracles of Christ. The miracles of judgment and the miracles of Providence are all
explained by a moral impulse or purpose. The Lord condescends to use the
explanatory word, Because. Thus we read: Because they have forsaken Me. Why
this Divine wail because God has been left, neglected, forsaken? This is not the
complaint of mere fastidiousness; this is the revelation of the Divine nature. He
condescends to cry that we may understand that He has heart; He is willing to send
upon the earth a shower of tears that we may know how capable He is of being
grieved. There is, then, a spirit of justice in the whole condemnation. Verily, there is
a reason or an explanation of all the judgment that falls upon our life. (J. Parker, D.
D.)

The potters vessel broken

I. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PARABLE OF THE MARRED VESSEL
AND THAT OF THE BROWN VESSEL. The one parable speaks of reformation, the
other of destruction. The vessel was made of clay which had become hard, and it
was impossible to remodel it. Therefore it was broken to shivers.

II. THE INSIGHT WHICH THIS PARABLE GIVES INTO THE SPIRITUAL
CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE TO WHOM IT WAS SPOKEN. People who needed to
have the messages of God brought home to them by such signs as this, who seem to
have been incapable of laying to heart Gods Word unless it was accompanied by some
external manifestation, must have had little spiritual perception, and were therefore
most likely to be in a low state as regards moral character.

III. THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PARABLE. It declares that the nation would, in
time, fill up the full measure of its iniquity. The Divine Potter never breaks what can be
mended. The message which accompanied the parable, being a repetition of the curses
threatened by Moses in Deuteronomy 28, is intended to make the people feel that the
fault was with themselves alone if the curses therein foretold were fulfilled, and the
promised blessings withheld. We come into this world and find laws in existence which
we soon understand are prophecies. They tell us beforehand that their observance will
be accompanied with blessings, and their non-observance with penalty. We can choose
for ourselves which shall be fulfilled in our case. The people to whom Jeremiah brought
this message found themselves in such a position. God had set before them life and
good, and death and evil (De 30:15). So that the terrible woes foretold in this chapter
were the choice of the people of Israel, and not unheard of penalties now promulgated
for the first time. (A London Minister.)

Opportunities and their limit (with Jer 18:3-4)

I. THERE IS A DIVINE IDEAL POSSIBLE FOR EVERY MAN. God has not made any
man simply for destruction. There was one ideal possible for Egypt, another for
Assyria, and another for Babylon, with their respective privileges and opportunities, and
quite another for Israel, with its preeminent advantages. And what is true thus of
nations is true also of individuals. He has one ideal for those who, like ourselves, are
favoured to the full with Gospel blessings; and another for such as have not our original
advantages. But there is a possible result that shall be worthy of His approval for each;
and that each may reach that, has been His original and primary design in the creation
of each.

II. THIS IDEAL IS TO BE ATTAINED BY A MAN ONLY THROUGH IMPLICIT

FAITH IN GOD AND WILLING OBEDIENCE TO HIS COMMANDS. It was a
profound saying of a great philosopher in regard to physical things that we command
nature by obeying her. He meant, for example, that by
complying with the requisite conditions in electricity, we can command that agent to
do our work. And similarly we may affirm that we command God by obeying Him (Isa
45:11). By obeying God we secure HIS approval and cooperation with us and in us by
His Spirit for the attainment of that which He has designed to make us.

III. IF SUCH FAITH AND OBEDIENCE ARE REFUSED BY A MAN, THAT MANS
HISTORY IS MARRED, AND IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE FOR HIM TO
BECOME WHAT OTHERWISE HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN. That is seen by us every
day in common life. The youth who trifles through these years which ought to have
been devoted to education, may possibly, as the saying is, take himself up in after
days, but he can never attain such a position as might easily have been his if he had
been diligent all through the formative period of early life. And the same thing holds
morally. Sin mars the Divine ideal for a man. It deprives him of the full advantage of
the skill and help of God in the development of his character.

IV. IF THE MAN SHOULD REPENT AND RETURN TO THE LORD, HE MAY
YET, THROUGH THE RICH FORBEARANCE OF GOD, RISE TO A MEASURE OF
EXCELLENCE AND USEFULNESS WHICH, THOUGH SHORT OF THAT WHICH
WAS ORIGINALLY POSSIBLE TO HIM AND INTENDED FOR HIM, WILL
SECURE THE APPROVAL OF THE MOST HIGH. There will always be in you and
about you, indeed, the marks of your former lives; but God has you yet upon the
wheel, and He will make you another vessel as it pleases Him. Think here of such
a case as that of Manasseh. But why need we go so far back for illustrations of this
truth? I think of John Newton in the pulpit, doing a noble work for God and men in
spite of his early sins and shameful habits. He was never such a man as he might
have been had he been all through his days truly devoted to his God, but he was a
good and useful man after all, saved by grace through faith in Christ and repentance
unto life. I think of some, long enslaved by intemperance, and even yet feeling
degraded at the thought of what but for it they might have been, but now
emancipated from the thraldom of habit, by the power of the Holy Ghost, through
faith in Jesus, and living mainly for the good that they can do. And with such cases
before me, I proclaim the willingness of God to save all who penitently turn to Him,
and to make them vessels of mercy which He will prepare for His glory.

V. IF THE MAN HARDEN HIMSELF INTO PERSISTENT REJECTION OF GOD,

AND SHOW STUBBORN IMPENITENCE, THERE COMES A TIME WHEN
IMPROVEMENT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE, AND THERE IS NOTHING FOR
HIM BUT EVERLASTING DESTRUCTION FROM THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD
AND THE GLORY OF HIS POWER. The clay that was plastic was made into another
vessel; but the bottle that was burned into hardness and was found to be worthless,
was broken into pieces and cast out. So when impenitence is perversely persisted in
there comes a point at which the heart is so hardened thereby that repentance is
neither thought of, nor prompted to, nor desired, and the man is abandoned to
perdition. Do not dream of probation after death. Even if it were true that such a
thing were to be given to the heathen, there would still be no hope for you. And so,
while you may, before the day of grace ends and the door of opportunity is shut,
return to the Lord by faith in Jesus and in obedience unto Him. I conclude with a
word of exhortation especially addressed to the young. I have tried to show you that
the morning of sin will prevent you from reaching the highest excellence of character
in life, and I have pointed out also that, though you may afterward turn to God, the
result, at last, will be short of that which otherwise you might have gained. How
important it must be, therefore, to give yourselves to God, in Christ, with the first
dawnings of your moral intelligence! (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)

A broken vessel
An earthen vessel is a true emblem of human life, so frail, so brittle. But
there is something frailer yet in our resolutions and efforts after holiness. And when
once these have failed us, we can never be again what we were. Always the crack, the
rivets, the mark of the join. In Gideons days there was a light within the earthen
vessels; and when these were broken it shone forth. There is, therefore, a breaking
of the vessel which is salutary and desirable. If there be in any one of us a proud and
evil disposition, a masterful self-will, which frets for its own way and makes itself
strong against God, then indeed we may ask to be so broken as never to be whole
again. Take me break me make me, is a very wholesome prayer for us all. (F.
B. Meyer, B. A.)

Punishment made to tally with the sin

How exactly Gods judgments tally in their attendant circumstances to the
sin which has provoked them. The valley of Hinnom, the scene of the Jews
greatest guilt, was made the scene of the denunciation of their doom, and was to
be the scene of its execution (ver. 2). As its name Tophet once indicated the loud
drum peal of joy (ver. 6), so it was hereafter to be noted as the scene of unmingled
woe. Once it resounded with the cries of innocent (ver. 4) children cruelly put to
death, hereafter it was to resound with the death groans of adult men who richly
merited their retributive punishment. As the houses of Jerusalem were defiled by
the burnt offerings unto the host of heaven upon the flat roofs, so were they to
be defiled as Tophet and to be burnt with fire by the enemy, as the Jews
estranged the place (ver. 4) which was Gods from Him who was its rightful
owner, so was the land to be estranged from them and given to strangers, whilst
they themselves must sojourn as captives and strangers in a strange land. (A. F.
Fausset, M. A.).

JEREMIAH 20

JER 20:7
O Lord, Thou hast deceived me.

The arduous character of Gods service forgotten

Too often the servants of God are impatient under present crosses, and give way
to the infirmity of their old nature. Like Jeremiah, they complain as if God had done
them some wrong, and had not let them know in entering His service what trials
were before them. But it is not God who has dealt unfairly with them, but
themselves who have lost sight of the appointed conditions of His service. The Lord
never allures any to follow Him without plainly telling them the cross that awaits
them.(Fausset.)

He deals with them as brave Garibaldi did with his recruits. When Garibaldi was
going out to battle, he told his troops what he wanted them to do. When he had
described what he wanted them to do, they said: Well, General, what are you going
to give us for all this? Well, he replied, I dont know what else you will get; but
you will get hunger and cold, and wounds and death. How do you like that? (Rev
2:10.)

The ideal and the real; or, does God deceive?

A religious man in the nineteenth century is not accustomed to speak of God as a
deceiver. And yet, once we allow for the difference of phraseology and get behind the
words, we find that the experience which Jeremiah expressed here is one through
which we ourselves have passed, and the problem which he tries to solve is still on
our hands. He had now been preaching for several years. He had set out with all the
ardour of young enthusiasm. His was no reckless rush into the ministry. Objections
and difficulties there were, and he took account of them. But the impulse to preach
was too strong to be resisted, and the young prophet had no doubt that that impulse
was the voice of God. His obedience involved an expectation. He expected, of course,
that his work would tell; the God who called him would be with him, and the work
of the Lord would prosper in his hands. After several years hard, faithful work,
what does he find? A people not only obdurate and disobedient, but revengeful and
cruel. He had seen the reformation under King Josiah, and he had seen also the
terrible relapse. It grieved his heart to see the fearful idolatrous practices restored in
the Valley of Hinnom. He went down there one day to protest against it in the name
of God. While he delivered his message he held in his hand a potters earthen bottle,
which, at one point in his discourse, he dashed to pieces on the ground, and assured
his hearers that so the Lord would break them and their city in pieces. The result of
this was not, as he might have hoped, the turning away of the people from sin. On
the contrary, Pashur, the chief officer in the house of the Lord, struck Jeremiah and
put him in stocks to be jeered at. Though liberated the next day, this treatment
caused the prophet seriously to reflect upon the whole question of his mission. He
looked upon that mission in the light of results, and he confessed to a great
disappointment. That is what he expresses in the words, Lord, Thou hast deceived
me. Results seemed to tell him to give up, and he tried to give up. He said: I will
not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name. But what did he find?
A burning fire in his heart, and he could not forbear. Here, then, was the prophets
dilemma. The language of actualities to him was stop, but there was an imperative
in his soul, and he could not stop. Now the practical question to him was--Which of
these two conflicting voices was the voice of God? Was it the voice of history, or was
it the prophetic impulse of his heart? If the latter, then there was the hard fact for
him to face, that the word of the Lord made him a laughing stock, a derision, and a
reproach. Jeremiah decided for the latter, spite of the tremendous odds against him,
and preached on in the faith that God would some day vindicate his cause. The
problem which Jeremiah had to solve for himself is still with us. There does appear
to be a contradiction between the world as it is and the world as we feel it ought to
be, which is very puzzling. To many minds that contradiction is altogether
inexplicable. The so-called moral ideal is an illusion of the mind, and if we call it the
voice of God, then God deceives men. There always have been ideals of justice and
goodwill, but the real world is all the time in dead opposition to them. Now, which of
these expresses the will of God? Is it the world of fact, or the world of aspiration? Is
it in our sight of what is, or in our hope of what may be? Shall we learn His character
from what He has actually done, or from an ideal which He has always promised but
never realised? Does God deceive men? Reformers die with their holms unfulfilled;
lives have been given to the cause of righteousness, and yet might remains right, and
the tyrant prevails. Do our ideals simply mock us? If these are the voice of God, why
do they not prevail? Is God defeated? What shall we say? Let us not try to escape the
difficulty by denying it. We may purchase a cheap optimism by blinking the ugly
facts of the world. Let us admit to the full that the history of moral reform has its
sore disappointments. The world has not only opposed the reformer, but it has
always put him in stocks. It changes the kind of stocks as time goes on, but they are
stocks all the same. Official religion and real religion are often engaged in deadly
conflict, a conflict which frequently results to the reformer, as to Jeremiah, in a sore
sense of disappointment. And every man who seeks to do good soon comes upon
many discouraging facts. There are times when he says: I have laboured in vain,
and spent my strength for nought. Nor is it by ignoring such and similar facts, and
dwelling only on the bright side, that we have to support faith. On the other hand,
we must beware of the temperament which ever occupies itself with lifes
disappointments, and fails to see its progress and success. Now, I admit that if there
were that complete breach between the real and ideal which appears to be, the
problem would be utterly insoluble. But it is not so. In the first place, it is not correct
to speak of the world of fact and the world of aspiration as separate and distinct, for
the aspiration is one of the facts. It is a part of that unto which it aspires. The
aspiration after goodness is itself good, and all prayer for spiritual excellence is part
of its own answer. There is no clear line between the ideal and the real, for the ideal
is a part of man as he is, and he is a part of the world as it is. When we ask whether
we shall learn Gods character from that which He has accomplished in the world, or
from the ideal which stirs the soul, we forget that that soul with its ideal is a part of
what He has done. Man, with his sense of duty, with all his yearnings for purer and
diviner being, is a part of the world as it is; the ideal is partly actual; prophecy is
history at its highest range. If only one man desired that society should be righteous
and pure, society could not be judged without that man. The power of an ideal may
culminate in a great person, find in him an exceptionally brilliant expression, and
reach the point at which it commands the world; but he is always a sharer in the
conditions he condemns, and the men he condemns have helped to make him what
he is. He may be as different from the average society as the blossom is from the
stem on which it grows, but that society conditions him as the stem conditions the
blossom. This is the fact which the prophet is liable to forget. It was as true of
Jeremiah as of Thomas Carlyle, that he made the blackness blacker than it was.
Jeremiah was not as lonely as he himself thought he was. If that nation had been
utterly faithless, such faith as his could not have been born in it. So, though the
prophet must condemn the actual, because he is swayed by the ideal, and is a
divinely discontented man, working for progress, yet his very existence proves that
that progress has already been the order of God, and has produced him. That there
is a contradiction between what is and what ought to be is true, but it is not the
whole truth. Strictly speaking, nothing is, but everything is becoming. We are in the
process of a Divine evolution in which the ideal is forever actualising itself. The
contradiction is not ultimate, nor the breach complete. What cannot we hope, for
instance, of a race that counts one Jesus among its members? He is, then, an
example of what we may become, and our representative before God. In like
manner, surely, when God judges the human race, He does not judge it with its best
specimens left out; He takes its highest points into consideration. He does with the
race what you and I do with the individual--takes its best as its real self, as that to
which it shall one day fully attain. And when we think that Jesus, and all that He
was, is a part of the actual history of the world, then we say that the richest ideals
that ever sway our souls are justified by the history of our race--God is not deceiving
us. Let us try to remember this when we come to bitter disappointments in lifes
work. When the prophet finds, as find he will, that multitudes do not listen, but
mock and deride, let him nevertheless be sure that the good and the true must
prevail. Some disappointments are inevitable. It is of the very nature of an ideal to
make life unsatisfactory; a spirit so possessed can never rest in what is, but will
forever press forward to that which is before. To be content with all things as they
are is to obliterate the distinction between good and bad, between right and wrong.
No high-souled man will settle matters so. But some of our bitterest
disappointments come from the fact that the form in which the ideal shapes itself in
our mind is necessarily defective, and that our scheme of work is consequently
partial and one-sided. This was a constant source of trouble to the prophets of
Israel. We get many of our disappointments in a similar way. Here are two men, for
instance, whose souls are stirred by the ideal of a renovated world in which
righteousness and love shall reign. Each think of bringing it about chiefly in one
particular way, the former, perhaps by some scheme of social reform, the latter by a
certain type of gospel preaching. Both will be very disappointed; the world will not
come round to them as they wish. And yet while these two men are groaning under
their disappointments, the fact is that the world is all the time advancing, though
not in their way. The man who thinks that his particular gospel is the only thing that
can possibly save the world finds the world very indifferent to that gospel, and
thinks that it is going to perdition, while all the time it is going onward and upward
to higher and better things. But the truth is, that the worlds progress is far too great
to be squeezed into any one creed, or scheme, or ordinance, and you cannot measure
it by any of these. Attempt that, and while you bemoan your discouragements and
think ill of the world, humanity will sweep onward, receiving its marching orders
from the throne of the universe. For practical purposes we must confine our
energies chiefly to one or two ways of doing good, but if we only remember that
when we have selected our way it is but a small fragment of what has to be done,
that other ways and methods are quite as necessary, we shall save ourselves from
much personal trouble, and from much ill-judgment of others. But even when we
have done our best, there will still be some adverse results. These must not
dishearten us. If there be in our heart as it were a burning fire, and we become
weary of silence and cannot contain, then let the fiery speech flow, however cold the
world. We must obey the highest necessities of our nature. Our best impulses and
purest desires are the word of God to us, which we have to preach. With this
conviction we can go on with our work, disappointments notwithstanding. Nothing
is more evident in reviewing history than the continuity of Divine purpose. It is the
unfolding of a plan. It is full enough of evil and of sorrow, and yet out of evil
cometh good, and joy is born of sorrow. It is full enough of error, and yet,
somehow, even error has been used to preserve truth. Out of mistakes and
superstitions have come some of the greatest truths. The greatest tragedy of history
was the crucifixion of Jesus, yet Calvary has become the mount of our highest
ascensions, and the altar of our best thanksgivings. So often, indeed, has the best
come out of the worst, so often has the morning broken when the night was darkest,
so often has peace come through war, that no discouragements of today shall
weaken our faith, or bedim our hope, or mar the splendour of our expectation. We
believe in God. There are dark places in history, tunnels through which we are not
able to follow the train of the Divine purpose, but we saw it first on the one side, and
then on the other, and conclude it must have gone through--the tunnel, too, was on
the line of progress. The history of the world is an upward history. And those who
know God are ever looking up; men with a Divine outlook are ever on the march.
And, friends, whatever you do, cling to the ideal. Let no discouragement release your
hold. Be active and practical; yes, but do not be bound within the limits of any one
scheme. Climb the mount of vision, and have converse with God, and you will carry
down with you a faith that can stand any disappointment, and hold itself erect amid
the rush of the maddest torrent. (T. R. Williams.)

JER 20:9
Then I said, I will not make mention of Him nor speak any more in His name.

Jeremiah discouraged
 I. JEREMIAHS MOMENTARY RASHNESS. Oh! it was a rash speech--like the rashness
of Job, like the petulance of Jonah. It is useful for us to have set before us the
failings of the most distinguished of Gods people. We learn from these failings, that
after all they were mere men, and men of like passions with ourselves, that they
were encompassed with the same infirmity, that they carried about with them the
same weakness, and that therefore the same grace which was triumphant in them in
the result can be equally triumphant in our support and in our ultimate victory.

II. His many and great discouragements.

1. They arose partly from the very nature of his message. His was not a pleasing
burden. The message of Gods Word is a message of wrath as well as of
mercy; there are denunciations in it as well as promises. And we must be as
faithful and as earnest in the delivery of the one as we are in the delivery of
the other.
2. The unbelief and opposition which that message experienced.
3. Nor were the hearers of Jeremiah satisfied with the discouragement that
would be occasioned by their opposition to and unbelief of the message of
the prophet; they added to this bitter reproach, misrepresentation and
persecution. What though earth meets us with its opposition? What though
calumnies are flung against the cause in which we are engaged? We are not
looking for earthly honours; we are not seeking the gratitude and encomiums
of the world. Our record is with God; our reward is on high. We appeal to His
judgment seat; we labour as in His sight.

III. THE PERSEVERANCE, BY WHICH THE COURSE OF THE PROPHET WAS MARKED,
NOTWITHSTANDING ALL. Mark, then, it was only a momentary fit of despondency.
They are the moments of Gods people, that are the seasons of their giving way; it is
not the characteristic of their entire life. Though they may now and then say, I will
not make mention of Him nor speak any more in His name, follow them a little--
they are at it again, and again, and again; and on to a dying hour, and with their
dying breath, that name is on their lips; and when the tongue is silent, it is still
engraven on the heart. (W. H. Cooper.)

Pulpit experience

I. THE POWER OF THE OUTWARD TO INDUCE A GODLY MINISTER TO DISCONTINUE HIS

WORK. I will state a few of the things which often induce this depressing state of
mind
1. The momentous influences that must spring from our labours. In every
sentence we touch cords that shall send their vibrations through the endless
future; that shall peal in the thunders of a guilty conscience, or resound in
the music of a purified spirit.
2. The incessant draw upon the vital energies of our being. To preach is to teach
as well as to exhort and warn; and to teach the Bible requires a knowledge of
the Bible, and to know the Bible requires the most earnest, continued, and
indefatigable investigation. Physical labour tires some limb, but this labour
tires the soul itself; and when the soul is tired, the man himself is tired.
 3. The seeming ineffectiveness of his labours.
4. The inconsistent conduct of those who profess to believe the truth.

II. THE STRONGER POWER OF THE INWARD TO INDUCE A GODLY MINISTER TO

PERSEVERE IN HIS WORK. Look at this inner force; it is like a fire. Fire! What a
purifying, expanding power! it turns everything to its own nature. So it is with the
Word of God. This fire was shut up in the bones of the prophet; it became an
irrepressible force. The thoughts that passed his mind about resigning, feel as fuel to
increase its force. If a man has Gods truth really in him, he must speak it out.
1. This word kindled within him the all-impelling fire of philanthropy. Many
waters cannot quench love. All the waters of ministerial annoyance,
disappointment, anxieties, and labour, shall not quench this fire, if the
Word of God is shut up in his bones.
2. This word kindled within him the all-impelling fire of piety. It filled him
with love to God. David felt this fire when he said, I beheld the
transgressors, and was grieved. Paul felt this fire at Athens, when he felt
his spirit stirred within him.
3. This word kindled within him the all-impelling fire of hope. The Word of
God kindles within us a fire that lights up the future world, and makes us feel
that what we are doing, however humble, is great, because it is for eternity.
4. This word kindled within him the strong fire of duty. It is giving in trust,
etc. I am a debtor, says Paul. (Homilist.)

The soul under discouragement

I. The effects of discouragement as a pious soul.

1. In our labours for the good of others.
2. In our exertions for our own souls. Such apprehension is most enervating.

II. The effect of piety on a discouraged soul.

1. To shame querulous impatience.
2. To resuscitate drooping energies.
Conclusion:
1. Expect discouragements in every part of your duty.
2. Make them occasions for glorifying God the more. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

Ministers, their discouragements and supports

I. Ministerial discouragements distressingly felt.

1. Here is a rash resolution formed.
2. An insuperable obstacle presented to his meditated abandonment of his work.

II. Popular detraction sensitively deplored.

1. Explain the nature of popular detraction.
 2. Adduce Scripture precepts respecting the evil of popular detraction.
3. Exhibit Scripture examples of individuals who have felt the scorpions sting of
popular detraction.
4. Analyse more particularly the ease of the prophet as exhibited in the text.

III. Divine support happily realised.

1. From a sense of the presence and power of God.
2. Expectation of the future failure and confusion of his opposers.
3. From a belief of the omniscience of God.
4. From the efficacy of prayer.
Learn--
(1) To expect detraction.
(2) Follow the Saviours rule: speak to the detractor alone.
(3) Cultivate habits of circumspection.
(4) Lay our cause before God.
(5) Anticipate through the merits of Christ a world where there will be no
defaming. (J. Redford)

The burning fire

We have sometimes seen a little steamer, like The Maid of the Mist at the foot of
the Falls of Niagara, resisting and gaining upon a stormy torrent, madly rushing
past her. Slowly she has worked her way through the mad rush of waters, defying
their attempt to bear her back, calmly and serenely pursuing her onward course,
without being turned aside, or driven back, or dismayed. And why? Because a
burning fire is shut up in her heart, and her engines cannot stay, because impelled in
their strong and regular motion. Similarly, within Jeremiahs heart a fire had been
lit from the heart of God, and was kept aflame by the continual fuel heaped on it.
The difficulty, therefore, with him was, not in speaking, but in keeping silent--not in
acting, but in refraining. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

A heart on fire
But, after all, our main desire is to know how we may have this heart on fire. We
are tired of a cold heart toward God. We complain because of our sense of effort in
Christian life and duty; we would fain learn the secret of being so possessed by the
Spirit and thought of God that we might be daunted by no opposition, abashed by no
fear. The source of the inward fire is the love of God, shed abroad by the Holy Ghost;
not primarily our love to God, but our sense of His love to us. The coals of juniper
that gave so fierce a heat to the heart of a Rutherford were brought from the altar of
the heart of God. If we set ourselves with open face towards the Cross, which, like a
burning lens, focuses the love of God, and if, at the same time, we reckon upon the
Holy Spirit--well called the Spirit of Burning--to do His wonted office, we shall find
the ice that cakes the surface of our heart dissolving in tears of penitence; and
presently the sacred fire will begin to glow. When that love has once begun to burn
within the soul, when once the baptism of fire has set us aglow, the sins and sorrows
of men--their impieties and blasphemies, their disregard of God, of His service and
of His day, their blind courting of danger, their dalliance with evil, will only incite in
us a more ardent spirit. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JER 20:10-18
An my familiars watched for my halting.

Pathetic experiences
In these verses we have two distinct aspects of human experience. Within this
brief section Jeremiah is on the hill top and in the deepest valley of spiritual
dejection. How much depends upon circumstances for mans estimate of life! That
estimate varies with climate, with incidents of a very trivial nature, and with much
that is only superficial and transitory. Life is one thing to the successful man, and
another to the man whose life is one continual series of defeats and
disappointments. It is well, therefore, that all men should have a touch of failure,
and spend a night or two now and then in deepest darkness that cannot be relieved:
such experience teaches sympathy, develops the noblest faculties, brings into
beneficent, exercise many generous emotions, and in the morning, after a long
nights struggle with doubt, there may be tears in the eyes; but those tears denote
the end of weakness and the beginning of strength. The year is not one season, but
four, and we must pass through all the four before we can know what the year is. So
with life: we must be with Jeremiah on the mountaintop, or with him in the deep
valley; we must join his song, and fall into the solemn utterance of his sorrow, before
we can know what the whole gamut of life is. How impossible it is to realise all the
conflicting experiences at once, and to be wise. There is an abundance of
information, there is a plentifulness of criticism that is detestable; but wisdom--
large, generous wisdom, that understands every mans case, and has an answer to
every mans necessity--oh, whither has that angel-mother fled? We need now and
again to come into contact with those who know us altogether, and who can speak
the word of cheer when we are cheerless, and the word of chastening when our
rapture becomes riotous. Consider the vanity of life, and by its vanity understand its
brevity, its uncertainty, its fickleness. We have no gift of time, we have no assurance
of continuance; we have a thousand yesterdays, we have not one tomorrow. Then
how things disappoint us that were going to make us glad! The flowers have been
blighted, or the insects have fallen upon them, or the cold wind has chilled them,
and they have never come to full fruition or bloom or beauty; and the child that was
going to comfort us in our old age died first, as if frightened by some ghost invisible
to us. Then the collisions of life, its continual competitions and rivalries and
jealousies; its mutual criticisms, its backbitings and slanderings; its censures,
deserved and undeserved: who can stand the rush and tumult of this life? Who has
not sometimes longed to lay it down and begin some better, sunnier state of
existence? And the sufferings of life, who shall number them?--not the great
sufferings that are published, not the great woes that draw the attention even of the
whole household to us in tender regard; but sufferings we never mention, spiritual
sufferings, yea, even physical sufferings; sufferings that we dare not mention,
sufferings that would be laughed at by unsympathetic contempt--but still sufferings.
Add all these elements and possibilities together, and then say who has not
sometimes been almost anxious to shuffle off this mortal coil, and pass into the
liberty of rest. Jesus Christ understands us all. We can all tell Jesus, as the disciples
did, what has happened. He can listen to each of us as if His interest were entranced
and enthralled. He knows every quiver of the life, every throb of the heart, every
palpitation of fear, and every shout of joy. Withhold nothing from Him. You can tell
Him all, and when you have ended you will find that you may begin life again. In
your hope is His answer. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Evil watchers
All my familiars watched for my halting: the original word does not mean my
innermost friends, for true friendship can never be guilty of such treason, but the
Hebrew word means, The men of my peace; the men who used to accost me on the
highway with, Is it peace?--the men who salaamed me out of civility, but who
never really cared for me in their souls: these men, behind their painted masks,
watched for my halting; they all watched. Some men take pleasure when other men
fall. What is the answer to all this watching of others? It is a clear, plain, simple,
useful answer: Watch yourselves; be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary the devil,
as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. It is not enough that
others watch you--watch yourselves; be critical about yourselves; be severe with
yourselves; penetrate the motive of every action, and say, Is it healthy? Is it honest?
Is it such as could bear the criticism of God? Dare we take up this motive and look at
it when the sun burns upon it in its revealing glory? If a man so watch himself he
need not mind who else watches him. Watch the secret places; watch the out-of-the-
way doors, the postern gates, the places that are supposed to be secure against the
approach of the burglar; be very careful about all these, and then the result may be
left with God. He who does not watch will be worsted in the fray. He who does not
watch cannot pray. He who watches others and does not watch himself is a fool. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

But the Lord is with me as a mighty terrible one.--

The best Champion
(as a mighty terrible one):--As a strong giant, and mine only Champion on whom I
lean. Here the spirit begins to get the better of the flesh, could Jeremiah but hold his
own. But as the ferryman plies the oar, and eyes the shore homeward where he
would be, yet there comes a gust of wind that carrieth him back again; so it fared
with our prophet (verses 14, 15). (John Trapp.)

Cursed be the day wherein I was born.

Existence regretted
Job and Jeremiah were alike in wishing they had never been born. They were both
men of sorrow.

I. A preference alike irreligious and irrational.

1. Good men should not for a moment think that non-existence is preferable to
life and being. These were both good men, children of God; existence was
therefore a blessing to be prized, not an evil to be mourned over. Had they
 been versed in the design and results of Divine dispensations, as Paul, they
would have said, Our light affliction, etc. With such a destiny before them,
instead of cursing the day of birth, they would have blessed it as the dawn of
an eternal existence, to be hereafter crowned with a glory that fadeth not
away.
2. Ungodly men may with some degree of reason prefer non-existence; because
in trouble they have no Divine support, in death no good hope, in eternity no
expectation but the penalty of sin.

II. Non-existence is preferable to existence unless existence possess more

pleasure than pain.
1. If every ungodly man lived out threescore years and ten, and the whole was
spent in pleasure, yet, as that period is but momentary as compared with his
eternal existence, and as that existence is to be one of pain, he might curse
the day of his birth.
2. Existence, eternal existence, is a blessing to all unfallen ones, and also to such
fallen ones as are redeemed by the death of Christ.
3. But perpetuity of existence can be no blessing to the angels who kept not
their first estate, nor to those of the human race who by impenitence and
unbelief reject the great salvation and bring upon themselves the double
condemnation of the law and the Gospel.

III. Hell and heaven are two great teachers.

1. Hell teaches--the folly of wickedness, the full enormity of sin in the penalty it
has entailed, and leads all its victims amid the consequences of their
depravity to curse the day they were born.
2. Heaven teaches--the wisdom of holiness, the full benefits of redemption in the
felicity it has secured, and leads all the ransomed to bless the day of their
birth as the morn of their noontide of glory.

IV. God is not willing that any should have occasion for preferring non-existence.
1. He has devised and carried out a costly plan by which the existence of fallen
ones might be made an eternal blessing.
2. Every man who now wishes for a glorious existence has only to look to Jesus
and be saved. (D. Pledge.)

JEREMIAH 21

JER 21:1-2
Inquire, I pray thee, of the Lord for us.

A distressed king seeks Divine counsel

Of Galba the emperor, as also of our Richard III, it is recorded that they were bad
men but good princes. We cannot say so much of Zedekiah. Two things he is chiefly
charged with--
1. That he brake his oath and faith plighted to the King of Babylon (Eze 17:16).
2. That he humbled not himself before Jeremiah, speaking from the mouth of
the Lord. Hitherto he had not: but now in his distress he seeketh to this
prophet; yea, sendeth an embassage. Kings care not for soldiers, said a great
commander, till their crowns hang on the one side of their heads. Sure it is
that some of them slight Gods ministers till they cannot tell what to do
without them. (John Trapp.)

Kings have their cares

Kingdoms have their cares, and thrones their thorns. Antigonus cried of his
diadem, O base rag, not worth taking up at a mans feet. Julian complained of his
own unhappiness in being made emperor. Diocletian laid down the empire as weary
of it. Thirty of the ancient kings of this our land, said Capgrave, resigned their
crowns; such were their cares, crosses, and emulations. Zedekiah now could gladly
have done as much. But since that might not be, he sendeth to Jeremiah, whom in
his prosperity he had slighted, and, to gratify his wicked counsellors, wrongfully
imprisoned. (John Trapp.)

JER 21:6
They shall die of a great pestilence.

Pestilence
In a romance, The End of an Epoch, by A. Lincoln Green, the hero, Adam
Godwin, makes the acquaintance of a German professor, bearing the ominous name
of Azrael Falk, who comes to London, bringing with him a large quantity of an active
and deadly germ poison, which would depopulate any country where it might be
turned loose. His idea is to make an enormous fortune by selling it to either Russia
or Germany, between whom at the time discords had arisen. The catastrophe is
brought on in a simple way. The professor, with his jars in his possession (he is too
jealous and suspicious ever to part from them), carries out a long-cherished fancy to
see the Derby, and on Epsom Downs is taken for a welsher, and set upon by the
mob. His precious jars are broken, and he himself is removed insane and dying to a
neighbouring asylum. The death dealing contents of the jars rise in a brown mist
and float in the air. Adam Godwin knows that London is in mortal peril, but he has
not been told the secret of the anti-toxin, and Falk dies without recovering his
reason. The most exciting pages are those in which we watch the slow creeping of
the plague over London. It attacks all except aged persons, and there is no remedy.
The calamity which in this book is merely fictitious was, in dire fact, to befall
Jerusalem Disobedience, stubbornness, and impenitence were the deadly germ
poison by which the inhabitants of the city were to be swept away.

JER 21:7
 He shall not spare them, neither have pity, nor have mercy.

No mercy in war
The exploits of Surrey in Scotland are thus recorded in a letter of Wolsey: The
Earl of Surrey so devastated and destroyed all Tweedale and March, that there is left
neither house, fortress, village, tree, cattle, corn, nor other succour for man;
insomuch that some of the people that fled from the same, afterward returning and
finding no sustenance, were compelled to come into England begging bread, which
oftentimes when they do eat they die incontinently for the hunger passed. And with
no imprisonment, cutting off their ears, burning them in the faces, or otherwise, can
be kept away. (Knights England.)

JER 21:8
I set before you the way of life, and the way of death.

Gods message of life and death

I. It is Gods prerogative to mark the path in which He would have us go for both
worlds.
1. In His written Word.
(1) By doctrinal statements.
(2) By warnings and invitations.
2. By providence and mercies: examples and instances.

II. The path to life is clothed with many attractions.

1. It is a plain way, though narrow. Only difficult and perplexed to those who are
reluctant to renounce the burden of their sins and the corruption of this evil
world, or would fain invent some method to reconcile the discordant claims
of God and mammon, earth and heaven.
2. It is an old way, and well trodden. From Abels time.
3. It is a safe way; for, though much contested, it is Divinely guarded.
4. It is a pleasant way.

III. WE ARE DAILY ADVANCING IN ONE OR OTHER OF THESE PATHS. There can be
amidst the diversities to the race but two broad divisions: wise and foolish; wheat
and tares. A worldly man is one that has his chief treasure upon earth, while God
and eternity are forgotten. Whereas the Christian is one who has been converted
from the error of his ways; his mind has been enlightened to discern the evil of sin
and the love and loveliness of Christ, and he is anxious to lay up his treasure and
hopes in heaven.

IV. The doom on the impenitent will be aggravated by weighty considerations.

1. The path of life and death was clearly set before you, and rejected by
 deliberate choice.
2. The solemn providences and warnings you have abused.
3. The vanity and worthlessness of pursuits for which salvation was rejected.
4. The changeless eternity of the state to which you go. (S. Thodey.)

JER 21:12
Execute Judgment ill the morning.

Justice must be prompt

Execute judgment in the morning, as David your progenitor and pattern did
(Psa 101:8). Be up and be at it bedtime, and make quick despatch of causes, that
poor men may go home about their business, who have other things to do besides
going to law. It is a lamentable thing that a suit should depend ten or twenty years in
some courts through the avarice of some pleaders, to the utter undoing of their poor
clients. This made one such (when he was persuaded to patience by the example of
Job) to reply, What do you tell me of Job? Job never had suits in chancery. Jethro
adviseth Moses (Ex 18:1-27) to dismiss those timely, whom he cannot despatch
presently. (John Trapp.)

JEREMIAH 22

JER 22:3
Do no wrong.

Wrong
The meaning of the word wrong is, something that is twisted from the straight
line. Do you say you have not done wrong? When you set yourself up as a pattern of
goodness, and at the same time turn up your nose at your erring acquaintance, it
leads one to think that your angelic profession may cover the filthy rags of human
sin. Some people profess too much. If they would acknowledge to some fault and
confess that occasionally they are common metal like everybody else, we should
respect them. People who will not permit you to think that they have ever done
wrong, are often very unfeeling in their dealings with a person that has made a fool
of himself. The man who feels himself to be a wrong-doer, is the most
compassionately helpful to those that have fallen. When I hear anybody speaking
harshly or ridiculing somebody who has done wrong and been found out, I fear that
the only way to save them is for God to let them also fall into the mire of iniquity.
Bear patiently with wrong-doers, and give them time to repent. Had they possessed
your light, your education, your good parents and your virtuous surroundings, they
might have lived a nobler life. When a man or a woman has done wrong, do not cast
a stone at them; let us, if we can, lead them on to the path of right.
 1. Let me urge that you do no wrong in your intentions. Let us weigh well our
motives. Before doing any act, we should consider its intent, and ask
ourselves, What is my intention? Is it the glory of God, the good of man, or
only my own advantage--my own indulgence? When the intention is wholly
selfish it is pretty sure to cause disappointment and misery; but when the
intention is unselfish, it is likely to result in happiness both to ourselves and
others.
2. It is also a matter of course that every true Christian should do no wrong in
his practice. We profess much; let us seek to practise what we profess. I do
not suppose that we are at present on such a high level as that shown in the
spirit of the life of Christ; but let us aim at it, and though we fall, let us rise
and try again. A farmer one day went to his landlord, Earl Fitzwilliam,
saying, Please, your lordship, the horses and hounds last week quite
destroyed my field of wheat. The earl said I am very sorry; how much
damage do you think they did? The farmer replied, Well, your lordship, I
dont think 50 would make it right. The earl immediately wrote out his
order for 50 and handed it to the farmer, saying, I hope it will not be so
bad as you think. So they parted. Months afterwards, the same old farmer
came to the hall again, and when admitted into the library, said, Please,
your lordship, I have brought back that 50. The earl exclaimed, Why,
what for? The farmer said, Well, because I find that the trodden field of
wheat has turned out to be a better crop than any of the others. So I have
brought the money back. The earl exclaimed, This is as it should be; it is
doing right between man and man. He tore up the order and wrote another,
saying, Here, my good friend, is an order for a hundred pounds; keep it by
you till your eldest son is twenty-one and then give it him as a present from
me, and tell him how it arose. Now I think the honest farmer sets a good
example to us all No doubt the tempter whispered in the ear of his soul, The
earl will never miss that 50. Why, farmer, you dont mean to say you are
going to give the morley back! But the honest old John Bull of a farmer
replied, It would be wrong, you know, for me to keep that 50. Do no
wrong to your neighbour, either in competition of business, or in your social
and political relationship. Every man has a weak side to his character, and a
tendency to do wrong in some direction. In other words, every man is a
spiritual invalid who wants a heavenly prescription to restore him to health.
Now, when your body is ill, you send for a doctor who counts your pulse and
asks where your pain is, and how you feel. If you do not tell him all the truth,
he does not know how to treat you. In the same way, when we are spiritually
sick, we should confess all the symptoms of our sin-disease to the Great
Physician of heaven. Let us be humble and honest enough to tell Him our
sins. (W. Birch.)

JER 22:10-11
Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him.

The prophet and the exile

 I. THE DEAD, probably Josiah, for whom a long mourning was kept (2Ch 35:24;
Zec 12:11). Shallum is Jehoahaz (2Ki 23:33).

II. The chapter, even the text, suggests the picture of the disappointment of the
prophet and the sympathy of the prophets.
1. Jeremiah had begun to work when a better time seemed to dawn (Jer 1:2). His
hopes had been baffled, his words neglected, by the guilt that scorns to be
forgiven. Could human lot be more sad than thus to foresee the coming
ruin, and to be helpless to avert it?
2. The true prophet, in spite of the peoples sin, sympathises with them (1Sa
12:20-22). The Prophet of prophets did so. The kings captivity was only a
type and foretaste of that of the nation.

III. THE LOVE OF ONES COUNTRY IS FREELY RECOGNISED IN SCRIPTURE (Psa 137:1-9;
Psa 102:1-28). National life is an ordinance of nature. National as real as home
affections. The sorrows and joys which they bring are alike used for our discipline by
Him who knows whereof we are made.

IV. The captivities, terrible as they were, served good ends.

1. To wean the people from idolatry.
2. To draw them nearer to God. All affliction used aright does so.
3. To turn the people more to prayer, which seems to have become more
common after the Babylonian captivity (Isa 66:1-2; Dan 6:10; Dan 9:3; Dan
9:19).

V. THE DEAD ARE IN THE HANDS OF GOD, BEYOND OUR REACH. Weep rather for
those who are living, torn away from the city of God.
1. Those who have been ensnared by their own sins and carelessness.
2. Those who are brought up in vice through circumstances of birth. Slaves of
worse than Egyptian bondage (Joh 8:34).
3. Those of our own countrymen who, from duty or circumstances, are in foreign
lands, and away from outward tokens of the Church. But should we merely
mourn for these, and do nothing for them?

VI. Jeremiah a forerunner of the Lord, and A TYPE OF HIS SERVANTS IN

WITNESSING TO THE TRUTH, and in the endurance of persecution and disappointment
of hope. (B. Moffett, M. A.)

JER 22:15-16
Did not thy father eat and drink.

Gods expostulation with Jehoiakim

 I. GOD REMEMBERETH THE PIETY AND USEFULNESS OF OUR ANCESTORS, AND
OBSERVETH HOW FAR WE RESEMBLE THEM. The Eternal Mind cannot possibly forget
anything. All things past, as well as present, are naked and open before His eyes. He
remembers all the way in which our fathers walked; the secret piety of their hearts;
the evidences of it in their lives, and all the service they did for God and their
generation. He remembered how piously Josiah walked, and mentions it to his
honour. God hath a kind remembrance of His faithful servants, when they are
departed out of this world; and is not unrighteous, to forget any work and labour of
love which they have performed. Let it be further observed, that God takes notice
how far we resemble them. Thus He chargeth it upon Jehoiakim, that he had not
trod in his fathers steps. God can and will make a just estimate, what our religious
advantages are, compared with theirs, and what improvement we make of these
advantages. He observeth every instance of declension from that which is good, and
the principles from which our departures from God and religion flow.

II. YOUNG PERSONS OFTEN FORSAKE THE RELIGION OF THEIR FATHERS, THROUGH
PRIDE, AND LOVE OF ELEGANCE, POMP, AND SHOW. This was the case of Jehoiakim. No
doubt it is lawful for persons of rank and fortune to build themselves houses and to
beautify them; provided it be suitable to their circumstances, and no injury to justice
or charity. But it was pride that led Jehoiakim to covet so much splendour, and
practise so much injustice. This is a sin that easily besets the young, and often leads
them to forsake the ways and the God of their fathers. They set out beyond their
rank and circumstances, and begin where their wiser fathers ended. And this their
pride and vanity leads them to forsake the religious profession of their fathers. Thus
Jehoiakim, it is probable, turned idolater. He forsook the God of Israel, and
persecuted His faithful prophets. Hence so many among us forsake the principles
and profession of their ancestors; because the favour and preferments of the world
and public fashion are not on that side. Set out in life, young friends, with moderate
desires, wishes, and expectations. Be content with your rank and station. Endeavour
to cultivate and strengthen religious principles and dispositions. Never compliment
any at the expense of truth and conscience. Thus you will be able to do justice and
mercy, and will retain that steadfastness in religion which is true politeness, and
improve in that humility which is the brightest ornament.

III. IT IS A GREAT DISHONOUR AND REPROACH TO ANY TO FORSAKE THE GOOD WAYS
OF THEIR FATHERS. Having fully known their manner of life, their devotion, purity,
temperance, patience, charity, and love to Gods house and ordinances, they must
act a very mean and scandalous part, if they neglect these virtues, and show
themselves blind to the lustre of such good examples. How justly may such be
expostulated with, as Jehoiakim was in the text! Did thy father, young man, do
justice and judgment, and assist the poor and needy? Was he sober, diligent, grave,
and devout? And will it be to thy credit to be giddy, dishonest, idle, extravagant, and
an associate with rakes and sots? Did thy mother, young woman, fill up her place
honourably? Was she active, prudent, serious, and good tempered? Did she sanctify
Gods Sabbath, and labour to keep thee from pride and levity, and dangerous
acquaintance? And wilt thou forget all this, and run into every fashionable folly?
Will this be for thy reputation and comfort? But there is a more weighty thought
than this, yet to be urged; and that is, if you act thus, you will forfeit the favour of
God. There are terrible threatenings, in the context and other places of this
prophecy, against this wicked Jehoiakim. All his wealth, pomp, and power could not
shield him from the judgments of God. A few years after this prophecy, the King of
Babylon seized him, and bound him in fetters to carry him to Babylon; but, being
released upon his promise of allegiance, he afterwards rebelled, was slain in a sally
out of Jerusalem, and was buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth
beyond the gates of Jerusalem (Jer 22:19), and had no child to sit upon the throne
of David (2Ch 36:6; Jer 36:30). If you forsake the religion of your pious ancestors,
it will be to your shame.

IV. The way of religion is the way of wisdom, honour, and happiness.
1. The way of religion is the way of wisdom (Psa 111:10). With this the New
Testament agreeth (1Jn 2:3-4). Many think themselves wiser than their good
fathers; and perhaps they may have juster notions of religion, and be more
free from superstition and enthusiasm. Yet, while they profess to know
God, they may in works deny Him, and love the praise of man more than
the praise of God. And thus they prove that they are not so wise as their
fathers.
2. The way of religion is also the way of honour. Josiah was universally esteemed
while living, and much lamented when dead. The prophet Jeremiah
lamented for him. All Judah and Jerusalem mourned for him, and made
them an ordinance in Israel, that his remembrance should be kept up by
some annual form of lamentation (2Ch 35:25). Luxury and extravagance,
splendour and show, are not the way to be truly honourable. The just, the
generous, the friendly man, he who is strictly religious, and soberly singular,
and who studies to do good to others, though he hath a mean house, and
dresseth and liveth plain, this man will be held in reputation.
3. The way of religion is the way of happiness. It is the way to enjoy prosperity,
and to have comfort in it. While we do well, it will certainly be well with us. If
our views extended no further than the present life, it is our wisdom and
interest to be steadfastly religious. But when we consider ourselves as in a
state of trial for another world, and that our future state will be either happy
or miserable forever, according to our present behaviour, it must be the
greatest folly and madness to neglect religion, to sacrifice it to anything else,
or not to make it the main business of our lives. (Job Orion, D. D.)

JER 22:18-19
With the burial of an ass.

Dishonoured in death
Jehoiakim was king, and yet not one word of thanks do we find, nor one word of
love, nor one word of regret expressed concerning his fate. We should learn from
this how possible it is to pass through the world without leaving behind us one
sacred or loving memory. He that seeketh his life shall lose it. A man that sacrifices
daily to his own ambition, and never sets before himself a higher ideal than his own
gratification, may appear to have much whilst he actually has nothing, may even
appear to be winning great victories, when he is really undergoing disastrous
defeats. What is a grand house if there be not in it a loving heart? What are walls but
for the pictures that adorn them? What is life but for the trust which knits it into
sympathetic unity? What is the night but for the stars that glitter in its darkness?
There is an awful process of retrogression continually operating in life. Experienced
men will tell us that the issue of life is one of two things: either advancement, or
deterioration; continual improvement, or continual depreciation: we cannot remain
just where we are, adding nothing, subtracting nothing, but realising a permanence
of estate and faculty. The powers we do not use will fall into desuetude, and the
abilities which might have made life easy may be so neglected as to become burdens
too heavy to be carried. It lies within a mans power so to live that he may be buried
with the burial of an ass: no mourners may surround his grave; no beneficiaries may
recall his charities; no hidden hearts may conceal the tender story of his sympathy
and helpfulness. A bitter sarcasm this, that a man should be buried like an ass! (J.
Parker, D. D.)

The doom of the defrauder, libertine, and assassin

After a life of private or public iniquity, a mans death is not deplored. The
obsequies may be pretentious--flags, wreaths, catafalques, military processions; but
the world feels that a nuisance has been abated; he is cast forth by reason of the
contempt of men; figuratively, if not literally, he is buried with the burial of an ass.

I. There is the romance of FRAUD. The heroes of this country are fast getting to be
those who have most skill in swallowing trust funds, banks, stocks, and moneyed
institutions. I thank God when fortunes thus gathered go to smash. They are plague
struck, and blast a nation. I like to have them made loathsome and an insufferable
stench, so that honest young men may take warning.

II. Next, I speak of the romance of LIBERTINISM. Society has severest retribution
for the impurity that lurks about the cellars and alleys of the city. It cries out against
it. It hurls the indignation of the law at it. But society becomes more lenient as
impurity rises towards affluence and high social position, until, finally, it is silent, or
disposed to palliate. Where is the judge, or the sheriff, or the police, who dare
arraign for indecency the wealthy villain? Would God that the romance which flings
its fascinations over the bestialities of high life might be gone! Whether it has
canopied couch of eiderdown, or sleep amid the putridity of the low tenement house,
four families in a room, Gods consuming vengeance is after it.

III. Next,. I speak of the romance of ASSASSINATION. God gives life, and He only
has a right to take it away; and that man who assumes this Divine prerogative has
touched the last depth of crime. Society is alert for certain forms of murder. For
garroting, or the beating out of life with a club, or axe, or slung shot, the law has a
quick spring and a heavy stroke. But let a man come to wealth or social pretension,
and then attempt to avenge his wrongs by aiming a pistol at the header heart of
another, and immediately there are sympathies aroused. If capital punishment be
right, then let the life of the polished murderer go with the life of the ignorant and
vulgar assassin. Let there be no partiality of hemp, no aristocracy of the gallows. (T.
De Witt Talmage.)
The ignominious burial of the wicked
Christ tells the story of a prosperous farmer who was clean intoxicated with
success, and could not entertain a thought but of his gains,--how the very night that
he had decided on the enlargement of his premises, a voice from heaven called his
soul away; and whatever monument with flattering title his friends may have erected
over his grave, God wrote his epitaph, in one word of four letters, Fool. Buried
with the burial of an ass. No one will for a moment suppose that a splendid
catafalque and imposing funeral obsequies betoken the close of a noble and
honourable life. Ah! many a man is laid in one of yonder cemeteries with every form
of ceremonial pomp, with gilt, and nodding plumes, and long rows of carriages and
costly wreaths; and if the truth were told, a nuisance is being got rid of; the world
will be better now that he is gone. Well might the artless child, who had been
wandering among the tombstones, and reading the epitaphs, turn to its mother and
say, Mother, where are all the bad people buried? (T. Thain Davidson, D. D.)

A kings humiliating burial

Our Richard II, for his exactions to maintain a great court and favourites, lost his
kingdom, was starved to death at Pomfret Castle, and scarce afforded common
burial. King Stephen was interred in Faversham monastery; but afterwards his body,
for the gain of the lead wherein it was coffined, was cast into the river. (John
Trapp.)

JER 22:21
I spake unto thee in thy prosperity; but thou saidst, I will not hear.

Influence of prosperity
In heaven, the more abundantly Gods bounties are dispensed, the more is He
loved and adored; but on earth, the richer His gifts, the more will He be neglected
and disobeyed. A striking proof of our depravity, that constant prosperity hardens,
and is unfavourable to piety.

I. Abundant earthly blessings do tend to make the heart rebellious towards God.
1. Scripture teachings are emphatic on this matter (De 8:12-14; Hos 13:6; Pro
30:8-9).
2. Experience confirms Scripture. In many instances we see that the highest
human virtues and holiest saints of God were unable to withstand the
influence of prosperity. They could endure affliction, and profit thereby; as
certain liquors ripen in the shade, which under the noonday beams turn to
acidity and corruption.
3. It is doubtful whether there ever was a single instance of piety which could
pass uninjured through the ordeal of unmingled prosperity. The tone of
religion is lowered amid riches and honours. Where simplicity and humility
of spirit are preserved amid prosperity, it is owing to some hidden trouble,
which like the cord on the feet of the aspiring bird keeps the proud spirit
lowly and abased.
 II. What, then, must be the effect of prosperity on those who have no religious
principle to counteract it, and who are avowedly lovers of the world and its
pleasures?
1. They will not heed the messages of God.
2. Religion, with its sober realities, is despised.
3. Those favoured of fortune are the most pitiable objects in the world.

III. They who have worldly prosperity should be led to self-inquiry as to its effect
on themselves.
1. Are you the same simple-hearted and sincere follower of Jesus as when you
began to lay the foundation of your worldly exaltation?
2. What a caution is here to those who are seeking prosperity! Can you discover
a means of preserving a lowly spiritual mind amid prosperity? Unless so,
there is no alternative but that you must suffer adversity to keep you humble,
or become worldly and spiritually hardened.
3. They who have become more indisposed to hear the voice of God should
awake to their peril.
4. Prosperous ones may well regard their ease with apprehension. (W. H. Lewis,
D. D.)

Prosperity baneful

I. The exactness with which God observes all that relates to human character and
conduct.
1. All our relative circumstances are immediately before His eye; and He notices
with tender and faithful scrutiny the various effects which His merciful
dispensations have upon the mind.
2. The circumstances of human life, however produced, are undoubtedly under
the guidance of providence, and therefore subservient to a wise and perfect
design. Each mans history is arranged and adapted with utmost precision to
the growth of permanent character.

II. The tendency of unsanctified prosperity to render us insensible to the claims

of religion and separate us still further from God.
1. Uninterrupted comfort tends to lessen our confidence in God: to form in the
mind a feeling of self-confidence: a security nothing can shake: so much so
that religion can make no entrance into the mind.
2. It hardens the heart. God would have every temporal blessing raise the
inquiry, Lord, what is man? But wicked and irreligious men are only
concerned for enjoyment, and for scope for their ambition. They feed and
grovel like swine beneath the oak, without looking up to the boughs that bore
the fruit, or the hand that shakes it down.
3. Then comes pride. Nebuchadnezzar. God is forgotten, prayer neglected.
4. Leaves a dulness and lethargy of mind. All Divine threatenings, warnings,
promises unheeded.
 III. VARIOUS WAYS IN WHICH GOD REBUKES THIS TENDENCY AND HUMBLES MEN.
God speaks to men in various ways, and He distinctly marks the various impressions
produced upon the mind by His communications. He speaks to us by His Word and
ordinances, by the instructions we receive in religious education, by the various
dispensations of His providence, by affliction, by mercies. (S. Thodey.)

The perverseness of prosperity

Why is prosperity so perverse?

I. Because prosperity often tends to hardness of heart.

II. BECAUSE PROSPERITY OFTEN GROWS PROUD AND SELF-SUFFICIENT. Religion and
the Bible are well enough for the poor, who need comfort, but what do they want
with it, who have more than heart could wish?

III. BECAUSE PROSPERITY IS OFTEN IMMERSED IN CARES OR PLEASURES. There is no

room for religion. The voices of the counting house, the mart of commerce, the shop;
or the voices of the pleasure takers, who call men to partake of their pastimes, so fill
their ear that they will not obey the voice of God. I have my nest in the cedars.
(Anon.)

The Christian prospering in business

The voice of God to the prosperous, which they are in danger of not hearing,
concerns--

I. Humility.
1. This humility will be shown towards God. There is a natural tendency in
wealth to foster a spirit of sinful self-sufficience and independence of God.
Many things conspire to this. Wealth is power. Not only the labour of the
hands, but the thoughts, the will, and consciences of men may be bought.
Wealth not only gives a sort of independence, but a sort of sovereignty. And,
thus, it is an object of esteem and reverence. Now, whatever natural religion
may teach us, it is certain that the Bible teaches, that God giveth power to
get wealth, and that we have nothing which we have not received. Now,
how comprehensive is the claim for humility involved in all this! It makes
every difference, whether we be the authors of our wealth, or whether it be
the gift of God. If we receive all, the more we have, the more we have
received. The prosperous Christian should realise this; and, realising this, he
will be grateful. The bounty of Providence will endear the thought of God. In
proportion to his joy will be his thankfulness.
2. This feeling of dependence will respect the future, will influence the mode of
regarding the continuance of good things. He who feels deeply that we are in
the hands of God; that we are in a state of probation; that the great purpose
of God is to try us, to reveal us, to exercise us, and especially to sanctify us;
that we deserve nothing, while we receive everything; and that crosses and
afflictions are often among the most gracious methods of Divine discipline;
 will regard the fluctuations of life as Divine dispensations. He will not say
only, It is the course of things, It is the lot of man, It must be expected,
It cant be helped, but he will say also, It is the will of God.
3. Another aspect of this humility will be towards men. In pleading for humility
in the rich Christian, I do not advocate an impossible equality, or a
forgetfulness of outward distinctions. But I mean, that the feeling of human
brotherhood and of Christian respect and affection should be displayed
towards all; and that the favours of Providence should only bind us to a more
careful regard to the will of our common Father, and a more delicate respect
to the feelings of our brethren.

II. Spirituality.
1. Spirituality is opposed to extravagance. He who prizes the manliness and
integrity of his soul; he who would not render himself unfit for the possible
reverses of life; he who would maintain a taste for the most exalted
pleasures; he who is duly alive to the perilous corruption within him, ever
ready, like a magazine of powder, to ignite from the smallest spark, or, like a
river, on the removal of a little portion of embankment, to burst forth with
desolating violence; he will err on the side rather of defect than of excess,
and deny himself too much rather than smooth the way and strengthen the
temptations of the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.
2. Spirituality is opposed to worldliness. He is worldly who walks not with
God; whose conversation is not in heaven; whose affections are not set on
things above; who has no keen eye for the mysteries of the kingdom, no
quick ear for its voices, no delicate sensibility to its impressions. Have you
not many before your minds who have become worldly through prosperity
3. Spirituality is opposed to indolence. Prosperity says, Take thine ease! and
men are but too ready to comply with the suggestion. The man well-to-do
contributes to societies that perform the works in which he was engaged. He
now works by proxy. He assigns his sphere to others. He is not idle; he
supports all good things. But, my brother, the power to do this is additional
to the powers you used to have, not instead of them. You did good then by
personal service. That obligation remains. The ability to give does not
destroy the ability to labour, and the purse cannot answer the demand for
activity and effort.

III. BENEVOLENCE. The very means of riches, the common way and method of
getting rich, should teach this lesson. Why has God appointed commerce? Why
given to men different faculties and spheres? Is it not all designed to impress the
doctrine of brotherhood, and to draw out affections and promote deeds in keeping
with it? The prosperous Christian should be a liberal Christian. It is not enough that
he continue his gifts; he must increase them Proportion is Gods rule. He estimates
what we part with according to what we keep. A healthy saint will delight in being
able to relieve his brethren, and one of the chief charms of prosperity, will be the
power it gives him to be a minister for good. His first care will be his own, the needy
kindred whose trials he may soothe by generous gifts, or whom he may more
worthily and wisely serve by enabling them to serve themselves. His next will be the
welfare of those by whose assistance he has succeeded. He will not think his duty
done by a mere payment of wages; but will seek to promote their physical and
mental and moral well-being. (A. J. Morris.)

The danger of self-confidence

Christians are taught, at least in words, to believe that riches and, indeed, any
kind of worldly prosperity are exceedingly dangerous to us--that they prove, very
often, too great a trial for mens principles; a snare in which they are entangled to
their own destruction. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, to submit himself to the mortifying
precepts of the Gospel. The word in the text translated prosperity signifies
properly calmness, tranquillity, self-satisfaction. It does not merely mean the
possession of money, and other such advantages, but also any state or business of
life, which makes a person unwilling to apply to his heart or his conscience those
truths of the Gospel especially, which might lessen his confidence about himself, and
him spiritual estate. When God speaks to men in this their fancied prosperity,
how often in the pride . . . of their hearts do they refuse to hear. They will not
hear, because they will not consider. Thus, for instance, when things go well with a
man, and he has sufficient to maintain himself and his family comfortably his case is
one of great difficulty and danger. There is this which makes prosperity a greater
danger to us than adversity, that it renders us less willing to listen to the voice of
truth and conscience. When worldly things have gone well with a person, and he has
yet neglected his eternal interests, there is still hope that adversity may bring him
back to his God. But if things have gone ill with a man, and yet he is still worldly-
minded and irreligious, what hope is there that prosperity will effect what adversity
could not do? The reason is, because worldly business, especially if it be at an
successful, is apt to intoxicate the mind, as a dram, and to make a man unable to
collect his thoughts and fix them steadily on any object which is not some way or
other connected with his immediate interests. But adversity, and suffering, if the
heart be not quite hardened against the convictions of conscience, as they make us
feel our frailty and dependency, so they have a natural tendency to make us look
beyond this present scene for support and consolation. Let it also be considered,
that a life of prosperity, and ease, and freedom from trouble, is the least suited for
the exercise of those graces and virtues which are peculiarly Christian, and by which
our souls are to be fitted for an entrance into that blessed land where sin and sorrow
shall be lab more. It is quite certain and unquestionable, that the Gospel of Christ is
uniformly addressed to us, as to persons on their trial and probation for an
everlasting reward,--to persona who have it in their power to refuse or to receive the
gracious offers made to them,--to persons who are to be through life exercised and
disciplined, and led on by degrees towards that perfection of holiness from which
our nature was degraded by the transgression of our first parents. Here, then, we
may see and acknowledge the great danger of a life of prosperity, ease, and self-
satisfaction; and, at the same time, the real benefit of adversity, suffering, and self-
distrust. If, then, our gracious God have spoken to us in our prosperity, and we have
refused to hear; if He have spoken to us in adversity, and our hearts have been
somewhat softened at His gracious chastisement, then let us learn to bless Him for
all His dispensations, indeed, but most of all for His punishments. (Plain Sermons
by Contributors to the Tracts for the Times.)

Man in material prosperity

 I. Addressed by almighty God.
1. Be humble. Charge them that are rich, etc. Through the depravity of the
heart, wealth has a tendency to fill the soul with self-sufficiency and pride.
2. Be spiritual. Through the depravity of the heart, wealth is often used so to
pamper the appetites as to carnalise the soul.
3. Be generous. There is a tendency in wealth so to feed selfishness.

II. REFUSING AN AUDIENCE WITH HIS MAKER. Material indulgence deadens the
moral tympanum of the heart. I will not hear though Thou speakest in nature, in
Providence, in the Bible, in conscience, in a thousand holy ministries, I will not hear.
Why?--
1. Because I am happy as I am. I have all that I want; not only to supply my
needs, but to gratify my passions, to satisfy my vanity and ambition.
2. Because Thy voice will disturb me. (Homilist.)

Sin in prosperity

I. THE DIVINE CONDESCENSION. I spake unto thee. What is man that God should
notice him at all? It is not so much that man is fallen, but he is rebellious, wilfully
ignorant, deliberately sinful, and infinitely beneath God in capacity, duration,
power.

II. THE HARDNESS OF MAN. Thou wouldst not hear. Surely, one would think that
when the great God comes down to commune with man, man, out of mere
reverence, would stay to listen. On the contrary, he turns away with disdain. The
worm turns upon its Maker and King. This hardness is astonishing--
1. On account of the disrespect it manifests. So great, so good, so merciful a
Being demands our attention, our love, our all.
2. On account of the pain it gives. Could you spurn a loving friend, and not cause
him grief?
3. On account of the loss it entails. Why does God speak to man?
(1) In order that He may save him from evil--from the evil of sin, of death, of
eternal loss.
(2) In order that He may do him good--that He may raise his intellect body
and soul, and exalt him to eternal life and glory. It is, then, an
astonishing fact that man refuses to hear.

III. THE UNNATURAL REASON IMPLIED. I spake unto thee in thy prosperity.
1. This is a strange assertion. It is strange because--
(1) All prosperity comes from God. The natural thought respecting it, then,
would be that it would excite greater reverence and love towards Him
who so mercifully bestowed it.
(2) All prosperity gives greater prosperity and enjoyment, and demands a
greater return in thanksgiving and sacrifice.
 2. It is a true assertion, as history and experience infallibly prove.
(1) When men have prosperity, they get engrossed with their possessions.
(2) When men have prosperity, they get satisfied with what they possess.
This makes them refuse the invitations and solicitations of God.
(Homilist.)

Danger of prosperity
The long reign of Philip of Macedon--over forty years--witnessed the great
decadence of the Hellenic Empire. When he came to the throne she was still a strong
empire, full of fairest prospects. But he was one of those characters that are only
kept within the bounds of good sense and justice by the sternest adversity. As soon
as he found himself safe, his idleness, his tempers and lusts broke out. It was a
misfortune both to himself and the world that he was not obliged, Like his
predecessors, to recover by arms the kingdom to which he had succeeded by right.
Prosperity enervated him; adversity would have braced him. (H. O. Mackay.)

How Gods voice is drowned

On entering a mill the noise of the machinery stunned and bewildered me. The
owner of the mill explained the various processes as we went on, but it was a dumb
show to me, I heard nothing. Suppose when I came out I had been asked whether
the gentleman spoke to me during my visit and I had replied No! would it have been
true? Certainly not. He spoke but I did not hear. His voice was drowned in the
surrounding noise. And so it is with thousands of those around us. God speaks to
them, but His voice is drowned in the hubbub by which they are surrounded. They
are awakened in the morning with the postmans knock, and before they have time
for a though about God or eternity the noise of their own mill is all around them;
before the letters are finished the morning papers arrive, and the roar of the world is
added to the sound which already existed, and henceforth it is whirl and excitement
till evening. (Charles Garrett.)

This hath been thy manner from thy youth.

Youthful habits retained

I. Habits formed in youth generally continue in future life. This applies to those--
1. Whose Life is given to the luxury of pleasure.
2. Who pass the season of youth in gross vices.
(1) Sabbath breaker.
(2) Profaner.
(3) Drunkard.
3. Equally relevant to vices of the mind.
(1) Selfishness.
(2) Pride.
(3) Malignity.
4. So also as regards their attitude towards religion.
 (1) Those who pass their youth in a merely formal regard to the external
duties of religion usually become formalists.
(2) Those who practise guile and deceit become hypocritical.
(3) Those who in youth slight the Gospel, in old age are seen to be unfeeling
and hardened.
(4) Those who are sceptical frequently become confirmed infidels.

II. Custom in any course generally issues in confirmed habits.

1. The commencement of a course in life is often attended with a struggle and
with difficulties.
2. But continuance in a course renders habits congenial and easy.

III. Solemn cautions and exhortations.

1. Cautions. Guard against slighting--
(1) Parental instruction.
(2) The Gospel.
(3) The Sabbath.
(4) Avoid ungodly companions.
2. Exhortations.
(1) Accustom yourself to consider your accountability to God.
(2) Study the sacred Book, by which your future should be directed.
(3) Decide early in favour of religion. (Anon.)

JER 22:23
O inhabitant of Lebanon, that makest thy nest in the cedars.

The nest in the cedars

The inhabitant of Lebanon, that maketh his nest in the cedars, is an illustration of
all those who, in the pride and security of the present, are blind to the uncertainties
of the future.

I. WHY IS IT THAT GODS MESSAGE TAKES SUCH LITTLE HOLD OF THE HEART? He
pours out all His love in pleading with men. Seek ye My face. Has the answer gone
up from your heart, Thy face, Lord, will I seek? If not, why not? Are you making a
nest for yourself among the cedars? dreaming yourself to be secure, and, like the
false Church in the Apocalypse, saying to yourself, I shall see no sorrow? What is
the ground of your security? Has the hand of diligence surrounded you with
comforts? The cheerful home, the well-spread table, the smiling faces of children,--
are these your portion? Oh, how often are these things as the nest in the cedars! Or
the nest may be of another kind--framed out of self-righteousness and moral
excellence. In short, whatever it be which holds back the heart from Christ, and
prompts the vain hope that all will be well at last, though there be no conscious
faith, nor any evidence of a converted heart, that is your nest among the cedars.
Though now heedless to the call of God, the storm must ere long burst on the cedar,
and rive it to its roots, laying in the dust the nest that seemed so safe in its towering
branches. Disappointment, loss, disaster, trial, death, the judgment,--what are these
in their turn but just the lightning flash which strips the cedar of its foliage, and
leaves the nest exposed to the scorching of the summers heat, and the withering of
the winters frost? What are they all but Gods instruments for shivering into ruins
the miserable refuges in which men seek shelter and comfort amid the experiences
of time, and in the prospect of eternity?

II. WHEN THE CEDARS ARE FALLEN, HOW BITTER THE DISAPPOINTMENT! The world,
its business, its pleasures, its cares, its struggles, its joys, its sorrows,--all are fast
vanishing. Snap the cedars go! and meanwhile there is dismay at the review of the
past, and the still darker prospect of the future! Behind, a life spent with the form of
godliness, but entirely without God. Before, is death, the sifting of the judgment,
eternity. Behind, a life given up to earth and earthly things. Before, an immortality,
over the far-reaching expanse of which no star of hope sheds a gleam of life and
peace. Can we wonder if the soul shrinks back in alarm, if dark forebodings haunt
the spirit, and prayers, and regrets, and vows, and promises blend together as the
outward expression of anxiety and fear?

III. WHERE CAN YOU BUILD YOUR HOPES AND NOT FIND THEM SHATTERED AND
BROKEN BY DISAPPOINTMENT. Not among the cedars, but in the hollow of that Rock of
Ages, which defies the howling of the tempest, and the sweep of the hurricane--
which stands forth calm and stately in its strength, amid the shocks of time, and
shall lift its head unshaken, even when the earth and all that is in it shall be
dissolved and broken up. The memory of guilt and shortcoming, and the record of
transgression are terrible, hut to the humble and believing Christian they can bring
neither harm nor hurt. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall
abide beneath the shadow of the Almighty. (R. Allen, M. A.)

A sure refuge

I. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF EVERY HUMAN AID, as illustrated by the prophet in the

example of the inhabitant of Lebanon. Lebanon was a noble and a stately
mountain, the pride and the ornament of the Eastern world. Its summit was crested
with eternal snows, while its sides were adorned with forests of the graceful and
goodly cedar. Beneath were slopes of rich pasturage, on which were fed unnumbered
flocks and herds. Rivulets gushed from the fissures, and separated among the hills,
which afforded refreshment to the fainting traveller, and maintained in native purity
of freshness the verdure of the mountain side. No image could more expressively
convey to the mind of an Israelite all that man most highly esteems of grandeur,
magnificence, and beauty. But the idea of security is also implied. In many human
ills, money, as the wise man says, is a defence; and the rich man, in a land of
commerce like our own, is as the inhabitant of Lebanon, compared with the
dweller in the plain below. The winds may rage, and the storm beat; but his airy
dwelling place is unmoved. The enemy may spread themselves over the plain; but
his house of defence is the munitions of rocks. How enviable a condition! you will
say, But Ah! the things that are impossible with men, are possible with God.
Lightning from heaven above may blast the towering cedar; the earthquake
muttering from beneath may rend the solid rock: or even when the wave reposes
without a ripple or an undulation on the surface of the mountain lake, the stroke of
death may come suddenly, the strong mans fortress may be powerless in an instant,
as a woman in her travail, or as the infant just struggling into birth.

II. For all who will seek it there is a sure refuge, whatever may be the danger, and
an invincible arm of defence, whoever may be we adversary. St. Paul indeed said, in
reference to the times of fiery persecution in which his own lot was cast, that if in
this life only they had hope in Christ, believers were of all men most miserable; but
what was then the present distress, has happily passed away, and godliness is now
truly profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that
which is to come. All creation is redolent of joy and peace to the true believer in
Christ Jesus. He knows, that God hath made with him an everlasting covenant,
ordered in all things and sure; that all His ways are mercy and truth, unto such as
keep His covenant and His testimonies; and that no truly good thing will He
withhold from them that walk uprightly. So long, then, as prosperity continues,
enjoyment is enhanced by thankfulness; and when adversity comes upon him,
suffering is lightened by faith. The light affliction, which is upon him, will, he
knows, work for him a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, etc. (T.
Dale, M. A.)

JER 22:24
Though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet upon my
right hand, yet would I pluck thee thence.

Punishment of the impenitent inevitable and justifiable

I. Mention some awful instances in which God has verified this declaration.
1. The apostate angels.
2. Our first parents.
3. The Flood.
4. The Jews.
5. The Saviour Himself.
It pleased the Lord to bruise Him. He spared not His own Son. And will He then,
O impenitent sinner, who by refusing to believe in Jesus Christ crucifiest Him
afresh, will God spare thee? No; though thou weft the signet on His right Hand;
though thou wert dear to Him as the Son of His love, He would not spare thee, when
His violated law and His insulted justice call for thy destruction.

II. STATE SOME OF THE REASONS WHY GOD HAS FORMED AND ENACTED SUCH A
DECLARATION; or, in other words, why He will sooner give up all that is dear to Him
than suffer sin to go unpunished.
1. It is needless to remark that, among these reasons, a disposition to give pain
has no place. As God has sworn by Himself that the wicked shall die, so He
 has sworn by Himself that He has no pleasure in their death.
2. Nor has a desire to revenge the insults and injuries which sinners have offered
to Himself any place among the motives which induce God to punish sin; for
He inflicts punishment, not as an injured individual, but as the Sovereign
and Judge of the universe, who is under the most sacred obligations to treat
His subjects according to their deserts.
3. It is because the welfare of His great kingdom, the peace and happiness of the
universe, require it. It is because a relaxation of His law, a departure from
the rules of strict justice, would occasion more misery than will result from a
rigid execution of His law. Were sin unrestrained, unpunished, it would soon
scale heaven, as it has once done already in the case of the apostate angels;
and there reign and rage with immortal strength through eternity, repeating
in endless succession, and with increased aggravation, the enormities which
it has already perpetrated on earth. We may add, that after God had once
surrendered His truth, His justice, and holiness, and laid aside the reins of
government, He could never more resume them. Nor could He ever give
laws, or make promises to any other world, or any other race of creatures,
which would he worthy of the least regard. (B. Payson, D. D.)

JER 22:29
O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord.

The treble urgency of the Gospel call

I. The Gospel call may well be pressed with threefold emphasis, when we consider
THE LIMITATION IT IMPLIES AS RESPECTS THE PARTIES ADDRESSED: it is addressed to
men and not to angels--it is addressed to earth as contradistinguished from hell.
Between these two worlds, behold the Bible, like the cloud between Israel and Egypt,
with a side of brightness for the former and a side of darkness for the latter! It is
surely a solemnly affecting and suggestive thought that, while the Sun of
Righteousness is flinging His splendours over the earth, there is another fallen
world very differently circumstanced. Do you not feel your soul, at the very thought,
concentrating its energies on the inquiry, What is the Gospel message, and what are
the terms it proclaims? Will not the sinking crew turn to the lifeboat that is making
directly for them, and that all the more eagerly that they discern around them a
foaming sea strown rough with wrecks? Will not the patient turn to the physician
that proffers his aid, and grasp at the prepared medicine with all the greater
eagerness that he is given to understand that no other physician is within reach,
though pestilence stalks all around him? And shall we not ply the Gospel call with
treble emphasis, and wilt not thou listen to it with treble interest, that it proclaims a
Saviour for men, over the head of angels--that it names our earth, but names not
hell?

II. Universal as my text is, it carries A LIMITATION AS RESPECTS TIME: it is

addressed to men in time, not in eternity--to the earth as it is now, not as it shall be
hereafter.
 1. As respects the individual, God limiteth a certain day, saying, Today, if ye will
hear, etc. Each has his allotted time of probation, his day of grace. Now is
that time, that golden day - the time of acceptance. Come, fellow sinner;
come as you are; come now; touch the golden sceptre, and live forever.
2. God has also limited a certain time for our world as a whole. There is a certain
hour known to God when He will address the commission to Jesus, Thrust
in Thy sickle, etc. Momentous harvest! The earth even now is rapidly
ripening. All will be astir and in earnest then; but many, alas! will awake, not
to touch mercys sceptre, or the folds of her garment, but to catch the echo of
her last farewell.

III. This triple emphasis will be still further accounted for if we consider THE
UNIVERSALITY OF THE GOSPEL CALL: it is addressed to the whole race, and not to part
of it merely. All the seeming limitations in Scripture of the universal call are, in fact,
the strongest proofs of its universality. Were I now to press the appeal in my text on
different classes--the old, the young, the abandoned, the careless, or the anxious,--
every candid man would understand that my specifying one class implied no
exclusion of others, but was merely intended to give point and pungency to my
appeal by breaking down the universal call into its particular applications, and thus
rightly dividing the word of truth. On this obvious principle are we to explain such
descriptive phrases as hungry, thirsty, weary, heavy-laden, which some have
regarded as denoting incipient spiritual attainments, or subjective qualifying
prerequisites, which the sinner must have before he is entitled to believe the Gospel.
Far from it. They express not our holiness but our misery, not our riches but our
poverty, whether we have caught a glimpse of Christs fulness or not. Wide as the
reach of Satans rage, doth His salvation flow. Let us share in our Saviours spirit.
Let the universality of the Gospel provision lead us increasingly to realise the wants
and woes and claims of the unnumbered myriads of mankind. It is here that the fire
of missionary and evangelistic zeal is to be kindled.

IV. We shall cease to wonder at the threefold emphasis here imparted to the
Gospel call when we reflect on THE FACTS IT PRESUPPOSES AS TO THE CONDITION OF
THE WORLD.
1. It supposes the world to be in a state of danger, for a threefold call to the
earth, so pointed and energetic, implies that no ordinary catastrophe
impends over the world. It is precisely such an impassioned appeal as would
be given forth on the outbreak of some public danger, such as fire, or flood,
or hostile invasion.
2. But, further, and as a frightful aggravation of the danger, the world is, to a
lamentable extent, in a state of insensibility to it. This, too, is implied in the
appeal of our text. It represents the world as asleep: hence the call O earth;
and because that sleep is profound, the call is redoubled, O earth, earth;
and because the world sleeps on, wrapped in a slumber deep as death, a third
time peals the call, each louder than before. Some years ago, two or three
men were seen floating asleep in a boat on the river Niagara, and were
already among the rapids. Loud and long were the calls addressed to them by
the spectators on the river side; but the unhappy men awoke only to utter a
wild shriek of despair as they were borne over the tremendous verge. This, by
no means an isolated case, aptly illustrates the sinners danger as he floats
 down the stream of time, his insensibility thereto, and the loud warnings
addressed to him, both by God and man, to shake off the slumberous spell,
and turn while he may to the matte of safety. Say not, If I am asleep, I am
not responsible. You are not in this sense asleep. You are responsible; for
you are an agent rational, intelligent, moral, voluntary, unfettered and free.
You are responsible; for, if you believe man, you can believe God; you can
give that attention to the Bible which you lavish on the things of time; you
can think upon your souls salvation with the same faculties that you exert on
your business or pleasures; and if you are reluctant to do so, this is not your
misfortune, remember, but your crime.

V. The Gospel call may well be urged with threefold emphasis when we consider
THE QUARTER WHENCE IT COMES: it is not of earth, but from heaven--it is not the
word of man, but the word of the Lord. The King of heaven gives forth an
utterance from His everlasting throne, but the worms of His footstool will not deign
to give Him audience. Louder and louder speaks the voice which at first spake us
into being--and could at any moment revoke that being,--but men sleep on; they will
not consider; they say, Who is the Lord that He should reign over us? Depart from
us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. Disbelieve man if you will, spurn
authority, trample on the tenderest of human ties, but oh, address not yourself to a
sin that towers in solitary magnitude far above all these--venture not on the
supreme blasphemy of making the God of truth and love a liar.

VI. The Gospel call may well be plied with treble emphasis if we consider THE
PRECIOUS IMPORT OF THE MESSAGE IT PROCLAIMS: it is a word of Gospel, or good
news, and not of authority merely--when it might have been a word of wrath. Ah,
this deepens the dye still further, of the sin of unbelief--a perpetration of which
earth, and earth alone, is the theatre. The light of Gods love in the glorious Gospel
makes the darkness of human rebellion the more appallingly visible; and the
thought that such mercy is within reach, and yet such wrath is in reserve--that mans
destination, if not high heaven must be some nethermost abyss: ah, this, considering
the magnitude of the interests involved, may well make us to intensify, redouble,
and treble the call, O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord! (T. Guthrie,
D.D.)

The Divine appeal to man

I. THE CHARACTERS ADDRESSED O earth, earth, earth,! By earth, we are to

understand the dwellers on earth--man the lord of this lower creation; andlooking to
its origin, the term is one that is appropriately employed to designate man.
1. When addressed as earth, we are reminded of our native origin. Man is of the
earth, earthy. God made man of the dust of the ground. What, then,
becomes of the boastings of man? How foolish the pride of pedigree, the
pride of descent! The sable sons of Africa, the swarthy Hindoo, the Red
Indian of America, the stunted Esquimaux, the tribes of Europe, and of all
the islands of the sea, have all of them a common origin: they are all of them
of the earth, earthy.
2. When addressed as earth we are reminded also of our true nature. We are not
 only from the earth, but we are of the earth. Dust thou art, is the true
description of every man, of every child of man. Yes, what is that muscular
frame but brittle earth? What is that beautiful countenance but tinted earth?
What are those sparkling eyes but transparent earth? What are those
sensitive nerves so keenly alive to pleasure and to pain, what are they but
fine filaments of earth? What is that amazing structure the brain, the seat of
the thinking powers, but just a curiously wrought mass of earth?
3. When addressed as earth, we are reminded of the source of our supplies. Not
only are our bodies of the earth earthy, but it is from the earth that we derive
all that is essential to their sustenance and comfort. It is on its kindly surface
that we erect our habitations. It is from its yearly replenished storehouse that
we derive the staff of life. It is thence we draw our supplies of corn, of wine,
and of oil, while from its copious fountains issue those crystal streams that
fertilise our fields and quench our thirst, and in other ways minister to our
comfort; and by this, too, we are reminded to moderate our desires. Bread
and water are the supplies that the earth most copiously yields, and to these
only does the promise extend, Thy bread shall be given thee, and thy water
shall be sure.
4. We are reminded, when we are addressed as earth, of the earthly state of our
minds, that state which is so aptly expressed in the words of the Psalmist,
My soul cleaveth unto the dust. The design of Gospel truth is to draw our
affections from the world, to raise our minds above its grovelling pursuits,
and to change the current of our desires, our feelings, and our affections; and
for the effecting of all this it is perfectly competent, for it is the power of
God unto salvation, to everyone that believeth. Why, then, is its success so
limited? The reason is that the earthly is more potent than the heavenly, that
the material outweighs the spiritual in our thoughts, affections, and desires.
5. We are reminded, when we are addressed as earth, of the tendency of us all.
Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return. These bodies, full of life and
activity, must ere long drop into the grave. Those eyes now sparkling with life
and intelligence, must ere long be closed in death. Those tongues, now
eloquent with the language of hope and affection, must ere long be silent in
the tomb. Upon that countenance, now flushed with the bloom of health,
must ere long settle the damp dews of death. Let our thoughts and
aspirations, then, be tending heavenward while our bodies are tending
earthward. Let it be seen, that if our bodies are ripening for the grave our
souls are ripening, for heaven.

II. THE EXERCISE THAT IS ENJOINED. Hear the word of the Lord.
1. The subject of attention: The word of the Lord. In other words, the subject
of that attention is the revealed will of God, the Holy Scriptures, the
preached Gospel. It must be listened to, not as to a tale that is well told, not
as to the voice of one that playeth well upon an instrument, but listened to
with self-application, and with a believing heart.
2. This exercise of hearing the word of the Lord may be enforced by many
considerations, especially when you take into account the Being who
addresses you. It is God who speaks. It is He whose Word is life or death,
which exalts to heaven or sinks to hell. Think of the Word itself, of the
 subject of which it treats. It is no indifferent theme on which it discourses. It
is the Word of knowledge, it is the proclamation of mercy, it is the glad
tidings of salvation. It is, too, a Word of judgment and of death, but only to
those who contemn and refuse to hear it. And then, think of the universal
adaptation of its truths. They are fitted for all, for saint and for sinner alike;
for the most learned and the most illiterate; for the king upon the throne and
the beggar by the wayside. Think, too, of your dying condition, as yet another
consideration enforcing attention to the word of the Lord. Soon you may be
beyond the reach of its tidings of mercy. (H. Hyslop.)

Jehovahs call to the earth

We know of persons who rise up early and sit up late, in order that they may
accumulate riches, in order that they may follow their trade, or in order that they
may enjoy the pleasures of sin; but how few there are who can say they prevent the
night watches that they may meditate upon Gods Word!

I. In meditating upon Gods blessed Word, notice THE AUTHORITY WITH WHICH IT
COMES.
1. It has no title, save that which distinguishes it from all common
communications, from all uninspired books. It is the Bible, which means
emphatically THE BOOK, in distinction from every other book.
2. If you inquire as to its topics, its index, it is impossible to make a catalogue of
these. Who can describe the truths, the doctrines, the promises, the precepts,
the predictions that it contains?
3. Then you have to inquire respecting its Author. It is God--He that made us,
He that sustains us, He that governs us, He alone that can bless us. The Bible
is not anonymous, any more than the sun, the moon, the stars, or the sea, for
it bears the impressive signature of the Divine name. It is not a fable. We
have not followed cunningly-devised fables when we testify to you the great
things of Gods Word. Oh, the riches, oh, the profundity of this inexhaustible
Word! Christians have been drawing upon the resources of its wisdom;
mighty preachers have been expounding its contents, scholars have been
penetrating into its mysteries, the press has been pouring out dissertations
and commentaries upon its mighty theme, and it is still unexhausted and
inexhaustible; for it is like its infinite Author.

II. HOW WE ARE TO RECEIVE THIS COMMUNICATION, O earth, earth, earth, hear the
word of the Lord.
1. If we are to hear the Word of the Lord that our souls may live, our ears must
be opened. Closed by prejudice, ignorance, and sin, closed by the
imperfection and deceitfulness of our nature, the Holy Spirit must open our
ears to hear: then we shall hearken diligently, we shall hear believingly, so
that this Word will be the life of our souls.
2. As this Word comes to you there must be spiritual participation. Indeed, the
reception of the Word of God is described as eating that Word; and the
Word of God is described as bread which we are to eat, and the manna that
came doom from heaven and fell around the camps of the children of Israel
was understood to be the type of that living bread upon which we are to feed.
 It is receiving Christ by faith, it is believing on Him, that is eating the Word.
Oh, for this spiritual participation of Gods blessed Word! May God give you
a spiritual taste, and spiritual desires.
3. The Word of God is to be received or heard with spiritual joy. Come and take
of the most precious things God has given in His Word--let your souls delight
themselves in fatness. There are precious promises and precious doctrines,
precious prophecies and precious precepts; yea, everything is precious; but
the nearer you get to the Cross of Christ and the discovery of Gods love in
the gift of His Son, the more precious, the more nourishing, the more
comforting, and the more consoling will Divine truth be to your minds.

III. This word comes to different characters and in various ways.

1. In the first place, let me address the sceptic--the doubter. There is no
discovery in science which does not tend to confirm the inspiration and
credibility of Gods truth; and there is not an evolution of Providence which
does not serve to illustrate some portion of Gods prophetic Word. Keep your
eyes upon the movements of Providence, and you will find that God is
continually unfurling His truth Recollect eternity, with its weal and its woe,
stands upon the decision, whether you receive with reverence, or whether
you despise or neglect the great salvation which the Word of God brings.
2. This Word comes a warning to the man absorbed in the anxious cares of time;
and, says it, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose
his own soul? This world cannot make you happy. Why spend your money
for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth not!
3. Then the Word of God speaks to the man who assents to Gods Word with his
understanding, but denies it with his hearts affection--having the form of
godliness, but denying the power thereof. God cannot be deceived by
pretences, God cannot be mocked by external service.
4. The Word of God speaks to the sorrowful. It speaks generally to the
mourning, Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. It
speaks to the widow in her desolateness, and says, Thy Maker is thy
husband. It speaks to the orphan and the fatherless, and gives them the
assurance of protection. It speaks to the soul half-despairing under a
consciousness of its sin, and saying, I am a great sinner, I do not know
whether Christ will have compassion upon me and save me. You are a great
sinner? Well, then, Christ is a great Saviour. It speaks to the timid believer,
who is ready to say, I fear I shall some day fall by the temptations and
allurements of the world. Fall! you cannot fall; you walk upon firm ground,
and the arms of Almighty grace sustain you whilst you are unreservedly
trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ. (H. Dowson.)

Gods loud call to a sleeping world

;--On our rugged and water-worn shores you may often see a black wall of stone,
as regular as if it had been built by human hands, running across the tide mark from
the terrestrial vegetation down to the lip of the water at its lowest. It is a trap dyke,
forced up when its matter was molten, through a fissure in the overlying strata, and
appearing now a narrow band of rock, totally distinct both in colour and in kind
from the surrounding surface. These protruding portions show that the material of
which they consist lies in vast masses underneath. So the thin line of our text seems
to protrude above a broad field of mingled prophecy and fact.

I. The MANNER of this cry. You may measure the danger which a monitor
apprehends by the sharpness of the alarm which he gives. The earth itself, and all
the creatures on it under man, have a quick ear for their Makers voice, and, never
needing, never get a call so urgent. The alacrity of the creatures that lie either above
or beneath him in the scale of creation brings out in higher relief the disobedience of
man. Physically, earth is wide awake and watchful. It courses through the heavens
without halting for rest, and threads its way among other stars without collision. The
tide keeps its time and place. The rivers roll toward the sea, and the clouds fly on
wings like eagles, hastening to pour their burdens into the rivers springheads, that
though ever flowing they may be ever full. The earth is a diligent worker; it is not the
sluggard who needs a threefold call to awake and begin. Equally alert are the various
orders of life that crowd the worlds surface. Above our own place, too, angel spirits
are like flames of fire in the quickness, and like stormy winds in the power, with
which they serve their Maker. The cry of this text is meant for man; he needs it, and
he only. When the polar winter threatens to freeze the navigators blood, rendering
constant and violent exercise necessary to keep the currents moving, then it is that
the man feels the greatest drowsiness. It is only by the vigilance of experienced
chiefs that they are prevented from sinking into a sleep from which there is no
awakening. This fact, and the law which rules it, constitute in the moral region the
saddest feature in the condition of the world. They sleep most soundly who have
most need to be wakeful. The guilt which brings upon a man Gods displeasure, so
stupifies the senses of the man that he is not aware of danger, and does not try to
escape.

II. The MATTER of this cry.

1. The speaker is the only living and true God. It is essential that our belief in the
first principle of religion should be well defined and real. Religion may be
faint and feckless, for want of a foundation in an actual belief that God is.
That Christian education is a tally defective which does not leave upon the
mind and conscience a practical sense of Gods being and presence, as the
first principle of all truth and all duty.
2. The thing spoken is the Word of the Lord. It is not enough for us that God is
near. He was not far from the men of Athens in the days of Paul, and yet He
was to them the unknown God. He has broken the silence; He has revealed
His will The Word of the Lord lies in the Scriptures.
(1) The Word of the Lord in the Scriptures is Mercy. If the message brought
only vengeance, we could at least understand the voluntary deafness of
the world. But it is strange that men will not listen to their best Friend;
strange that the lost should shut their ears against a voice which
publishes salvation.
(2) Still further, and more particularly, the Word of the Lord is Christ. The
use of the Scriptures is to reveal Christ; if we reject Him, they cannot give
us life.
3. The injunction to regard that Word O earth, earth, etc.
(1) The earth so summoned, has already, in a sense most interesting and
 important, heard the Word of the Lord. Christs kingdom is even now
more powerful on the earth than any other kingdom. The power that lives
in the conscience and links itself to God is, in point of fact, the most
persistent and effective of all the powers which mould the character and
history of the human race. It is great, is growing greater, and will yet be
supreme.
(2) The earth through all its bounds will one day hear and obey the Word of
the Lord. Saving truth lying in the hearts of saved men has a self-
propagating power.
(3) When the earth hears its Lords word, forthwith it calls upon the Lord.
Those who sail in air ships among the clouds, as others sail on the sea,
tell us that every cry which they utter on high is answered by an echo
from the earth beneath When the earth, spiritually susceptible, receives
from heaven the sound, O earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the
Lord, another cry forthwith arises, O heaven, heaven, heaven, hear the
petition of sinful men upon the earth. God delights in that cry.
(4) Earth--that is, men in the body--should hear the Word of the Lord, for to
them it brings a message of mercy. Now is the accepted time; this is the
place of hope. Beware lest the sound that first awakens you be the crash
of the gate when it shuts!
(5) Earth--the dust of the dead in Christ--shall hear the Word of the Lord,
and shall come forth. (W. Arnot, D. D.)

The Divine appeal

I. The deep and awful concern of Jehovah for the soul of the sinner.
1. There is surely something peculiarly affecting and awful in this. Mark the
concern of your Creator, deeply anxious about the noblest work of His skill
and power. It is the concern of your Preserver, who hath watched you with
His eye, led you by His hand, etc. It is the concern of a Saviour God, who
spared not His own son, etc. This concern of Jehovah assumes a more
amazing character when you think of the persons for whom it is manifested.
These are not only creatures of a day, but creatures laden with iniquity, filled
with corruption, at enmity with Himself, in rebellion against His law, and
hastening unto perdition, without one plea for mercy, or one claim on His
pity.

II. THE STRANGE STUPIDITY AND UNCONCERN OF THE SINNERS TO WHOM THIS APPEAL
IS MADE. We are blind and see not God; deaf, and hear Him not; dumb, and speak
not to Him. We are, as Paul says, past feeling. Try this truth by a double
experience. Try it first by the experience of those who never felt it. How else can you
account for the fact that such appeals as this addressed to sinners by the living God,
are often as unheeded as if the voice of the Eternal resounded through the charnel
house of the tomb, or were lost amid the echoes of the desert? But try it by the
opposite experience. Give me the sinner who has been startled by the voice of God,
and aroused from the slumber of his carnality; give me the man with a broken spirit,
who fears, hates, and mourns his manifold iniquities, and looks back upon his
former state with shame and sorrow; and that is the man whose language will be,
Oh! what a blinded being I was not to see my guilt and my Saviour sooner I what a
stupid creature to go on as I have done neglecting my soul! what a hardened wretch
to stand out so long against my God and Saviour!

III. AN APPEAL TO FRAIL AND DYING CREATURES. This is always a melancholy and
solemnising reflection;--we are earth. We spring from the dust and we hasten back
to it. Old men, we appeal to you, and ask you how few have been the days since you
were children? But how speedily now shall you be borne away from your frailties to
the tomb! Young men, how rapidly are you and I hastening on to become the old
men of our time! As to the children, do you not see how fast they are climbing the
hill of life? But who will venture to say that things will take that natural course with
us? Who can count upon a day, an hour, a moment? The thread of life is frail as the
spiders web, and may be snapt by the feeblest breath. It may be now or never.

IV. GOD MAY BE SUPPOSED TO CALL THE EARTH TO WITNESS THAT HE HAS OFFERED
YOU SALVATION, and to be ready to testify that He has spoken to you, warned you,
besought you to hear His word, and flee from the wrath to come, so that if you refuse
the offered mercy, the very earth will lift up its voice against you to silence every
excuse, and you shall stand speechless at the bar of the judgment. Will not heaven,
and earth, and seas, and skies thus conspire to tell the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, on that great and dreadful day? Will not the simple fact that
He shall summon up our spirits to His bar from every hiding place, turn these places
into witnesses? Will not the fact that He shall gather our dust from the four winds,
from the bottom of the sea, or from the silence of the grave, turn these elements into
witnesses? Will not thus the Omniscient God turn the air we breathe, the light we
behold, the dust on which we tread, every object we touch, every scene we visit, into
a witness for or against us?

V. APPLY THE TEXT TO THOSE WHO HAVE BELIEVED THIS WORD OF THE LORD.
Having felt concern for your own souls, you will feel for the souls of others. You
know the preciousness of Christ, and the value of souls. You perceive the danger you
have escaped, but to which multitudes are still exposed. You can see yonder long,
deep, gloomy phalanx of immortal souls rushing on and rolling over the brink of
time into the abyss of eternity. You have entered in some small measure into Gods
own views of their state. Having these views, you will, you must feel deep and
distressing concern for them. You will plead for the outpouring of the Holy Ghost to
raise up labourers, to qualify and send them, and give them success in winning
souls. You will do more. You will put your own hand to the work as God Himself
does. Is He to give all, and we nothing? Is He to do all, and we not to be fellow
workers with Him? Shall He give the word, and we not publish it abroad? (John
Walker.)

The earth and Gods Word

I. Earths attention to the divine word is of the utmost importance.

1. The earth is under condemnation; His Word can alone gain its acquittal
2. The earth is in moral darkness; His Word can alone enlighten it.
3. The earth is in bondage; His Word alone can liberate it.
 4. The earth is in misery; His Word alone can relieve it.

II. Earths indifference to the divine word is very stolid.

1. This indifferentism has always been awfully prevalent.
2. This indifferentism is monstrously irrational.
3. This indifferentism cannot always continue. (Homilist.)

An exclamation

I. The solemn address to the children of men.

1. The expression is a metonymy, in which the container is put for the contained;
but as man is of the earth earthy, it is also descriptive of his mortality. The
expression, O earth, earth, earth! when properly heard, is well calculated to
bring down the lofty looks of man, and to produce humility in the place of
pride.
2. The repetition of the word earth, is used to command greater attention. This
way of arresting the attention was very common amongst the Roman and
Grecian orators.
3. When preceded by the interjection O or Oh! the repetition generally expresses
uncommon emotion or grief (2Sa 18:33).

II. The important object to which their attention is called.

1. The Word of the Lord demands our attention, because it is the most
interesting Book.
2. The Word of the Lord demands our attention, because it contains the most
and best information of any book of the size.
3. But O earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the Lord! for there are the words
of eternal life. (B. Bailey.)

Gods voice to man

I. Specify some respects in which we should hear Gods voice.

1. In the still small voice of heavenly mercy.
2. In the loud thunder of Gods providential dispensation.
3. In your personal and relative afflictions.
4. In the ample promises and encouragements addressed to returning penitents.

II. Enumerate some reasons why the whole earth is interested in these
communications.
1. Because the Gospel shows the only plan of salvation.
2. Because the progressive improvement and advancement of the race is
connected with this message.
3. Because the success of missionary work shows the practicability of diffusing
it.
 4. Because the signs of the times are in direct accord with the promises of God.
(S. Thodey.)

A call to hear the Word of the Lord

I. The subject on the address.

1. The Word of the Lord is unwritten as well as written.
2. It is threatening as well as promising.

II. The duty inculcated in the address.

1. To hear and understand.
2. To hear and obey.
3. To hear and make known to others.

III. The style of the address; apostrophe.

1. The universality of its range.
2. The earnestness and affection of its spirit. (G. Brooks.)

JEREMIAH 23

JER 23:3
I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries.

Home missions
As when some beautiful picture which has been put aside and forgotten, hid, it
may be, from the enemy in time of invasive war, is found and cleansed and restored,
and the eye is delighted with the gradual revelation of colour and of form, the life-
like features of the portrait, the characters and incidents of the historical scene, the
sunny landscape, or the moon-lit sea: so in that great revival of spiritual life which
came by God s grace little more than fifty years ago into this Church of England, the
glorious truths of the Gospel, the joy Which we have in the presence of our Lord, in
His Sacraments and Scriptures, in our praises and our prayers, in our daily duty
done in His name, and in our works of mercy done for His sake, have been again
abundantly given to the faith which worketh by love. Oh! blessed be He who of His
tender mercy hath visited and redeemed His people. This merciful, marvellous
restoration maybe divided into three developments. First, there was the restoration
of Faith: Credenda, what we should believe. Then there was the restoration of Hope:
Precanda, what we should pray for, and when and how we should pray,--a
restoration of worship. Thirdly, there came the grandest development o fall--the
restoration of charity, love: Agenda, the things we have got to do for God, our duty
to Him and our duty to each other; to love Him with all our heart, and all our soul,
and all our strength, and then to love our neighbour as ourself. It is impossible for a
Church or an individual to be quickened with spiritual life, and not yearn that others
should be saved. It is impossible for your heart and mine to be unfed with the sacred
heart of Jesus and not to long that others should share our joy and peace in
believing. Jubilant and thankful--thankful for the past, strong and of a good courage
in the present, and hopeful of the future--we stand no more by broken cisterns, for
God has struck the rock, and the streams are flowing, and our cry is, the Masters cry
is, O every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters and drink Our obedience is
that of His mandate, Go ye out rote the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in
hither the lame, the halt, and the blind; go into the byways and hedges and bring in
all--compel them to come in. Surely we may ask, almost in shame, are we true sons
of those forefathers who built such churches as this, are we true sons of the men who
built those grand cathedrals, and churches, and hospitals, and colleges throughout
England? Was there ever a time when it was so needful that the Spirit of the Gospel
should be brought to bear upon the divisions and dissensions which are among us? I
mean, for example, the jealousies that exist between the classes, the commercial
rivalries, the disaffection which there is. Without going beyond the measure of our
knowledge, without presuming to interfere between employers and employed as to
wages and those matters which we cannot possibly understand, we have an
influence in pleading the great principles of justice, and honesty, and love, which,
though it may be resented at first by those who are in the wrong, must in the end
prevail and be established. Was there ever a time when it was more needful for men
who know that God is no respecter of persons to preach the equality of all souls for
whom the Lord Jesus died? It has been well said that the Gospel code, if it could
only be enforced by human laws and a human legislature, would produce a
condition of security and success of which the most sanguine, the cleverest politician
has never even dreamed. But the Gospel is something infinitely higher and better to
you and me. To you and me Christianity means all that is brave and pure in our life,
all that is bright and happy in our death. It means re-union with those whom we
have loved and whom we loved the best. It means--I hardly dare speak the thought--
it means that you and I shall be sinless, and shall see God. It is impossible to have
such a faith and hope as this, and not to desire that all should share it, and that none
should perish. It is impossible for us to love God and not to love our brother also.
(Dean Hole.)

JER 23:4
I will set up shepherds over them, which shall feed them.

God-appointed pastors
God, in His wisdom, has most clearly indicated to every man his work. The doer
carries within him the fitness for the work to be done. Each has most certainly been
made for the other. A law of God brought them face to face at lifes threshold. The
same law unites them, when not interfered with, and stamps the union as Divine. As
the vessel from the potters hand, so we from the Divine mind. We and our work
move along one continuous line till we scale the golden stairway where we end the
now and begin the hereafter. The place to be occupied by us may possibly be of the
most humble, but man is not estimated because of the place so much as how he
filled it. Move along the line of Gods plan and you will tap the fountain of Divine
help. Each of Gods intelligent workers has been given a place in the whitened fields,
along the line of workers, and no position necessary to the many enterprises of the
world has been by the great Creator forgotten. We are not surprised then, in the
least, that the children of God should be provided with leaders, and that He would
approach His flock and assure them of such provision made in their behalf. The men
whom God has touched with a Divine sense of this sacred calling have adaptation to
the work. God makes no mistakes in classifying His workers. His divinely appointed
shepherds whom He will place over His people carry the evidence of such intention
in their physical and spiritual construction. God prepares the shepherd to do the
shepherds work, and for him to throw himself out of his Divine gearing is to live an
inharmonious life and walk where God could not walk with him, nor furnish him a
comforting promise. The world would move as one harmonious whole, if every
creature would keep within the laws made to govern him, and wear as his armour
the outfit his Creator gave him. Like Moses, many may see from a human standpoint
impossibilities in the way; but the same God, now as then, is abundantly able,
willing, and ready to remove them. Woe and disappointment have been inevitable to
all such as have overpowered this sense of Gods wish, and have sought to follow
some idle suggestion which reached the pride of the heart through the lust of the
eye. With a shepherds construction, having head, heart, and hand divinely adjusted
to so important a calling, how readily each function reaches out, as the petal for the
dew, after every nutritious element adapted to its growth. He who is to minister in
holy things, early finds his thoughts running along the line of Gods thoughts, and if
he will yield to the Spirits sweet influence, will gradually as growth gravitate to
within the necessary sources for his equipment. While mental culture and literary
discipline are necessary, and a holy familiarity with the doctrines of the Bible, the
ministers wall and roof, yet Gods ambassadors are expected to feed the flock of the
fruit which comes from the bounty these attainments have led them to. The
ministers knowledge should be principally used as the means to the end. Our
peculiar gifts must be called into liveliest action and placed well to the forefront, and
whatever else we may possess in the line of mental or spiritual gifts should be made
to contribute subordinate, but loyal, help. But it is not enough that the doctrine be
sound. While truth can be nothing but truth, and sound doctrine nothing less than
sound, yet, the effect produced is all the better for having come from pure lips, and a
heart known to be sincere. The man of God ordained to the high office of shepherd,
whoso business it is to minister in holy things, and preside at His altar, should, as
far as it is possible, live along the line of Christs life. Without this he cannot be the
safest counsel for the flock entrusted to his care. He should not only know how to
instruct, but how to live, so that his doctrine and his life may not antagonise. Like
Christ, he must do as well as teach. His should be a life of simplicity, free from
exceptional practices and evil habits. Bold and fearless, yet humble and
unostentatious. Mingling freely with the people, but in modest, quiet reserve. His
language should always be the most chaste. His business relations with all men
should be of the pleasantest character. Pulpit brilliancy may fill the pews and
produce applause, but often spoils the preacher and cools the church. With an
eloquent pulpit the church falls an easy prey to pride and vanity, losing sight of her
humble, but dignified, mission, permitting the undershepherd to use the temple of
God for self-glory. Bernard, whose power came from his tenderness and simplicity,
on one occasion preached a very scholarly sermon. The learned only thanked him
and gave applause. The next day he preached plainly and tenderly, as had been his
custom, and the good, the humble and the godly gave thanks and invoked blessings
upon his head, which some of the scholarly wondered at. Ah! said he, yesterday I
preached Bernard, but to-day I preached Christ. Congregations should arise from
their pews more impressed with the power of Gospel facts than with well-rounded
sentences and lofty flights of oratory. The Christian hearer should be made to feel
the need of greater consecration. The sinner should be made to feel the remorse
which comes from a correct estimate of a lost soul for which he has nothing to give
in exchange. (A. J. Douglas.)

Preachers must feed the people

From the deck of an Austrian gunboat we threw into the Lago Garda a succession
of little pieces of bread, and presently small fishes came in shoals, till there seemed
to be, as the old proverb puts it, more fish than water. They came to feed, and
needed no music. Let the preacher give his people food, and they will flock around
him, even if the sounding brass of rhetoric, and the tinkling cymbals of oratory are
silent. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Food attractive
Everybody knows that large flocks of pigeons assemble at the stroke of the great
clock in the square of St. Mark: believe me, it is not the music of the bell which
attracts them, they can hear that every hour. They come, Mr. Preacher, for food, and
no mere sound will long collect them. This is a hint for filling your meeting-house; it
must be done not merely by that fine, bell-like voice of yours, but by all the
neighbourhoods being assured that spiritual food is to be had when you open your
mouth. Barley for pigeons, good sir; and the Gospel for men and women. Try it in
earnest, and you cannot fail. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 23:5
I will raise unto David a righteous Branch.

Christs Divine titles: the righteous Branch; and the Lord our
Righteousness
Some of the grandest productions of nature appear small or feeble in their origin;
though nothing is little or feeble with God. The majestic oak, the pride of the forest,
that breasts the heavens in power, springs from a little acorn-cup; the mighty ,river,
that creates life, health, beauty, and fertility in a realm, rises from some feeble well-
spring beside the mountain. Now the wonderful fact of growth in life, or progress in
nature or grace, was pre-eminently a profound truth with Christ, in His pure human
nature. He that was Davids Root, as God, the almighty cause of all life, was yet
Davids Offspring and Branch, as Man.

I. CHRIST IS THE RIGHTEOUS BRANCH. He is called by this remarkable name by the

prophets (Isa 11:1; Isa 4:2; Jeremiah, in my text, and 33:15, 16; Eze 17:22-24; Zec
3:8; Zec 6:12).
1. The Divine titles of our Redeemer in Scripture are most expressive, and are
full of spiritual truth and beauty. Among other glorious titles, He is called the
 Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, including all the letters of the Greek
Alphabet, to denote His Eternal nature; as the Beginning and End of all
things; as the Author and Finisher of our faith; as the origin, centre, and
circle of all blessings for His people. He is the only and true Foundation on
which the whole Church of God is built, and the chief Corner-stone of its
perfection and beauty. He is our great Captain of salvation, and our
Counsellor and Mediator before God in heaven; He is the Mystical Vine to
give us Divine life; and the Heavenly Manna to feed and nourish our souls; as
well as the living Water of purity and celestial joy. He is our Day-spring and
Day-star from on high, to enlighten and guide us; as well as to give Divine
knowledge and glory; and our Daysman and Deliverer to reconcile us to God.
He is the Child born as man, to be our sacrifice; and the Son given as God,
the Eternal Son of God, to impart infinite value to His work of salvation. He
is the Prince of Peace, the King of Zion, our Great Prophet and High Priest;
and our Peacemaker with Jehovah; our Redeemer from all sin; our Refuge in
all danger; our Strong Rock in every storm; our Divine Saviour and
Shepherd, who died to deliver us, and lead us to heaven; our Almighty Sun
and Shield; in fine, the Righteous Branch, the Branch of Renown, the
Righteous Branch of Jehovah, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
2. Christ is the Righteous Branch, as the cause of all Divine light and life in the
Church. The word rendered the Branch, has a double meaning; it signifies
both a shoot from an old stock, or a branch springing from a tree, vigorous in
life, with rich blossoms and fruits; as well as the splendour of dawn, or the
sun rising in eastern glory. This double emblem is most appropriately
applied to our Redeemer; both in the sense of His human origin, as springing
like a branch into perfect and glorious life from the family of David; and in
His Divine nature as God, displaying the splendour of His majesty like the
full-orbed sun rising over the earth and dispelling all darkness.
3. As the Righteous Branch Christ fills all His Church with Divine life and
blessings. This may be illustrated thus: when a tree is transplanted from one
field to another, it belongs, in civil law, to the ground where it has root, and
receives nourishment and growth; for though it may be the same tree still in
its roots, stock and branches, yet, as all these derive new and continued life
from the place where it grows, it therefore belongs, in civil law, by right to
the lord of the soil. So Christ, in taking our pure human nature into union
with His Divine nature, made ours His own by lawful right, and He gives
infinite value to humanity. His Divine and human nature are distinct, though
united--separate, though in connection, like our own soul and body. And all
of our Divine life, and all the blessings we spiritually enjoy, must come and
be derived from Christ, and vivify and nourish our spiritual life, as sap rising
from the roots of a tree gives all the stock, branches, leaves, blossoms, and
fruit their support, beauty, and sweetness!

II. How is Christ truly the Lord our Righteousness?

1. He only can restore righteousness to our fallen nature.
2. No sinner can ever be saved unless in some way by this righteousness of
Jesus.
3. Christ is the Lord our righteousness in a twofold sense. He is the Cause, by
 His active and passive obedience to all the demands of Divine justice, and the
Fountain of all our righteousness by His sacrifice on the cross. And as our
Mediator in heaven, His continual intercession, and the blessed work of His
Holy Spirit produce in our hearts holiness of life. This great work and
doctrine may thus be illustrated. Suppose a powerful monarch goes to a
prison-cell, where some favourite, who has been condemned for treason, lies
expecting death. Royal mercy rises above law; royal affection remembers a
friends doom. The sovereign opens the prison door and bestows on him a
full pardon. This frees the offender from all just demands of the law. But the
monarch does more: he takes him again into his favour; he exalts him even
to higher honours than he forfeited, and he admits him to an the communion
of a friend, and to all the dignities of the state, and he bestows on him a royal
title to an inheritance which nothing can destroy.
4. This scriptural doctrine, that Christ is our righteousness, must be implicitly
the firm reliance of faith, and of all the heart. The natural man cannot receive
this great truth. Like other things of the Spirit, it must be spiritually
discerned.
Remarks--
1. How Divine and comforting are the Scripture titles of Christ! This one of the
Righteous Branch is most expressive and just for our Redeemer. Many kings
and rulers have been unjust and unholy, but the Lord Jesus never! for all His
own nature, all His moral government of the world are perfectly righteous,
holy, and just, and all of His dealings among men shall shine forth as the
rays of a full-orbed sun in glory!
2. How great and glorious are the blessings bestowed on Christians by the
Redeemers work as the ever-living and righteous Branch of Jehovah! Take
heed, then, of being in Christ for Divine life and fruitfulness. The leaves and
blossoms on any fruitful branch or tree, though all various, must derive all
their life and beauty from the living stock. All real Christians have all their
continued spiritual life, holiness, and perfection from Jesus. And as no
flower nor blossom can he without a branch, nor no ray of light without a
star or sun, so no beauty nor brightness can be without Christ, the righteous
Branch and Sundawn of eternal blessedness.
3. What a blissful and long day of peace and happiness shall that be for all the
gathered Church of God! Gentile and Jew, all nations shall join hands in
perfect amity and goodwill No more discord, no more destruction, no more
death. (J. G. Angley, M. A.)

The Lord our righteousness

I. Inquire who is the person here spoken of; and whether any individual has
appeared, since the days of Jeremiah, answering this description. Jeremiah, we find,
flourished in the reigns of Josiah, Jehoiakim, and Zedekiah. In vain shall we look
either to the times of the prophets, or to the commencement of the Christian era, for
any individual answering the description in the text.
1. He was to be of the stock of David: to this description Christ exactly
corresponded. He was born of a virgin, of the house and lineage of David.
2. He was to be righteous. To this part of me description, also, Christ exactly
corresponded. He did no sin, and in Him no guile was found.
3. He was to be a King. To this, also, the character of Jesus of Nazareth
corresponded. He was born King of the Jews; He was so called by the wise
men who came from afar to worship Him. When asked by Pontius Pilate if
He were a King, He did not deny it; and when He was pressed, He replied in
the affirmative--Thou sayest that I am a King. A King He was, but in
disguise--a King, but wearing the garb of a servant.
4. It is here predicted that He should reign and prosper. Here, certainly, the
history of Jesus of Nazareth does not correspond with the prediction before
us. To reign and to prosper, is to have victory over all open enemies, and to
see his friends in peace, and happiness, and prosperity around him. But
mark the history of Jesus of Nazareth. Being in disguise, He hid Himself: He
refused to be made a King when the people would have done so; and, instead
of reigning and prospering, He was despised, scorned, crucified, and slain;
instead of having the victory over His enemies, they had the victory over
Him; and though, from the inherent dignity of His person, they could not
hold Him, for He was a King, yet He left the world under a disguise, and left
His foes in apparent triumph, to rejoice in the success of their rebellion.
5. He was to execute judgment and justice in the earth. Here, again, the history
does not correspond with the prediction. He was, indeed, just; but He did not
execute justice; He did not establish an ascendency of righteousness. On the
contrary, injustice, violence, and deceit remain to this day.
6. In the reign of the King here spoken of, Judah is to be saved, and Israel is to
dwell safely. Here, certainly, the history of Jesus of Nazareth does not
correspond with the prediction. In His days, Judah was despised and
trodden down: according to their own confession, they had no king but
Caesar:--to Caesar, the Emperor of Rome, they paid tribute.
7. His name was to be called, the Lord our Righteousness. Now, what shall we
say to this? Why, instead of all acknowledging Christ as the Lord our
Righteousness, the bulk of professing Christians scoff at the very doctrine
connected with this name! But I dwell not on this:--the speaker is a Jew, and
the words must apply to Jews;--the Lord our Righteousness;--the
Righteousness of the Jewish nation. Now I ask, Has the Jewish nation ever
acknowledged the Messiah to be the Lord their Righteousness? Certainly
not: therefore, the prophecy of Jeremiah has not been fulfilled. In examining
this prophecy, we have seen that three points of the description have been
fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth; that three other points of His description have
not been fulfilled in Him; and that the seventh has been fulfilled in a very
partial manner, and not in a peculiar application to the Jewish nation. Now,
it is an acknowledged truth, by all who believe the Word of God, that Christ,
who, for a season, dwelt upon earth, shall come again. So that between what
He did and what He shall do, all the parts of the prophecy shall be fulfilled in
Him. Now, it is very remarkable that what we should expect from this
prophecy He would be, we are told from other prophecies He shall be. For we
are told that He will execute judgment and justice in the earth; and that He
will reign as a King in the earth.
 II. Consider one or two of the important particulars which are revealed
concerning this King, so prospering and reigning.
1. Concerning the reality and identity of the Kings person. The human nature of
Jesus, returning to earth as He quitted it from Mount Olivet,--the nature that
was degraded, persecuted when on earth,--this same human nature shall be
exalted in Zion; calling His brethren after the flesh, the Jews, to rally around
Him, and to acknowledge Him as Jehovah their Righteousness in that day.
2. Concerning the appearance of the King in that day. On this subject the history
of the Transfiguration was, I think, intended to instruct us.
3. Concerning the manner of His administration in His kingdom: the manner, I
mean, of His interference in this kingdom. It was a Theocracy under which
the Jews were placed. All difficult questions were referred to God Himself;
and He gave answers by the Urim and Thummim on the breast of the High
Priest. He either spake to the people by Moses, or by some visible
appearance. The Lord Jesus Christ will reign by a visible interference; by
stretching out His arm to award and to punish. And then will be said that
which is written in the Psalms: So that a man shall say, Verily, there is a
reward for the righteous; there is a God that judgeth in the earth. (H.
MNeile.)

The kingdom of the Messiah

I. The person of the Messiah.

1. His human incarnation--A Branch. This term is often used by the prophets,
to represent Christs assumption of our nature.
2. His personal perfection--A righteous Branch.
(1) In His essential nature as God, Jesus Christ was infinitely pure, holy,
just, and good.
(2) In His human nature as man, He was perfectly righteous, and free from
everything sinful and impure.
3. His sovereign character--A King shall reign. He possessed every
qualification requisite for the dignity of His character. He is infinite in
wisdom, righteousness, power, and goodness. He is not only a Prophet to
instruct, a Priest to atone, but also a King to rule and save His people.

II. THE NATURE OF HIS KINGDOM. A King shall reign and prosper, &c.
1. A universal kingdom. His presence fills all space, and His power is unlimited.
2. A mediatorial kingdom. This refers to Christs official character, as the
Mediator between God and man.
3. A spiritual kingdom. The kingdom which Christ established in the work of
redemption, is designed in its personal influence to destroy sin, that grace
might reign through righteousness unto eternal life.
4. A celestial kingdom. Heaven is often denominated a kingdom, and is the
promised inheritance of the Lords faithful people (Luk 12:32). (Sketches of
Four Hundred Sermons.)
The nature and prosperity of the Messiahs reign

I. THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. A King (Num 24:17; Psa 2:6; Psa 45:1; Isa 32:1;
Zec 9:9; Luk 19:38; Joh 18:37; Rev 17:14). There are three things we look for in a
King.
1. Supreme power (Eph 1:21; Rom 9:5; Php 2:9; Col 1:18).
2. Legislative authority.
(1) Christ s authority to govern all arises out of His being the proprietor of all
(Joh 1:10; Col 1:16).
(2) His legislative authority is still more confirmed by virtue of His
redeeming acts: He has bought us with a price, and redeemed us to God
by His blood.
3. Righteous administration; or the exercise of certain qualities essential to good
government.
(1) In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; He
knows all His subjects--is acquainted with their infinitely diversified
necessities. And such is His immaculate purity, that it is impossible for
Him to enact any laws that will not subserve the interests of His
creatures.
(2) His justice is equal to His wisdom; justice and judgment are the
habitation of His seat.
(3) He is so merciful as to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.

II. THE NATURE OF HIS REIGN. A King shall reign, &c.

1. The reign of Christ is spiritual (Luk 17:20; Rom 14:17).
2. The reign of Christ is benevolent. Look at the Alexanders, or Caesars, or
mighty chiefs of antiquity, marching at the head of vast armies, while every
battle of these warriors is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood.
How violent their operations! how cruel and sanguinary their triumphs! Oh,
how unlike the means used by the Lord Jesus to subdue the world to the
obedience of Himself! (Isa 42:2.)
3. The reign of Christ is equitable. It is founded on principles of justice, reason,
and truth (Heb 1:8). The laws by which He governs are holy, just, and good:
the obedience which He requires is not only right in itself, but essentially
connected with human happiness.
4. The reign of Christ is perpetual. Earthly kingdoms have their rise, progress,
perfection, declension, and ruin (Isa 9:7; Heb 1:8).

III. THE PROSPERITY WITH WHICH THAT REIGN SHALL BE ATTENDED. The word
prosper is always used in a favourable sense. To prosper as a king implies--
1. To have an increase of willing subjects.
2. To have adequate provision for the supply of all their wants. Our heavenly
King possesses infinite treasures of grace and glory.
3. To secure their real happiness. Christs subjects are all happy--by the
indulgence of benevolent dispositions--by the conformity to righteous laws--
by the practice of holy duties--by the anticipation of future felicities (Psa
 72:7-8; Isa 11:4-9; Isa 52:9).
4. To subjugate or destroy His enemies (Psa 2:9; Psa 2:12; Isa 60:12). But as
Christ came not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him
might be saved, He is employing means to conquer its prejudice, and slay its
enmity.
Observe--
1. If Christ shall reign and prosper, how great is the folly and madness of
infidels, sceptics, and sinners of all descriptions, who attempt to prop the
tottering throne of infidelity!
2. This subject should inspire the souls of Christs devoted subjects with joy and
gladness. (Sketches of Four Hundred Sermons.)

JER 23:5-6
The Lord our Righteousness.

Jehovah-Tsidkenu
After his conversion the apostle Paul must continually have been meditating on
the state of Israel. Much as he loved the Gentiles, and clearly as he saw the
disposition of God that now the Gentiles should be brought in, he never could forget
Israel. What shall we say then? he exclaims. Look at Israel look at the Gentile
nation! Israel for centuries has been striving most anxiously after one thing, to be
righteous before Jehovah; they have not attained it. Why then has Israel not
attained it? Because they sought it not by faith but by works (Rom 10:3). Why have
the Gentiles attained it? Because by the grace of God they have been made willing to
receive Jesus as their righteousness. Now look at the Jews going about to establish
their own righteousness. They wish to be righteous before God. They wish to be such
men as God approves--to be counted righteous and just so that He may be pleased.
Therefore their idea of righteousness before God entirely depends upon their idea of
God and of Gods requirements. God has not left them in ignorance about this. If
men who have not the revelation of God form a conception of God according to their
own ideas it will be exactly in proportion to their moral condition; therefore the
heathen nations made unto themselves gods like unto themselves, as ambitious, as
impatient, as self-indulgent, as impure, as changeable as they were themselves.
Israel knew the Lord. I am Jehovah; I am God, and not man, spirit and not flesh; I
am holy, be ye also holy. And not simply had God revealed Himself unto them, but
He had given unto them also the law as a mirror in which they should see what His
idea of men was. Israel had the law of God, and in the law of God they had the
character of the righteous One described. And now Israel went about to establish a
righteousness of their own. In this process those of them who were sincere in
themselves and those of them who really sought not merely to be righteous, but to
be righteous before God in order that they might have communion with God, very
soon came into the knowledge of their sin, and into the most painful consciousness
of their defilement, and, therefore, wishing to he righteous before God, they soon
began to cry unto God out of the depth, and to know that innumerable sins had
taken hold upon them, and that woe is unto them because they are undone and of
unclean lips, and unto such through the knowledge of the law there came death
under the law, a longing after pardon, and after the power of Gods Spirit operating
on their hearts. But those were always the exceptions, the small minority, the
remnant according to the election of grace. The majority of the nation lowered
their standard of God, and lowered their standard of the law, and so far did this
deteriorating process go on that they not merely came into the idea that they were
able to fulfil the law, but they came even to the idea that they were able to do more
than the law commanded; that they were able, by extra exertions and by observing
precepts which God never has enjoined, to have a treasury of merits, works of
supererogation. Curious inconsistency--as long as men go about establishing their
own righteousness they are proud before God. But then you would think that if a
man is proud, and if he has got the kind of self-consciousness so that he can stand,
as it were, before God, that then he would be sure of his salvation. One of their most
celebrated prophets, whom they called the law of the world, was on his death-bed,
and one of his disciples asked him, Rabbi, what sayest thou now? The Rabbi said,
Heaven and hell are before me, and I know not whither I am going. If I were to be
summoned into the presence of an earthly king I might well be afraid, and yet his
displeasure would only last a few years, and his punishment, however severe it may
be, must come to an end; but I am now going into the presence of the Lord God
Most High, whose wrath is everlasting, and His punishment is infinite, and I know
not whether I shall be acquitted. Going about establishing a righteousness of their
own, lowering the idea of God, lowering the standard of the law, proud and
unbroken in spirit, and yet without any peace or assurance of the favour of God.
Such a one, also, was the apostle Paul before he was converted; he went about
establishing his own righteousness, and afterwards he said that he was a Pharisee of
the Pharisees, according to the law blameless, but now he wishes not to have his own
righteousness, which is by the law. There is another righteousness of which both the
law and the prophets have continually testified; which is apart from the law, which
man does not work out, which is as much given to man as bread is given to a hungry
person, and as water is given to a thirsty person. Blessed are they that hunger and
thirst after righteousness. What is the sad condition of the Jews? They do not see
two things: they do not know that Jesus is Jehovah, and they do not know that this
is our only righteousness. Jesus our Righteousness. And what is the lamentable
condition of Christians who do not know the Lord? Simply the same thing, for if they
knew Jehovah-Tsidkenu then they would have the knowledge of salvation, they
would put no confidence in the works of the law, they would simply rejoice in Christ
Jesus. Then this Jesus is Jehovah When He was an infant He had angels already
calling Him Lord, and it was quite right that the wise men of the East worshipped
Him. He is Jehovah, but He is God manifest in the flesh There is in all human
beings, however far they may be from God, this peculiarity: that without union with
God they cannot have life. When we think of this union with God, that God should
be all in all, that we should be one with God, unless we go by the Word of God we
may fall into great depths of error, and into that which is very ungodly. And here is a
very peculiar thing, that you find among all the Eastern nations a striving after this
being absorbed in God. You find it in India, you find it in China--almost wherever
you go; you find it among the Arabs and the Persians. Mystics in all nations, what do
they want? They have a feeling that there is in God the only true existence, the only
life and blessedness; that everything else apart from God is transitory, is imperfect,
is unsatisfactory; they wish to be one with Him; they wish to be absorbed in Him.
But the great error which they commit, the great evil into which they are landed is
this, that they do not see that sin is sin, that it is wrong, that it is evil. They imagine
that sin is necessary, something through which we have to pass, something for
which we are not accountable; and thus they deafen the voice of conscience, and
declare evil not to be evil, and that there can be no real difference between good and
evil. But round it is the truth which God has taught us, that we are to be one with
God; we are to be in such a close union with Jehovah that it may be said, We live,
yet not we, but Jehovah lives in us. But how union with God? Because we believe in
Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us, and in this faith in Jesus submitting to
the righteousness of God there are three elements. No boasting. You can judge any
religion, simply by that one point--is all the glory given to God and no glory to man?
Secondly, there is no uncertainty, for we have a perfect and Divine righteousness.
Thirdly, there is no compromise with sin, because, if we believe that Jesus died for
us, we believe that God condemned sin in the flesh. We must depart from all
unrighteousness, nay, we are crucified unto the world, and the world unto us. (A.
Saphir, D. D.)

The Lord our Righteousness

If, as it seems probable, Zedekiah had already begun to reign, it is perfectly certain
that he could not be the person to whom the prophet referred when he looked
forward to the advent of the righteous Branch. If he wrote shortly before the
commencement of his reign it would be just possible so to interpret the prophecy. In
the former case the very allusion which there might have been to the name of the
reigning king would show all the more plainly that it was not in him that the
promise was fulfilled; in the latter case, the want of precise correspondence between
the two names would only bring out into higher relief the non-correspondence of the
prophecy with the fact. As a matter of fact the name of Mattaniah was changed to
Zedekiah, and not to Jehovah-Tsidkenu. Neither could it be said that in his days,
when the captivity was fast hastening on, and the dark shadow of Babylon must have
hung like a thundercloud over the land, Judah should be saved and Israel should
dwell safely. We are constrained to infer from the known historical conditions of the
writing, that the prophet must have meant to depict circumstances not immediately
before his eyes when he wrote. Moreover, this conclusion is forced upon us from the
fact that some eight or ten years later Jeremiah repeated this promise, in a slightly
altered form, when he was shut up in prison,--In those days shall Judah be saved,
and Jerusalem shall dwell safely: and this is the name wherewith she shall be
called, or, this is that which men shall proclaim to her; or, as Bishop Pearson has
it, He which calleth her is the Lord our Righteousness. Enforced as that promise
was by the remarkable addition at the very lowest ebb of the national hope, Thus
saith the Lord, David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of
Israel; neither shall the priests the Levites want a man before Me to offer burnt-
offerings, and to kindle meat-offerings, and to do sacrifice continually; it is
inconceivable that the same prophet who had declared the seventy years captivity of
the whole nation as well as the captivity of Zedekiah himself should have spoken in
this way, believing that the hopes he cherished for Judah were fulfilled in Zedekiah.
His words, therefore, are a standing monument of an onward-looking hope. The
main point which we have to grasp firmly, is that here, if anywhere, there is a
prophecy of the times of the Messiah, which is known to have been given before the
Captivity, and was undeniably not fulfilled for many centuries to come after it. It is
insisted, however, that the analogy of similar names in Scripture, such as Jehovah-
Messiah, Jehovah-Shalom, and Jehovah-Shammah, and the like, makes it needful
for us to render this name, The Lord is our Righteousness. Let us assume, then,
that we are to understand it, The Lord is our Righteousness. If that, then, was His
name, the name by which He was to be called, I see not how it can be applicable to
Him unless He is Himself the Lord Jehovah. The proposition, The Lord is our
Righteousness, is to be His name, however awkward and uncouth that may; but if
men are to say to Him or of Him, if they are to call Him The Lord is our
Righteousness, it is hard to escape from the conclusion that He must be the Lord.
But believing, as we do most firmly, that this is the prophetic name of Christ, and of
Christ alone, what is it designed to teach us?
1. It teaches us that Christ is to us the realisation of righteousness; it is no longer
an unattainable conception or an abstract idea which we find it hard to grasp
or to fulfil, but in Him it becomes a concrete fact on which we can lay hold,
and a thing which we can appropriate and possess. He becomes first
righteousness, and then our righteousness; first, the visible, incarnate
and reeled exhibition of righteousness, and then something of which we can
claim possession, and in which we can participate.
2. If this is the obverse presentation or positive statement of the truth, it has also
its reverse or negative side. If the name whereby Christ is called is The Lord
is our Righteousness, that fact is destructive to all other hopes, prospects, or
sources of righteousness; it gives the lie to them, and asserts their vanity, for
we can have no righteousness but what we find in the Lord. Behold in Him
your righteousness; look away from and out of yourselves to Him and be
righteous. The apprehension of that blessed fact will be the harbinger of
peace and joy and fruition of righteousness in you. Whereas before there was
nothing but continual delusive hope and abortive effort, together with
painful disappointment and self-reproach, now there is the fulness and the
fatness of a satisfied soul, the soundness and strength of a heart that is at
peace with God, the quietness and assurance, the blessedness and calm
confidence of a mind that is at rest in Christ. To know that the Lord is our
Righteousness, is to have and to know that which can alone enable us to
contemplate the past with equanimity or serenity; it is to have and to know
that which is alone the antidote for care and anguish and remorse, that
which can alone take the sting out of sin and rob even the broken law of its
just terror. But we have to face the future as well as to look back upon the
past, and in that future there sits the shadow, fear of man, and we know not
what besides may lurk there. It may be loss, bereavement, sickness, pain,
disgrace, infamy; but if the Lord is our righteousness, and if He who is our
righteousness is the Lord, the very and eternal God Himself, then, come
what may, we must be safe with Him (Prof. Stanley Leathes.)

The Lord our Righteousness

Man by the fall sustained an infinite loss in the matter of righteousness: the loss of
a righteous nature, and then a twofold loss of legal righteousness in the sight of God.
Man sinned; he was therefore no longer innocent of transgression. Man did not keep
the command; he therefore was guilty of the sin omission. In that which he
committed, and in that which he omitted, his original character for uprightness was
completely wrecked. Jesus Christ came to undo the mischief of the fall for His
people. So far as their sin concerned their breach of the command, that He has
removed by His precious blood. Still it is not enough for s man to be pardoned. He of
course is then in the eye of God without sin. But it was required of man that he
should actually keep the command. Where, then, is the righteousness with which the
pardoned man shall be completely covered, so that God can regard him as having
kept the law, and reward him for so doing? The righteousness in which we must be
clothed, and through which we must be accepted, and by which we are made meet to
inherit eternal life, can be no other than the work of Jesus Christ. We, therefore,
assert, believing that Scripture fully warrants us, that the life of Christ constitutes
the righteousness in which His people are to be clothed. His death washed away
their sins, His life covered them from head to foot; His death was the sacrifice to
God, His life was the gift to man, by which man satisfies the demands of the law.
Herein the law is honoured and the soul is accepted. You have as much to thank
Christ for living as for dying, and you should be as devoutly grateful for His spotless
life as for His terrible death. The text speaking of Christ, the son of David, the
Branch out of the root of Jesse, styles Him, the Lord our Righteousness.

I. First, then, HE IS SO. Jesus Christ is the Lord our Righteousness. There are but
three words, Jehovah--for so it is in the original--our Righteousness. He is
Jehovah, or, mark you, the whole of Gods Word is false, and there is no ground
whatever for a sinners hope. He who walked in pain over the flinty acres of
Palestine, was at the same time possessor of heaven and earth He who had not
where to lay His head, and was despised and rejected of men, was at the same
instant God over all, blessed for evermore. He who did hang upon the tree had the
creation hanging upon Him. He who died on the Cross was the ever living, the
everlasting One. As a man He died, as God He lives. Bow before Him, for He made
you, and should not the creatures acknowledge their Creator? Providence attests His
Godhead. He upholdeth all things by the word of His power. Creatures that are
animate have their breath from His nostrils; inanimate creatures that are strong and
mighty stand only by His strength. Who less than God could have carried your sins
and mine and cast them all away? How can He be less than God, when He says, Lo I
am with you always unto the end of the world? How could He be omnipresent if He
were not God? How could He hear our prayers, the prayers of millions, scattered
through the leagues of earth, and attend to them all, and give acceptance to all, if He
were not infinite in understanding and infinite in merit? How were this if He were
less than God? But the text speaks about righteousness too--Jehovah our
Righteousness. And He is so. Christ in His life was so righteous, that we may say of
the life, taken as a whole, that it is righteousness itself. Christ is the law incarnate.
He lived out the law of God to the very full, and while you see Gods precepts written
in fire on Sinais brow, you see them written in flesh in the person of Christ. No one
that I know of has dared to charge Christ with unrighteousness to man, or with a
want of devotedness to God. See then, it is so. The pith, however, of the title, lies in
the little word our,--Jehovah our Righteousness. This is the grappling iron with
which we get a hold on Him--this is the anchor which dives into the bottom of this
great deep of His immaculate righteousness. This is the sacred rivet by which our
souls are joined to Him. This is the blessed hand with which our soul toucheth Him,
and He becometh to us all in all, Jehovah our Righteousness. You will now observe
that there is a most precious doctrine unfolded in this title of our Lord and Saviour.
As the merit of His blood takes away our sin, so the merit of His obedience is
imputed to us for righteousness. Imputation, so far from being an exceptional case
with regard to the righteousness of Christ, lies at the very bottom of the entire
teaching of Scripture. The root of the fall is found in the federal relationship of
Adam to his seed; thus we fell by imputation. Is it any wonder that we should rise by
imputation? Deny this doctrine, and I ask you--How are men pardoned at all? Are
they not pardoned because satisfaction has been offered for sin by Christ? Very well,
then, but that satisfaction must be imputed to them, or else how is God just in giving
to them the results of the death of another, unless that death of the other be first of
all imputed to them? I must give up justification by faith if I give up imputed
righteousness. True justification by faith is the surface soil, but then imputed
righteousness is the granite rock which lies underneath it; and if you dig down
through the great truth of a sinners being justified by faith in Christ, you must, as I
believe, inevitably come to the doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ as the
basis and foundation on which that simple doctrine rests. The Lord our
Righteousness. The Lawgiver has Himself obeyed the law. Do you not think that
His obedience will be sufficient? Jehovah has Himself become man that so He may
do mans work: think you that He has done it imperfectly? You have a better
righteousness than Adam had. He had a human righteousness; your garments are
Divine. He had a robe complete, it is true, but the earth had woven it. You have a
garment as complete, but heaven has made it for you to wear. You will remember
that in Scripture, Christs righteousness is compared to fair white linen; then I am, if
I wear it, without spot. It is compared to wrought gold; then I am, if I wear it,
dignified and beautiful, and worthy to sit at the wedding feast of the King of kings. It
is compared, in the parable of the prodigal son, to the best robe; then I wear a better
robe than angels have, for they have not the best; but I, poor prodigal, once clothed
in rags, companion to the nobility of the stye,--I, fresh from the husks that swine do
eat, am nevertheless clothed in the best robe, and am so accepted in the Beloved.
Moreover, it is also everlasting righteousness. Oh! this is, perhaps, the fairest point
of it--that the robe shall never be worn out; no thread of it shall ever give way.

II. Having thus expounded and vindicated this title of our Saviour, I would now
APPEAL TO YOUR FAITH. Let us call Him so. This is the name whereby He shall be
called, the Lord our Righteousness. Let us call Him by this great name, which the
mouth of the Lord of hosts hath named. Let us call Him--poor sinners!--even we,
who are to-day smitten down with grief on account, of sin. I have no good thing of
my own, sayest thou? Here is every good thing in Him. I have broken the law,
sayest thou? There is His blood for thee. Believe in Him; He will wash thee. But
then I have not kept the law. There is His keeping of the law for thee. Take it,
sinner, take it. Believe on Him. Oh, but I dare not, saith one. Do Him the honour
to dare it. Oh, but it seems impossible. Honour Him by believing the impossibility
then. Oh, but how can He save such a wretch as I am? Soul! Christ is glorified in
saving wretches. Only do thou trust Him, and say, He shall be my righteousness to-
day. But suppose I should do it and be presumptuous? It is impossible. He bids
you; He commands you. Let that be your warrant. This is the commandment, that
ye believe on Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. And some of us can say it yet better
than that; for we can say it not merely by faith, but by fruition. We have had the
privilege of reconciliation with God; and He could not be reconciled to one that had
not a perfect righteousness; we have had access with boldness to God Himself, and
He would never have suffered us to have access if we had not worn our brothers
garments. We have had adoption into the family, and the Spirit of adoption, and
God could not have adopted into His family any but righteous ones. How should the
righteous Father be God of an unrighteous family?

III. I appeal to your GRATITUDE. Let us admire that wonderful and reigning grace
which has led you and me to call Him, The Lord our Righteousness. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Christ the righteousness of those who believe in Him

I. Christ becomes the righteousness of those who believe in Him--AS THEIR

ATONING MEDIATOR. Sprinkled with that blood which the Godhead hath enriched,
the penitent sinner fears not the wrath of the destroying angel of justice. Covered
with that righteousness with which the Godhead hath invested him, the true believer
can stand even the searching beams of Divine holiness. Behold, then, both the way
by which we are to be justified from our sins, and our encouragement to apply for
mercy. In this part of the process of justification, no qualifications are required on
the part of man, but a lively sense of his need of mercy, and a full reliance on the
propitiation of the Lord his righteousness. But as he is to be fitted for eternal
happiness by the love and service of his Maker, a rule of duty must be prescribed
and imposed on him. Christ therefore becomes the righteousness of His people--

II. AS THEIR LAWGIVER--imposing on them a law of evangelical holiness and

perfection. The destiny of man which the scheme of redemption is designed to
further and to secure, is to be eternally happy in the presence of God. For this
presence, holiness is an indispensable qualification. In the justification of those who
believe, therefore, Christ acts not only as Mediator, procuring their pardon, but also
as Lawgiver, delineating the nature and extent, and enforcing the obligations of the
Divine law. In this character, we are to acknowledge, receive, and obey Him, and He
thus becomes the Lord our Righteousness.

III. AS OUR ALMIGHTY SANCTIFIER who impresses on our hearts the obligations of
the Divine law, and enables us to obey it. Thus is complete provision made for our
release from the bondage of sin, and our being reinstated in all the graces and
virtues of the Divine image. Let us then learn--
1. To ascribe our salvation to the free and unmerited grace of God.
2. But while we humbly acknowledge and adore the free grace of God in our
salvation, let us remember that there are qualifications on our part. (Bp.
Hobart.)

Christ, the Lord our Righteousness

So could none speak, save God. If man would condense his words, he says too
little, or he says it obscurely or untruly. The characteristic of this Divine saying, is,
that in the two Hebrew words it contains a summary of the whole supernatural
relation of God to man under the Gospel, and of man to God. It contains the whole
hidden life of the Christian: it is the substance of sacraments: the unseen spring of
self-sacrificing holy action; the fountain of his inward peace; the surest contentment
of his soul; the enkindling of burning zeal; the soul of devotion, the fervour of love.
It matters little, as to the great outline of the prophecy, whether He, through whom
this was to be wrought, is here declared to be the Lord our Righteousness or
whether the Lord our Righteousness were simply a title given to designate His
character, that this would be His characteristic, His watchword, the centre of His
teaching, His life, His being; this the end of His toils and tears; this the passion of
His heart; this He should labour to bring about, that the Almighty God should be
our righteousness. In contrast to the evil shepherds, who, misleading the people,
had encouraged them in their sins, and so had brought Gods judgments upon them,
He was to do away Gods judgments, and outwardly to restore them to His favour;
but He was also inwardly to remove the cause of that disfavour, their
unrighteousness, and to he their righteousness. The change was to be, not without
man, but within. It was to be an inward closeness of relation of God to man, and of
man to his God. The words presupposed all the teaching of the law, orally or through
ritual, as to sin. Create in me a new heart, O God, and make anew a stayed spirit
within me. Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. It was the universal cry of our fallen
nature; the deepest trace of that original righteousness, wherewith God endowed
Adam, as soon as He created him. But, though felt more or less, weakly or mightily,
disguised or clearly or corruptly, the belief that it could, that it would, be satisfied,
was given, where alone it could be given, among the people to whom God revealed
Himself, by those whom He sent to promise what He alone could fulfil. This union
Jeremiah spoke of under those two words, the Lord our Righteousness. As
unrighteous, we could not be united with Him. God s aweful holiness and mans
sinfulness are incompatibles. Your sins have been abidingly severing between you
and your God, was expressed in act by the whole Hebrew ritual. The truth ever lived
before their eyes; it was enforced by the prophets; it was chanted in the Psalms; it
was confessed in their prayers. But there was a Deliverer yet to come, a deliverance
larger, wider, deeper, more inward, than any before, which should stretch out and
encompass the human race, through One despised and rejected by those who were
despised of all. He Himself was personally to restore our race, personally to be our
righteousness. And has it not been? Is it not? This was the faith of the barbarous
nations from the first, written not with pen and ink, but by the Spirit of God upon
the hearts. This was the hope and strength of martyrs; this was the virtue of the
continent; this was the victory of the young; this, the triumph over the worlds
seductions; this, the peace with God and the full contentment of the soul, the Lord
our Righteousness. In Christ Jesus, the Holy Ghost saith, we are chosen; in
Christ Jesus we are called to eternal glory; in Him we have redemption; in Christ
Jesus we are created, are a new creation in Christ Jesus we are alive unto God;
in Christ Jesus we are accepted; in Him we are justified; in Him we are
sanctified; in Him we are accepted; in Christ Jesus we are of God; in Christ, it
is the will of God that we should be perfected; in Christ Jesus, those who are His,
have fallen asleep; in Christ Jesus they shall be made alive. This supernatural life
antedated our use of reason. Antedating, then, the use of reason, His first act, in our
Christian land, is to unite the soul to Himself. As we are really sons of man by
physical birth, so are we as really and as actually sons of God by spiritual birth;
sons of man, by being born of man; sons of God, by being members of Him, who is
the Son of God. Blessed they who so remain, in whom the hidden life in Christ
unfolds with the life of sense and reason. But if this has not been so, if the soul have
gone away from God into a far country, forgetting Him, squandering in pleasures
of sense the gift of God, can such an one be the object of the love of God, can to such
an one Jesus be the Lord our Righteousness? God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
long to communicate Themselves to the creature, which they made for Themselves.
They long anew to sanctify him, anew to make him that wherein They may take
pleasure; to fit him, by the renewed gift of righteousness, for Their gracious
engracing Presence; to make the soul, which has been the abode and sport of devils,
the dwelling-place of the Trinity. And whether He works this in those who know no
more, by creating in the soul a penitent sorrow, for love of their God, that they had
so offended God, or whether He teach the soul, over and above, that He gives
superabundant grace through an ordinance of His own appointing, and that He has
still left power with His Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and turn to
Him, no sooner is His work accomplished, sooner has his Saviour absolved him
through His own words, pronounced at His command by his creature s lips, than the
dark catalogue of sins is blotted out by the precious blood, the soul is again
transfigured with light; it is not forgiven only, it is arrayed anew with the
righteousness of Christ. Yet there is a higher closer union still, on which Jesus
Himself dwelt with greater fulness and greater complacency of love towards us;
which, in different words, He presented again and again; which, when contradicted
or misapprehended, He dwelt on the more; which He seems in His love to have been
loath to cease to speak of, that mystery whereby He is, above all, our righteousness,
because He, who is righteousness itself, comes to dwell in us, that we may dwell in
Him; to be one with us, that we may be one with Him. In other sacraments He gives
us grace; in this, Himself. By no less condescension could He satisfy His love
towards us. They are His own words, he that eateth Me. (E. B. Pusey, D. D.)

Christ is our Righteousness

I. What is meant by His being our righteousness?

1. That it is in Him alone that God the Father is well pleased (Mat 3:17; Mat
17:5). Not only with whom, but in whom, I am well pleased, atoned, pacified,
satisfied. He is Gods all in all, and why then should He not be ours?
2. That it is by and through Him alone that we are justified; that is, acquitted
from guilt, and accepted into favour, which are the ingredients of
justification.
3. It is through His merit and mediation alone that our performances are made
acceptable (1Pe 2:5),
4. It is by Him alone that we have right and title to the heavenly inheritance.

II. CALL JESUS CHRIST BY THIS SWEET NAME, the Lord our Righteousness; each one
with application to himself---as David. And would you think an Old Testament saint,
that lived under that dark dispensation, should have such clearness in this matter? A
shame to us that are not clear in it, that live under Gospel light (Psa 4:1).
1. The misery they are in who never yet called Jesus Christ by this name, and the
blessed and happy condition they are in that have done so.
(1) Till we have called Jesus Christ the Lord our Righteousness, that is,
heartily owned Him as such, our condition is a shameful, naked
condition, and that is a wretched, miserable condition (Rev 3:17),
because, till clothed with Christs righteousness, our shame appears in
the sight of God.
 (2) Till we have called Jesus Christ the Lord our Righteousness, ours is a
dismal, dark condition. When we call the Lord our Righteousness, then
He rises upon our souls as a Sun of Righteousness, and that which
follows is the light of comfort, and peace, and joy; such joy as none
knows but they that feel it. It is hidden manna (Psa 85:10).
(3) Till we have called Jesus Christ the Lord our Righteousness, we are in a
perilous, perishing condition. Christs righteousness is to us as Noahs
ark.
2. The difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of being pardoned and justified,
accepted and saved, in any other way, and the facility and easiness of
obtaining it in this way.
(1) It is impossible we should be accepted of God without a righteousness,
one or other, because He is a righteousness God; that is, He is of pure
eyes, and, therefore, cannot endure to look upon iniquity (Psa 5:4; Psa
11:7).
(2) It is impossible that either our own righteousness, or the righteousness
of any of our fellow-creatures, one or other, in heaven or earth, should
bear us out and bring us off before God. On the other hand, how easy is it
to obtain peace, and pardon, and salvation, by the merit and
righteousness of the Lord Jesus, by calling Him by this name. Easy, did I
say? mistake me not. I mean easy to grace, easy where God is pleased to
give a willing mind, as knowledge is easy to him that understandeth (Pro
14:6; Mat 11:28-30; 1Jn 5:3). Easy; that is, it is a ready way to
justification and salvation, whereas seeking it by our own righteousness
is a round-about way. We can never while we live know in any other way
that one sin is pardoned, because perseverance to the end is required.
Oh, then, be persuaded; and you that have called Him by this name, call
Him so still.
There are four special times and seasons when this should be done.
1. When we have done amiss, and are under guilt, and wrath threatens. And
when is it not that it is so?
2. When we have well done, after some good work, and pride of heart rises, and
we begin to expect from God as if we were something. No, Jesus Christ is the
Lord my Righteousness. I am an unprofitable servant when I have done all
3. When we ask anything of God (Joh 14:23).
4. When we come to look death and judgment in the face, which will be shortly;
when sick and dying. Oh, then, for Christ, and His righteousness--it will be
the cordial of cordials. (Philip Henry.)

The Lord our Righteousness

I. When the people of Christ address Him by this name, it implies A CONTRITE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT THAT THEY HAVE NO RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THEIR OWN,--that they are
destitute of all personal righteousness in which to appear before a holy God.

II. When the people of Christ give this name to Him, they declare THEIR SOLEMN
PERSUASION THAT THEY REQUIRE A RIGHTEOUSNESS, though they have none of their
own, in which to appear before the Holy One of Israel; they not only confess their
entire destitution, but acknowledge their indispensable need, of a true and perfect
righteousness.

III. When the people of Christ address Him by this name, they express and
profess their faith, that Messiah being in one person God and man, has brought in a
righteousness in their behalf, which is by God accepted for them, and imputed unto
them, for their justification.

IV. When the people of Christ call Him by this name, they are seen IN THE ACT OF
EMBRACING, APPROPRIATING, AND REJOICING IN HIM, as the Lord their Righteousness.
The Lord our Righteousness. It is the language of joy and triumph, as well as of
reliance and faith. It is not tile spirit only of the drowning man laying hold of the
plank, but of the safe and happy, rich and joyful man, realising his safety, and
rejoicing in his treasures. My Beloved is mine, and I am His. Conclusion--
1. See here how wondrous a provision the Gospel has made for at once humbling
the sinner and exalting him,--laying him low in his own eyes, and yet
gloriously ennobling him.
2. See what a ground of security, of peace, and of everlasting blessedness, the
believer in Christ enjoys.
3. Use the subject in the way of self-inquiry, and of direction, according to the
result of it. (C. J. Brown, D. D.)

Jehovah-Tsidkenu

I. A righteousness that is absolutely perfect.

1. It has passed through every test (Joh 14:30; Joh 8:46; Heb 4:15; Heb 7:26;
1Pe 2:22).
2. It has fulfilled every requirement (Php 2:8; Mat 3:15; Mat 5:17).
3. It has satisfied the highest claims (Mat 3:17; Rom 4:25; Php 2:9).

II. A righteousness that is identified with Christ Himself.

1. Christ--Gods gift of righteousness (Rom 5:17).
2. Christ for us, in the presence of God (Heb 9:24).
3. He is made unto us righteousness (1Co 1:30).
4. The Lord our Righteousness (Jer 23:6; Isa 40:1-31; Isa 42:1-25; 1Jn 2:1).

III. A righteousness that is put to our account.

1. Not the reward of our obedience (Tit 3:5; Eph 2:8-9; Gal 2:16).
2. Not something we have to wait for (Rom 3:22; Rom 10:4).
3. But a righteousness that is ours now by faith (Rom 5:1; Rom 3:28; Php 3:9).
4. Christ for us, our righteousness, to be distinguished but not separated from
Christ in us, our sanctification (1Co 1:30). (E. H. Hopkins.)
The Lord our Righteousness
In journeying through a mountain region, we find ourselves, at times, on the top
of a gentle hill which will give us a delightful view of the picturesque scenery of the
landscape that immediately surrounds us. But, now and then, we may reach the
summit of some towering mountain. That lifts us far above all other points of view.
As we stand there and gaze, we can look down on hills, and plains, and valleys, and
take in the geography of all the surrounding country. In the mountain range of
Scripture truth, we reach such an elevated summit in our text. The righteousness
here spoken of may be looked at from five different points of view.

I. Its AUTHOR. We see from the connection in which our text is found, that the
person here called Jehovah our Righteousness, is the same as the righteous
Branch, the prosperous King, promised to be raised up unto David. This proves that
the Jehovah of our text is Jehovah-Jesus. Isaiah (Isa 11:1), in speaking of Him, says,
There shall come forth a rod, &c. Ezekiel (Eze 34:29) calls Him the Plant of
renown Zechariah (Zec 6:12-13), speaking of Him, says, Behold the man whose
name is the Branch, &c. When the angel Gabriel foretold His birth, he applied this
very prophecy to Him, saying, The Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of His
father David, and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever. And then, to
complete the testimony of Scripture on this point, and prove to a demonstration that
the Jehovah of our text is Jesus, it is only necessary to turn to a single passage in the
New Testament (1Co 1:13).

II. Its FOUNDATION. It is spoken of in the New Testament as the righteousness of

Christ. And the foundation on which it rests--that of which it is made up--is the
active and passive obedience of our Lord and Saviour. It embraces all that He did, to
honour Gods law, when He obeyed its every precept to the uttermost, in thought
and feeling, in purpose, word, and action; and all that He suffered, when the
tremendous penalties of Gods broken law were visited upon Him. The
righteousness of Christ means simply the BENEFIT of all that He did and suffered.
This benefit, or righteousness, belongs to His people. It is made over to them. It is
reckoned as theirs.

III. Its NATURE. No miser ever felt half the joy in counting over his hoarded gold,
and no monarch ever experienced half the rapture in gazing admiringly on the
magnificence of the crown jewelry he inherits, than the intelligent- Christian
experiences in dwelling on the nature of that all-perfect righteousness that Jesus, his
glorious Saviour, has wrought out for him.
1. It is a gracious righteousness. It was of Gods good pleasure alone, that ever a
plan for working out such a righteousness was devised. It is grace alone
which makes men feel their need of this righteousness, inclines them to seek
it, and makes them willing to cast sin and self, and everything else away, and
to rest on this righteousness, on this only, on this now, and on this for ever,
as the ground of their acceptance with God.
2. It is a perfect righteousness. Gods perfect law was the standard by which this
righteousness was to be measured; and it came fully up to that standard. It
was the scrutiny of Gods holy and penetrating eye to which this
righteousness was subjected. He weighed it in the balances of the heavenly
sanctuary, and declared Himself well pleased with it. It is because of His
 connection with this righteousness that God the Father loves His Son with a
love that is unspeakable. This was what the Psalmist meant (Psa 45:7). And it
is because Christs people share in this righteousness that God cherishes
towards them the same affection that He entertains towards His only-
begotten Son. Nothing less than this will meet our wants. A robe I must
have, says an old writer, of a whole piece; broad as the law, spotless as the
light, and richer than ever an angel wore; and such a robe I have in the
righteousness of Christ. It is a perfect righteousness.
3. It is an uniform righteousness. Where the sun shines at noonday, I have the
benefit of his shining, as fully as though there were none around me to share
his beams, and he shone for me alone. Yet each of my neighbours has, or
may have, the same benefit of his beams that I have. And so it is with the
righteousness of Christ. The dying thief who turned in penitence and faith,
and was accepted in the last hour, had just the same title to enter heaven that
the apostle Paul had, or Peter, or John, or Isaiah, or Elijah, or David, or
Moses, or Abraham, or Enoch.
4. It is an unchanging righteousness. If the whole world, with its contents, were
given at once to you or me, in fee-simple ownership, of course it would be
impossible to add to our worldly possessions. There might be much that was
new for us to discover; but there could be nothing new for us to own. We
might proceed to lay bare the rich mines in our inheritance, and to search
out their hid treasures. But this would only be adding to the knowledge of
our possessions; it would not be enlarging them. And so when Christ gives
Himself and His righteousness to His people, He gives them a world of
spiritual treasures, which it will take all eternity for them fully to explore and
find out. But all this is given to them from the start. The soul once justified is
justified fully. The righteousness which secures justification will remain
without changing what it was at first.
5. It is a glorious righteousness. We see this in the peculiar position which the
ransomed people of Christ will occupy among the creatures of God, in
possessing this righteousness. They will stand on higher ground in the scale
of being than even angels and archangels can ever reach. We have no reason
to suppose that there is another tribe or race of creatures in all the boundless
universe who will rise to a point of elevation like this. This is what is meant
when we are told that Christs ransomed ones are to be a peculiar treasure
unto Him. They are to be to the praise of the glory of His grace, as none
other of His creatures shall be. Their peculiar, distinguishing privilege will be
that Jehovah-Jesus is their righteousness.

IV. Its importance.

1. It is not possible that we can have the comfort of being Christians, unless we
have a clear knowledge of this great truth. Suppose that, in a week from to-
morrow, you have a note of a large amount to take up, and you have nothing
with which to meet it. Of course, under such circumstances, you must feel
very uncomfortable. And suppose that, under these circumstances, a friend
should deposit, in your name, at the bank a sum of money more than
sufficient to meet all your indebtedness. The fact that the money was there
would put you in a position of safety. But unless you have a clear knowledge
and a full assurance of this fact, you cannot be in a position of comfort in
 reference to it. Now, in our natural condition as sinners, we are all
overwhelmingly in debt to God. We are liable at any moment to be called to a
settlement, and we have nothing to say. But when we are led to repent of our
sins, and believe in Jesus as our Saviour, His infinite and all-perfect
righteousness is entered in the bank of heaven in our name, and to our
account. It is reckoned as belonging unto us. If we are able to understand
this truth, and grasp it, in the exercise of a firm faith, we shall have access to
the most full and flowing fountain of comfort which the Gospel affords.
2. Our confidence for the future must depend entirely on our knowledge of this
doctrine, and our belief in it. It is only by sharing in the righteousness of
Christ that any child of Adam ever has entered heaven, or ever will. And the
robes which the ransomed wear who entered that blessed abode are robes
that have been washed, and made white in the blood of the Lamb.

V. Its POSSESSION. It is faith in Christ, alone, which can make this righteousness
ours. Show me one, therefore, who is exercising simple faith in Christ as his Saviour,
and I will show you one who has a gracious, covenant, inalienable right to say, This
little word our in the text takes me in. I belong to the company here spoken of.
Jehovah-Jesus is my Righteousness. (R. Newton, D. D.)

Jehovah our Righteousness

In that day, when we all shall stand before God, there will be a great multitude
whom no man can number, perfectly spotless even in His searching sight. He who is
of purer eyes than to behold evil, will look on them without offence. Nay, more than
this: He will delight in them. These very men came from the world where we live--
out of sin and imperfection--out of disease and decay--out of doubts and fears--out
of murmurings and backslidings, and a thousand infirmities and errors. And whence
came this change? Where nothing approaches that is not perfectly holy, how entered
this uncounted multitude of sinners? First, I think we shall be able to make it
manifest that such a change cannot come from a mans self. We all can do much for
ourselves in the way of self-government. But will any one be bold enough to say that
self-government will make a man perfectly holy in Gods sight? Everything human is
imperfect; and no imperfect thing will suit our present purpose. We must have a
perfect principle of righteousness, a perfect fount of holiness, something into the
image of which the saints may be changed, each in his measure and degree, but all
without spot or flaw of any kind. I answer that I cannot believe death to bring with it
any such radical and total change. On what is the change at death dependent, in the
case of Gods saints? Why, entirely on the reality, and on the amount of progress, of
that other change of which we are speaking. According as they are holy here below,
so will that change be glorious. Again, what sort of a change is it that death brings
about? Not a change of heart--not a change of desires, affections, principles--but
merely, great as it is, a change of circumstances. The righteousness of the saints
remains after death what it was before, with this difference, that every circumstance
which before hindered its development will then be removed, and all will be
replaced by circumstances the most favourable possible. Sin and imperfection will
have been left behind in the grave; perfection and spotlessness put on in the
resurrection. But the spiritual life goes on throughout, before and after death, one
and the same in principle, in nature, in acceptability with God. Mankind is a tree
tainted at the root. It is not that there are not fair branches--goodly leaves--bright
blossoms--vitality and sap in abundance:--but that a taint lies at the root and infects
all, so that it brings forth no fruit fit for the Masters use. What power can heal this
tree? Manifestly, no power from without. All the suns, showers, and dews of heaven
will never eradicate that taint from its root. The only conceivable way would be, if by
some wonderful process its vital sap could be renewed; if some better and healthier
influence could enter into its very root and core, and permeate all its branches with
wholesome and fruit-bearing vigour. Such was the state of our humanity. Our race
laboured under two disabilities before God: guilt, and powerlessness for good. He
that created first, must create anew. By the same power, which made the first man a
living soul, must the second Adam become a life-giving spirit. And all this within the
limits of our race,--that the God whom man had offended, man might satisfy; that as
by the disobedience of one man all were made sinners, so by the obedience of one
man might all he made righteous. And this mighty thing was undertaken and
achieved by the eternal Son of God Himself. He became man: not an individual
human person, bounded by His own responsibilities, accountable to God for Himself
and Himself only, which would have done us no good, whatever were the result of
His Incarnation: but He took our nature upon Him--our nature entire: as entire as it
was in Adam: He entered into its very root and core, and became its second Head.
Now mark--He did not take that nature in its sinful development, as it then was, and
now is, in each member of the human family; this would have been against His very
essence and attributes as God, and was unnecessary for His work, nay, would have
nullified that work: but He did take it subject to all the consequences of the state in
which He found it--to temptation,--to infirmity,--to bodily appetites,--to decay,--to
death. In our nature, He wrought out a perfect righteousness: and He presented
Himself before the Father at the end of His course on earth, as the holy and
righteous Head of our race, claiming of right, and by the terms of the everlasting
covenant, that gift of the Holy Spirit, due by His merits, and become possible by His
perfect human righteousness now united to the Godhead. So, then, the Lord Jesus
becomes the Justifier of our race,--i.e., our clearer from guilt: and the Sanctifier of
our race,--i.e., the giver of the Holy Spirit from the Father, by whom we become holy
and changed into the image of God. Now, let us contemplate the effect on those who
believe. Entering into Christs finished work, they know Him as Jehovah their
Righteousness. In themselves, they are as others. They carry about with them the
remnants of a body of sin, and are in conflict with it as long as they are here below.
But sin has no dominion over them, nor shall it condemn them in that day. They are
accepted in the Beloved. Christs righteousness is their righteousness, because they
are living members of Him the righteous Head, and are regarded by the Father as in
Him with whom He is well pleased. Do you call Christ, Jehovah your Righteousness?
What, then, is your estimate of your own duties, and your performance of them?
(Dean Alford.)

The Lord our righteousness

I. The Lord is our Righteousness, because He is OUR PARDON. We have

redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins. Our amendment--our
often too partial, superficial amendment--is not our pardon; for how can
amendment cancel the past? Neither is our repentance our pardon; it neither is nor
can be the meritorious cause for which God pardons. In the words of one of our
greatest saints: Our repentance needs to be repented of, our tears want washing,
and the very washing of our tears needs still to be washed over again in the blood of
our Redeemer.

II. He is the Lord our Righteousness in the sense of OUR ACCEPTANCE WITH GOD.
It is solely through His merits that we are first received, and are afterwards
continued in the favour of God. Just as His righteousness is the meritorious cause of
the remission of those sins which we repent of, so His righteousness is the
meritorious cause of the acceptance of our service, notwithstanding its
imperfections.

III. In ordaining His Son to be the Lord our Righteousness, God has also
ordained in His wisdom that He should be the SOURCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IN US. He,
our great Head, our second Adam, is the Lord, our renewal in righteousness.
1. We partake of an evil nature, because we have naturally transmitted to us
Adams weak and sinful nature, and those who are savingly in Christ have
had, and yet have, supernaturally transmitted to them Christs nature, as the
seed in them of spiritual and eternal life.
2. He is the Lord our Righteousness, inasmuch as He is the Lord our strength
to serve God and subdue Satan.

IV. IN WHAT RESPECT CHRIST IS NOT, AND NEVER CAN BE, OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.
He never can be our righteousness, so as to supersede the necessity, in any one
particular, of our own personal holiness and righteousness. Righteousness is the
order, the harmony, of Gods intelligent creation, just as sin is its disorder, its
confusion. The righteous Lord loveth righteousness, because He loves order, He
loves harmony, He loves to see His creatures truly and permanently happy, which
they only can be so long as they understand and fulfil the conditions of the
particular place in His creation which He, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, has
assigned to them. The love of God is righteousness. It is our inmost heart and
affections being disposed towards God, as they should be when we consider who
God is, and what He has done for us, and what claims His goodness has on us as
spiritual beings redeemed by His Sons blood. Reverence to God is another branch of
righteousness. It is our souls knowing and realising their place in the presence of so
great and terrible a God. Obedience to rulers is righteousness; it is acting in
accordance with the requirements of the place in which God has set us in human
society. Obedience to parents, honouring and reverencing our parents, loving our
brothers and sisters, is righteousness; it is realising the duties of our condition as
members of families and households. Feeling for, assisting, judiciously and
generously relieving the poor, is righteousness; it is fulfilling our position in a world
left by God full of inequalities of estate and condition; which God has left full of
these inequalities, in order that those servants of His to whom He has lent some
superfluities, may grow in the grace of Christian charity by lessening the misery they
see around them. Bearing distress with patience is another branch of righteousness;
it is our hearts not revolting under, but submitting to, the dispensation of a God who
always orders all things for the very best. (M. F. Sadler, M. A.)

The Lord our Righteous

 I. TO WHOM DOES THIS PASSAGE REFER? It is vain to inquire whether the reference
here be to the Jews literally, or to Christians; for the thing comes to the very same
result.

II. HIS PERSONAL TITLE. He shall be called the Lord our Righteousness. The
word is Jehovah. Hence the amazing importance of the preceding inquiry; for
whoever the person, intended may be, here is a name applied to Him which is
above every name.
1. The language is strong; but His perfections allow it. His omniscience allows it.
Peter said to Him, Thou knowest all things; and He said, The Churches
shell know that I am He who searcheth the reins and the heart. His
omnipresence allows it. Where two or three are gathered together, &c. Lo,
I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. His unchangeableness
allows it. He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
2. The language is strong; but His operations justify it. By Him were all things
created, &c. Without Him was not anything made that was made.
3. The language is strong; but it accords with the worship demanded of Him and
received by Him.
4. The language is strong, but the occasion requires it. His greatness must he
carried into every of His work as a Saviour.

III. HIS RELATIVE CHARACTER, or what He is to us. The Lord our Righteousness.
The former would have filled us with terror; but this softens down the effulgency;
this throws a rainbow around His head, and tells us we need not be afraid of a
deluge. How is He, then, our Righteousness? We answer, generally, He is so in two
ways: by His making us righteous by a change in our state, and by a change in our
nature; for the latter is as really derived from Him as the former.

IV. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THIS. For names are designed to distinguish and to make
their owners known. Persons, more than things, are always called by their proper
names.
1. This is considered His greatest work and honour. When a man takes a name
from any of his actions, you may be assured that he will do it from the most
peculiar, the most eminent, the most glorious of them.
2. It means that He is to be approached under this character. This is always to be
the great subject of the Christian ministry.
3. That all His people would own Him as such. (W. Jay.)

The Lord our Righteousness

I. The law has shut us all up under sin.

1. This law having been given, and being expressive of Gods nature and
holiness, He must require that it be perfectly obeyed. He can allow of no
deviation from it, no coming short in any one jot or tittle. A lawgiver
conniving at the breach of his own laws, though in the smallest particular,
would be to make them despicable.
 2. Who can declare, that never in thought, word, or deed, he has come short of
what he owed to God and his neighbour? Who can say, I am clean, I am pure
from sin? Yet the slightest imperfection, though but in thought, exposes us to
the curse of Gods righteous law.
3. But some perhaps will say, I have not, it is true, done all I should have done;
but I have done my best. The law replies, Tell me not of your best; have you
done all? if not, the curse is upon you. But I have repented of what has
been amiss. Tell me not of your repentance: you have transgressed; the
curse is upon you. But I will do better. Tell me not of doing better: you
must do all. Could you render full obedience for the-time to come, the past is
still against you. That debt is unpaid: you are under condemnation.

II. HOW, THEN, SHALL MAN ESCAPE? He has transgressed, and he must die, unless
he can find one to answer the utmost rigour of its demands, to bear the fiercest
vengeance of its curse. But no creature can do this. What hope, then, unless God
Himself should find a substitute? What hope, unless God Himself should obey the
law which He had given, and suffer in our stead? But is this probable? nay, is it
possible? Yes. God Himself has done it. Jehovah has become our Righteousness.
God has given His only-begotten Son--In Christ, and in Him only, have we
righteousness and strength.

III. Apply these truths.

1. Has the law wrought in us its convincing humbling work? Have we seen
ourselves lost?
2. Have we, under a deep sense of our own undone condition, betaken ourselves
to Christ for help? Have we, without reserve, fixed our hope of salvation
upon Him? (E. Blencowe, M.A.)

The Lord our Righteousness

I. An announcement of an important truth.

1. The Lord is our Righteousness inasmuch as the purpose and plan of justifying
sinners originated with Him.
2. Inasmuch as He Himself has alone procured righteousness for us.
3. Inasmuch as it is through His grace and by his free donation that we receive
righteousness.

II. AN UTTERANCE OF PERSONAL BELIEF AND CONFIDENCE. The language of faith,

hope, joy, gratitude.

III. A DIRECTORY TO THE SPIRITUAL INQUIRER. Anxious sinners wish to know the
way of acceptance with God. The text is a brief but satisfactory answer. (W. L.
Alexander, D. D.)

Christs supreme name

 I. Exhibit the delightful character under which Christ is here presented.
1. His essential dignity.
2. His mediatorial office.
3. The spiritual relation in which He stands to His people.

II. Specify some considerations which put an emphasis and value upon
redemption, and heighten our sense of its importance.
1. The work of redemption has ennobled our nature and shed a lustre over the
annals of our world.
2. It eclipses and throws into the shade the greatest of the Divine works.
3. It enhances the value of temporal blessings following in its train.
4. It forms a permanent bond of union among subjects of grace.
5. Judge of the grandeur of the work by the doom denounced against those who
despise and reject it. (S. Thodey.)

JER 23:7-8
The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the house of Israel
out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them.

Divine persistence
Faith, even our own trembling faith, can hold on, perhaps, to the past; it retires
upon the past in order to fortify its position. There are its reserves, its supplies. It
looks back, and as it looks the big words stand out, the high memories awaken, the
ancient story revives again. God was a King of old. The works that were done upon
earth, He did them Himself. We can believe it still. God was about in those days,
long ago. Men met Him in the way. The hand of the Lord was upon me. Yes! in the
past, in days long ago, we are sure of God; and this, not merely out of traditional
habit, nor merely because it is far off and remote. No! it is rather because the
present is never really grasped or understood in its true significance until it is past.
The present disguises its inner glories in a suit of drab; it is busy with small affairs;
it has no leisure to sit at Gods feet and brood. So the present is always being
misjudged and misinterpreted by those it holds prisoners in its tiresome meshes.
Only as it passes off into some quiet distance from us do the frivolous incidents drop
away out of sight and hearing, and the superficial vulgarities fall back into
insignificance, and the real heart of the mystery is felt in its work upon us. It is no
glamorous illusion which gives wonder to the present as soon as it is past. Rather, it
is become wonderful because it has shaken itself free from the illusion which veiled
it from our eyes while it was still with us. We see it now in its actual worth as part
and parcel of a continuous existence, not as an isolated accident that comes and
goes. So it wins dignity and pathos and beauty. So strange--this transfiguration of
the common-place by the past: an old brick wall, a garden walk, a turn of a lane--all
can become sacred and mystical because of those unknown to us who once walked
there before we were born. And this is right. This is their truth. And so, too, our past,
as we turn to review it, is really recognised to have possessed an importance which
escaped us when it was within our living grasp. We see now how momentous were
the issues involved in this or that ordinary and temporary decision which we took as
it came along, without anxiety or strain. There lay, we now acknowledge, the parting
of the road for us. There and then our souls were indeed at stake. Our whole future
turned on what we saw or did that day. A day at the time so unmarked, and dull, and
unmomentous. How little we remembered God as we did it! Yet it was He, before
whose eyes we were at that moment become a spectacle to men and angels, at that
passing moment when we made our choice. Yes! it is no glamorous illusion that the
past throws: it is the actuality of things which it discloses. The past reveals God at
work in the acts of judgment by which we stand or fall under His searching light.
Therefore it is that the Jew, reading out his national past, saw and found God at
work everywhere in it. Jewish prophecy was concerned with the past, at least as
much as with the future. The prophet looked back and read into the facts their deep
inner interpretation. Old events were recognised by him for their spiritual value;
now they were lifted into the light of the Divine will. When Israel came out of Egypt
and the house of Jacob from among the strange people, Judah was His sanctuary
and Israel His dominion. The sea saw that and fled. Jordan was driven back. The
mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like young sheep. Not at the
moment of the deliverance could Israel have sung out that clear song of recognition.
The escape out of Egypt was probably sordid enough at the moment; troubled,
confused, dismal. Only long afterwards, when it had been clarified by the purifying
process of time, could the prophets eye pierce below the surface disarray and see
the whole scene as a vivid and unthwarted drama; only after long review with vision
purged could the singer pronounce that God came from Teman and the Holy One
from Mount Paran. Backed by the strong assurance that God was with our fathers,
that God brought up His people out of Egypt, Faith must make its great venture and
recognise that the God who was alive and active in the past is the same God to-day
and for ever. This drab and dismal present which rings men ruefully round with its
noisy bustle, with its troublesome futilities, holds in it urgent and supreme the living
energies of God. When it has dropped away from them into the past they will see
and know it. How disastrous, then, to cry out, when it is too late, Surely God was in
this place and I knew it not. Why not wake up at once, in the very heart of stony
and forlorn Bethel, and see now the golden stairs laid between heaven and earth?
Here is the prophets task, to declare that what God did once, He may yet do again.
If He brought up His people out of Egypt, He can yet deliver them out; of captivity in
Babylon. Ah! that is the difficult, the impossible thing to believe. That is when and
where the ordinary temper of faith collapses and recoils and surrenders. Egypt!
They can see it all, feel it all Gods arm was outstretched to save, and He spake; and
His great presence went out to them; and His voice was heard like the voice of a
trumpet, exceeding loud. But Babylon, where they now lie in captivity! How hard
and grim those iron walls of fact which hold the people fast! How relentless the
immense pressure of its tyranny! Day follows day, and all days are the same; and the
night comes following the day; and no watchman can tell them any news; and no cry
shatters the night! Nor even are the people gathered in Babylon. They are not
assembled and compact, as once in Egypt, ready to move altogether if the
opportunity ever came. No; they are now hopelessly divided--scattered to the four
winds; lost in detachments amid a crowd of swarming cities. Nothing can happen;
there is no sign; they see not their tokens. Heaven above them is as brass, and the
earth as iron. No God appears. Well enough in Egypt! We would have gone out with
Moses then with willing feet; but we see no Moses now. Things are too strong for us;
they shut us in. We listen, and no voice answers. It is different now; it can never be
again as it once was. So we can fancy what these poor, faint souls to whom
Jeremiah is writing must have murmured. As if Egypt had not looked just as hard
and just as motionless to those who first heard the summons of Moses; as if it had
not all been as grimly incredible then. And therefore, that same chill of despair that
now overshadows them beside the willows of Babylon need not prevent another day
like that of Moses arising as glorious as in Egypt. Another prophetic epoch will be
known and named for ever. So the prophet announces. Once again the faith which is
strong enough to face and defy the repellent facts of the present shall see its God rise
as of old. We ourselves are sorely aware of conflict between our faith as it gazes back
at the past, and our faith as it faces the shill and staggering present. We who can yet
hold on to our belief in what happened long ago, find no heart to declare this might
happen again to-day. God might be seen as visibly at work; Jesus Christ might be
heard calling us with as clear a voice as that which fell on the ears of fishermen
washing their nets by Galilean waters. The present wears so horribly material an
appearance, and it looks so absurdly remote from Spirit and from God. There is no
God here, we cry; Christ cannot be alive no angels sing here of peace and goodwill.
So everything about us asserts with might and main; it defies us to say our creed in
front of it without laughing or without breaking down in sobs. Yes; but was not the
present always what it feels to us to-day? Did it not always look as hard and
commonplace and godless? The inn at Bethlehem was as noisy and regardless as
Fleet Street to-day. The people felt life then as commonplace an affair as it seems to
us on Ludgate Hill to-day. The past witnesses through all its long centuries to the
actual reality of the living deed done by God in our midst. Again and again in dark
days those who believed it to be true have dared to realise it in their own present day
afresh, and have found it answer to their appeals. There was a revival, as we say, a
revival in the present of what was once for all asserted in the past. As God who had
delivered men from Egypt verified Himself anew in the God who can deliver out of
captivity, so Christ who rose and lived has quickened a new generation sunk in its
sloth; has named a new epoch, has brought in a new day; and men have started from
their sleep to find that it was true what they had always dimly believed, Christ is
alive, Christ is at work here on earth; the impossible can happen; the incredible
change can stir and can transform; it is all true. It shall no more be said merely that
God liveth who once raised Jesus from the dead; but God liveth--our own God--who
still raises in Jesus Christ those who were dead in trespasses and sins into newness
of life for evermore. Why not? Why not now? The old creed is being battered by
ruthless attacks on its past records, and there is only one triumphant answer--a
revival of its ancient efficacy in full swing here and now. Christ, we feel, may have
once raised a dead world into life, but He cannot do it again. Are we going to
acquiesce in that? Are we going to try to keep our faith, and yet confine it to a day
long dead? If Christ cannot do it now, then He never did it. If we resign the present
to its godlessness, then we shall not long retain our belief in God in the past. No; we
have but one obligation: to rally first on the past, and in its strength to dare the
present. Why should not we take our belief in Jesus Christ as seriously to-day, and
let it be done again? Oh, for this outrush of a great revival! We have lingered and
languished so long is not the moment near for some reaction from our spiritual
lethargy? The night has been so prolonged, there must surely be a streak of dawn.
(H. S. Holland, D. D.)
 JER 23:14
They strengthen also the hands of evil-doers.

Strengthening the hands of the wicked

1. All sin is horrible in its nature, as being contrary to the character and will of
God.
2. To strengthen the hands and hinder the repentance of sinners is to oppose the
great plan of the Divine government.
3. It tends to the misery of mankind, and is the reverse of that benevolence
which ought to govern us in all our conduct.
4. It is to operate with that evil spirit who works in the children of disobedience.
5. It is a horrible thing, because we thus become partakers of their sins.
6. It is directly contrary to Gods commands, and marked with His peculiar
abhorrence. (J. Lathrop, D. D.)

JER 23:21-22
I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran; I have not spoken them, yet they
prophesied.

A Divine call indispensable to the success of a minister of the

Gospel

I. A DIVINE CALL IS NECESSARY TO WARRANT ANY MAN IN TAKING UPON HIMSELF THE
MINISTERIAL OFFICE. First, he ought to be satisfied that, in making his decision, he is
not swayed by worldly motives, and should examine himself strictly as to the
singleness of his aim, and earnestness of his desire, to promote Gods glory and the
good of souls. But as there may exist this desire on our part, when there is no call on
God s, there is a second necessary point in regard to which we must be satisfied,
namely, our fitness for the work; and this is a matter which must be determined not
by ourselves, but by the proper authorities of the Church. But there is still another
security against error in reference to this matter; for we must, in the third place,
clearly see a way open in Providence for our approach to the ministerial office; and I
can conceive that, not only may a man be satisfied as to the two first points, but his
way may be so hedged up, that his vocation may be as clear as if a voice were to
address him from heaven upon the subject.

II. The man who intrudes into the ministerial. Office without a proper call, has no
right to expect the Divine blessing upon his labours, whilst he is uncalled and
unsent. There are few things more absurd and thoroughly inconsistent with every
principle of propriety, than the grounds on which young men have too often been
appointed to the holy ministry. How often have we known young men licensed to
preach the Gospel, merely because they had attended the requisite number of years
at college, and were able to undergo an examination, whilst decisive evidences of
personal religion were neither sought nor given; and then ordained as ministers of
Christ upon being presented to a living by a patron, who, perhaps, had little interest
in the parish, and still less in the cause of vital godliness! How deplorable that a
youth inexperienced in the Christian warfare should be appointed to lead the hosts
of the Lord! How deplorable that a person should be ordained to rouse and watch
over the souls of others, who never felt any concern for his own; that one should be
appointed to deal with persons labouring under the convictions of an awakened
conscience, who is altogether ignorant of the matter, and to point out the way of
salvation to others when he knows it only by hearsay himself! It is only a converted
and divinely-called ministry, whose labours God can be expected to own and render
profitable to His Church. However profound the intellect and acute the
discrimination and splendid the eloquence of a mere man-taught preacher, though
he may gratify the itching ears of his audience, and excite their admiration of
himself, so far as the grand ends of preaching are concerned, he is like a man
beating the air.

III. Though a person may have entered into the sacred ministry without a proper
call, there is here a hope held out, that if he is faithful in the discharge of ministerial
duty, God may favour him with a call and render his labours at last eminently
successful. It would seem from Jer 23:22, that, even though a person to enter the
ministerial office from improper motives, and without a Divine call, yet, if he act
according to the instructions of Gods Word, and apply it for the regulation of his
own heart and conduct, and be diligent and faithful in the performance of
ministerial duty, he will be caught by the truth with which he is brought into
contact, and converted and commissioned by God, and made to see the Divine
pleasure prospering in his hand. This is certainly a perilous experiment for any man
to make, but there are undoubted instances on record of unconverted men intruding
into the ministerial office from secular motives, whose presumption has been
pardoned, whose souls have been converted, Whose official appointment has been
recognised of God, and whose labours have ultimately been abundantly blessed. Oh,
what need of intimate and very frequent communion with God, that our graces may
be kept in lively exercise, that, when we mingle with our people, coming fresh from
the ivory palaces, all our garments may smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia; that,
being constantly conversant with spiritual things, and having our affections placed
upon them, an habitual solemnity may pervade our conduct, so that it may be no
effort for us, wherever we go, always to bear in mind that we are the servants of the
Lord Jesus. Ah, were we thus always to act, how should our private conduct
illustrate and enforce our public services! (W. B. Clark.)

If they had stood in My counsel, and had caused My people to hear My

words.

The ideal preacher

I. HIS MENTAL POSITION. If they had stood in My counsel. By Gods counsel

here we understand His written Word. To stand in it implies making His Word the
permanent sphere of the mind, the one great subject of study and scene of action.
This mental position is--
1. Most necessary. Gods thoughts alone and not mans can spiritually and
 effectively help humanity, and these thoughts are only to be got at by
profoundly studying the Scriptures, and thus standing in the counsel of the
Lord.
2. Most ennobling. The man who lives in the Scriptures will have an elevation of
spirit, a nobility of nature, a dignity of bearing that will give him power over
the minds of men.

II. HIS GRAND WORK, Caused My people to hear My words.

1. This is the most difficult work. Mans spiritual ears are so sealed by carnality,
worldliness, and sin, that they will not listen Notwithstanding, this is the
preachers work.
2. This is the most urgent work. The words of the Lord are a mans only light,
hope, and salvation.

III. HIS TRUE TEST. They should have turned their hearers from their evil
ways, &c.
1. Conversion from evil is the great want of mankind.
2. Conversion from evil is the great tendency of Gods Word. (Homilist.)

Gods ministers must deal faithfully with men

Ministers should not be merely like dials on watches, or milestones on the road,
but like clocks and larums, to sound the alarm to sinners. Aaron wore bells as well as
pomegranates, and the prophets were commanded to lift up their voices like a
trumpet. A sleeping sentinel may be the loss of the city. (Bishop Hall.)

The effectiveness of faithful dealings with the wicked

Dr. Pierson said, that at the funeral of a man who had been very generous but
ungodly and dissipated, he felt unwilling to say anything that would be untrue to his
convictions, and accordingly spoke to the business men, who were there in large
numbers, of the folly of neglecting the soul even for the sake of worldly profit. One of
them cursed and swore that he would provide in his will that he (Mr. Pierson)
should never officiate at his funeral. Shortly after, he was smitten of an incurable
disease, and for months he lingered in great agony, and died. He sent for Mr.
Pierson, and begged him to pray for and with him. He also wrote him a letter in
which he said, Be always honest and true with men; tell them the truth, and even
those who at the time may take offence, will afterwards stand by you and approve
your cause. When he came to look into the hereafter, he wanted no shallow
quicksand of flattering falsehood on which to rest his feet.

JER 23:23-24
Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off?

God nigh at hand

God is nigh at hand for judgment: the period of judgment, therefore, need not be
postponed until a remote age; every man can now bring himself within sight of the
great white throne, and can determine his destiny by his spirit and by his action.
God is nigh at hand for protection: He is nearer to us than we can ever be to
ourselves: though the chariots of the enemy are pressing hard upon us, there is an
inner circle, made up of angels and ministering spirits, guarding us with infinite
defences against the attacks of the foe. God is near us for inspiration; if any man lack
wisdom, let him ask of God: what time we are in doubt or perplexity as to the course
we should take, let us whisper our weakness into the ear of the condescending and
ever-accessible Father, and by the ministry of His Spirit He will tell us what we
ought to do. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The practice of Gods presence

God is a Mind having all possible perfections, and one of these is Omnipresence.
The deepest thought of modern poetry is that of the Divine immanence in nature,
and the best modern theology recognises it. Emerson said that Nature is too thin a
veil, God is all the while breaking through. Are there not those among us who
imagine that God dwells in churches, in certain consecrated places, at certain
appointed times, and who rarely think that He is in their houses, unless one lies
dead there and prayer is being said by, an open coffin? The Syrian enemies of the
Israelites caned the God of Israel the God of the hills and not of the valleys,
believing that Jehovahs presence was stationed there, as the Greeks believed that
Neptune was confined to the sea. And something of this misconception lingers in us
all when we think of God as being somewhere else than where we now are. Such
mistakes make worship impossible. If Gods nature had any bounds, if it were
limited to any portion of space, it would be defective in being. If you could conceive
of God as confined to any one place, He would immediately be shorn of His glory. In
order to be God, He must be everywhere in His perfection. He cannot be restrained
and confined by any higher power, for there is none other equally exalted. He would
not voluntarily shut Himself out from His dominions, for He would not willingly
curtail His own perfections. But, it may be asked, is not God peculiarly present in
heaven, in the assemblies of His saints, in the hearts of His loving children? Yes,
wherever He reigns without opposition, there He manifests His completer glory. But
how can God dwell in heaven, in human temples, and in the hearts of His scattered
children, without being omnipresent and without being purely spiritual; that is,
incorporeal? God is in my soul, if there at all, in His whole nature, and in yours also;
and when you come to realise the presence of God, never think that a fragment of
Him is before you. No; the whole nature of the Eternal and Infinite Jehovah, before
whose presence angels hide their faces, from whose throne the heavens and the
earth flee away, and in whose light in the celestial climes the sun himself dare not
shine, the whole essential glory of the Lord, God Almighty, penetrates, sustains, and
glorifies our lives continually. God is an infinite Mind, present here in His infinite
glory, and present in whatever other part of the universe I may ever dwell. And if
you say such a mode of Being as His is mysterious even to inconceivability, I gladly
and reverently grant it. God is Light, and as the light of the sun fills a globe of crystal
with its splendour, displacing no particle, and yet not becoming identified with that
which it illuminates, so God fills all this crystalline universe with His shining
presence without becoming identified with that which He glorifies. Thus a rational
philosophy justifies the teaching of Gods omnipresence; but modern science throws
even a more dazzling light on this sublime theme. Science, as taught to-day, presents
to us four commanding facts, each one of which runs into practical religion. The first
of these is the omnipresence of thought and adaptation in the universe. The doctrine
of evolution, as Professor Drummond has said, has not affected, except to improve
and confirm it, the old teaching that all things have been created on a plan. Now the
plan is a complicated one, requiring the fitting together of many parts. It is plain
that He who brings in the winter months directs the honey-bee to lay up in
summertime its store of food for the season of cold, and teaches it to build of
waterproof wax its six-sided cells, wherein the honey may be packed without waste
of room. Mind is present, not only in the bees instinct, but in the world which
supplies with its blossoms the sweetness on which the bee feeds. The second fact
which science presents to us is the universality of motion. It is a mistake to speak of
anything as being at rest. The universe is one blazing wheel within another blazing
wheel, all rushing with inconceivable rapidity, and testifying, by the omnipresence
of motion, to the omnipresence of that Mind that created and upholdeth all things,
and without whose continued activity the very thought of universal motion is
inconceivable and inconceivably absurd. The third fact that science presents to our
attention is the universality of law. There is no caprice in the motions of the
universe, but undeviating submission to intelligent regulation. But the proof of the
universality of law is the proof of the omnipresence of God. Law is only the method
of the Divine activity. Law is inconceivable except as the working of a willing Mind.
Law, self-made and self-executed, is an absurdity, as much so as a proposition made
to yonder organ that it should compose and then render the Hallelujah Chorus. So
that when you extend the domain of law so as to embrace the rushing hosts of the
stars, and you find law everywhere executed, you only announce the omnipresence
of Him who said to Jeremiah, Am I a God at hand,. . . and not a God afar off?. . . Do I
not fill heaven and earth? And the fourth fact which science presents is the
omnipresence of conscience. The moral law cannot be escaped. But this law is not of
human origin. It was not enacted, it is not executed by man. It existed prior to all
human legislation. It is universal and infallible; and, above all, it is executed by a
Power not human. God is behind it and in it: and if we can escape by no possibility
from its action, then by no possibility can we escape from the presence of Him who
is its Author and Executor. Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see
him? saith the Lord. Neither heaven, nor hell, nor the uttermost part of the sea is
beyond the immediate presence of Him who filleth all in all It is sometimes said that
God is in the world. It is truer to say that the world is in God. In Him we and all
things move and have our being, and thus the universe becomes what Sir Isaac
Newton called it, The vast sensorium of Deity, with God vital and throbbing in
every part. He upholds all things by the Word of His power. When the question was
asked of Basil, one of the Christian Fathers, How shall we do to be serious? he
answered, Mind Gods presence. How shall we avoid distraction in service? he
replied, Think of Gods presence. How shall we resist temptations? Oppose to
them Gods presence. This is Gods method of perfecting holiness. Enoch, the first
saint, is described as one who walked with God. His faith was to him the evidence of
things not seen. His loving trust made God a present reality. The Lord said unto
Abraham, Walk before Me, and be thou perfect. The secret of perfection is to know
Gods presence. Remember this truth when you are abroad in nature, and nature is
everywhere, in your solitary room as truly as among the summer fields. This is Gods
universe, in every part of which He is actively present. Behold Him in the light, as
the Persian poets did, for He is there. See Him in the sun, as the makers of the
Hindu Scriptures did. Breathe in His life as you breathe the morning air, for it is
Gods atmosphere in which you dwell. Let every created thing be a reminder of the
Infinite Father, the Eternal Spirit, who lives in all life, moves in all motion, shines in
all splendour, and filleth heaven and earth. And remember this truth when you pray.
It will kindle your soul to devotion, it will control rebellious thoughts, it will make
prayer a real communion with a personal God. Remember this truth in the midst of
sorrow. It brings to the weary and troubled heart the immediate presence of the
Infinite Comforter. It brings before the mind the consolation of an omnipresent
love, and the sure defence of an omnipotent hand. And remember this truth in your
daily toil. God is with you, and you may build a chapel to Him in your heart and sing
His praises from morning until night. But if God is everywhere, the Spirit of God,
embodied in His people, should go everywhere. There can be no righteous divorce in
our best lives from this sorrowing and sinning world. The Church has lived too much
apart with God, in meditation and worship. Its business is to enter human life in
every division of it, with the Divine Spirit of healing and help. (J. H. Barrows, D. D.)

The present God

I. THE FOLLY AND SIN OF EVERY FORM OF IDOLATRY. When Pompey, the Roman
general, had conquered Jerusalem, his curiosity prompted him to enter the temple;
and finding no image there of any divinity, he was filled with astonishment, and
would fain have called the Jews atheists. The presence of an image seemed to him an
essential part, or, at least, an important prerequisite, of Divine worship. As Pompey
thought, so all pagans think; hence we term them Idolaters (from ei!dwlon, an
image), because they either worship an image as God, or adore their divinities
through the instrumentality of an image. This practice both reason and revelation
condemn, as being exceedingly senseless, and exceedingly sinful.

II. THE TRUTH OF THE TEXT SHOULD STIMULATE US TO THE CULTIVATION OF AN

INCESSANTLY DEVOTIONAL SPIRIT. The whole universe is but one vast apartment filled
with the Divine presence, and everywhere, therefore, we may be closeted with God

III. SURE CONSOLATION TO THE CHRISTIAN, AMIDST THE SORROWS TO WHICH HE IS

EXPOSED. God sees every tear, hears every groan. His seeing is blended with
sympathy. Like as a father pitieth his children, &c. With the exercise of sympathy
is connected the putting forth of Divine power. He will either deliver us from our
sorrow, or give us strength bravely to bear it.

IV. WHAT A SAFEGUARD AGAINST THE SEDUCTIONS OF SIN MAY THOSE NOBLE WORDS
PROVE, Shall we yield to temptation beneath the gaze of the infinitely Holy One!
Shall we dare to oppose the righteous will of Him, in whom we live and have our
being? Shall we dare to break the holy commands of the Divine law-giver, in whose
presence we are at all times placed? (Homilist.)

The Divine perfections

There are three ways of discoursing upon the perfections of God.
1. We prove that there is a God, and that He must have these powers and
qualities which we ascribe to Him.
 2. Supposing that God is, and that He possesses all perfections, we explain them
as far as the sublimity of the incomprehensible subject permits, and confute
the wrong opinions which have been entertained concerning them.
3. Supposing that they to whom we address ourselves have just and honourable
notions of all Gods perfections, and confining ourselves chiefly to practical
truths, we show the effects which such a belief and such knowledge ought to
produce, and endeavour to excite in them a behaviour suitable to their faith.

I. Gods omnipresence, unlisted knowledge, and irresistible power.

1. God is present everywhere. A proof of this may be taken from the creation.
The world is plainly the offspring of one great and wise mind, which
produced it, and disposed all its parts in that beautiful order in which they
continue, and gave them those regular motions which they preserve, and by
which they are preserved. Now God must of necessity be present with the
things that He made and governs.
2. He is present everywhere in knowledge. This perfection is united with the
former: for, if God be everywhere, everything must be known to Him.
3. God is also present everywhere in power. He is the only independent being,
He is before all things, He made all things, He upholds and governs all
things; from Him all powers are derived, and therefore nothing is able to
resist or defeat His will

II. What effects the fore-mentioned truths should produce in us.

1. We should endeavour to resemble God in these perfections, and in the
manner in which He exerciseth them.
2. This consideration should deter us from sin.
3. This consideration should teach us humility. Pride is a very unfit companion
for poverty and dependence; and vain men should remember that they
receive all from God, and that they can acquire and preserve neither strength
nor skill unless by His blessing, by His appointment or permission.
4. A particular encouragement to reliance and contentment, to faith and hope.
(J. Jortin, D. D.)

The omnipresence of God

I. THE DOCTRINE OF GODS OMNIPRESENCE. The omnipresence of which the Bible

teaches us that God is possessed, is that attribute by which He is present
everywhere, equally, at all times, in the possession of all His perfections.
1. The uniformity of the operations of nature, and of the moral principles by
which the universe is governed,--everywhere that we are able to trace them,--
leads us to conclude that the same God is everywhere present, as the Ruler
and Disposer of all.
2. The possession of this attribute is necessary to the perfection of His other
attributes, and the want of this would destroy the analogy and resemblance
that otherwise exists between them.
3. The declarations of Scripture regarding the omnipresence of God are both
 plain and numerous: Job 11:7-9; Act 7:27-28; Psa 139:7-11; 1Ki 8:27; Am 9:2-
3; Jer 23:23-24; Mat 18:20; Mat 28:20.

II. The practical aspects of the doctrine of Gods omnipresence.

1. God is everywhere present, as the Preserver and Governor of all.
2. God is everywhere present as the object of religious worship,
3. God is everywhere present as the inspector of our conduct.
4. God is always present as the helper and Saviour of His people. In the time of
duty he will give them strength to perform, in the time of trial strength to
resist, and in the Period of trouble strength to endure. (W. Dickson.)

The Divine omnipresence

Few things in nature but are mysterious to us. Outward appearances we know, but
when we attempt to inquire into the causes of things, we find our researches quickly
at an end. Our sensations give us no intelligence of the essence of those material
objects which produce them, nor, indeed, immediately of their existence itself: and
though we have an inward consciousness of our own existence, our perceptions, and
volitions, yet what the intimate nature is of that self-consciousness, we cannot
understand. Least of all can we form any adequate notion of the Supreme Being
himself. By reflecting on ourselves, on the constitution of our nature, with its
various tendencies, affections, passions, and operations, and by considering external
objects as perceived by our senses, we are led to a persuasion of His being, power,
wisdom, and goodness. By this method of inquiry we are also convinced that God is
intimately present with us, and with all beings in the universe: yet still it is only by
the means of sensible effects that we attain to this conviction. The Divine nature and
attributes themselves, the inward principle of the Almightys various operations, no
man hath seen at any time, nor can see. Hence it follows, and we find it so in
experience, that the Perfections of God which are the most clearly manifested, and
immediately exercised in His works, are the best understood by us. We have much
more distinct apprehensions of power, wisdom, and goodness, than of self-existence
and infinity. With regard, therefore, to those attributes which it is hardest for us to
conceive, we shall still think and speak of them the most usefully, when, as far as it
can be done, we consider them in relation to the works of God. God is from all
eternity: He consequently exists without any cause; He therefore necessarily is, and
it is impossible that He should not be. But it is certain that absolute necessity of
existence excludes all relation to any one place more than another: for He who is, by
necessity of nature, must be everywhere, for the same reason that He is anywhere;
because if He could be absent from any one place, He might be absent also from any
other place, and so could have no necessary existence. To necessity of existence all
points of space are alike; and, therefore, it is equally necessary in them all. This
argument is held to be irrefragable: but there is another, at once more obvious and
more convincing. We see, in this vast creation, a power everywhere exerted in
pursuing a design that is perfectly uniform and consistent: we see it exerted at all
times, and in all places; the same intentions are, by the same energy, advanced from
age to age. Now, wherever this power is exerted, there is God; in the heavens above,
and in the earth beneath. But if we know that He fills heaven and earth, we know
that there can be no difficulty in supposing that He is present in all imaginable
worlds, and in all imaginable space. In this kind of reasoning, from obvious and
manifest appearances, the mind rests perfectly satisfied. And thus we conceive, that
as in man there is one individual conscious self, that sees, hears, feels, and
determines for the whole body; so in the universe (but in a manner infinitely more
perfect) there is one conscious intelligent nature, which pervades the entire system,
at once perceiving in every place, and presiding over all To every good mind this
must be a joyful reflection. It is a noted observation, that in the company of one
whom we esteem and love, we are sensible of a pleasure which seems to
communicate itself to all objects around us. And why should not all nature appear to
us delightful, as it is everywhere the seat of the Divine presence; the seat of that
presence which contains the perfection of grandeur and of beauty? God is here; and
should not everything rejoice as in His presence? So the rising sun displays his
beams, and the skies are filled with day; a thousand beautiful objects open to the
eye, nature smiles on every hand, and the world appears a grand and delightful
theatre. To look on the beauty of opening flowers, gradually growing up to all their
pride, is certainly pleasant, even to a superficial observer; but to discern the
Creators hand which adorns them in a manner so delightful, and to consider them
as the contrivance of the eternal Mind, eloquently displaying His intention to please
the children of men, this shows them in a very different, and in a much nobler light.
Even the most formidable appearances in nature, considered in this view, become
easy to the imagination. If the thunders and the lightnings of heaven are conceived
as having the Deity presiding in them; if the wild tempests and the tumultuous
ocean are His servants, constantly under His eye, ever executing His pleasure, and
having all their force measured by Him; they cease then to be terrible, for they
discover a power which must be always tempered with kindness, and directed by
love. (A. MacDonald.)

The omnipresence of God

I. INFINITE KNOWLEDGE. If a being is perfectly acquainted with me--if he knows all

I do, and all I say, and all I think--he is, in an eminent sense, present with me. In
this sense God is everywhere present; there is nothing hidden, nothing concealed
from Him.

II. DIRECT, CONSTANT, AND UNIVERSAL AGENCY. Wherever a being immediately

operates, there He is present. When God created the world out of nothing, He was
present at its production: but the same power is requisite to sustain, as to create, the
universe. If we imagine the lights of heaven to exist and move, and the processes of
nature to be carried on by the laws of this Creator, yet let it be remembered, that
there is no binding power in law; it is only the ordinary rule by which creative
energy and power sustains the world, and the works He has formed. Thus it is with
Gods power in the laws of nature, not simply by ordination or by appointment, but
by a perpetual impartation of mighty energy, which, if for a moment withheld, the
world would cease to be. And He is not only employed in preserving His works, but,
as far as our knowledge extends, He is perpetually calling new beings into existence
and terminating the present condition of others. Both are perpetually passing the
opposite barriers of life--entering into existence, and passing out of it: but neither
event transpires without the immediate presence of God.
 III. THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF HIS PURPOSES. The world was created for His glory:
but if on its production he had retired from it, only sustaining it in being, we might
have seen His power in creation; but His wisdom, His might, His goodness in the
works of providence, would not have been displayed. But He governs the world
which He has made, and His supremacy is so complete that nothing happens
without His permission; and every purpose of the Eternal Mind will he fully and
perfectly accomplished. The purpose of the Lord shall stand, and He will do all His
pleasure. To accomplish these objects He must be everywhere present; not only
acquainted with external events, but with the thoughts and the intents of the human
heart.
1. The grandeur and the incomprehensibility of Jehovah.
2. The nature of all true religion. All religion is founded on correct views of the
Deity; it is the state, the habit of mind, which accords with our relation to
God and His perfections. If, therefore, God be a Spirit, and by reason of His
spiritual nature is everywhere present, then He must be worshipped in spirit
and in truth; that is, in sincerity and with the heart.
3. Religion is a habit of mind. It consists not in isolated acts of worship; not in
our regular attendance on the Sabbath in the house of prayer: but the
conviction that God seeth us at all times should make us religious in all
places.
4. Our subject is full of consolation to the good man. Oh, it is a delightful and
cheering thought, that my heavenly Father is never absent from me.
5. However forgotten and contemned may be the doctrine of Gods
omnipresence, it is an awful truth to ungodly men. (S. Summers.)

The omnipresence of God

1. THE PROOFS OF IT. It is implied in the idea of an unoriginated Being, that there
can be nothing to limit Him. Were His existence determined to one place,
rather than to another, it must have been so determined by some prior
cause; and, consequently, He could not have been the first cause.
2. That necessity by which the Deity exists, can have no relation to one place
more than to another. It must be the same everywhere that it is anywhere.
The infinity itself of space is nothing but the infinity of the Divine nature.

II. The manner of it.

1. God is to be conceived as present with us in all we think, as well as in all we
do. The motives of our actions, our most secret views and purposes, and the
inmost recesses of our hearts, lie naked before Him.
2. He is present with us by His influence. His hand is always working to preserve
us, and to keep up the springs of life and motion within us.
3. He is present with us by His sense. We feel Him in every effort we make, in
every breath we draw, and in every object that gives us either pain or
pleasure.
4. It follows, from hence, that He is present with us in a manner in which no
other being can be present with us. It is a presence more real, more close,
more intimate, and more necessary.
 III. The practical improvment of this subject.
1. Since God is equally present everywhere, we ought not to imagine that our
worship of Him can be more acceptable in one place than in another.
2. Since God is the only being that is present with us in the manner I have
described, there can he no other being who is the proper object of our
prayers.
3. The consideration of the constant and intimate presence of the Deity with us,
ought to encourage us in our addresses to Him. He is our benevolent parent,
and therefore no pious wish of our hearts, no virtuous breathings of our
minds, no desire of bliss that can be directed to Him, can escape His notice,
or fail of being properly attended to.
4. A reverential fear should continually possess us, since God is always with us.
5. The presence of God with us should deter us from sin.
6. The presence of God with us should support us in the performance of our
duty, and quicken us in a virtuous course.
7. The consideration of Gods presence with us should encourage and comfort us
under every pain and trouble. A present Deity is a present friend, and a
present helper in every time of need. (R. Price, D. D.)

The omnipresence of God

If you were cast out of your country a thousand miles off, you are not out of Gods
precinct; His arm is there to cherish the good, as well as to drag out the wicked; it is
the same God, the same presence in every country, as well as the same sun, moon,
and stars; and were not God everywhere, yet He would not be meaner than His
creature, the sun in the firmament, which visits every part of the habitable world in
twenty-four hours. (S. Charnock.)

JER 23:28-29
The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath My Word,
let him speak My Word faithfully.

The word and the dream

The prophet here exhibits in contrast Divine teaching and the speculations of
men. The former he calls the Word of the Lord. The latter he calls but dreams, the
visionary offspring of the human mind, and partaking of the weakness and fallibility
of the source whence they spring. Human minds must think. They will clothe truth
in forms of their own. Classify, arrange, systematise. It helps memory and clearness
of conception. Yet all such speculation needs to be under the restraint of a godly
fear, of a solemn sense of responsibility, to be sober, guided by a constant reference
to Holy Scripture, carefully restrained from wandering into the dangerous regions of
mere invention, and guarded against the spirit of dogmatism and dictation. The
moment the dream of man and the oracle of God are put on a footing of equality,
and the distinction that separates them is forgotten, mischief ensues; the teacher
promulgates error, his teaching degenerates into vain babbling; and the lips that
should keep knowledge, cause the people that seek at them the law of the Lord to
err through their lies and their lightness. In that pure word alone Divine energy and
efficiency reside. That is the fire whose searching heat few things can abide
unchanged, the hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces, that alone can effectually
subdue the hardness of the human heart, and conquer the stubbornness of the
human will. One step in the process of obtaining scriptural truth from Scripture is
interpretation. Scriptural truth is not the letter of the word, but its meaning, the
mind of God conveyed to men under its various forms and delineations. Truth lies in
the Scriptures as the ore lies in the mine, mingled with foreign substances, disguised
by various combinations. Not till it is elicited, disengaged and presented in its
simple, unmixed condition, is it moral and spiritual truth, an infallible lesson of
doctrine and duty to men. Another step in the process of obtaining scriptural truth
from Scripture is to systematise, arrange, and combine the results of interpretation.
Truth must be adjusted to truth, so that they may be parts of a coherent whole, and
not a confused aggregation of unrelated particles. A separate truth viewed without
reference to other truths grows immediately disproportionate and corrupt. Hence
the necessity of comparing spiritual things with spiritual, prophesying according
to the proportion, that is, the analogy of the faith, rightly dividing the word of
truth. Let us next attend to the action of the human mind on the truth thus
ascertained. The mind will not receive truth passively. It will think, speculate. For
instance, it is taught redemption, viz., that by the suffering and death of Christ, man
is relieved from the wrath of God and the punishment legally due to transgressors
on condition of becoming penitent and believing. This is Divine teaching. But the
mind will not rest there. It will have theories of redemption, and it may have
different theories innocently, provided it leaves the truth in its integrity; and any
man may tell his theory, his dream, if he do but tell it as a theory, and not put it on a
level with the truth which it attempts to explain. There are Scripture hints, again,
which we cannot refrain from attempting to expand, to give them form and fulness
by conjectures of our own; as, for instance, a spiritual state of being and a future life
we seek to clothe with substance and reality by imagining what they are, what are
the conditions of such states of existence, what are their sources of enjoyment, what
their modes and occasions of action; and we seize upon analogies and symptoms, if
we can find any, to help our conceptions. But the teacher must always be careful to
distinguish between the explicit announcements of Gods Word, which are infallible
because Divine, and those thoughts of man about them, which are valuable only in
proportion to the soundness of the argument and evidence by which they are
sustained. But there is a question lower down than all we have yet said--How shall
we extract scriptural truth from Scripture,--how shall we derive the meaning from
the letter of the Word?
1. The natural and apparent meaning is ordinarily the true one. The Bible is God
teaching men by human speech. To do this effectually it conforms to the laws
of human speech. It is popular teaching clothed in popular phraseology, and
not in the technical language of scientific theology.
2. That meaning of any particular passage of Scripture is the true one, which
harmonises with the general strain of its teaching. We are not to build
doctrines on isolated texts, if there are other texts which, fairly considered,
operate to modify and limit their sense. God must he consistent with
Himself. What He says in one place cannot contradict what He says in
another. And the true sense in either must be that which gives a consistent
 sense in both.
3. The ancient meaning is to be preferred to any that is more modern. There are
no such things as discoveries in Christianity. It is not an improvable system.
It has no such thing as growth. Christianity came from the hands of its
Author perfect and unalterable. No doctrine that was unknown in early ages
is any part of it. We are to remember that the Gospel was taught before it was
written, that a definite system of belief and practice was established before
the Christian Scriptures were composed. And the Scriptures do but echo and
republish this, and with this system in our minds, handed down from the
beginning in the Church, we are to read them. The meanings that conform to
it we are to embrace, the meanings that contradict it we are to reject. (R. A.
Hallam, D. D.)

Religious truth and error

I. Religious error is a human dream but religious truth is a divine word.

1. Let us notice a few of the religious errors that have ever been prevalent in the
world.
(1) Sacramentalism--the idea that we can discharge our moral obligations,
and obtain the favour of God, by attending to certain religious
ceremonies.
(2) Moritorialism the Pharisaical idea that, on the ground of our own
individual excellence, we have a claim to the Divine benignancy.
(3) Functionalism--the idea that certain periodical religious services
rendered to our Maker, where the life is selfish and worldly, are
acceptable worship.
(4) Proxyism--the idea that we can be saved through the merits or offices of
some priest, or supposed heaven-favoured man.
(5) Fatalism--the idea that we can do nothing; that if we are to be saved, we
shall be saved, and that, therefore, we must run the risk.
2. These ideas are all human dreams.
(1) They imply a partial dormancy of the soul.
(2) They are temporary illusions. There is a morning to dawn on every soul,
when they will melt away as visions.
3. But while these religious errors are mere human dreams, religious truth is
Gods Word. A word is the representative of mind. Gods Word is the
representative of His all-perfect Mind; it is the arm of the Lord revealed.

II. Religious error, as well as truth, is allowed a voice in this world.

1. God allows it to speak. He does not seal the lips of the false prophet. This fact
indicates--
(1) The superior force of truth. God knows that truth is sufficient to conquer
any error, if His prophets will but speak out faithfully.
(2) Mans inalienable right to free speech. God allows it even to the false
prophet. It is not, therefore, for man to interfere with this right.
 (3) The probability of future retribution. False prophets will not always
speak; their mouths will one day be stopped; they will be speechless.
Eternal justice demands this.
2. But whilst the false is allowed to speak, the true is bound to speak. He that
hath My Word, let him speak My Word faithfully. My Word, not his own;
not the word of others, but Mine, and that faithfully. Though it clash with
mens tastes, prejudices, and practices, speak it;--though it rouse the
bitterest opposition, lead to the sacrifice of property, health, life itself, speak
it, and speak it faithfully.

III. The relative value of religious truth and religious error does not admit of
comparison.
1. What are these human dreams, these religions errors, though elaborated into
intellectual systems, or organised into gorgeous rituals, compared to My
Word? Chaff.
2. But this pithy appeal may be viewed in other applications without violating its
spirit.
(1) It may apply to ideas and their expressions. There is a man who is
exceedingly particular about the garb of thought: all his talk is about
style. Mere style is chaff.
(2) It will apply to religion and its forms. There is another who is
wondrously attached to certain forms of worship; he has but little
sympathy with those who adopt not his ritualism. Mere formalities are
chaff.
(3) It will apply to character and its accidents. There is another who has not
much sympathy with a brother, because of his appearance, manners, or
connections. These accidents of character are chaff.
(4) It will apply to spiritual and secular worth. There is yet another who is
striving after worldly wealth; who thinks more about property than
principle--the body than the soul. The world is chaff compared with the
soul. (Homilist.)

The faithful utterance of the Divine Word

I. A COMPARISON INSTITUTED AND ILLUSTRATED. What is the chaff to the wheat?

The comparison is instituted between the pure authorised Word of God, and the
vain fancies and delusions of men, called here dreams. Dreams are those vague
speculations of men who profess to be trying to find something new in the world of
religion about God, man, and the future life,-while at the same time they depart
from the truth. Their endeavour seems to be to comfort and cheer those who are
anxious about spiritual things, and the future, by throwing doubt upon the old
teachings, and they cry, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. But the sure Word of
God tends to arouse men, to quicken their consciences, and show them what they
are within themselves. Revelation is a light streaming from the throne of God upon
our dark world; where its beams shine, the night of pagan darkness retires, the
spectres of ancient superstition depart, and errors which had enslaved the mind for
ages melt away; there Truth erects her throne and bestows the blessings of her
reign; she breaks the iron sceptres of despotism, throws open wide the putrid
dungeons of oppression, removes the fetters of the slave, awakens the torpid powers
of the mind, erects the prone savage into a man, transforms man into a saint, and
fits him to dwell with the angels of God. In the time of sorrow, when life is darkened
with affliction and bereavement, what are the dreams of men then when compared
with the Word of God? said a man some time ago, who had not gone to the Word of
God for his comfort and hope in times of trial, but he had tried to find comfort and
hope in the philosophy, falsely so called, of human reason; finding, as he thought, a
refuge in agnosticism; but when his beloved daughter died, and when he saw the
corpse prepared for its last resting-place, his heart was sad, for he saw nothing
beyond; in his philosophy he could find no help, not a ray of light to lighten the
gloom, and there was nothing to soothe his sorrow, until from the lips of the man of
God standing by the side of the casket he heard words that seemed to drop from
Heaven for him: Let not your heart, &c. Then, he said, whilst the tears were not
dried, and the sorrow for the present loss yet remained, yet through the tears I could
see a light breaking through the darkness, and above the sorrow a fountain of joy,
which would be eternal, and I rested upon the Word and found peace.

II. AN ADMONITION TO MINISTERS, URGING THEM TO FAITHFULNESS IN THE DELIVERY

OF THE DIVINE WORD. And he that hath My Word let him speak My Word
faithfully. Let him maintain its Divine authority. Let him hold to the truth and
proclaim the Word that has the thus saith the Lord behind it. Speak it not as the
word of men, but as the Word of God. Let the dreams of men be told (if they must be
told) as dreams, but let the faithful minister proclaim the Word of God with all
faithfulness and earnestness. Let him speak it correctly. Keep close to instruction,
neither add to nor take from, bring no corrupt glosses, but receive it at the mouth of
God, and deliver it pure and unadulterated to the people. But there is also, I think,
in the text a word or suggestion for the hearers, as well as for the preacher. They
should take heed how they hear, and should never indulge in the desire for human
speculation instead of the Word of God. (John T. Wills, D. D.)

Ministerial fidelity

I. EXPLAIN THIS MINISTERIAL DUTY. To preach the. Word of God faithfully implies-
-
1. That a minister understands it. He that hath My Word, &c. By having the
Word of God is meant having the knowledge of it, in distinction from having
a dream, or a mere imaginary idea of Divine truth. It is true that a perfect
knowledge of every text in the Bible is not necessary, in order to preach the
Word of God faithfully. No man does, nor perhaps ever will, possess such a
universal and perfect knowledge of the Scriptures. But yet a clear, a just and
general knowledge of the first principles of the oracles of God, is necessary to
qualify a preacher for the faithful discharge of his duty. Ministers must have
the Word of God in their understandings as well as in their hearts, in order
to be able and faithful instructors of the doctrines and duties of Christianity.
2. They must not only understand the Word of God, but know that they
understand it. He that hath a dream, saith the Lord, let him tell a dream,
and not pretend it is My Word; and he that hath My Word, let him speak My
 Word; and speak it as Mine, and not as his own. But if ministers do not
know that they understand the Word of God, how can they, with propriety
and sincerity, preach His Word as His Word? To do this would be daring
presumption. The primitive preachers -of the Gospel knew that they knew,
not only the inspiration but the doctrines of the Gospel. They could say, We
believe, and therefore speak. They could confidently declare that they did
not preach cunningly devised fables.
3. Fidelity requires ministers to preach the Word of God fully, and lay open the
great system of doctrines contained in it. The apostle Paul declares that he
did not preach the Gospel in a partial and superficial manner, nor shun to
declare the whole counsel of God. And if we look into his epistles we shall
find that he developed the great plan of salvation as devised by God the
Father, as executed by God the Son, and as applied by God the Holy Ghost.
He explained the distinct offices and operations of the ever-blessed Trinity,
in creating, redeeming, and governing the world. Of course, he taught the
doctrine of Divine decrees; the doctrine of human depravity the doctrine of
vicarious atonement; and the doctrine of Divine agency in preparing all
mankind for their future and final destination. It is difficult to see how
ministers can preach the Word of God faithfully, unless they preach it in
such a full and comprehensive manner.
4. They must preach the Word of God plainly, so as to be understood; but they
cannot be understood by the great majority of their hearers, unless they use
proper words, arranged in their usual, natural, and proper order. Christ
preached as He conversed, with peculiar perspicuity. Paul imitated His
example. He said he had rather speak five words which were easy to be
understood, and edifying to common Christians, than ten thousand which
they could not understand, and which could do them no good.
5. Fidelity requires ministers to preach the Gospel in its purity and simplicity.
They have no right to mix their own crude and confounded opinions with the
revealed truths which they are commanded to deliver. Truth mixed with
error is often more dangerous than mere error alone.
6. It belongs to the office of those who preach the Word of God, to defend it
against its open enemies. They are set for the defence of the Gospel; and
charged, in meekness, to instruct those who oppose themselves, if God
peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth.
And to hold fast the faithful Word that by sound doctrine they may both
exhort and convince gainsayers, whose mouths must be stopped.
7. The faithful preaching of the Gospel necessarily includes godly sincerity.
Christ requires those to love Him supremely, whom He employs to feed His
sheep and lambs.

II. Enforce the practice of ministerial fidelity.

1. God expressly commands those who preach His Word to be faithful in the
discharge of their duty.
2. It concerns them to consider, that they have solemnly bound themselves to be
faithful in their sacred office.
3. Faithful preaching has a tendency to save, but unfaithful preaching has a
tendency to destroy the souls of men.
 Conclusion--
1. If preaching the Gospel faithfully includes so much as has been represented,
then ministers have a very arduous and laborious work to perform.
(1) It requires much reading and much thinking to acquire that knowledge of
the Gospel, and that knowledge of the human heart, and that knowledge
of the various ways of preaching and affecting the human heart, which is
necessary in order to preach plainly, instructively, and impressively.
(2) Besides preaching, they have a vast many pastoral services to perform,
which require the exercise of all their wisdom, prudence, zeal, and self-
denial.
2. If ministers are bound to preach the truth and the whole truth faithfully, then
they are bound to preach against every species of error, whether in principle
or practice. They are set as watchmen to espy danger, and warn their people
against it.
3. If ministers are bound to preach the Word of God faithfully, then they can
have no excuse for being unfaithful Their obligations to fidelity are superior
to all the reasons they can possibly urge in excuse for unfaithfulness. The
commands of God, their own engagements, the cause of Christ, and the
salvation of souls, create obligations to fidelity, paramount to all possible
excuses for unfaithfulness, in the sight of God and man.
4. If ministers are bound to preach the Word of God faithfully, then they ought
not be afraid to preach it faithfully. (N. Emmons, D. D.)

God not in the preachers code

Dr. J. G. Paten, when last leaving these shores for the South Seas, was seen off by
a good number of friends. Many of his well-wishers were assembled on one of our
piers to say farewell, and it occurred to them that a last signal might be sent to the
departing vessel. One of the party approached the man in charge of the signal-
station, and asked if a message could be sent. On hearing in the affirmative, the
visitor wished that the words, God-speed to you, should be arranged, and for that
purpose the code-book was consulted. To the astonishment of all, the seaman
confessed that the word God did not appear at all in the register; and so, to the
general disappointment, a fresh message had to be signalled to the veteran
missionary as he passed out from the river to the open sea. Sad, indeed, is it for any
of us if we have not the name of God in our code-book. If we will we may all have
Gods name, first in our hearts, then on our lips, to be signalled as a message of
peace to all whom we meet.
What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.

Chaff or wheat
My theme is the superiority of the Divine Word to the merely human dreams by
which men have sought to displace it. I refer not to the discoveries of science, but
rather to those views regarding God, and the soul, and the hereafter which
multitudes in our times are seeking to put in antagonism to the Word of God,--and I
say that these human dreams when tested by experience are found to be chaff,
while the Word of God, when similarly tried, is discovered to be wheat.
 I. THE HUMAN DREAM IS EMPTY; BUT THE DIVINE WORD IS SUBSTANTIAL. Chaff is a
mere husk, but wheat is all grain. So the antagonists of the Bible deal in vague
speculations, or empty negations; whereas the Scriptures are positive and satisfying.
Try the human dream in the hour of bereavement. What has it to say to the mourner
weeping over the casket that holds his dead beloved? I challenge infidelity to utter
then a word which has in it a single particle of comfort for the stricken one. If he
choose to repress the intuitions of his own nature, and shut his eyes to the evidences
of intelligent design which exist in the external world, one may affirm that there is
no God. But what comfort is there in that at such a time? The specific in medicine
has won its recognition when it is seen to be unfailing. In like manner the power of
the Gospel to comfort the mourner establishes its claim to be received as the Divine,
specific for his grief, and he will not give it up unless he gets something better in its
place; least of all will he part with it for that which is unsubstantial as an airy
nothing.

II. The human dream is destitute of nourishment for mans spiritual nature,
while the Divine Word is strengthening, and ministers to its growth. Chaff does not
feed; but wheat gives nutriment. So mere speculation has in it no educating and
ennobling influence, It occupies the mind without strengthening the character.
Scepticism puts an arrest on progress. It stimulates the critical faculty into excess;
and, instead of stirring a man up to the formation and development of his own
character, it makes him a mere anatomist of the characters of others. The great
majority of mere critics have become so through their lack or loss of personal
religious faith. What a contrast, in this regard, there is between the lives of the two
Frenchmen, Vinet and St. Beuve! They were companions in youth, and, indeed,
friends through life. But St. Beuve lost his religious faith and became a literary critic,
one of the very best of critics, indeed, yet only a critic, delighting the readers of his
Causeries du Lundi with his expositions of the systems of other men and his
estimates of their worth; but Vinci, who retained his faith to the last, became a
producer himself, added something great to the thought and work of his time, and
earned the right to be called the Chalmers of Switzerland.

III. The human dream has no aggressiveness in it to arrest or overcome the

evils that are in the world, but the Divine Word is regenerating and reforming. Is
not My Word like as a fire? saith the Lord, and like a hammer, &c. Where shall we
look for anything like similar results from those who are the votaries of the human
dreams of agnosticism, scepticism, or infidelity? What has any one of these done
to improve the characters of individual men, or elevate society, or bless the world?
Let the advocates of infidelity either do more than we have accomplished, or let
them for ever hold their peace.

IV. THE HUMAN DREAM IS SHORT-LIVED, BUT THE DIVINE WORD IS ENDURING. Chaff
is easily blown away,, but the wheat remains. And so the little systems of human
speculation have their day and cease to be; but the Word of the Lord endureth for
ever. The arguments of the first antagonists of the Gospel are now read only in the
pages of the apologists who replied to them. And in more recent times, how many
adversaries have advanced to assail it, with haughty boasting that it would speedily
be defeated, but with the same result? Voltaire said that it took twelve men to
establish the Gospel, but he would show that one man could overthrow it. Yet the
Gospel is here studied by millions, and how few now read Voltaire! A certain
German rationalist alleged that the Gospel was not worth twenty-five years
purchase; but half a century has gone since he wrote, and the Gospel is more
vigorous than ever, while he is forgotten. Again and again, in the estimation of its
adversaries, it ought to have been demolished; but it will not die, for there is deep
truth in Bezas motto for the French Protestant Church, which surmounts the device
of an anvil surrounded by blacksmiths, at whose feet are many broken hammers,
and which I once heard Frederick Monod translate thus--

Hammer away, ye hostile bands:

Your hammers break, Gods anvil stands.
(W. M. Taylor, D. D.)
Winnowing-time
Whenever Gods Word deals with things truthful, be they material objects or living
persons, however weak and feeble they are, it always speaks of them tenderly and
handles them gently. God Himself has an eye of respect for everything that is real
and veritable. He does not quench the smoking flax, nor will He break the bruised
reed. But God hates every false thing. He scorns the hypocrite and the dissembler.
The words of Jehovah are keen and cutting, sometimes even sarcastic, as He withers
the specious lie with a laugh of ridicule. Notice the peculiar sharpness and biting
severity of the text: What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord. Like the edge of
a razor it cuts. As a sabre flashing over ones head--a sword gleaming to the very
point, a fire lurid with coals of juniper--we are appalled as we glance at it. It strikes
with implacable resentment. There is no word of mercy towards the chaff--not a
thought of clemency or forbearance. He bloweth at it as though it were a worthless
thing, not to be accounted of, a nothing that vanishes with a puff.

I. IN APPLICATION TO ALL MINISTRIES Of Gods Word, let us first of all face the
question, What is the chaff to the wheat? That ministry which comes from God is
distinguished altogether from that which is not of His own sending by its effects.
1. It is sure to be heart-breaking. If thou hast not been made to feel thyself lost,
ruined, and undone by the Word, I charge thee by the living God to be
dissatisfied with thyself, or else with the ministry under which thou art
sitting; for if it were Gods ministry to thy soul, it would break thy heart in
shivers, and make thee cry, God be merciful to me a sinner!
2. Not less also is a God-sent ministry clothed with power by Gods Spirit, to
bind up the heart so broken. Only let a ministry be full of Jesus, let Christ be
lifted up and set forth, evidently crucified in the midst of the assembly--let
His name be poured forth, like a sweet perfume, it shall be as ointment to the
wounded heart, and then it will be recognised as the ministry of wheat, and
not a ministry of chaff to your souls.
3. Further, the ministry which God does not send is of no service in producing
holiness. Dr. Chalmers tells us that, when he first began to preach, it was his
great end and aim to produce morality, and in order to do so he preached the
moral virtues and their excellences. This he did, he says, till most of the
people he thought honest turned thieves, and he had scarcely any left that
knew much about morality practically. But no sooner did Chalmers begin to
 understand, as he afterwards did so sweetly, the power of the Cross, and to
speak about the atoning blood in the name and strength of the eternal Spirit,
than the morality, which could not be developed by preaching moral essays,
became the immediate result of simply proclaiming the love of God in Christ
Jesus. What we all want, is to have less and less of that which comes from
ourselves and savours of the creature, and to have more and more of that
which comes from our God, who, though we cannot see Him, is still in our
midst, the mighty to will and to do; for His power is the only power, and His
life is the only life by which we can be saved ourselves, and those that hear
us.

II. Apply the text, as individuals, to ourselves.

1. No doubt, we are all well aware that if we have wheat in us, there is chaff too.
Which preponderates, it may be difficult for us to tell. Some Christians are
greatly puzzled when we begin to talk about the experimental riddle which
the Christian finds in himself; but, if they be perplexed, we cannot help them
out of the difficulty except by describing the case. I know in my own soul that
I feel myself to be like two distinct men. There is the old man, as base as
ever, and the new man, that cannot sin, because he is born of God. I cannot
myself understand the experience of those Christians who do not find a
conflict within, for my experience goes to show this, if it shows anything, that
there is an incessant contention between the old nature--Oh, that we could
be rid of it! and the new nature, for the strength of which God be thanked!
This suggests great searching of the heart in connection with the question,
What is the chaff to the wheat? Oh, let us feel that the chaff is to be all got
rid of. Let us feel that it is a heavy burden to moan and groan under, that it is
not a grievance we should be contented with. Let us make no provision for
the flesh. Let us not ask that any chaff may be spared to us.
2. A great deal of our religiousness is chaff likewise. Do you never find
yourselves borrowing other peoples experience? What is that but chaff? Do
you never find yourselves at a prayer-meeting glowing with somebody elses
fervour? What is that but chaff? Does not your faith sometimes depend upon
companionship with some fellow-Christians? Well, I will not say that your
faith is chaff, but I think I may say that such growth in faith as is altogether
the result of second causes and not immediately of God, is very much like
chaff. Lord, take from me all the guilt, leave me nothing but the gold; take
from me all the paint, the graining and the varnish, and leave me nothing but
what is veritable and bona fide. It is a prayer for every Christian to offer.

III. THIS TEXT MAY HAVE A VERY STRONG BEARING UPON THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
Take any of our churches, take this church, and do you suppose that all of yon who
now profess to be Christians would be willing to burn at the stake for your Master? I
wish we could believe it, but we cannot. I dare not tell you we believe it, because
some of you have been put to much smaller tests than that, and what has become of
you? The nautilus is often seen sailing in tiny fleets in the Mediterranean Sea, upon
the smooth surface of the water. It is a beautiful sight, but as soon as ever the
tempest wind begins to blow, and the first ripple appears upon the surface of the
sea, the little mariners draw in their sails and betake themselves to the bottom of the
sea, and you see them no more. How many of you are like that? When all goes well
with Christianity, many go sailing along fairly, in the summer tide, but no sooner
does trouble, or affliction, or persecution arise, where are they? Ah! where are they?
They have gone.

IV. We may use this text, sorrowfully and solemnly, WITH REGARD TO THE WHOLE
MASS OF HUMAN SOCIETY. The whole mass of our population may just be divided into
the wheat and the chaff. Both are mixed up together now, and it would be
impossible for you or for me to divide them. In courts of law and the houses of
commerce, on the Exchange, and in the committee-rooms, in busy thoroughfares
with their various shops, and in the open streets among those that ply different
callings, here in this tabernacle, and in the many churches and chapels where
multitudes are wont to assemble, we are all mixed up together--the wheat and the
chaff. And it is wonderful how united the chaff is with the wheat, for see, the wheat
once slept in the bosom of the chaff. There is chaff on the best threshing-floor. There
are ungodly sons and daughters in the best families. Unconverted persons are to be
found in intimate association with the holiest men and women. Two shall be
grinding at the mill, one shall be taken and the other left. Two shall be in one bed,
and one shall be taken and the other left. God will make a division, sharp, decisive,
everlasting, between the chaff and the wheat. Oh, thou thoughtless, frivolous, light,
chaffy, giddy spirit, canst thou bear the thought of being thus separated for ever? (C.
H. Spurgeon.)

The chaff and the wheat compared

I. WHAT ARE WORLDLY MAXIMS, COMPARED WITH THE WORD OF GOD, BUT AS THE
CHAFF TO THE WHEAT? Regard the conduct of men who call themselves men of the
world; by what principles are they governed t what maxims do they follow? to what
authority do they defer? To the authority of Him who made them, who sent His own
adorable Son to buy lost, guilty offenders with the shedding of His precious blood;
or to the authority of him who deceived our first parents, and hath ever since been
spreading snares for their posterity? Doth it not encourage the worldling to spend
the precious and unreturning season of mercy in laying up treasure to himself,
instead of being rich toward God? Doth it not industriously stigmatise all true
religion, as the dreams of enthusiasm, or the inventions of hypocrisy? But what is
the chaff to the wheat? What is the authority of the world, compared with the
authority of Him who reigneth supreme, King of kings and Lord of lords, King over
His enemies? What is the ridicule which deters many a feeble-minded professor
from seeking Christ, compared with the indignation of Him who can destroy both
body and soul in hell? What is the present judgment of man respecting us, compared
with Gods decisions?

II. What is the value of that legal righteousness in which carnal man delights,
compared with the righteousness of Christ Jesus, as a ground of justification before
God? A self-complacent Pharisee may regard himself to be, touching the
righteousness which is in the law, blameless. An amiable moralist may gather, and
deservedly gather, around him the esteem and love of men, and may ask, in the
spirit of presumption, What lack I yet? Let the Spirit shine into his heart, take him
as by the hand, and flash the lightnings of an injured law in his eyes; let him see God
condemning sin in the flesh, by sending Christ to die for it in the flesh; let him see
his own miserable shortcoming of that obedience, which a pure and heart-searching
Judge requires, and then what is the chaff to the wheat?

III. WHAT IS THE HAPPINESS OF THE WORLDLING, COMPARED WITH THE HAPPINESS
OF A CHILD OF GOD? What is the chaff of his perishing joys, compared to the
happiness of a believer t He hears the joyful sound of Gospel love, receives it
through infinite grace into his heart, and walks in the light of his Fathers
countenance.

IV. What are the present pleasures of sin, which are for a season, compared with
the glory of heaven, which will be forfeited by their indulgence? (R. P. Buddicom, M.
A.)

Lessons of the harvest field

Chaff is of great importance. We mete it out its due quota of praise, but are
terribly anxious for fear the praise of chaff and that of wheat be disproportionate to
their respective value. If chaff is praised by one sweet voice there ought to be a
hundred singing the praises of the grain. Would a farmer be pleased if the net result
of his ploughing and sowing, harrowing and reaping, was so many bags of chaff? Do
we not see that if chaff has any value at all, it only has such through being the
guardian angel of the wheat? It is the golden grain which will be food to men that is
the great aim to which all the work of a farmer is directed. Let me apply in one or
two ways the analogy of the chaff and wheat.

I. MOTIVES AND ACTS HOLD THE RELATION WHICH CHAFF AND WHEAT HOLD TO EACH
OTHER. Every act a man performs has behind it a motive. This may be good, bad, or
indifferent. The motive determines everything, and however much the world
condemn us for our actions, if they are done in the spirit of Christ, this reward will
be ours, that our characters will become Christlike. Dont despise a mans actions,
but never forget that it is the motive that made him do these that makes them
commendable or condemnable.

II. GOD JUDGES NOT THE ACTS BUT THE MOTIVES. Whilst the world is applauding
some men because they have given some money to put a fancy window in some old
church, God has written down words of condemnation. The motive in giving the
money was as base as base could be. The day is coming when the harvest of God will
be gathered. Woeful and sad will that man be who in the threshing day will give
abundance of chaff but no wheat.

III. THE PRESENT LIFE AND THE FUTURE HOLD THE RELATION OF CHAFF TO WHEAT.
In answer to the question, What is this life? two extreme answers have been given.
Some say that this life is not worth living. Others live in this world as if this world
were everything. The truth, as in all extremes, lies between the two. Now, as to life
not being worth living, let me say this is throwing stones at the wisdom of God, and
is as absurd as saying chaff has no place in this world. The present life is the chaff
covering an eternal life. Within each of us there is a precious wheat that needs
nourishing and protection. The trials and difficulties of this life are all working
together towards its development. Instead of this world not being a help, like chaff it
is Gods appointed means whereby the eternal life may grow within us and spring
into full perfection. The chaff may not appear worth all the sunshine and rains
bestowed on it, yet it is. It has its purpose to fulfil To-day, as when God made the
world, it can be said and behold it was very good. If the one extreme--that life is
not worth living--is false, how shall I stigmatise that answer which says in deeds that
the present life is everything? How absurd for a man to say chaff--this present life--
is all he wants! Fancy a farmer collecting all his chaff in sacks and burning all the
golden grain. Would we consider him to be in his sane senses? (J. M. Dryerre.)

The chaff and the wheat

Divine revelation does not degrade or supersede human reason. It assumes reason
on our part; sets before us what is above, though not contrary to reason; aids reason
as the telescope aids the eye, and also shows spurious, antichristian counterfeits--
the chaff as distinguished from the wheat. Let the dream go for what it is worth.
Take the wheat of Gods Word instead. The text speaks half in irony, half in warning.
1. As admonitory to Christian people. Human speculations present themselves at
the bar of my taste or judgment. In self-complacency I pass judgment upon
them, but when Gods Word is heard, it breathes authority, and my place is
in the dust. Keep, then, the chaff of man free from the wheat of God.
2. As counsel to us who are teachers.
(1) Let parents inculcate the thought of God. Endued with His Spirit, their
children may be left in confidence, for the promise is to us and our
children.
(2) Teachers in the Sunday School are to give, not guesses, but Gospel.
(3) The clergy need this counsel. They cannot, ought not to stay the current
of free thought. Yet, in the wide activity of intellectual conflict, in the
bewildering notions and refractory egotism of the age, we must
discriminate. Stability is found in loyalty to God s truth. Applying these
thoughts
1. We are now better able to estimate what reputation really is. We are not to be
indifferent to mens estimate of us. It is a useful stimulus, but it needs to be
regulated. It is a small matter to be judged by them. What is Gods
estimate?
2. What is success? Many look at pecuniary results. They play fast and loose with
conscience. Some affect a supercilious devotion and look down on others
above whom they seem to rise. What is Gods estimate?
3. Finally, we learn to understand the value of the life we are living as compared
with that which is eternal. There is no antagonism in the interests of each.
Even the chaff envelops and protects the wheat. It has its place and work,
though perishable. (John Hall, D. D.)

What is the chaff to the wheat?

I. WHAT IS MANS WORD TO THE WORD OF GOD? Gods Word has its base deep
down amongst the eternal things of the mysterious past; and if there be clouds and
dimness upon some of its higher peaks, it is because its top rises up amongst the
sublimities of a glorious future. Now and then a gleam lights up the awful heights to
which revelation towers, and the eye of faith is strong enough to see the rosy tints,
which tell that those holier mysteries are near to the beauteous heaven to which they
point. At such a time, the believer will say, What is the chaff to the wheat? The
fallible comment to the infallible text? The earthly setting to the heavenly jewel? The
basket of silver to the apples of gold?

II. WHAT IS MANS FAVOUR TO THE LOVE OF GOD? It is pleasant to live in the
creatures love. There are happy family groups on this our beautiful earth, upon
which the loving eye is glad-to be permitted to look. There are satisfactions which
come over the soul when pleasures of earth are many, and the hopes for time are
bright. The first sip of pleasures cup is sweet. The first climb up ambitions hill is
sunny. The first burst of hope s young bud is beautiful. Some are so smitten with the
loveliness here, that they care not to look for the brighter things which are in store
hereafter. But what is the chaff to the wheat? What is all this to the love of God?
Oh, glorious thought! that I am loved by the Father of Lights, the King of uncreated
glory! It is the candle of the Lord within my soul. It is the comfort of the Holy Ghost
springing up unto everlasting life. To know the love of God, which passeth
knowledge: this is peace, this is bliss, this is life.

III. WHAT IS THE BODY TO THE SOUL? We are fearfully and wonderfully made. This
mortal body is beautiful in the very ruins by which sin has laid it low. And when the
building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, shall have
been given us,--when our vile bodies shall have been fashioned like unto Christs
glorious body, then the beauty of our material part shall be seen in all its glory. But
what is the chaff to the wheat? Who can tell of all the value of a human soul?
Coated, as it is now, by earthly matter, we see something of the brightness which
this gem can wear. What will the soul be, under the light of heaven, in the crown of
Christ? In righteousness and true holiness--seeing Jesus face to face--amid the
pleasures which are at Gods right hand for evermore, the spirit of the just made
perfect, the soul of the redeemed in the garments of salvation: oh, it must be a
glorious thing!

IV. WHAT IS THE WATER TO THE BLOOD? No earthly fountain can suffice to wash
away sin. After all that civilisation has ever done to wash the outside of the cup and
platter, it has never been able to touch, much less to purge, the heart. Mans
resolution, mans effort to reform himself, mans contrivance to cure the souls
running sore, have all and altogether failed. The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son,
cleanseth us from all sin. It is the blood of sprinkling which purges the soul and
conscience. Turn ye, then, from doing to believing; turn from self to Jesus; turn
from earning to accepting; turn from water, which cannot cleanse, to the blood
which will make filthy garments white: say in the matter of merit and salvation,
What is the chaff to the wheat? What is self to the Saviour?

V. WHAT IS THE FORM TO THE LIFE? The words of worship are easily said. The
attitude of worship may be soon assumed. But what is the chaff to the wheat? The
eye of God is upon the worshippers heart. The ear of God listens to the language of
the soul. Put off, spiritually, the shoes from off your feet. Gird up the loins of your
minds. Let the holy fire be kindled upon the altar of your heart, and the incense
cloud of grateful praise will rise with acceptance before the mercy seat.

VI. WHAT ARE THE THINGS OF TIME TO THE THINGS OF ETERNITY? In lifes endless
progress, the earthly is the shortest stage. In the continuous chain of being, the
lowest link is the least. When we shall climb up the great hill of eternal life, we shall
see how small our earthly dwelling looks at the mountain base. How small earth
looks to the eye which can travel over the visible orbs which come even within its
limited field of vision. Oh, it is an important thing so to live that we may have life
everlasting! Jesus bids us seek first the kingdom of God. His servants say, Here
we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come True wisdom bids a man set
your affections upon things above, not on things on the earth. We are all moving,
things are all changing: it is madness to cling to these passing things, and say, Here
will I dwell for ever. It may not be, it should never be desired. God has found some
better thing for His children. He says, What is the chaff to the wheat? (J.
Richardson, M. A.)

JER 23:29
Is not My Word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh
the rock in pieces?
Gods fire and hammer

I. The word of God has power in it.

1. It is like a fire.
(1) You who are the people of God must often have felt greatly comforted,
encouraged, and cheered, when you have been hearing the Gospel, just as
when, on a cold day, and you are half benumbed, if your eyes arc
blindfolded you know when you are coming near a fire by the genial glow
which you feel You delight yourself in the Word of the Lord as you warm
your hands at a bright cheery fire.
(2) But, next, fire is only at work very moderately when it yields us comfort;
it has also the effect of paining, awakening, arousing. So, even if you are
an unconverted man, if you have as yet no knowledge of the power of the
Gospel of God, yet if you come in contact with it, I will warrant you that
you will know it. Very likely you will show that you know it by getting
very angry, growing very indignant. Men do not like being singed and
scorched by the Gospel
(3) Fire also has a melting power, and so has the Gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ. Oh, that we could get the hearts of many hardened ones into the
very centre of the blessed flame, till the holy heat should make them flow
like melted wax before the presence of the God of Israel!
(4) More than that, the Gospel has a consuming power. When it first comes
into a district, it finds people indifferent to it; but possibly it begins by
burning up some one of their vices. There have been old systems of
iniquity that have been hoary with age, but when, at last, they have been
 attacked by the Church of God, with the sword of the Spirit, and the
Gospel of Christ, they have been utterly destroyed.
2. Gods Word is like a hammer: and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in
pieces. So that, whenever a minister has the Gospel to use, this simile
should teach him how he ought to use it; with his whole might let him strike
with it mighty blows for his Lord. Hammer away, then, brethren, hammer
away, with nothing but the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The heart that is struck
may not yield even year after year, but it will yield at last.
3. Now put the two together,--the fire and the hammer,--and you will see how
God makes His servants who are to be instruments for His use. He puts us
into the fire of the Word; He melts, He softens, He subdues. Then He takes
us out of the fire, and welds us with hammer-strokes such as only He can
give, till He has made us fit instruments for His use; and He goes forth to His
sacred work of conquering the multitudes, having in His hands the polished
shafts that He has forged with the fire and the hammer of His Word.

II. ILLUSTRATE THIS STATEMENT by noticing certain parts of Gods Word which
have, to our personal knowledge, operated both as a fire and a hammer upon the
hearts of men.
1. A large part of Gods Word is taken up with the revelation of His law, and you
cannot fully preach the Gospel if you do not proclaim the law of the Lord.
Men will never receive the balm of the Gospel unless they know something of
the wounds that sin hath made. If the law of God is faithfully and fully
preached, what a fire it is! What a hammer it is!
2. But have you not also felt that there is fire-work and hammer-work in the
teaching of the Gospel? The Gospel of redemption through the precious
blood of Jesus, the Gospel which tells of full atonement made, the Gospel
which proclaims that the utmost farthing of the ransom price has been paid,
and that, therefore, whosoever believeth in Jesus is free from the law, and
free from guilt, and free from hell,--the telling out of this Gospel has made
mens hearts burn within them, and has dashed out the very brains of sin,
and made men joyfully flee to Christ.
3. Above all, what fire-and-hammer power there is in the doctrine of the Cross!
Man must yield when the power of the Spirit of God applies to his heart the
doctrine of the precious blood.

III. PUT THE STATEMENT OF THE TEXT TO A PRACTICAL TEST. Is not My Word like as
a fire, saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?
1. Let us, first, try it upon ourselves. When you are sad, do not run into your
neighbours house, do not sit down alone, and weep in sullen despair; get you
to the Word of the Lord. There is such sweetness in it, there is such power in
it, that in a short time you shall have beauty instead of ashes, and songs
instead of sighs. You say that you are not sad, but you are very sleepy; you
have become very drowsy and dull in the ways of God; you have not the
earnest spirit you used to have, nor half the spiritual life and vigour you once
felt. Very well, then, come to Gods Word; read it, study it, listen to it, find
Out where that Word is faithfully preached, and go there. Oh, how quickly
the Lord has blessed some of us in times of great barrenness! Perhaps
 another says, I have lost so much of my comfort, and assurance, and joy,
that I feel as if I had grown quite cold and hard and insensible. Why need
you be cold when Gods Word is like as a fire? Why need your heart remain
like a rock when Gods Word is like a hammer that breaketh the rock in
pieces:
2. Let us try to use it upon others. I have an opinion that there are a great many
persons in this world, whom we give up as hopeless, who have never been
really tried and tested with the Gospel in all their lives. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Fire and hammer

I. A picture of the HUMAN HEART.

1. It has within it that which requires to be consumed. Who that knows his own
soul can gainsay this? There is ignorance, prejudice, error, selfishness, guilt,
and ungenerous and pernicious principles of action that must be consumed.
They pollute the conscience, they enthral the faculties, they enervate the
powers of the soul. Like the luxuriant growth of the prairies, they must be
burned down to the root before the soil can be cultivated.
2. It is in an unimpressionable condition. It is like a rock, insensitive, hard,
obdurate, and so it verily is in its unregenerate state.

II. A picture of the DIVINE WORD.

1. It is a fire. Is not My Word like as a fire? saith the Lord.
(1) It is a penetrating fire, it burns into the inmost soul.
(2) It is a destructive fire, it burns up the wrong.
(3) It is a purifying fire, it consumes all that is noxious and vile,
(4) It is an unquenchable fire, it cannot be put out; the billows, from the
great ocean of worldliness, infidelity and superstition, have been dashing
against it for centuries; but it burns as strongly and brightly as ever.
2. It is a Divinely constructed hammer, to break through the stratum of moral
rock which covers the soil of the heart, shutting out the sunbeam and the
shower, and preventing the germination and growth of the seeds of virtue
and religion. Conclusion--Thank God for this fire and hammer! Let the fire
burn, let the hammer strike. (Homilist.)

Human resistance and Divine power

I. THE MORAL RESISTANCE OF MAN. The rock--the unconverted heart of man.

1. Every rock has a character. There are aqueous and igneous rocks--stratified
and unstratified rocks. So with hearts; some are hard and unyielding, others
are soft and flexible; some are full of pride and selfishness, others are gentle
and benevolent. But they are all rock--hard against God. They all agree in
this, though they may differ in other respects.
2. Rocks remain in the same condition for ages. So with sin-hardened hearts.
Under the kindly rays of the Fathers countenance, and the Saviours love,
they remain in the same unmoved and unfeeling state. The Lord has called,
 but they have not answered--they have despised His reproofs.
3. These rocks may be broken. They are composed of blocks of stone. The
hardest is formed by the adhesion of minute particles; these may be
separated--pieces may be detached, and the whole rock broken. If we now
apply this to the heart, we shall see the points of resemblance. Each heart has
many parts and many avenues. One part after another is conquered, until the
whole soul is subdued, and brought in humble submission to Jesus.
4. These rocks may be made useful Rock is valuable in many ways: it girds the
seacoast and stops the encroachment of the waters; it is the best foundation
for the friendly lighthouse; it gives us the most solid and the most beautiful
of buildings. So with the wicked hearts around us. It is true, that they are not
only useless but injurious in their sinful unquarried state; yet from these
must come the able and devoted servant of Christ, the loving disciple, the
brave defender of the faith, and the real benefactors of a needy world. They
need only to be broken to be useful.

II. The divine means employed by God to remove this resistance.

1. There is adaptedness in the means to accomplish the desired result. The result
is to be the broken rock. There is no instrument so adapted for breaking as
the hammer. It has weight in a small compass. It has also hardness; it will
not yield to the stone; it has a peculiar shape and this gives it power. Thus
the Word of God, with all its doctrines, promises, and threatenings--in all its
discoveries of truth, and sublime revelations of the Father, and His Son
Jesus Christ, is fitted to make deep and abiding impressions on the mind,
and to subdue the soul.
2. There is a concentration of power. The same part is struck repeatedly,--each
stroke tells. It cannot withstand. The hardest rock will yield to this
concentrated force. The Word is similarly applied to the heart in order to
subdue It. The rays of Divine truth shine upon the hearts false refuges until
they are seen to be such, and are abandoned.
3. There is the strong arm in its application. There must not only be the means,
but these must be applied by intelligence and power. This is seen in other
matters. For instance, we may have all the apparatus for taking a correct
likeness, but unless the photographer is there to superintend the process, we
shall have no likeness. So with the Word. We must have the Divine Spirit, the
arm of the Word, to bring it with convincing and saving power to the heart.
(W. Darwent.)

Fire and a hammer symbolical of the law and the Gospel

I. IS NOT MY WORD LIKE A HAMMER THAT BREAKETH THE ROCK IN PIECES, SAITH
THE LORD? I place this simile before the other, because it is in the order of human
procedure, when a mass of ore is to be submitted to the fire, that its metal may be
extracted, to beat it small with hammers, then to carry it to the kiln, and finally to
the furnace. Take the case of one whom the Word of salvation hath never influenced,
who is alienated from God, and with no other principle of affection, or of action,
than his own unsanctified reason, or his own unrenewed desires. Here, then, is the
rock. But let the law of God speak to his soul in its power; let it show him the
perfection of the Lawgiver, the spiritual character of the law, the withering curse
pronounced against every one that continueth not, &c.; let it moreover display his
utter inability to do the will of the Being who chargeth even His angels with folly, by
letting him into the secrets of his own fallen nature, and proving that he is carnal,
sold under sin. And what will be the consequence? The rock, hard it may have been
as the nether millstone, will be bruised and beaten to pieces.

II. But after the mighty and terrible agency of the law, MAY WE HOPE THAT THE
GOSPEL CALL OF LOVE WILL BE EQUALLY EFFECTUAL? We surely may. Is not My Word
like as a fire? saith the Lord.
1. Fire hath a penetrating nature, and finds its way into every part of the
substance that may be submitted to its action. And surely thus doth the
Gospel of our redemption.
2. Is it the nature of fire to enlighten? Even so doth the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It
removes the delusion which overspreads the mind of man until it shines into
him, and he learns, by the light which it reveals, that other foundation can
no man lay, save that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. It exhibits the Divinity of
His character, the freeness of His love, the riches of His salvation, the peace
that flows into the heart when His kingdom is embraced and submitted to;
the holy nature of His law; the sanctifying work of His Spirit; the brightness
and grandeur of those hopes which it enkindles, and the duties to which it
binds the obedient children of the love of Jesus.
3. Is it the property of fire to warm every object to which it may be applied? And
shall we deny a similar power to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, when
communicated to the heart by faith and in sincerity?
4. Hath the fire a purifying energy? So hath the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The
refiners flame may be fierce, the trial of a child of God beneath the discipline
of the Gospel may be severe, but it will have an effect the most salutary and
gracious. It will separate the gold from the dross. It will consume the one,
and make the other meet to be employed even in the noblest uses.
5. Fire hath a property to comfort. And shall we deny this quality to the mercies
of the everlasting Gospel, when faith embraces them, and makes them her
own? It is that provision which a gracious God hath sent to sustain us in the
way to heaven, as the corn ,was given by Joseph to his brethren, for their
sustenance through the wilderness that lay between Canaan and Egypt,
whither he had invited them. (R. P. Buddicom.)

The power of Gods Word needful for national education

The circumstances of Judah were new and strange when this question was put by
God into the mouth of Jeremiah. The name of Jehovah was now falsely used to cover
those deceits for which Baals was of old the cloak. Against this new form of an old
temptation God now warns the people. He bids them winnow the wheat, and cast
away the chaff, and not slight necessary truth because falsehood was abroad. What
is the chaff to the wheat? The counterfeit cannot have the inner life and power of
the original Is not My Word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer, &c.
Here is the mark of My true message: there is a power and might about it which
cannot be caught by imitation. The figure is natural and expressive. The custom on
which it is founded still prevails in the East. In Madeira, for example, at this day, if a
new road is to be carried through a set of rocky obstacles, a fire is lighted on the bed
of rock; and when by its action the solid mass is charred and its cleavage loosened,
the hammer of the workman soon breaks it thoroughly away. And this same power,
says God, is the true credential of My message: as the hammer and the fire against
the rock of the wilderness, so shall be My Word and My message against the
stoutness of mans heart. In this sense, evidently, the Word of God must not be
limited to His written Word; in its first application it did not describe the written
Word at all: it was the living ministry of the prophet of the Lord, and not the written
law, which was to be discerned from that of all pretenders by its possession of this
inner power: and it is therefore a strong and impressive assertion of this great truth,
that the power of God, and that only, avails for the real subjection and renewal of
mans heart--that this fire, and that hammer can break it up; and that this is so
exclusively their work, that the possession of this power is truly a mark and a
countersign of that administration with which God is coworking. Who can watch
himself without seeing how far too strong evil always is, and has been, for his own
unaided resistance? When did our best resolutions stand long before the hotness of
a pressing temptation and the seeming safety of a fitting opportunity? when did the
frost-work of the morning stand before the sunshine of the noon? how often do we
find old habits of sin breaking out again, when we deemed them long since
quenched; showing, like revived volcanoes, that what seemed extinction was but a
temporary lull! On the other hand, who that has noted what is passing round him
has not marked some instances in which Gods grace has evidently changed the
heart and formed anew the spring of its affections? Who has not seen this heavenly
power bow the swelling passions of youth to the pure and peaceable rule of a willing
obedience? Who has not seen the proud made humble, the rough-tempered gentle,
and the indolent laborious? How broadly too has this truth been sometimes written
in the alteration of a nations character, and its submission to the Gospel yoke.
Whenever the stone cut out without hands has indeed smitten a people or nation,
how have they and all their former manners crumbled into dust before it. Such then
is the witness of experience; and right reason would lead us to expect this difference
between the work of God and all inferior power. For, if the hypothesis be true; if
mans nature be thoroughly corrupted to its deepest springs; how can he indeed
renew himself to righteousness? That on which he has to work, and that with which
he has to work, are both alike defiled; how can the one cleanse the other? From the
very nature of things it is impossible. And yet who is there that has closely watched
others, or still more himself, who does not know that one of the last and hardest
things which we can do, is to bring the mind and soul in very deed to hold this truth?
The peculiar attempt of infidelity at present is silently and decently to supersede
religion--to speak of it as an excellent thing in its way: but to be always able to do
without it. It is the monstrous folly of confessing that God is, and treating Him as if
He were not our God. This new form of infidelity might easily be traced as more or
less harassing society at present. But what is most to our present purpose, nowhere
is it more plainly to be found than in the schemes of education which we hear every
day buzzed on every side of us. It is asserted, and with a painful truth, that our
people are not now educated as they should be: but what remedy is set before us? A
scheme of national education which, more or less, evidently is indeed so framed as
to exclude religion. What, then, even for this world, is the object of national
education? Doubtless, to form amongst the masses of our population a high-toned
character; to make them brave, honest, industrious, and unselfish; and then, to add
to this as much of knowledge upon other matters as will enlarge their powers of
mind without diverting them from the peculiar duties of their several stations; for
this will make them wealthy, powerful, and happy: that is, in one word, you educate
your people to give them a higher moral tone; and can mere earthly learning give a
man this moral tone? Surely not. The most learned man may, in spite of his
learning, continue the most thoroughly depraved. What human understanding can
come up in subtlety and power to his who is Gods enemy and mans: who once was,
as we deem, second in power and wisdom to none of Gods highest creatures, and
whom spiritual, not carnal wickedness, drew into rebellion and cast down to hell? So
that the highest spiritual wickedness may be combined with the greatest mental
cultivation. What, then, but God can purify mans heart? And is it not, then, the
mere naked madness of the infidel to endeavour to do this without religion? Is it
not, in very deed, to shut God out of His own world, to believe that other means
besides His power can be, in truth, the hammer and the fire to break the heart of
man? (Bp. Samuel Wilberforce.)

The Word of God compared to a hammer

1. Words are the vehicle by means of which we convey to others the ideas which
exist in our minds, making known our wishes, responding to the speech of
our friends, and declaring to the world what manner of men we arc. By the
medium of words we give expression to the feelings of kindness and of
benevolence toward others, by which we are animated. Our desires for help
or assistance in times of difficulty and of danger, are made known by means
of language addressed to friends, or to those from whom aid may be
expected. Our real characters are often made known by the use which we
occasionally make of our tongue, more than by the habitual form of our
words, and an accidental inadvertence may do more to enable others to form
a correct estimate of us than years of dissembling. Words often fly from our
lips, without ever being thought about again, but the consequences which
flow from them, either for good or for evil, cannot be calculated. Words
spoken by our lips may prove us to be Gods people and animated with love
to our fellow-man, or they may brand us as children of the devil, and
enemies of religion and of truth.
2. The Word is one of the names by which Christ is known in the New
Testament. In the first ages of Christianity a sect arose in the Christian
Church, who held some very peculiar opinions, of which the adherents were
called Gnostics. They supposed that the world was ruled by one supreme
Being, but that under Him there were inferior deities, who presided over
departments of creation, to whom were given the names of the Word, the
Life, and the Light, and of whom Christ was one. St. John commences his
Gospel by declaring the falsity of such an idea, and, instead of denying that
Christ was one of these inferior beings, he asserts at once that He was the
Word, that He was really God, and that He had existed from the beginning in
the bosom of the Father. He is called the Word, because He came upon earth
to declare the Father, whom He revealed to man much in the same manner
as words make known the desires and intentions of a human being.
3. There is another meaning to be given to the term word in Scripture,
differing from the speech by which men convey their thoughts one to
another, and from the person of Christ. It must be understood as the
revelation of His will, which God has condescended to make to man on
 various occasions, and the various forms which it has assumed in the hands
of different persons. In the New Testament it is equivalent to the Gospel
preached by Christ Himself, and afterwards by His apostles. It is a powerful
agent in the hands of the Almighty, the idea of which is conveyed by a
threefold comparison--to a sword, to a fire, and to a hammer, in order to
show its effects when applied to the consciences of men.

I. IT IS MANIFESTLY GOD HIMSELF WHICH IS SPOKEN OF; for the inquiry is, Is not
My Word . . . like a hammer? It is the Almighty who uses the Gospel as His
instrument for reaching the consciences of sinners, and awakening in them a sense
of the value of the blessings which it is calculated to bestow. The Father, Son, and
Spirit planned the scheme of redemption in the councils of eternity, by which a lost
and degraded race were to be rescued from ruin and death, and to recover their
forfeited inheritance. This great work having been finished, the Holy Spirit employs
His power in applying it to the consciences of men, giving them ability to see the
efficacy of the blood of Christ to wash away sin, renewing them by the washing of
regeneration, and shedding abroad in their hearts the love of God.

II. THE INSTRUMENT WHICH THE SPIRIT USES IN ACCOMPLISHING THIS WORK. It is
the hammer of the Word. The age of miraculous manifestations is past, and there is
no reason to suppose that God will ever employ miracles to convert men from sin. It
is Scripture and Scripture only which He employs to carry home conviction to the
soul. God does not speak to man from heaven with an audible voice, commanding
him to repent and live, but He speaks by His Spirit, in the words of the revelation
which is now in our hands. He does not reveal His will to any, in another manner
than by the inspired sentences which contain the embodiment of His gracious
purposes of mercy and of love, and which the simplest and most illiterate can
understand. The Word is the instrument which Ha always uses, and none other,
wielding it like a hammer, to smite the human heart. If you went into the forge of a
blacksmith, you would see him, with strong arm, beating a piece of heated iron with
a hammer or sledge, in order to form it into some particular shape, either of a nail, a
horse-shoe, or a ploughshare. If you went into the shop of a carpenter, you would
see him driving home nails into wood with a hammer, as he makes some article of
furniture or of utility. Now, in the same manner, the Holy Spirit uses the hammer of
the Word, in order to fashion the hearts and characters of the saints, employing
particular passages of Scripture for this purpose, by shedding upon them a light,
Which, when reflected into the soul, causes them to be felt and experienced in
power. He uses the hammer of the Word in order to drive home truth, as nails
fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.

III. OBJECT UPON WHICH THE HOLY SPIRIT USES THE HAMMER OF THE WORD. It is
called in the text the rock; this being a metaphor to convey the idea of the
hardness and insensibility of the heart of the natural man. The heart of man is
compared to a stone by our Lord Himself, in the parable of the sower. Some of the
good seed of the Word is represented as falling upon stony places, where there was
little earth, and where it was impossible for it to come to perfection, because it could
not take root, and soon withered away. Nothing will grow upon stones or rocks, and
no good thing can come out of the heart of the natural man; but, on the contrary,
very much evil. But, when the human heart is thus compared to a stone, and in our
text, to a rock, what do we exactly understand by the comparison? If you saw a stone
lying upon the ground, you would see it to be destitute of the power of motion, a
hard, irregular, and useless mass. If you saw a rock out in the sea, at a distance from
an iron-bound coast, lashed unceasingly by the restless waves of the ocean, you
would see that it ever bids defiance to the utmost rage of the tempest, unaffected
and unchanged by the ceaseless flow of the briny waters. These illustrations will give
us some idea of the senseless nature and the hardened indifference of the heart of
the unconverted mail There are persons in the world upon whom no impression
whatever is produced by the tale of sorrow or of distress, the spectacle of suffering or
of misery, or by appeals to their feelings of compassion or of sympathy. The story of
Divine love, surpassing that of a mother for her child, as much as the Infinite
surpasses the finite, the spectacle of suffering and of distress endured in the Garden
of Gethsemane, and on the Cross, when Christ drank to the very dregs the cup of
wrath, appeals to men to have compassion on themselves, by accepting the mercy
which God offers, exhortations to repentance, motives to draw forth the exercise of
the feelings of affection and of love, and calls to manifest gratitude for unceasing
favours, fail to extract a tear from their insensate eyes, to stir within the soul a single
emotion, or to soften their hard and obdurate hearts.

IV. THE EFFECTS WHICH ARE PRODUCED WHEN THE ROCK IS SMITTEN BY THE
HAMMER. It is said that it is broken in pieces, which conveys to us the idea of
destruction. If the human heart be not softened by the ordinary means which the
Spirit employs, and if the sinner be not brought to humble himself before God, the
only alternative before him is to be broken to shivers. If you went into a blacksmiths
forge, and struck his anvil with a hammer, it would recoil, damaged to some extent
by the blow, while the metal of which the anvil is made would be condensed. If the
hammer were strong enough, and if a blow of sufficient violence were struck, it is
manifest that the anvil would be shivered into fragments. This will give us some idea
of the method of the Spirits operation, when He strikes the conscience with the
hammer of the Word. If all efforts are unavailing, and the stone of the human heart
still continues impenetrable, then the awful doom is pronounced--Ephraim is
joined to idols; let him alone. The Spirit ceases to strive, invitations to come and
drink of the water of life freely are no longer issued, the unpardonable sin has been
committed, and nothing remains but the execution of the sentence. The Word is the
instrument which we may now turn to account, that we may be saved; but hereafter,
if rejected, it will be a witness against us, and a testimony to the justice of the
perdition of ungodly men. (J. B. Courtenay, M. A.)

JER 23:35
What hath the Lord spoken?

The contents of the Bible

I. IMPARTIALITY of its contents. Each writer is an honest chronicler. With an

unflinching adherence to truth the whole story is told whoever may be unpleasantly
involved therein. Such is the undaunted boldness, sterling integrity, and resolute
independence of the Scripture scribes that they do not pause to inquire whose faults
they are recording. Such is their antipathy to sin in all its forms that they expose the
hydra wherever he may be encountered. Ay, the writers even disclose their own
faults and infirmities. They unfold their hearts without any reserve. They allude to
their own virtuous actions without any ostentation, and do not palliate their vices.
They refer to themselves with the same simplicity and fidelity with which they treat
of others. Where will you find such a marked feature in any other book?

II. THE ORIGINALITY of its contents.

1. Look, for example, at the disclosures given of the Divine Being--read the
sublime language of the holy scribes concerning the self-existence,
independence, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, justice, long-
suffering, and love of the Deity. Whence were these lordly conceptions
derived? They were revealed by God to man, and so made known to mortals.
You commend us to the productions of Horace; do you forget that a
thousand years before his day the lyric poetry of the Hebrews was famous?
Read the books of Grecian or Roman authors of the highest standard, and
tell me in which of them can you discover themes so stately, thoughts so
surprising, and diction so sublime as you have in the Bible
2. Look, again, at the Scripture teaching concerning Christ. Now, such a Divine
Being either lived or He did not. If you grant He lived, then the evangelistic
narratives are the authoritative biographies of Jesus. If He did not live, then
the narratives are fictitious, and the character is an invention. But was it
possible for the New Testament writers to have invented such an original
character? It is a moral impossibility that they should have concocted a story
such as that the New Testament contains. Nor did they gather the elements
of the unique character of Christ from any person or persons then living. A
sight acquaintance with the condition of society at the time of the Saviours
appearing will suffice to satisfy us that there were no men who could sit as
models to the evangelic artists. Nor did they reproduce themselves. Four
men of very different temperaments produce a history of one Man in which
all four coincide. There is but one way of accounting for this original,
peerless, beautiful life in the Gospels, and that is by accepting the declaration
of John--That which we have seen and heard, declare we unto you.

III. THE HIGH MORAL TONE of the contents. From first to last the Book of books
holds forth the Divine law as the safe and sole standard of morality. It points to God
as the supreme lawgiver, and tells us that He, in His spotlessness, demands purity in
man. It condemns not merely the overt evil, but the concealed offence; not only the
spoken word, but the voiceless emotions; not alone the guilty act, but the hidden
thought of its committal. Where was such elevated morality taught before the Bible
propounded it? So far back as the days of Abraham, Egypt was sunk in sensuality
and unrighteousness. Whence, then, did Moses obtain the morality with which his
writings are full? He could not evolve it from his own brain--that were a greater
miracle than the act of Divine revelation. And whence did the evangelists and
apostles obtain their sublime and stainless sentiments? Not from Rome, not from
Greece. In the lands where Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Plato, Socrates, Virgil, and
Cicero wrote--in the countries where philosophers, poets, and orators- of the most
distinguished order lived and laboured, idolatry abounded, brutal savageness was
patronised, voluptuousness and debauchery were approved. How out of paganism,
as it then was, could there have sprung up the noble, beautiful, and blessed system
of morality like that we possess in the New Testament? How could the icy,
indiscreet, and infamous teachings of heathen philosophy have given birth to the
warmhearted, winsome, and wonder-working ethics of our Scriptures? Do men
expect figs from thistles?

IV. THE BEAUTIES of its contents. The volume is full of literary splendours.
Picture, proverb, parable, and poem arc blended to produce a superb Book. Creation
has been ransacked that its choicest works may embellish the page of inspiration.
The fairest flowers of nature are woven into this garland for the brow of Immanuel.
The beauties of this volume are like the veins of gold beneath the surface soil.
Generations of men intellectually cross and recross the hallowed ground, and
remain in entire ignorance of a tithe of the hidden glories. Whole armies of mental
athletes handle the sword of the Spirit, without ever detecting the jewels which
decorate its hilt. Companies of learned men saunter in the gardens of revelation,
examine one plant and another, and-pronounce an opinion upon the whole--an
opinion dogmatic and defiant---whilst they have never discovered the sweetest
flowers which are concealed by the masses of luxuriant foliage. And yet they who
have judged simply by the conspicuous features of the volume are enthusiastic in
their praises of the Book, even our enemies themselves being judges.

V. THE PROMINENCE GIVEN TO CHRIST. It is said that a celebrated artist of ancient

times constructed a shield of so remarkable an order that he had worked his name
into the device in a manner that it could not be removed. To erase the name you
must destroy the shield. Thus is it emphatically with the Bible. From Genesis to
Revelation the whole volume points to Jesus. He is the centre and soul of the Book.
Take away Jesus from the Book of books, and you have a casket without a jewel, an
envelope without a letter, a scaffolding without any superstructure, musical notation
without any melody, a frame without a portrait, an assembly without a leader, ages
of preparation on the most extensive scale for an event that never happens,
centuries of practice for an oratorio that is never performed. From the fatal
declension of Adam, He was the subject of promise and prophecy. In paradise He
was referred to as the seed of the woman. Abraham rejoiced to see His day, and
avowed that the Lord would provide Himself a Lamb. Jacob spake of Him as the
coming Shiloh, Moses foretold the rising of a Prophet, Balaam saw Him as a
Star and a Sceptre, Job rejoiced in the life of his Redeemer, David described
the agonies, death, and resurrection of the Holy One, Solomon ecstatically praised
his Beloved, Isaiah graphically dwelt upon the doings of the tender Plant, and
the precious Corner-stone. He was Jeremiahs Branch, Ezekiel s River, Daniel s
Ancient of Days, Hoseas Lord of hosts, Joel s Latter-day Glory, Obadiah s
Saviour, Jonah s Salvation, Micahs Peace, Nahums Him that bringeth good
tidings, Habakkuks Strength, Haggais Desire of all nations, Zechariah s
Fountain, and Malachis Sun of Righteousness. How can you account for such a
marked blending of all writers on one theme--such a manifest gravitation of thought
toward one point--such a glorious clustering of hope, expectation, and joy around
one centre? How was it that these scribes, separated by ages, and climes, and
callings, and capacities, all looked Christward? There is but one answer. All were
under the invisible spell of the Saviours attractive influence--all felt the centripetal
force of the Cross which was to be erected on Calvary--all were God-guided and
God-taught. (J. H. Hitchens.)

JER 23:37-40
Because ye say this word, The burden of the Lord.

Sins of the tongue

Great part of the prophetical writings is occupied with denunciations of vengeance
on the Jews, for their obstinacy, ingratitude, and perverseness. Hence the message
which a prophet was commissioned to deliver was frequently and appropriately
named The burden of the Lord, as being heavy with woes about to fall on the
impenitent. But it would appear that the Jews not only gave no heed to the messages
which they received, but were accustomed to turn them into ridicule. They were in
the habit of coming to the prophet, and asking him if there were any new burden
from the Lord; using the word in such a way as to indicate contempt, or to mark that
they thought it good material for a jest. In consequence of this, God expressly
prohibited the use of the word burden. He forbade any who should come to
inquire of the prophet, to put the inquiry into the shape, What is the burden of the
Lord? but required a more simple form of speech, What hath the Lord answered?
and, What hath the Lord spoken? Very probably it appeared to the Jews quite an
indifferent thing what word they used; and they may even have said, that as they
had not invented the word, but had derived it from God Himself, they could not be
much to blame in persisting in its use. But God viewed the disobedience in a wholly
different light, and considered it deserving of most severe vengeance. Whatever had
been the crime with which God had been charging the Jews, He could not have
followed up the accusation with the denunciation of sterner punishment: Behold, I,
even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you, and the city that I gave you and
your fathers, and cast you out of My presence. Now, this is our subject of discourse,
the using a prohibited word drawing upon a nation the extreme vengeance of God.
You must all be aware of the importance which in the Bible is attached to our words,
and you may be disposed to wonder, if not to complain, that the utterances of the
tongue should be made so indicative of character, and so influential on our portion
for eternity. Our Saviour expressly declared, By your words ye shall be justified,
and by your words ye shall be condemned; as though actions might be wholly put
out of account, and words might determine our everlasting allotments. God gave
Adam his vocabulary, as well as that fine intellectual equipment which might
excogitate things worthy of being embodied in its magnificent expressions. We may
fairly regard language, the power of expression, as the great distinction between
man and the brute. Reason is often spoken of as constituting this distinction; but
speech, itself equally an endowment from God, may more justly be regarded as
separating the two. There is a much nearer approach to reason in the instinct which
an animal often displays than there is to language in the inarticulate sounds which
the animal utters. Wonderful power! that I can now stand in the midst of this
assembly, and use the air which we breathe in conveying to every one the thoughts
which are now crowding the hidden chambers of my own soul; that I can knock
therewith at every mans conscience and at every mans heart--transfusing myself, as
it were, into those impenetrable solitudes, filling them with the images that are
passing to and fro in my own spirit, or causing kindred forms to rise or stir in
hundreds that are around me. Every one condemns the prostitution of reason,
because every one regards reason as a high and a palmy attribute, and therefore,
when the intellect is unworthily employed, degraded to the ministering at the altars
of scepticism or sensuality, there is an almost universal sentence of indignant
reprobation; but language might be put before reason. It is reason walking abroad
among the myriads of human kind; it is the soul, not in the secret laboratory, and
not in its impalpable mysteriousness, but the soul amid the crowded scenes of life,
formed and clothed, and submitting itself to the inspiration, and influencing the
sentiments of a multitude. And if this be language, I know not why any one should
be surprised that so great heinousness is attached to sins of the tongue. God will
not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain. It is grievous to think of God
irreverently; the soul should be His sanctuary, and to profane Him there is to
aggravate contempt of God, by offering it at the shrine which He reared for Himself;
but it is yet more grievous to speak of Him irreverently. But now let us further point
out to you, that the Jews were guilty of turning solemn things into ridicule; and this
of itself might suffice in vindication of the severity of their sentence. It is quite
evident that scoffing and sneering were quite common in Jerusalem, and that the
word burden was contemptuously used in the way of ridicule or joke. The Jews did
not invent the phrase, or devise for themselves the applying it to the messages which
God sent through His prophets. God Himself calls some messages burdens--an
appropriate title, which well defined their chief subject-matter, for vengeance was
the great theme of the prophetic announcements. But such a use of the word burden
gave occasion for wicked comments and remarks. It were very easy, if we may use
the expression, to pun upon the word; and without any concern for the awful
significance which God had attached to the phrase, the Jews diverted themselves
with the sayings, and asked the prophets for burdens, that they might turn them into
ridicule, or provoke laughter at their expense. Now, let us suppose that jesting with
solemn things was the head and sport of the offence. Was, then, the offence trivial?
We might judge that it were, if opinion were to be guided by the frequency with
which a light thing is done. How often is a scriptural expression ludicrously used!
How often is a text, a saying, quoted in some jocular sense, or in some absurd
application! There could be no readier way of practically bringing the Bible into
contempt, and weakening or destroying its influence upon men, than the making
ludicrous applications of its statements, or using its expressions to give point to a
joke, or force to a witticism. What helps your laughter will not long retain your
reverence. Let not, therefore, the temptation of saying a good thing, or of giving a
laughable turn to certain words, prevail on you to use Scripture irreverently: you will
hereby harden yourselves more than you can calculate, and you will give an untold
advantage to your spiritual adversaries. It is to sharpen all the arrows of the devil, to
sharpen your wits on the Bible. Be jocular with what else you will; but revelation,
with its statement of everlasting things, be ever serious and reverent with this. (H.
Melvill, B. D.)

A contemptuous use of the phrase, The burden of the Lord.

Ye shall not say, The burden of the Lord. But this was a phrase which the
prophets themselves had used, and did use afterwards. They spoke of the burden of
Babylon, Moab, Dumah, Egypt, &c. It was not, therefore, the expression itself, so
much as the spirit in which these people repeated it, that was the offence. It might
perhaps be partly in the way of jeering contempt, turning the office of the prophet to
ridicule; representing it thus--What is the burden this time? Lets hear it. They did
show all this profane lightness sometimes. But probably it was with many of them a
deeper, graver feeling. It was to many an expression of grievance in hostility to the
will and dictates of God. Well, you are here again, in the name of God! a most
unwelcome sight you are; what is it you have now to say? Is it to be another solemn
aggravated recital of our crimes? There seems to be a very careful register kept in
heaven of our sins. We wonder our little failings should occupy such attention there.
And you have a strange liking for your office of accuser. If it were something
pleasant to be said to us you would not be so ready. Or, Is it that God forbids us
some one thing more of the few indulgences to our wills that are left us? We thought
we had already a sufficient number of the Thou shalt not, but a complete law is long
in making! Or, Is it some additional load to our long list of duties? Already we
cannot turn any way, but there is something for us to do we dont like. Or, Is there
some new threatening of judgment and vengeance? Now, such a spirit of
remonstrance against God is common in ancient time and to our own; frightful as
the spirit may seem when it is expressed in plain terms. (John Foster.)

JEREMIAH 24

JER 24:1
The princes of Judah, with the carpenters and smiths from Jerusalem.

The nobility of work

I. ALL LABOUR BECOMES TRULY NOBLE REGARDED AS THE SERVICE OF GOD. To regard
labour simply as a stern necessity of human life is to convert the workman into a
slave, and his toil into drudgery. The glory of the angels is found in the fact they are
messengers of God. And all the work of our hand attains its highest glory wrought
out in the love and fear of God. The apostle gives us the true point of view (Eph 6:6-
8). Here we have God the Taskmaster. Doing the will of God. Not only what we are
pleased to call our highest work for Him, but our lowliest toil also, serving Him with
two brown hands as Gabriel serves in the presence of the throne with two white
wings. Here we have also God the Paymaster. Whatsoever good thing any man
doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord. God is a grand paymaster, He is a sure
one, and rich beyond all hope are they who do His bidding. In the class-meeting a
poor man said to me, It was very strange, sir, but the other day, whilst I was looking
after my horses, God visited me and wonderfully blessed me; it was very strange He
should visit me like this in a stable. Not at all, said I, it is a fulfilment of the
prophecy: In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses Holiness unto the
Lord, &c. In an old book I was reading the other day the writer laughed at some
commoner who had just been made a peer, because he had his coat of arms burned
and painted even upon his shovels and wheelbarrows. In my reckoning, that was a
very fine action, and full of significance. If a man is a true man he is a man of God, a
prince of God; and he ought to pat the stamp of his nobility on the commonest
things with which he has to do.

II. ALL LABOUR BECOMES TRULY NOBLE REGARDED AS A MINISTRY TO HUMANITY. Few
men, comparatively, realise the social bearing of their toil, and therefore know it as
an insipid thing, when in truth it is their rich privilege to taste in all their work the
joy of a good Samaritan, for all conscientious work is an essential philanthropy.
With one hand we work for ourselves, with the other for the race, and it is one of the
purest joys of life to remember this. Let us be blind workers no more, but
consciously, lovingly, do our daily work, rejoicing in the social glory and fruitfulness
of it. Princes, smiths, carpenters, let us not forget we too toil for the larger happiness
of all men, so shall we prove in our toil some of the sublime pleasure Howard knew
when he opened the door of the prison, that Wilberforce felt striking off the fetters
of the slave, that Peabody tasted when he built homes for the poor.

III. ALL LABOUR BECOMES TRULY NOBLE REGARDED AS A DISCIPLINE TO OUR HIGHER
NATURE. Many, alas! sink with their work, but the Divine design in the duty of life
was the perfection of the worker. Our toil is to develop our whole nature. Our
physical being. Our work is neither to pollute nor destroy, but to purify and build up
the temple of the body. Sweat does not mean blood, and there is a blessing in the
curse. Our work should develop our intellectual self also. Much of our business may
become a direct mental education, and it need never hinder the flowering of the
mind. But chiefly the work of life ought to subserve our spiritual perfecting. In all
true work the soul works and gains in purity and power by its work. The carpenters
work tests his moral qualities, and Whilst he builds with brick and stone, timber and
glass, he may build up also character with silver, gold, and precious stones; the
smith fashions his soul whilst he shapes the iron on ringing anvil; the husbandman
may enrich his heart whilst he adorns the landscape; and the weaver at the loom
weave two fabrics at once, one that the moth shall fret, the other of gold and fine
needlework, immortal raiment for the spirit. The King of glory has consecrated the
workshop by His presence and glorified work by His example. (W. L. Watkinson.)

JER 24:2-3
One basket had very good figs.

Two baskets of figs

I. THE SAME NATION MAY CONTAIN TWO DISTINCT CHARACTERS, YET BOTH MAY BE
EQUALLY INVOLVED IN A NATIONAL VISITATION. There are laws of retribution m
operation in relation to nations which, so far as the outward condition is concerned-,
are no respecters of persons.

II. SUBMISSION TO DIVINE CHASTISEMENT WILL LEAD, IN TIME, TO DELIVERANCE

FROM IT, WHILE RESISTANCE WILL BRING RUIN. Two members of a family may be
suffering from the same disease; the physician will insist upon submission to his
treatment from both his patients. If one refuses, he must not complain of the
physician, supposing he grows worse. God desired to heal the Jewish nation of its
idolatrous tendencies; for this purpose He had decreed that it should go into
captivity. Those who submitted willingly are hem promised that the discipline
should be for their good, and that they should be brought again to their own land;
while those who resisted, would be consumed from off the land that He gave unto
them and their fathers.

III. Lessons,
1. In this life retribution to nations is more certain than to individuals. God can
deal with individual characters in any world, therefore we sometimes find
the greatest villains apparently unmarked by Him now.
2. Outward circumstance is no standard by which to judge Gods estimate of
character. Jobs friends were not afflicted as he was, but God esteemed him
far more highly than He did them.
3. Moral crime is commercial ruin to a nation. Israel lost God first, and then her
national prosperity and greatness. A body soon decays when the life has
departed, and a putrid carcase will soon be visited by the birds of prey. (A
London Minister.)

What seest thou, Jeremiah?--

Reflections on some of the characteristics of the age we live in
It is not difficult to see the force and application of this homely but sententious
little allegory. Jeremiah lived in those days of declension and disaster in which the
invasion of Judea by the King of Babylon was not only threatened, but actually took
place. He saw the departure of the King of Judah, and the princes of Judah, with
the carpenters and smiths, from Jerusalem, and these were all carried away
captive to Babylon. Nevertheless, many of every class were left behind, and these
were placed under the government of that weak and wicked king, Zedekiah. Those
who were carried away comprised the best of the population with regard to
intelligence, religious feeling, and patriotism. Their sorrows and afflictions humbled
them, so that they repented of their idolatries and obtained mercy of the Lord. In
due time the way was prepared for the return of the exiles to their own land; and
there, under the leadership of such men as Ezra, Nehemiah, and Zerubbabel, they
founded afresh a pious commonwealth, in which the worship of the true God was
ever afterwards main-rained down to the time of the coming of Christ. In them was
fulfilled the promise contained in verses 4-7. On the other hand, the Jews who
remained at home with Zedekiah and his princes revolted against God more and
more. They abandoned themselves openly to licentiousness and idolatry. Their
temper fiery and mutinous, their language blasphemous, their whole conduct
infamous. (See verses 8-13.) These were the evil figs, so evil that they could not be
eaten. The point suggested to us by Jeremiahs vision is, that there occur periods, or
special circumstances, in the religious life of nations, which tend to develop and
force the maturation of character with unusual energy and astonishing rapidity. In
such times, you do not find people merely good or bad; but the good are very good,
and the evil very evil. Now, it is evident that no parallel whatever can be drawn
between our position and circumstances in England at the present time and those of
Judea in the days of Jeremiah. We are not, as a nation, suffering either from internal
anarchy or from external assault. But still it may be, that other influences and
conditions of society are at work, producing an exactly analogous result to that at
the time referred to in the text.

I. Certain peculiarities of our times and position my be noted.

1. This is an age of extraordinary intellectual and social activity. The most
absolute liberty of speech exists, and men shrink from the utterance of no
opinion, the broaching of no speculation. This unusual activity and daring of
thought produces rapid and extraordinary changes in both political and
ecclesiastical affairs. Amid the astonishment and whirl of such events, it
requires a great effort to keep the mind calm, and hold fast in our judgments,
utterances, and actions to the sober requirements of sound principle and
acknowledged truth (Pro 17:27, margin).
2. The very full and clear religious light which we enjoy.
3. The corresponding increase of activity in the Church. All manner of special
devices are being tried and carried out vigorously whereby to reach all
classes, to instruct the most ignorant and reform the most vicious, whilst
ancient and ordinary means of grace are sustained with unprecedented
interest and efficiency.

II. WHAT DO ALL THESE THINGS IMPORT? and what do they necessitate on our part
individually? Truly we find here divers potent and stimulating agencies in operation,
calculated to arouse us up to repentance and godly solicitude, and then to prompt us
on to vigorous Christian life and action. If we yield to them, how fast and far may we
soon be carried in the path of faith, in a career of usefulness! What bold, what firm,
what fruitful Christians we must become if we enter fully into the spirit of the
times, considered as engaged on the side of Christ and His Gospel! But if we refuse
to do so, if we set ourselves to resist these powerful influences, how strenuous must
that resistance be! how determined and how self-conscious that action of the will
which still fights against God and clings to worldliness and sin! Facts are in
harmony with these reasonings. Illustrations abound on every side. In this earnest
age you find earnest men both for good and evil. Was ever war conducted on so
fearful a scale as we have lately witnessed? In our day, we have also seen such
specimens of commercial roguery and robbery, conceived on so magnificent a scale,
and executed under so clever and admirable a cloak of hypocrisy, as no previous age
has ever presented to the world. On the other hand, look at the men who stand
foremost in the van of religion and philanthropy. These are Gods heroes; men are
still living amongst us worthy of comparison with the spiritual heroes of ancient
times, in regard to all that is noble in faith, self-denying in zeal, munificent in giving,
or abundant in labours. These, indeed, are among the good figs, which by Gods
grace are very good: and to the production of such instances of exalted and matured
piety, the present times are not in the least unfavourable. One might speak of books,
as well as men. And if, on the other hand, it be true that infidelity and immorality
were never so speciously or so boldly advocated as now, in sensational novels, in
shallow critiques, or in vulgar serials; so, again, we defy any age to show such noble
and masterly treatises as are now written by men of sanctified learning and genius,
either in exposition of the Scriptures, or in vindication of their contents. Then there
are public institutions and societies to be looked at. If chapels are multiplied, so are
theatres. Look at the state of our large towns and cities. Were ever such facilities for
evil doing? such criminal attractions for the young? so many places where vice is
seductive and sin made easy? The kingdom of Satan is as active and roused up to
new exertions as is the kingdom of Christ. It is said that, in the early colonisation of
Van Diemens Land, one man took a hive of bees, and soon the island was filled with
swarms, and both the trees and rocks dropped with honey; another took a handful of
thistle-down, and ere long the country was overrun with prickly and gigantic weeds.
Like such actions, are the deeds of all men now. Shall we, then, multiply honey-
hives, or scatter thistles in the earth? Let us seek to be good, and do good: and then,
behold what glorious possibilities belong to us, of being pre-eminently holy, blest
and useful! (T. G. Horon.)

Figs good and bad

Events are divided. What seest thou? I see two kinds of events, one good, and
the other vile: and there they are in life. It is so in families: how do you account for it
that one son prays, and the other never saw the need of prayer? The one is filial; the
other has a heart of stone. Look at life broadly. What seest thou, O prophet, O man
of the piercing eyes, what seest thou? Two events, or series of events, one excellent,
the other vile; one leading upward, the other downward. What seest thou? Heaven--
-hell. The vision is still before us; we need to have our attention called to it. He who
deals in singularities, in isolations, never enters into the philosophy of Providence,
the method of the sublime organisation which is denominated the universe. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

JER 24:5
Whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good.

The action of love

The Lord says He will send His people into captivity for their good. How
marvellous is the action of love! The parent sends away the child he cannot live
without for the childs good; men undertake long and perilous and costly journeys
that they may accomplish a purpose that is good. Jesus Christ Himself said to His
wondering disciples, It is expedient for you that I go away. Who can understand
this action of love? It would seem to us to be otherwise: that it would be best for
Jesus to remain until the very last wanderer is home. Are we not sent away? have we
not lost fortune, station, standing? have we not been punished in a thousand
different ways-chastised, humiliated, afflicted? have we not been suddenly
surrounded with clouds in which there was no light--yea, and clouds in which there
was no rain, simply darkness, sevenfold night? Yet it was for our good; it was that
our vanity might be rebuked, that the centre of dependence might be found, that the
throne of righteousness might be seen and approached. Let us look upon our
afflictions, distresses, and losses in that light. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Outward circumstances no standard by which to judge of ones

true state
The captives already in Babylon are compared to good fruit, such as is fit for use
and sweet to the taste. The party in Jerusalem as yet free, is compared to bad fruit,
unfit for use, and nauseous to the palate. And yet if one judged by the mere outward
aspect of things, the state of the captives in the enemies city seemed a much more
undesirable one than that of their brethren in the metropolis of their own land.
Hence we see that the good or evil of ones circumstances is not to be judged by
outward appearances. Often what seems a peculiarly hard and distressing position
proves to have been the very best for us. God humbles us, and tries us sorely at the
first, in order to do us good in our latter end. (A. R. Fausset, M. A.)

JER 24:6-7
For I will set Mine eyes upon them for good, and l will bring them again to this
land.

Gods regard for His people

I. The nature of Gods declaration respecting Himself, I will set Mine eves upon
them for good.
1. This denotes--
(1) His omniscience over them (Job 34:21, compared with 31:4).
(2) His providence for them (2Ch 16:9).
(3) His grace to save them (Rom 8:29).
2. It implies--
(1) Divine personality--For I (Eze 34:11).
(2) Divine attention--Will set Mine eyes (Psa 32:8).
(3) Personal affection--Upon them (Eze 16:5-6).
(4) Great kindness--For their good (Isa 54:8).

II. A description of the deliverance here declared, I will bring them into this
land
1. Here we have the idea of distance (Eph 2:17).
2. How He brings them back.
(1) By the death of His Son (Rev 5:9).
(2) By the obedience of His Son (Rom 5:19).
(3) By virtue of His intercession (Heb 7:25).
3. This is--
(1) A rich land.
(2) A large land.
(3) A peaceful land.
(4) A land of security.

III. The blessings designed fob them on their return.

1. Negatively Not pull them down.
 (1) Not condemn them (Rom 8:1).
(2) Not visit their sins upon them (Heb 8:12).
2. Positively--I will build them up.
(1) The foundation of the building (1Co 3:11).
(2) The dimensions (Rom 11:5).
(3) The materials (Eph 2:1).
(4) The cement by which this building is united (Col 2:2-3).
(5) The instruments employed in building (2Co 4:7).
3. These plants had been--
(1) Fruitless.
(2) Cumberers.
(3) Injurious. Yet God did not pluck them up.
4. But He transplanted them to a superior soil: I will plant them.
(1) In a delightful situation (Psa 48:2).
(2) In a good and fertile soil (Psa 1:3).
(3) Where there is plenty of sun and rain (Psa 84:11).

IV. The results of all this.

1. And I will give them a heart to know Me.
(1) As a gracious God.
(2) A covenant-keeping God.
(3) A faithful God.
(4) A mighty God.
(5) And a God of salvation to His people.
2. And they shall be My people. As proved by their--
(1) Studying the Bible.
(2) Offering up prayers and praises.
(3) Attendance on His house.
(4) Living to God.
(5) And simply believing on Christ.
3. And I will be their God.
(1) By ruling in their understandings.
(2) Subduing their wills.
(3) And living in their hearts.
4. For they shall return unto Me with their whole heart.
(1) Positively-Nothing shall prevent them, for they shall return.
(2) Cordially--Their heart shall be delighted in returning.
(3) Personality--Each and all shall return in the same person, unto Me.
(4) Dissatisfaction--They return from all things sinful to God. (T. B. Baker.)

I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord.--

Heart-knowledge of God
By this great promise of the text is not merely meant that God will lead the
converted to know that there is a God, because that may be known without s new
heart. Any man possessed of reason may know that there is a Supreme Being, who
created all things and preserves the universe in existence. The text promises that the
favoured ones shall know that God to be Jehovah. Man fashions for himself a god
after his own liking; he makes to himself, if not out of wood or stone, yet out of what
he calls his own consciousness, or his cultured thought, a deity to his taste, who will
not be too severe with his iniquities, or deal out strict justice to the impenitent. The
Holy Spirit, however, when He illuminates the mind, leads us to see that Jehovah is
God, and beside Him there is none else. He teaches His people to know that the God
of heaven and earth is the God d the Bible, a God whose attributes are completely
balanced, mercy attended by justice, love accompanied by holiness, grace arrayed in
truth, and power linked with tenderness. When the heart is content to believe in God
as He is revealed, and no longer goes about to fashion a deity for itself according to
its own fancies and notions, it is a hopeful sign. The main stress of the promise lies,
however, in this: I will give them a heart to know ME; that is, not merely to know
that I am, and that I am Jehovah, but to have a personal knowledge of Myself. It is
not enough to know that our Creator is the Jehovah of the Bible, and that He is
perfect in character, and glorious beyond thought; but to know God we must have
perceived Him, we must have spoken to Him, we must have been made at peace
with Him, we must have lifted up our heart to Him, and received communications
from Him. If you know the Lord your secret is with Him, and His secret is with you;
He has manifested Himself unto you as He does not unto the world. He must have
made Himself known unto you by the mysterious influences of His Spirit, and
because of this you know Him. I THE SEAT OF THIS KNOWLEDGE I will give them a
heart to know Me. Observe that it is not said, I will give them a head to know Me.
The first and primary impediment to mans knowledge of God lies in the affections
The heart is the seat of the blindness; there lies the darkness which beclouds the
whole mind. Hence to the heart the light must come, and to the heart that light is
promised.
1. I understand by the fact that the knowledge of God here promised lies in the
heart, first, that God renews the heart so that it admires the character of
God. The understanding perceives that God is just, powerful, faithful, wise,
true, gracious, longsuffering, and the like; then the heart being purified
admires all these glorious attributes, and adores Him because of them.
2. The heart-knowledge promised in the covenant of grace means, however,
much more than approval: grace enables the renewed heart to take another
step and appropriate the Lord, saying, O God, Thou art my God, early will I
seek Thee. All the saved ones cry, This God is our God for ever and ever;
He shall be our guide even unto death
3. All true knowledge of God is attended by affection for Him. In spiritual
language to. Know God is to love Him. He that loveth not knoweth not God,
for God is love. It is the great passion of the renewed soul to glorify God,
whom he knows and loves; knowledge without love would be a powerless
thing, but God has joined this knowledge and love together in a sacred
wedlock, and they can never be put asunder. As we love God we know Him,
and as we know Him we love Him. Admiration, appropriation, affection are
crowned with adhesion. To know a thing by heart is, in our common talk, to
 know it thoroughly, Memories of the heart abide when all others depart. A
mothers love, a wifes fondness, a sweet childs affection, will come before us
even in the last hours of life; when the mind will lose its learning and the
hand forget its cunning, the dear names of our beloved ones will linger on
our lips; and their sweet faces will be before us even when our eyes are dim
with the shadow of approaching death. If we can sing, O God, my heart is
fixed, my heart is fixed, then the knowledge which it possesses will never be
taken away from it.

II. The necessity of this knowledge.

1. To know God is a needful preparation for every other true knowledge, because
the Lord is the centre of the universe, the basis, the pillar, the essential force,
the all in all, the fulness of all things. You may learn the doctrines of the
Bible, but you do not know them truly till you know the God of the doctrines.
You may understand the precepts in the letter of them, and the promises in
their outward wording, but neither precept nor promise do you truly know
until you know the God from whose lips they fell. The ancient sage said,
Man, know thyself. He spake well, but even for this man must first know
his God. I venture to say that no man rightly knows himself till he knows his
God, because it is by the light and purity of God that we see our own
darkness and sinfulness.
2. The knowledge of God is necessary to any real peace of mind. Suppose a man
to be in the world and feel that he is right every way except with regard to
God, and as to Him he knows nothing. Hear him say, I go about the world
and see many faces which I can recognise, and I perceive many friends upon
whom I can trust, but there is a God somewhere, and I know nothing at all
about Him. Whether He be my friend or my foe I know not. If thoughtful
and intelligent he must suffer unrest in his spirit, because he will say to
himself, Suppose this God should turn out to be a just God, and I should be
a breaker of His laws! What a peril hangs over me. How is it possible for me
to be at peace till this dreadful ignorance is removed? He is the God of
peace, and there can be no peace till the soul knows Him.
3. That this knowledge of God is necessary is clear, for how could it be possible
for a man to have spiritual life and yet not to know God? If you do not know
Him you are not a partaker of His grace, but you abide in darkness Into His
heaven you can never enter till He has given you a heart to know Him; do not
forget this warning, or trifle with it.

III. The excellency of this knowledge.

1. One of the first effects of knowing God in the soul is that it turns out our idols.
God so enamours the soul of the converted man, so engrosses every spiritual
faculty, that he cannot endure an idol, however dear in former times; and if
perchance in some back-sliding moment an earthly love intrudes, it is
because the man has withdrawn his eye from the splendour of the Deity.
2. The second good effect of the knowledge of God is that it creates faith in the
soul; to prove which I might give a great many texts, but one will suffice (Psa
9:10): They that know Thy Name will put their trust in Thee. We cannot
trust an unknown God, but when He reveals Himself to us by His Spirit, then
 to trust Him is no longer difficult; it is, indeed, inevitable.
3. This knowledge of God creates good works also (1Jn 2:3). A heart to know the
Lord begets and nurtures every virtue and every grace, and is the basis of the
noblest character, the food which feeds grace till it matures into glory.
4. To know God has over us a transforming power. Remember how the apostle
writes (2Co 3:18). Every thought which crosses the mind affects it for the
better or the worse, every glance is moulding us, every wish fashions the
character. A sight of God is the most wonderfully sanctifying influence that
can be conceived of. Know God, and you will grow to be like Him.
5. The knowledge of God causes us to praise Him. In Judah is God known; His
name is great in Israel. It is not possible for us to have low thoughts of Him,
or to give forth mean utterances concerning Him, or to act in a miserly way
towards His cause, when we practically know Him.
6. The knowledge of God brings comfort, and that is a very desirable thing in a
world of trouble. What saith the Psalmist? God is known in her palaces for a
refuge.
7. To know God also brings a man great honour. Because he hath set his love
upon Me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because e hath
known My name. Think of it--set on high, and set on high by the Lord
Himself, and all as the result of knowing the name of the Lord.
8. The man who knows the Lord will have usefulness given him (2Co 2:14). We
cannot teach others of things which we do not know ourselves. If we have no
savour in us there cannot be a savour coming out of us. We shall only be a
drag upon the Church in any position if we are destitute of the knowledge of
God in Christ Jesus; but if we are filled with a knowledge of Christ, then the
sweet savour of His name will pour forth from us as perfume from the
flowers.

IV. THE SOURCE OF THIS KNOWLEDGE. None but the Creator can give a man a new
heart, the change is too radical for any other hand. It would be hard to give a new
eye, or a new arm, but a new heart is still more out of the question. The Lord
Himself must do it.
1. It is evidently a work of pure grace. He freely gives to whomsoever He wills,
according to His own declaration, I will have mercy on whom I will have
mercy.
2. It is evidently a work which is possible. All things are possible to God, and He
says, I will give it to them. He does not speak of it as a blessing desirable,
but unattainable; on me contrary He says, I will give them a heart to know
Me
3. It is a work which the Lord has covenanted to do (Hos 2:19; Jer 31:32-34). (C.
H. Spurgeon.)

A believing knowledge of God

The manner of knowing the difference between believers and unbelievers as to
knowledge, is not as much in the matter of their knowledge as in the manner of
knowing. Unbelievers, some of them, may know more and be able to say more of
God, His perfections and will, than many believers; but they know nothing as they
ought, nothing in a right manner, nothing spiritually and savingly, nothing with a
holy, heavenly light. The-excellency of a believer is not that he hath a large
apprehension of things, but that what he doth apprehend, which may perhaps be
very little, he sees it in the light of the Spirit of God, in a saving, soul-transforming
light: and this is that which gives us communion with God, and not prying thoughts,
or curious raised notions. (J. Owen.)

To know God-a new, a gladdening experience

A touching story is told of the child of a French painter. The little girl lost her sight
in infancy, and her blindness was supposed to be incurable. A famous oculist in
Paris, however: performed an operation on her eyes and restored her sight. Her
mother had long been dead, and her father had been her only friend and companion,
when she was told that her blindness could be cured, her one thought was that she
could see him; and when the cure was complete, and the bandages were removed,
she ran to him, and, trembling, pored over his features, shutting her eyes now and
then, and passing her fingers over his face, as if to make sure that it was he. The
father had a noble head and presence, and his every look and motion were watched
by his daughter with the keenest delight. For the first time his constant tenderness
and care seemed real to her. If he caressed her, or even looked upon her kindly, it
brought tears to her eyes. To think, she cried, holding his hand close in hers, that
I had this father so many years and never knew him!
They shall return unto life with their whole heart.

The whole heart must be given to God

Suppose a mother gave her child a beautiful flower-plant in bloom, and told her to
carry it to a sick friend. The child takes it away, and when she reaches the friends
door she plucks off one leaf and gives it to her, keeping the plant herself. Has she
obeyed her mothers command? Then afterwards, once a day, she plucks off another
leaf, or a bud, or a flower, and takes it to the friend, still retaining the plant. Did she
obey the command of her mother? Nothing but the giving of the whole plant could
fulfil the mothers direction. Now, is not that a simple illustration of what we give to
God? He commands us to love Him with all our heart and with all our being, and we
pluck off a little leaf of love now sad then, a little bud or flower of affection, or one
cluster of fruit from the bending branches, and give to Him; and we call that
obeying. (J. R. Miller.)

JEREMIAH 25

JER 25:6
I will do you no hurt.

No hurt from God

I. The import of the promise.

 1. Such a promise can apply to none but the people of God.
2. The Lords people are apt to fear He should do them hurt, and hence He
kindly assures them of the contrary. We want more of that love to God which
beareth all things at His hand, which believeth all good things concerning
Him, and hopeth for all things from Him.
3. As God will do no hurt to them that fear Him, so neither will He suffer others
to hurt them. If God does not change their hearts, He win tie their hands; or
if for wise ends He suffers them to injure you in your worldly circumstances,
yet your heavenly inheritance is sure, and your treasure is laid up where
thieves cannot break through nor steal.
4. More is implied in the promise than is absolutely expressed; for when the
Lord says He will do His people no hurt, He means that He will really do
them good. All things to Gods people are blessings in their own nature, or
are turned into blessings for their sake; so that all the paths of the Lord are
mercy and truth unto such as keep His covenant and His testimonies to do
them (Gen 50:20; Jer 24:5-6; Rom 8:28).

II. The assurance we have that this promise will be fulfilled.

1. The Lord thinks no hurt of His people, and therefore He will certainly do them
no hurt. His conduct is a copy of His decrees: He worketh all things
according to the counsel of His own will, and therefore where no evil is
determined, no evil can take place.
2. The Lord threatens them no hurt; no penal sentence lies against them.
3. He never has done them any hurt, but good, all the days of their life. Former
experience of the Divine goodness should strengthen the believers
confidence, and fortify him against present discouragements (Jdg 13:23; Psa
42:6; Psa 77:12; 2Co 1:10). (B. Beddome, M.A.)

JER 25:31
He will plead with all flesh.

No excuse needed for faith in God

I. GOD PLEADS WITH MEN CHIEFLY THROUGH THE SPIRIT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS
CHRIST. This part of our life is a probation, like being at school; it is an
apprenticeship to eternal life, a life in which we are to be journeymen and masters of
the work of being good and doing good. We are learners here. Some learn their lifes
lesson thoroughly, and others only partially. God means us to learn; and if a man
will not do Gods will, he can only learn by the bitter pain of experience. There are
only two ways of learning--either by doing Gods will, or by disobeying it; either way
will bring us to our senses at some time or other, either in this world or in that
which is to come.

II. CHRISTIANITY URGES THAT IF WE BE WISE EVERY ONE WILL CHOOSE THE HIGHEST
AIM OF LIFE. Unless we have some great object in view, our life is a task which is hard
to bear; it is like being rubbed with sandpaper, everything seeming to be in
unpleasant friction with us. Yet you cannot get a polish without friction; and so the
friction of daily life that vexes and torments us, is an experience which is good for
us. It is one of Gods means of polishing us; but it is unpleasant, like having small
pebbles in ones boots. It is, however, a needful discipline. But were we humbly and
lovingly to do Gods will, as you would have your little child do your will, life would
not be a painful task, nor would it be a state of perpetual friction.

III. Christianity also teaches us that God is worthy to be both esteemed and
loved.

IV. CHRISTIANITY SWEETLY TEACHES US OF THE OTHER LIFE. Have you ever lived in
the country, and after being away for a time felt the joy of returning home? (W.
Birch.)

JEREMIAH 26

JER 26:1-24
In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah.

Afflictions, distresses, tumults

Jehoiakim was, perhaps, the most despicable of the kings of Judah. Josephus says
that he was unjust in disposition, an evil-doer; neither pious towards God nor just
towards men. Something of this may have been due to the influence of his wife,
Nehushta, whose father, Elnathan, was an accomplice in the royal murder of Urijah.
Jeremiah appears to have been constantly in conflict with this king; and probably
the earliest manifestation of the antagonism that could not but subsist between two
such men occurred in connection with the building of Jehoiakims palace. Though
his kingdom was greatly impoverished with the heavy fine of between forty and fifty
thousand pounds, imposed by Pharaoh-Necho afar the defeat and death of Josiah,
and though the times were dark with portents of approaching disaster, yet he began
to rear a splendid palace for himself, with spacious chambers and large windows,
floors of cedar, and decorations of vermilion. Clearly, such a monarch must have
entertained a mortal hatred towards the man who dared to raise his voice in
denunciation of his crimes; and, like Herod with John the Baptist, he would not
have scrupled to quench in blood the light that cast such strong condemnation upon
his oppressive and cruel actions. An example of this had been recently afforded in
the death of Urijah, who had uttered solemn words against Jerusalem and its
inhabitants in the same way that Jeremiah had done. But it would appear that this
time, at least, his safety was secured by the interposition of influential friends
amongst the aristocracy, one of whom was Ahikam, the son of Shaphan (Jer 26:20-
24).

I. THE DIVINE COMMISSION. Beneath the Divine impulse, Jeremiah went up to the
court of the Lords house, and took his place on some great occasion when all the
cities of Judah had poured their populations to worship there. Not one word was to
be kept back. We are all more or less conscious of these inward impulses; and it
often becomes a matter of considerable difficulty to distinguish whether they
originate in the energy of our own nature or are the genuine outcome of the Spirit of
Christ. It is only in the latter ease that such service can be fruitful. There is no
greater enemy of the highest usefulness than the presence of the flesh in our
activities. There is no department of life or service into which its subtle, deadly
influence does not penetrate. We meet it after we have entered upon the new life,
striving against the Spirit, and restraining His gracious energy. We are most baffled
when we find it prompting to holy resolutions and efforts after a consecrated life.
And lastly, it confronts us in Christian work, because there is so much of it that in
our quiet moments we are bound to trace to a desire for notoriety, to a passion to
excel, and to the restlessness of a nature which evades questions in the deeper life,
by flinging itself into every avenue through which it may exert its activities. There is
only one solution to these difficulties. By the way of the cross and the grave we can
alone become disentangled and discharged from the insidious domination of this
evil principle, which is accursed by God, and hurtful to holy living, as blight to the
tender fruit.

II. THE MESSAGE AND ITS RECEPTION. On the one side, by his lips, God entreated
His people to repent and turn from their evil ways; on the other, He bade them
know that their obduracy would compel Him to make their great national shrine as
complete a desolation as the site of Shiloh, which for five hundred years had been in
ruins. It is impossible to realise the intensity of passion which such words evoked.
They seemed to insinuate that Jehovah could not defend His own, or that their
religion had become so heartless that He would not. So it came to pass, when
Jeremiah had made, an end of speaking all that the Lord commanded him to speak
unto all the people, that he found himself suddenly in the vortex of a whirlpool of
popular excitement. There is little doubt that Jeremiah would have met his death
had it not been for the prompt interposition of the princes. Such is always the
reception given on the part of man to the words of God. We may gravely question
how far our words are Gods, when people accept them quietly and as a matter of
course. That which men approve and applaud may lack the Kings seal, and be the
substitution on the part of the messenger of tidings which he deems more palatable,
and therefore more likely to secure for himself a larger welcome.

III. WELCOME INTERPOSITION. The princes were seated in the palace, and
instantly on receiving tidings of the outbreak came up to the temple. Their presence
stilled the excitement, and prevented the infuriated people from carrying out their
designs upon the life of the defenceless prophet. They hastily constituted themselves
into a court of appeal, before which prophet and people were summoned. Then
Jeremiah stood on his defence. His plea was that he could not but utter the words
with which the Lord had sent him, and that he was only re-affirming the predictions
of Micah in the darts of Hezekiah. He acknowledged that he was in their hands, but
he warned them that innocent blood would bring its own Nemesis upon them all;
and at the close of his address he re-affirmed his certain embassage from Jehovah.
This bold and ingenuous defence seems to have turned the scale in hie favour. The
princes gave their verdict: This man is not worthy of death, for he hath spoken to us
in the name of the Lord our God. And the fickle populace, swept hither and thither
by the wind, appear to have passed over en masse to the same conclusion; so that
princes and people stood confederate against the false prophets and priests. Thus
does God hide His faithful servants in the hollow of His hand. No weapon that is
formed against them prospers. They are hidden in the secret of His pavilion from
the strife of tongues. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JER 26:8-16
When Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the Lord had commanded
him, the people took him, saying, Thou shalt surely die.

The characteristics of a true prophet

I. THE TRUE PROPHET HAS A STERN MESSAGE TO DELIVER (4-7). If they ally
themselves with Egypt, the Temple will be made desolate, as Shiloh had been
destroyed by the Assyrians at the deportation of Israel after the fall of Samaria, 710
B.C. Jerusalem will become a curse to all nations (will be recognised by all nations as
having fallen by the curse of God). To prophesy smooth things in a sinful world is to
be false to God. How often does even our blessed Lord denounce sin, and remind
men of the wrath of God for it! (Mat 11:21-24; Mat 12:41-42; Mat 23:31-38, &c.)

II. The true prophet may not diminish a word of Gods message, however
unpopular, or unpleasant, or personal.
1. This message referred to the public policy of the nation. The morality of a
nation as imperative as that of an individual
2. Other messages assail the sins of classes, from the king to the humblest
citizen.

III. The true prophet will speak fearlessly.

IV. The true prophet is promised the support of God.

V. The true prophet never was and never can be popular, but must raise up
enemies against himself.

IV. The true prophet will speak peace as well as wrath if men repent. (J.
Cunningham Geikie, D. D.)

Prophetic virtues
The Lord sent me to prophesy against this house. In this apology of the prophet
thus answering for himself with a heroic spirit, five noble virtues, fit for a martyr,
are by an expositor observed.
1. His prudence in alleging his Divine mission.
2. His charity in exhorting his enemies to repent.
3. His humility in saying, Behold I am in your hand.
 4. His magnanimity and freedom of speech in telling them that God would
revenge his death.
5. His spiritual security and fearlessness of death in so good a cause and with so
good a conscience. (John Trapp.)

A Saints resignation, meekness, and cheerfulness in persecution

One thousand eight hundred years ago an aged saint was being led into Rome by
ten rough Roman soldiers, to be thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre. Can
you imagine anything more dreary and deplorable? Was he unhappy? Did he count
cruelty and martyrdom as evil? No. In one of the seven letters that he wrote on his
way, he says: Come fire and iron, come rattling of wild beasts, cutting and mangling
and wrenching of my bones, come hacking of my limbs, come crushing of my whole
body, come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me! Only be it mine to attain to Jesus
Christ! What are those words of St. Ignatius but an echo of the apostles, What
things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea, doubtless, and I count
all things but loss that I may win Christ? How well the early Christians understood
these things by which we opportunists, cringing cowards, effeminate time-servers,
as most of us are in this soft, sensuous, hypocritical age, have so utterly forgotten!
(Dean Farrar.)

JEREMIAH 27

JER 27:4-5
I have made the earth.

God and the earth

I. God is the CREATOR of all earthly things: The man and the beast that are upon
the ground. The earth is not eternal, net the production of chance, not the work of
many Gods. It has one Maker. This agrees with all true science.

II. God is the SOVEREIGN DISPOSES of all earthly things. Have given it unto whom
it seemed meet unto Me. He might have built it and left it uninhabited, or He might
have populated it with other creatures than those who tenant it now. He has given
what He thinks fit of it to individuals, tribes, and nations. (Homilist.)

The earth made by God

I have in my house a little sheet of paper on which there is a faint, pale, and not
particularly skilful representation of a hyacinth It is not half as beautiful as many
other pictures I have, but I regard it as the most exquisite of them all My mother
painted it; and I never see it that I do not think that her hand rested on it, and that
her thought was concerned in its execution. Now, suppose you had such a
conception of God that you never saw a flower, a tree, a cloud, or any natural object,
that you did not instantly think, My Father made it, what a natural world would
this become to you! How beautiful would the earth seem to you! And how would you
find that nature was a revelation of God, speaking as plainly as His written Word!
And if you are alone, in solitude, without company, desolate in your circumstances,
it is because you have not that inner sense of the Divine love and care which it is
your privilege to have, and which you ought to have. (H. W. Beecher.)

Have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto Me.

Meetness before God

I. God is the proprietor of all.

1. Mans forgetfulness of this in daily life.
2. The harmony of mans being requires a sense of dependence.
3. Depression results from stopping short of God.

II. Wisdom and sovereignity go together.

1. No comfort to know we live under an absolute sovereign.
2. God gives not according to seeming fitness. He sees deeper than what seems.

III. The unerring mind of God.

1. Cultivate an adoring spirit.
2. Rest on Him in simple belief.
3. Repose in Gods law of meetness. (P. B. Power, M. A.)

The Divine distribution of the earth amongst men

I. In it He EXERCISES ABSOLUTE RIGHT. The earth, with all its minerals, fruits,
productions, and countless tenants, is His. If He gives a thousand acres to one man
and denies a yard to another, it is not for us to complain.

II. In it He ACTS ACCORDING TO HIS OWN FREE CHOICE ALONE. He gives it not on
the ground of merit to any man, for now He gave it to Nebuchadnezzar, one of the
worst of men. The only principle in the distribution is His own sovereignty. What
seemeth meet to a Being of Infinite wisdom and goodness must be the wisest and
the most benevolent. Here let us hush all our murmurings, here let us repose the
utmost confidence. Conclusion--The subject teaches us how we should hold that
portion of the earth we possess, however small or great it may be.
1. With profound humility. What we possess is a gift, not a right. We are
temporary trustees, not proprietors. He who holds the most should be the
most humble, for he has the most to account for.
2. With practical thanksgiving. This indeed is all the rent that the Supreme
Landlord requires from us, thanksgiving and praise.
3. With a solemn sense of our responsibility. It is given to us not for our own
gratification and self-aggrandisement, but for the good of the race and the
glory of God.
 4. With a conscious dependence on His will. We are all tenants at will. We know
not the moment when He shall see fit to eject us from His land. (Homilist.)

JEREMIAH 28

JER 28:11
And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.

Self in service
(with Jer 26:14):--We couple these passages together, because they lead our
minds to the same important thought, namely, the laying aside of self by the
servants of the Lord. Hananiah takes the yoke from off Jeremiah s neck, and breaks
it, and so discredits him and his prophecy in the presence of the people. And the
prophet Jeremiah went his way. He left it to God to vindicate His own honour,
which He did very soon--very terribly. Before the princes also, in chap. 26., he tells
out uncompromisingly all the truth of God; he knew that he did so at the peril of his
life. As for me,--he was not insensible to personal suffering, still himself he was as
nothing--behold I am in your hand, do with me as seemeth meet unto you. By this
complete abnegation of self on the part of the prophet, we are led to consider some
matters connected with self in our service. There is a young period in the
Christians life, when we are deceived by not seeing self at all; when we have no
dread of it; when we never even suspect its existence. At this time, we mistake its
energies for spiritual life, and often seek to carry out what is really the Lords work,
in the powers and energies of the flesh, i.e. self. There is a period farther on, when
we detect self partially. The Spirit of God has led us onward in our education, and
raised our standard, making us watchful and distrustful of self to some degree.
Then comes a yet more advanced stage, when we see self to such an extent as to
make us dread it greatly when we see it ever intrusive, ever substituting motives low
and mean for what should be holy and high; and we wage war with this self, fully
determined to put it down. There is also yet a more advanced state, when we have
attained such a knowledge of the power of self that, while we war with, and repress
it, we have come to know that here we shall never have done with it, and look
forward to full deliverance only when we reach that land where there is perfect
freedom.

I. THE WRONG OPERATIONS OF SELF IN SERVICE. Much that we do may be done

from the action of mere natural feelings--there may be nothing of God in it at all A
man may be gratifying only his own natural energy in all that seems so earnest and
true. And when we allow self to influence us, we shall be subjected to disturbing
influences. Self-love will be easily wounded in the rough contact with opposers of
the truth. And our judgment will be warped. It is very hard to be calm, and judicial,
when under the influence of strong personal feelings, and where personal interests
are concerned. Self will also drive us on too far. We shall not know when to go our
way. We need not go far to detect some of the evil effects which flow from this
wrong operation of self in service. It gives the enemy occasion to blaspheme. Satan
continually attempts to confound persons and principles; men will look at the
imperfect way in which we have manifested the principle, and not at the principle
itself. Our infirmities become mixed up with the cause of God, and so far as they can,
bring it into disrepute. And thus that saying becomes true--religion suffers more
from her friends than her enemies.

II. THE EXPULSION OF SELF FROM SERVICE. How can this be done? In the most
favourable of cases only by degrees. But what is a man to do?
1. He must seek for enlightenment on this subject from the Holy Spirit.
2. Let him seek for a more perfect sympathy with Christ. If we have this, we shall
become assimilated with Him--we shall grow like Him; His mind will
transfuse itself into our mind--and the principles, on which He acted, will
become ours.
3. And then the seeking for a true knowledge of our own insignificance is very
important in putting down self. We both think and act sometimes as
though we were the first cause; and not only the first cause, but the final
object also--as if all were to be by us, and for us--the axe thinks that it is
doing all the work, and is independent of the one that heweth therewith. The
very learning our insignificance will be helpful; and, when we have learned it
in some degree, it will keep us, in proportion as the lesson has been learned,
to our proper place. (P. B. Power, M. A.)

JER 28:13
Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.

Yokes of wood and of iron

To throw off legitimate authority is to bind on a worse tyranny. Some kind of yoke
every one of us must bend our necks to, and if we slip them out we do not thereby
become independent, but simply bring upon ourselves a heavier pressure of a harder
bondage.

I. WE HAVE THE CHOICE BETWEEN THE YOKE OF LAW AND THE IRON YOKE OF
LAWLESSNESS. Even a band of brigands, or a crew of pirates, must have some code. I
have read somewhere that the cells in a honeycomb are circles squeezed by the
pressure of the adjacent cells into the hexagonal shape which admits of contiguity. If
they continued circles, there would be space and material lest, and no complete
continuity. So, in like manner, you cannot keep five men together without some
mutual limitations which are shaped into a law. Now, as long as a man keeps inside
it he does not feel its pressure. A great many of us, for instance, who are in the main
law-abiding people, do not ever remember that there is such a thing as restrictions
upon our licence, or the obligation to perform certain duties; for we never think
either of taking the licence or of shirking the duties. The yoke that is accepted ceases
to press. Once let a man step outside, and what then? Why, then, he is an outlaw;
and the rough side of the fence is turned outwards, and all possible terrors, which
people within the boundary have nothing to do with, gather themselves together and
frown down upon him. I need not remind you of how this same thesis--that we have
to choose between the yoke of law and the iron yoke of lawlessness--is illustrated in
the story of almost all violent revolutions. They run the same course. First the rising
up of a nation against intolerable oppression, then revolution devours its own
children, and the scum rises to the top of the boiling pot. Then comes, in the
language of the picturesque historian of the French Revolution, the type of them all-
-then comes at the end the whiff of grapeshot and the despot. First the
government of a mob, and then the tyranny of an emperor comes to the people that
shake off the yoke of reasonable law.

II. WE HAVE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE YOKE OF VIRTUE AND THE IRON YOKE OF VICE.
We are under a far more spiritual and searching law than that written in any statute-
book, or administered by any Court. Every man carries within his own heart two
things, and two persons; the court, the tribunal, the culprit, and the judge. And here,
too, if law be not obeyed, the result is not liberty, but the slavery of lawlessness. A
great philosopher once said that the two sublimest things in the universe were the
moral law and the starry heavens. And that law I ought bends over us like the
starry heavens with which he associated it. No man can escape from the pressure of
duty, and on every man is laid, by his very make, the twofold obligation, first to look
upwards and catch the behests of that solemn law of duty, and then to turn his eyes
and his strength inwards and coerce or spur, as the case may be, the powers of his
nature, and rule the kingdom within himself. Now, as long as a man lets the ruling
parts of his nature guide the lower faculties, he feels comparatively no pressure from
the yoke. But if he once allows beggars to ride on horseback whilst princes walk--
sense and appetite and desire, and more or less refined forms of inclination to take
the place which belongs only to conscience interpreting duty--then he has
exchanged the easy yoke for one that is heavy indeed. What does a man do when,
instead of loyally accepting the conditions of his nature, and bowing himself to serve
the all-embracing law of duty, he sets up inclination of any sort in its place? What
does he do? I will tell you. He unships the helm; he pitches compass and sextant
overboard; he fires up the furnaces, and screws down the safety-valve, and says, Go
ahead! And what will be the end of that, think you! Either an explosion or a crash
upon a reef! and you may take your choice of which is the better kind of death--to be
blown up or to go down.

III. WE HAVE THE CHOICE BETWEEN THE YOKE OF CHRIST AND THE IRON YOKE OF
GODLESSNESS. If you do not take Christ for your Teacher you are handed over either
to the uncertainty of your own doubts or to pinning your faith to some man and
enrolling yourself as a disciple who is prepared to swallow down whole whatsoever
the rabbi may say, giving to him what you will not give to Jesus; or else you will sink
back into utter indolence and carelessness about the whole matter; or else you will
go and put your belief and your soul into the hands of a priest; or shut your eyes and
open your mouth and take whatever tradition may choose to send you. The one
refuge from all these, as I believe, is to go to Him and learn of Him, and take His
yoke upon your shoulders. But, let me say further, it is better to obey Christs
commandments than to set ourselves against them. For if we will take His will for
our law, and meekly assume the yoke of loyal and loving obedience to Him, the door
into an earthly paradise is thrown open to us. His yoke is easy, not because its
prescriptions and provisions lower the standard of righteousness and morality, but
because love becomes the motive, and it is always blessed to do that which the
Beloved desires. When I will and I ought cover exactly the same ground, then
there is no kind of pressure from the yoke. Christs yoke is easy because, too, He
gives the power to obey His commandments. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The two yokes

I. MEN MUST WEAR SOME YOKE. In every stage of life--childhood, youth, manhood;
and in every station of life--servants, masters, &c.
1. God has made and sustains us, and asks that we submit to His will
2. With our passions and propensities, if we break the yoke it is meet we should
wear, and do not serve God, we at once bend our necks to another yoke and
serve slavishly our own selves.

II. Christs yoke is an easy one to wear.

1. The yoke of Christ is a right one. Serve Jesus Christ, and it is found that the
Christian law is perfection itself.
2. The yoke of Christ is framed in our interest. To believe in Christ is the highest
wisdom; to repent of sin is the most delightful necessity; to follow after
holiness is the most blissful pursuit; to become a servant of Christ is to be
made a king and priest unto God.
3. Christ s yoke is not exacting. He, in His grace, always gives us of His bounty
when He asks of us our duty.
4. It is an easy yoke. Never did a man wear it but he always loved to wear it.
5. The bright example of Christ makes the yoke pleasant to bear. He Himself has
carried the very yoke we bear, and we have blessed fellowship with Him in
this.
6. All who have borne Christs yoke have had grace given equal to the weight of
the burden. Wolsey regretted that he had not served God with half the zeal
he had served his king, but none has ever bewailed the zeal with which he
followed Christ!
7. Christians who have borne this yoke always desire to get their children into it.
Often men say, I do not want my sons to follow my trade, it is wearying, its
pay is small, &c.

III. Those who refuse Christs easy yoke will have to wear a worse one.
1. Turning from the right road, from the cry of rectitude, because it threatens
shame or loss, will entail vaster after-losses.
2. Backsliders, by putting off the yoke of Christianity, have not improved their
condition.
3. They who refuse the Bible and follow tradition, Do these perverts of the true
Christian religion get an easier yoke? No.; there are penances and
mortifications, &c,
4. The self-righteous who attempt to work their own way to heaven. Self-
righteousness is an iron yoke indeed.
5. Unbelievers, who will not believe the simple revelation of God, presently find
themselves committed to systematic misbeliefs, which distract reason,
 oppress the heart, and trammel the conscience.
6. Lovers of pleasure. Pleasure often means lust, and gaiety means crime; and
self-indulgence brings beggary and degradation, In the last tremendous day
of Christs coming to judgment, the Christians yoke will be as a chain of gold
about his neck; but sin, pleasure, will be as an iron yoke, a burden of
enslaving woe. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 28:16
This year thou shalt die.

Thoughts on death
1. Let men live ever so many years, some one year will be the year of their death.
2. Every year is a year of death to many; there never was a year since the
abbreviation of human life, since the extensive propagation and dispersion of
mankind over all countries on the face of the earth, which has not been a
year of death to tens of thousands,
3. Last year was a year of death to very many.
4. This year, very probably, will be a year of death to some of us. This or the
other tree may be cut down; this or the other branch may be lopt off, and fall
to the ground. Let us see then that we be ready, that if cut down, it may be in
mercy, not in wrath; that if plucked up by the root and transplanted, it may
be to be transplanted in a far better soil, where the air is more genial, where
the fruits are always ripe.
5. No one of us knows but God may be saying to him or her, This year thou
shalt die. Futurity is wisely hid from man; we know not the year or day of
our death we need therefore constantly to watch.
6. It may be in mercy or in wrath that God is saying to this or the other one,
This year thou shalt die. It was in wrath that this was said to Hananiah.
7. The year of ones death is a most eventful year to him. This dissolves our
connection with the present world; it issues us into the world of spirits. If we
are the Lords people, it associates us with God, Christ, angels, and the spirits
of just men made perfect in the state of glory and blessedness.
8. There is no outliving the appointed year of ones death. No distinction of
rank, no worldly pre-eminence, no degree of riches, influence, or power, no
plea of necessity, no supposed usefulness in civil or sacred society, can
prevent death.
9. The year of ones death may come very unexpectedly. (Anon.)

Solemn thoughts

I. This sentence is doubtless expressive of the decision of God concerning many

this year.
1. The page of history affords no record of a single year in which death desisted
from his work of destruction.
 2. The last year of many is now commended.
3. Various are the means by Which Gods design will be executed.

II. No individual can be certain that this does not express Gods decision
concerning himself.
1. Utterly impossible for us to know who are, or are not, included in Gods
appointments.
2. The circumstances of some render it most probable that this year will be their
last.
3. Doubtless those who think least of death, and confidently reckon on future
years, will find this sentence fulfilled.

III. It is the duty and interest of all to use wisely the gracious hours they enjoy.
1. What is it to die? To pass from this state of being into the immediate presence
of our Maker and Judge.
2. Am I prepared to die?
3. Begin the year with earnest preparation. (J. Bunter.)

A sermon on the New Year

It is highly probable, that if some prophet, like Jeremiah, should open to us the
book of the Divine decrees, one or other of us would there see our sentence, and the
time of its execution fixed, Thus saith the Lord, This year thou shalt die. There
some of us would find it written, This year thou shalt enjoy a series of prosperity, to
try if the goodness of God will lead thee to repentance. Others might read this
melancholy line, This year shall be to thee a series of afflictions: this year thou shalt
lose thy dearest earthly support and comfort; this year thou shalt pine away with
sickness, or agonise with torturing pain, to try if the kind severities of a Fathers rod
will reduce thee to thy duty. Others, I hope, would road the gracious decree, This
year, thy stubborn spirit, after long resistance, shall be sweetly constrained to bow to
the despised Gospel of Christ. This year shalt thou be born a child of God, and an
heir of happiness, which the revolution of years shall never, never, terminate.
Others perhaps would read this tremendous doom, This year My Spirit so long
resisted, shall cease to strive with thee; this year I will give thee up to thine own
hearts lusts, and swear in My wrath thou shalt not enter into My rest. Others
would probably find the doom of the false prophet Hananiah pronounced against
them: Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will cast thee from off the face of the earth:
this year thou shalt die.

I. This year you may die.

1. Your life is the greatest uncertainty in the world.
2. Thousands have died since the last New Years Day; and this year will be of
the same kind with the last; the duration of mortals; a time to die.
3. Thousands of others will die: it is certain they will, and why may not you?
4. Though you are young; for the regions of the dead have been crowded with
persons of your age; and no age is the least security against the stroke of
death.
 5. Though you are now in health and your constitution seems to promise a long
life; for thousands of such will be hurried into the eternal world this year, as
they have been in years past.
6. Though you are full of business, though you have projected many schemes,
which it may be the work of years to execute, and which afford you many
bright and flattering prospects.
7. Though you have not yet finished your education, nor fixed in life, but are
preparing to appear in the world, and perhaps elated with the prospect of the
figure you will make in it.
8. Though you are not prepared for it.
9. Though you deliberately delay your preparation, and put it off to some future
time.
10. Though you are unwilling to admit the thought. Death does not slacken his
pace towards you, because you hate him, and are afraid of his approach.
11. Though you may strongly hope the contrary, and flatter yourself with the
expectation of a length of years.

II. WHAT IF YOU SHOULD? If you should die this year, then all your doubts, all the
anxieties of blended hopes and fears about your state and character will terminate
for ever in full conviction. If you are impenitent sinners, all the artifices of self-
flattery will be able to make you hope better things no longer; but the dreadful
discovery will flash upon you with the resistless blaze of intuitive evidence. You will
see, you will feel yourselves such. This year you may die: and should you die this
year, you will be for ever cut off from all the pleasures of life. Then an everlasting
farewell to all the mirth, the tempting amusements and vain delights of youth.
Farewell to all the pleasures you derive from the senses, and all the gratifications of
appetite. Then farewell to all the pompous but empty pleasures of riches and
honours. The pleasures both of enjoyment and expectation from this quarter will fail
for ever. But this is not all If you should die this year, you will have no pleasures, no
enjoyments to substitute for those you will lose. Your capacity and eager thirst for
happiness will continue, nay, will grow more strong and violent in that improved
adult state of your nature. And yet you will have no good, real or imaginary, to
satisfy it; and consequently the capacity of happiness will become a capacity of
misery; and the privation of pleasure will be positive pain. If you die this year, you
will not only be cut off from all the flattering prospects of this life, but from all hope
entirely, and for ever. If you die in your sins, you will be fixed in an unchangeable
state of misery; a state that will admit of no expectation but that of uniform, or
rather ever-growing misery; a state that excludes all hopes of making a figure, except
as the monuments of the vindictive justice of God, and the deadly effects of sin.

III. Is it possible to escape this impending danger?

1. Your case is not yet desperate, unless you choose to make it so; that is, unless
you choose to persist in carelessness and impenitence, as you have hitherto
done.
2. You all know that prayer, reading, and hearing the Word of God, meditation
upon Divine things, free conference with such as have been taught by
experience to direct you in this difficult work; you all know, I say, that these
 are the means instituted for your conversion: and if you had right views of
things, and a just temper towards them, you would hardly need instruction
or the least persuasion to make use of them. (S. Davies, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 29

JER 29:1
Now these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent.

Messages to exiles

I. THE VERY FACT THAT A MESSAGE WAS SENT TO THEM UNDER AN EXPRESS DIVINE
APPOINTMENT WAS CONSOLATORY. Wherever Gods children are scattered, the written
Word is to them a source of permanent encouragement. In the severest ways of
justice God does not forget His own children, but has in reserve ample consolations
for them, when they lie under the common judgment

II. The particular providence of God, appearing on their behalf under all their
calamities, was a source of consolation.
1. He is the Lord of hosts, of all the armies above and below, and yet is the God
of Israel; and though He permits their captivity, He does not break His
relation to them--their covenant-God still, though under a cloud.
2. He assumes the active agency in their dispersion. I have caused them to be
carried away. Certainly it must be a great sin which induces a loving father
to cast his child out of doors. But sin is a great scatterer, and is always
followed by a driving away and a casting out. Yet the fact of Gods being the
agent in their dispersion is referred to as a ground of consolation; since it
reconciles us to our troubles to see the hand of God in them, and to trace an
all-gracious and merciful design in them.

III. The promise of the stability and security of their social and domestic interests
was given.

IV. The prospect of a certain and favourable issue to their trials (verse 11). (S.
Thodey.)

JER 29:7
Seek the peace of the city.

The best Christians the best citizens

1. They know that the prosperity of the whole is their own prosperity. They o
 not, therefore, selfishly seek their own advantage.
2. They actually labour with all diligence for the furtherance of the common
good.
3. They employ for this end the power of Christian prayer. (Naegelsbach.)

The duties of Christians to their country

I. What are the things absolutely necessary to the security and prosperity, the true
glory and happiness, of our country?
1. The true honour of a nation, like that of the individual, lies in character.
2. The security and prosperity of our nation are inseparably associated with the
advancement of religion among the people.

II. What are the best means for securing those things which are essential to our
countrys highest welfare?
1. General diffusion of education. Education is a better safeguard of liberty than
a standing army.
2. Equally essential that the people be virtuous. Knowledge is power, but
unsanctified power is power for evil.
3. The general distribution of the Bible--the great instrument for enlightening
the conscience and purifying the heart.
4. Preaching the Gospel Our nature is a wreck, a chaos, which the Cross of Christ
alone can adjust.
5. Prayer (2Ch 7:13-14; Psa 106:23; Ex 32:10).

III. What arguments may enforce the duties of personal and combined activity in
seeking the highest good of our land?
1. Because our own individual good is intimately connected with its general
happiness and prosperity. For in the peace thereof ye shall have peace.
2. We shall thereby recommend the religion we profess.
3. The work of supplying our land with the preached Gospel, and with religious
institutions, is the most important work to which Christians can devote their
energies. (Samuel Baker, D. D.)

The civil obligations of Christian people

When a man becomes a Christian does he cease to be a member of civil society?
Allowing that he be not the owner of the ship, but only a passenger in it, has he
nothing to awaken his concern in the voyage? If he be only a traveller towards a
better country, is he to be told that because he is at an inn which he is soon to leave,
it should not excite any emotion in him, whether it be invaded by robbers, or
consumed by flames before the morning? In the peace thereof ye shall have peace.
Is not religion variously affected by public transactions? Can a Christian, for
instance, be indifferent to the cause of freedom, even on a pious principle? Does not
civil liberty necessarily include religious, and is it not necessary to the spreading of
the Gospel? (W. Jay.)
 JER 29:8-13
I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace,
and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

The thoughts of God to His people, peace and not evil

These words were addressed to the Jews, when they were captives in Babylon. It is
very delightful when we have kind thoughts of our fellow-men; for suspicion is
always a great misery. But it is especially delightful to have kind thoughts of God,
when we possess enlarged and noble conceptions of His excellency and glory.

I. THE GROUND AND REASON OF OUR SUSPICION RESPECTING GOD, THAT HE HAS
UNKIND INTENTIONS OR EVIL THOUGHTS TOWARDS US. The chief, if not the only cause,
is sin. Wicked men know that the wages of sin is death; that sin must be cancelled,
or God is against them, and they are ruined. But what is the evil which men
anticipate from God, and in respect to which they entertain suspicions? There is the
evil of affliction. This is the sense in which the text is to be taken. It relates to
temporal evil, the evil of calamity, losses, changes, and disasters. And why should
men fear or anticipate evil in this form? We are not to forebode anything. Sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof. Take no thought for the morrow. We hear often of
pleasures disappointed, and of hopes unrealised. Might we not speak of evils
anticipated which never come? Then there is an ulterior evil; that which is far off, or
apparently more remote. Are you afraid of death, or of dying? Are you afraid, when
Christ has said, He that believeth in Me shall never die; I am the resurrection and
the life; I will raise you up at the last day? Are you afraid of eternity, of which we
hear so much, and know so little? I ask, is the bird afraid, when the shell opens, and
he begins to feel the soft sweet plumage grow? Is the newborn child afraid, when it
comes into this world of sin and sorrow? And shall you be afraid to awake and
emerge, anywhere in Gods great empire, anywhere or at anytime, in His unbounded
and infinite dominion? Are we afraid of the love of God? God is love. Christ is love.
God invites you and me in love. He says, Come, and I will bless you. Come, and I will
pour My Spirit upon you. Come, and I will make you happy, and call you sons and
daughters. Come, and I will save you, and I will soon put you in possession of
heaven.

II. THE MANNER IN WHICH IT PLEASES GOD TO CONTRADICT THESE SUSPICIONS, AND
TO DENY THAT THERE IS ANY TRUTH IN THEM. Suppose you are a wicked man: what
does God say? Forsake your evil ways. I will multiply to pardon. Turn ye, turn ye,
why will ye die? I desire not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn and
live. God thinks no evil: if so, could He not crush and extinguish thee, O man, in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye? His thoughts towards thee are thoughts of
peace, and not of evil. Then to the backsliders He says, Return, O backsliding
children; I will receive you graciously, and love you freely. Are you penitent? He will
give you beauty for ashes; the oil of joy for mourning; the garment of praise for the
spirit of heaviness. You say that you are sinful, and not worthy of being called a
child. What does God say? Bring the best robe. Take off the filthy garments. Put the
fair mitre on his head. O God of peace! how peaceful, how pacific Thou art! You may
have had changes. You may have passed through storms; but the darker the cloud,
the brighter is the rainbow of promise that is stretched across it. And God intends to
give His people everlasting peace.

III. THE EXPECTED END. What is it? To the Jews in Babylon, it was restoration to
the temple and the altar, to the priests, and to the sacrifices; and by the Jews this
end was realised. To the Hebrews of later times, the expected end is recovery to
greater blessings. They are forsaken for a small moment; but with great mercy they
will be gathered in again. The expected end, both to Jews and Gentiles, is the
millennial light, repose, and happiness. The expected end is the end of all sin. It is to
endure no more conflicts, to undergo no more labours; to be wise by intuition; to
possess boundless knowledge, and perfect purity, derived immediately from Him
who is the source and fountain of all purity and all perfection. They who go in, shall
never go out again. (J. Stratten.)

Gods thoughts of/ peace, and our expected end

I. The Lords thoughts towards His people.

1. It is noteworthy that He does think of them, and towards them. Observe that
this Scripture saith not, I know the thoughts that I have thought toward
you. It would be possible for you to have thought out a plan of kindness
towards a friend, and you might have so arranged it that it would henceforth
be a natural fountain of good to him without your thinking any more about
it; but that is not after the method of God. His eye and His hand are towards
His people continually. It is true He did so think of us that He has arranged
everything about us, and provided for every need, and against every danger;
but yet He has not ceased to think of us. His infinite mind, whose thoughts
are as high above our thoughts as the heavens are above the earth, continues
to exercise itself about us. The Lord hath been mindful of us, and He is still
mindful of us. The Lord not only thinks of you, but towards you. His
thoughts are all drifting your way. This is the way the south wind of His
thoughts of peace is moving: it is towards you. A person may happen to do
you a good turn; but if you are sure that he did it by accident, or with no
more thought than that wherewith a passing stranger throws a penny to a
beggar, you are not impressed with gratitude. But when the action of your
friend is the result of earnest deliberation, and you see that he acts in the
tenderest regard to your welfare, you are far more thankful: traces of anxiety
to do you good are very pleasant. Have I not heard persons say, It was so
kind and so thoughtful of him? Do you not notice that men value kindly
thought, and set great store by tender consideration? Remember, then, that
there is never a thoughtless action on the part of God. His mind goes with
His hand: His heart is in His acts.
2. The thoughts of God are only perfectly known to Himself. It would be a mere
truism for God to say, I know the thoughts that I think toward you. Even a
man usually knows his own thoughts; but the meaning is this: when you do
not know the thoughts that I have towards you, yet I know them. Truly the
things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. God alone
 understands Himself and His thoughts. We stand by a powerful machine,
and we see the wheels moving this way and that, but we do not understand
its working. What does it matter? He who made the engine and controls it,
perfectly understands it, and this is practically the main concern; for it does
not matter whether we understand the engine or not, it will work its purpose
if he who has the control of it is at home with all its hands and wheels.
Despite our ignorance, nothing can go wrong while the Lord in infinite
knowledge ruleth over all. The child playing on the deck does not understand
the tremendous engine whose beat is the throbbing heart of the stately
Atlantic liner, and yet all is safe; for the engineer, the captain and the pilot
are in their places, and well know what is being done. Let not the child
trouble itself about things too great for it. Leave you the discovery of
doubtful causes to Him whose understanding is infinite; and as for yourself,
be you still, and know that Jehovah is God.
3. The Lord would have us know that His thoughts toward us are settled and
definite. Sometimes a man may hardly know his own thoughts, because he
has scarcely made up his mind. The case is far otherwise with the only wise
God. The Lord is not a man that He should need to hesitate; His infinite
mind is made up, and He knows His thoughts. With the Lord there is neither
question nor debate. He is in one mind, and none can turn Him. His
purpose is settled, and He adheres to it. He is resolved to reward them that
diligently seek Him, and to honour those that trust in Him.
4. Gods thoughts toward His people are always thoughts of peace. He is at peace
with them through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ. He delights in them;
He seeks their peace, He creates their peace, He sustains their peace, and
thus all His thoughts toward them are peace. Note well the negative, which is
expressly inserted. It might have appeared enough to say, My thoughts are
thoughts of peace. Yes, it would be quite sufficient, when all things are
bright with us; but those words, and not of evil, are admirably adapted to
keep off the goblins of the night, the vampires of suspicion which fly in the
darkness.
5. The Lords thoughts are all working towards an expected end, or, as the R.V.
has it, to give you hope in your latter end. Some read it, a future and a
hope. Goal is working with a motive. All things are working together for one
object: the good of those who love God. We see only the beginning; God
sooth the end from the beginning. He regardeth not only the tearing up of
the soil with the plough, but the clothing of that soil with the golden harvest.
He sees the after consequences of affliction, and He accounts those painful
incidents to be blessed which lead up to so much of happiness. Let us
comfort ourselves with this.

II. The proper attitude of Gods people towards their Lord.

1. You will all agree with me when I say that our attitude should be that of
submission. If God, in all that He does towards us, is acting with an object,
and that object a loving one, then let Him do what seemeth Him good.
2. Next, let our position be one of great hopefulness, seeing the end of God, in all
He does, is to give us a future and a hope. We are not driven into growing
darkness, but led into increasing light. There is always something to be
 hoped for in the Christians life.
3. Our relation to God should, next, be one of continual expectancy, especially
expectancy of the fulfilment of His promises. I will perform My good Word
toward you. His promises are good words: good indeed, and sweetly
refreshing. When your hearts are faint, then is the promise emphatically
good. Expect the Lord to be as good as His good Word.
4. Again, our position towards God should be one of happy hope, as to blessed
ends being answered even now. Affliction is the seal of the Lord s election. I
remember a story of Mr. Mack, who was a Baptist minister in
Northamptonshire. In his youth he was a soldier, and calling on Robert Hall,
when his regiment marched through Leicester, that great man became
interested in him, and procured his release from the ranks. When he went to
preach in Glasgow, he sought out his aged mother, whom he had not seen for
many years. He knew his mother the moment he saw her; but the old lady
did not recognise her son. It so happened that when he was a child, his
mother had accidentally wounded his wrist with a knife. To comfort him she
cried, Never mind, my bonnie bairn, your mither will ken you by that when
ye are a man. When Macks mother would not believe that a grave, fine-
looking minister could be her own child, he turned up his sleeve and cried,
Mither, mither, dinna ye ken that? In a moment they were in each others
arms. Ah, the Lord knows the spot of His children. He acknowledges them by
the mark of correction. What God is doing to us in the way of trouble and
trial is but His acknowledgment of us as true heirs, and the marks of His rod
shall be our proof that we are not bastards, but true sons. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Gods thoughts

I. GOD THINKS OF HIS PEOPLE. That seems a very simple thing to say, does it not?
It is as sublime as it is simple! God thinks of His people. Though so occupied--I had
almost said, though so busy,--God finds time and opportunity to give thought to
His children. He numbers the hairs of our head; He knows every inch of our path;
our sorrows and our joys are all calculated and catalogued by Him. He knows our
uprising and our downsitting, our going out and our coming in. What is there of
which He has not perfect cognisance? What is there in which He is not interested?
Oh, wonder of wonders, that this busy God of ours knows us, loves us, cares for us,
enters into the petty details of our fleeting life, and counts no grief too slight for us
to take to Him in prayer. The current of His thoughts sets our way. Like a great
warm gaff-stream, the loving thoughts of God lave the shores of every believing soul,
and bring life and verdure to the full, by means of their helpful influences.
1. This is the more wonderful, when we remember how sinful we are. He sees
and knows all about you, and you He loveth still.
2. I learn hence, also, that God thinks very definitely and deliberately about His
people.
3. Best of all is it He thinks so tenderly about us. Thoughts of peace. It is He
who has made peace possible twixt God and man, for He longs to have us
reconciled to Him. It is Jesus who has made peace by the death of His Cross.
It is the Holy Ghost who speaks peace to troubled hearts and consciences. It
is His kind providence that keeps us in perfect peace, our minds being stayed
 on Him.

II. GODS THOUGHTS CONCERNING HIS PEOPLE ARE OFTEN OF A PRIVATE NATURE.
The emphasis of this verse should come upon the personal pronoun. I know the
thoughts that I think towards you. They are hidden from you. My way, says God,
is not yet discovered. My purposes remain unrevealed. None can know perfectly
the mind and will of God. How can we reach to such an awful height? How can we
plunge into such abysmal depths?
1. Let the fact that God Knows His thoughts satisfy our curiosity. It is childish in
the extreme to lift the plant that has been lately put into the ground, and it
will fail to grow if treated thus. It is childish--is it not?--to break the drum-
bead, in order to discover whence the music comes. But we are not less
childish who want to know what God has not revealed, and who are not
content to do His bidding without saying, But why? The why and the
wherefore may not concern us. But the duty does concern us. Let us hasten
in the way of His commandment.
2. This, also, should calm our restlessness. Let the spirit of patience possess you.
Wait, wait, wait, till God sees fit to bless.
3. Meanwhile, let there be no distrust. It is fear that misconstrues the purposes
of God. It is unbelief that misinterprets the words and ways of Jehovah. Even
when things appear to be against us, let us trust and not be afraid.

III. WHEN GOD THINKS, HE THINKS TO PURPOSE. To give you an expected end.
God always works to an end, and with a motive. Here He speaks about the peoples
dreams. They were mere dreams--the baseless fabric of a vision. But God has no
dreams. His thoughts are honest, earnest, fruitful, resultful. Moreover, His works
ever agree with the thoughts from which they spring. God does not leave His people
to haphazard, nor does He do anything by halves. Trust Him in all His works and
ways, and you will see that as for God, His way is perfect. When He sets Himself to
make a world, He rests not till He has made it perfectly, and can pronounce it good.
When He sets Himself to destroy sinful men, He makes a clean sweep of them,
whether it be with flood or flame. And when He comes from heaven to redeem a
sinful race of men, His tears do not stop, nor does His blood cease flowing, till He
can cry, It is finished. (Thomas Spurgeon.)

Gods thoughts
Gods thoughts are like God,--they are wonderful as Himself, and worthy of
Himself. His ways are the results of His thoughts, and their revelation to us.
Creation, in all its vastness and completeness, is the thought of God,--a thought that
embraced not only the great outlines, but all the details of the work of His Word,--a
thought that did not require to be supplemented or enlarged. Providence, in its
heights and depths, its lengths and breadths, is His thought,--a thought that takes in
the entire history of our race, and is ever at work to bring about one great purpose,
one glorious design. Redemption, in all its surpassing glory, is His thought,-a
thought of which the whole Gospel is the revelation.

I. GODS THOUGHTS MUST BE REVEALED. They are known only to His Spirit, for the
Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. These deep things are
known to us, for God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. We are permitted to
know the thoughts of God that have had reference to ourselves; we are assisted in
our conceptions of these thoughts, and it is wonderful to be told that they come into
our minds, that they dwell in our hearts, and that we have communion with the
thoughts of God. God is ever at work in the world, not only on its great stage, but on
the narrow platform of our own dwellings; and we are permitted, in our brief lives,
to see the impressions that are thrown off from the mind of God, the thoughts of
God, in the dispensations of His providence. Many, O Lord my God, are Thy
wonderful works, and Thy thoughts which are to us-ward. God has spoken to man.
He spake unto the fathers by the prophets, but He hath in these last days spoken
unto us by His Son. All that God has to say cannot be spoken; all that He has to
reveal cannot be told us in words. We must have the death as well as the life of
Jesus.

II. GODS THOUGHTS ARE REVEALED, AND THEY ARE THOUGHTS CONCERNING US.
However wonderful these thoughts, they might not concern us, they might not be
about us; they might be about angels, and not about men,--about other worlds, and
not this small province in Gods empire. But these thoughts become to us of the
greatest moment, when we are told that they are about us--that God thought of us
long ago--that before the world began, the thoughts of God were concerning us. How
is man magnified by this very fact!

III. What is the character of these thoughts concerning us

1. Sometimes we think Gods thoughts towards us are evil, because His ways are
so full of mystery. We see the means to the end--we do not see the end. But
the way to it is dark and sorrowful, and the events by which it is to be
brought about, we baptise by the name of evil.
2. Gods thoughts are eminently practical They are thoughts to an end. God is
wonderful in counsel and excellent in working. God alone could originate
the thoughts that fill His mind; He only can accomplish them. He does not
merely think,--He speaks, He works, and fulfils His designs.

IV. God has the most perfect acquaintance with his own thoughts, and with their
character.
1. I know the thoughts that l, think toward you. The Infinite Mind knows no
change. Gods thoughts are the same to-day as yesterday; and hence His
promises are like thoughts that have just been breathed in our world; and
His gifts and calling are without repentance.
2. Let us acquaint ourselves with these thoughts. We have the record. We have
the words of Him who spake as never man spake. Let us get these Divine
thoughts into our minds, that our thoughts may be quickened and
strengthened, that we may think the thoughts of God, that we may have
communion with the mind of God.

V. If God has placed His thoughts before our minds, let us place our thoughts
before God. Let us not only think about Him, but to Him. Let us thus have
fellowship with Him.
 VI. LET US SO ACT AND LIVE, AS TO CARRY OUT AND EXEMPLIFY GODS THOUGHTS.
The grace of God has appeared to us, teaching us that we should deny ungodliness.
Let us profit by its teaching; let us act out its teaching by living Godlike. (H. J.
Bevis.)

To give you an expected end.

Gods future and hope for human race

I. THE HUMAN RACE IS UNDER DIVINE TRAINING FOR A BLESSED AND GLORIOUS
FUTURE. God cannot create a single creature to hate and to leave in sin and misery,
and if He could, how could He be God?

II. LET US WITH REVERENCE AND HUMILITY TRY TO LEARN SOMETHING OF GODS
GREAT THOUGHTS RESPECTING THE FUTURE OF FALLEN MEN. Try to think of the future
of Gods lost children in the light of what He has done for them. If we consider it in
the light of the Incarnation of the Son, His heavenly teaching, His mighty works, and
His voluntary sufferings, we shall never despair. Think further of what God is doing
through His Spirit; for He is through His Spirit enlightening mens minds, leading
them to the truth, convincing them of sin, and purifying the nature and perfecting
the character of believers. If earthly fathers are so anxious for making a worthy and
honourable future for their children, is it likely that the Divine Father will be
heedless about the future of His children? No; that cannot be. In all the sufferings,
trials, and discipline of the present, He has their future perfection, happiness, and
glory in view.
1. Holiness of nature.
2. Perfection of character.
3. Perfection of service.
4. Perfection of joy. (Z. Mather.)

Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all
your heart.
Divine purposes fulfilled in answer to prayer

I. A CERTAIN DANGER DECLARED (Jer 29:8-9). We have here the same caution
which the Redeemer subsequently gave, to beware of false prophets. In all ages
have they appeared, and most disastrous have been the effects produced by their
teaching (Eze 13:10-14).

II. A blessed deliverance promised.

1. The grounds on which it rested. For thus saith the Lord.
2. The time of their return is expressly declared (Jer 29:10). Gods time is always
the best.
3. In their restoration the Divine faithfulness would be strikingly manifested. I
will visit you, &c.
4. The procuring cause of their deliverance was the boundless compassion of
 Jehovah (Jer 29:11).

III. An important duty enjoined. Prayer.

1. It is a duty Divinely ordained.
2. It is a duty to the observance of which the greatest encouragement is afforded.
I will hearken unto you.
3. This duty, in order to be successful, must not be attended to in a formal and
lifeless manner. (Anon.)

Captivities and how to improve them

I. WE MAY DESCRIBE EVERY REAL AFFLICTION WHICH COMES UPON THE CHRISTIAN AS
A CAPTIVITY. To be in a condition which we never should have voluntarily preferred,
or to be held back, by the power of something which we cannot control, from that
which we eagerly desire to do,--is not that the very thing in an experience which
makes it a trial? Take bodily illness, for example, and when you get at the root of the
discomfort of it, you find it in the union of these two things: you are where you do
not want to be, and where you would never have thought of putting yourself, and
you are held there, whether you will or not, by the irresistible might of your own
weakness. The same thing comes out in every sort of affliction. You are, let me
suppose, in business perplexities. Well, that is not of your own choosing. If you
could have accomplished it, you would have been in quite different circumstances.
But, in spite of you, things have gone crooked. You have been carried from the
Jerusalem of comfort to the Babylon of perplexity, by no effort of yours, nay,
perhaps, against the utmost resistance on your part, and now you can do nothing. So
sometimes, also, our providential duties are a kind of affliction to us. We had no
choice in determining whether we would assume them. They came to us, unbidden,
at least, if not undesired, and they have chained us to themselves, so that when we
are asked to take part in some effort for the benefit of others we are compelled to say
No.

II. EVERY CAPTIVITY OF WHICH THE CHRISTIAN IS THE VICTIM WILL HAVE AN END.
Time and the hour run through the roughest day. Be the day weary, or be the day
long, at last it ringeth to evensong. It is but a little while, at the longest, and we
shall be where sorrow and sighing shall for ever flee away. This state of limitation,
this conflict between our aspirations and our abilities, is not to last for ever. Not for
ever shall we be in bondage to the weakness of the body, hampered by its liability to
disease, and hindered by its proneness to fatigue. Not always shall we be at the
mercy of the unscrupulous and dishonest. Not continually shall we be held down by
the encumbrances that overweight us here on earth. For in the fatherland above we
shall work without weariness, and serve God without imperfection. But, while there
is much in this view of the case to sustain us, we must not lose sight of the moral end
which God has in view in sending us into our captivity. Ah! how many of our
idolatries He has rebuked and rectified by our captivities! We had been worshipping
our reputation, and lo! an illness came which laid us aside, and our names were by
and by forgotten, as new men came to the front; and then, learning the folly of out
false ambition, we turned from the idolatry of self to the homage of Jehovah. Or, we
had made an idol of our business; but now it is in ruins, and as we see the
perishableness of earthly things, we turn to Him who is unchanging and eternal. Or,
we had made a god of our dwelling, and by some reverse of fortune it is swept away
from us, just that we might learn the meaning of that old song of Moses (Psa 90:1).
How many portions of His Word, also, have been explained to us by our trials! There
is no commentator of the Scriptures half so valuable as a captivity. It unfolds new
beauties where all had appeared to be beautiful before; and where formerly there
was what we thought a wilderness, it has revealed to us a fruitful field.

III. If we would have such results from our captivity, there are certain important
things which we must cultivate.
1. A willing acceptance of Gods discipline, and patient submission to it. The
impatient horse which will not quietly endure his halter only strangles
himself in his stall. The high-mettled animal that is restive in the yoke only
galls his shoulders; and every one will understand the difference between the
restless starling of which Sterne has written, breaking its wings against the
bars of its cage, and crying, I cant get out, I cant get out, and the docile
canary that sits upon its perch and sings as if he would outrival the lark
soaring to heavens gate, and so moves his mistress to open the door of his
prison-house and give him the full range of the room. He who is constantly
looking back and bewailing that which he has lost, does only thereby unfit
himself for improving in any way the discipline to which God has subjected
him; whereas the man who brings his mind down to his lower lot, and
deliberately examines how he can serve God best in that, is already on the
way to happiness and to restoration.
2. Unswerving confidence in God. If we doubt Him we at once become the prey
to despondency, impatience, and rebellion. Confidence in your physician is
itself more than half the cure, and trust in God is absolutely essential if we
would gain benefit from His discipline. Yet because a change in mens
conduct toward us is usually the indication of a difference in their disposition
toward us, we think that God has ceased to care for us when He puts us into
trial or sends us into captivity. But it is not so. To-day the medical man gives
his patient liberty to take anything he chooses; to-morrow he cuts off all
indulgence, and uses severe and painful remedies; but does he care the less
for him because he thus changes his treatment, or has his purpose regarding
him undergone an alteration? Not at all In both cases he is equally earnest to
have his health restored. And it is quite similar with God in His dealings with
His people.
3. Fervent prayer. No calamity can be to us an unmixed evil if we carry it in
direct and fervent prayer to God, for even as one in taking shelter from the
rain beneath a tree may find on its branches fruit which he looked not for, so
we, in fleeing for refuge beneath the shadow of Gods wing, will always find
more in God than we had seen or known before. It is thus through our
afflictions that God gives us fresh revelations of Himself; and the Jabbok
ford, which we crossed to seek His help, leads to the Peniel, where, as the
result of our wrestling, we see God face to face, and our lives are preserved.
(W. M. Taylor, D. D.)

Finding God
 To search after God is really to educate oneself. To know God requires that we
should be educated in the Divine qualities. The knowledge of God is not something
outside of us, and far removed from us. It is revealed in us, and by some quality that
is within us. Now, to search after God has always been considered or spoken of as a
work involving the expenditure of great zeal and intensity; and the question arises,
Is it so difficult for men to know God? Fellowship and a knowledge of God are the
food of the soul; they are the conditions of a true and large manhood; and axe we
pushed so far from Him by the intrinsic difficulties of knowledge that we cannot
know Him? We surely can know God by the use of our ordinary senses so far as He
is made manifest in the exterior world, as the Maker, as the Sustainer, as the
Architect, and the Engineer; we behold what He is by what He has done; and yet, we
have thus approached but a very little way toward Him. Can we, then, by sitting
down to contemplation, can we by any such method as that of the laboratory, or that
analysis which the philosopher employs, draw out a more perfect knowledge of God?
Only in after stages, and only in a subsidiary sphere, can men gain knowledge by the
internal philosophical method. It succeeds other methods, and methods of more
importance. So the difficulty of searching after God is real; but it is not the kind of
difficulty which men suspect. It is not that God is purposely hidden. It is because the
overruling of our lower nature, the subjugation of pride, the restraint of vanity, the
putting down of avarice, the overcoming of the fever of ambition, and the regulation
of the passions--it is because these things are so difficult, that the strife and the
seeking are made necessary by the required formation of a God-like nature in
ourselves; for we shall see God only through so much of the impartation of the
Divine nature as is given to us and received by us, The Divine qualities--the qualities
of truth, justice, mercy, long-suffering, love, kindness, self-sacrifice, disinterested
benevolence--these can be appreciated only by those who have something of them in
themselves; and when we seek after God to know Him, we are seeking really to know
ourselves, and to fashion ourselves. It is a work of self-education through which we
come to a knowledge of the supreme Being; and this does require searching. How,
then, do men seek after God? They have been told that the knowledge of God, that
the presence of God in their souls, is quite necessary for their safety in death, and for
their remission from hell in the life that is to come; and out of the most selfish or the
most superstitious feeling they often make a languid and feeble search after God
purely for protective purposes--not from honour; not from love; not from conscious
weakness to be impleted; not from a sense of their inferiority and a desire of
aggrandisement by things that make nobility in the soul; not from any worthy
purpose, but that they may have a barrier to keep off the avalanche of death. There
are others who join with me in denouncing folly upon such, who are scarcely better,
although they are frivolous in a higher mood. There are many who seek after God as
poets seek after conceits. They love God as they love music; they love Him as they
love the chant of the singer, or the effusion of the smooth-rhymed poet; and only
thus do they seek after God. To them He is a vision; He is a floating cloud; He is a
spring morning; He is a thundering sea; He is a landscape; He is a poem; but He is
not Jehovah; He is not Father; He is not Governor, or Judge, or Rewarder. Well,
there be others that seek after God, as a philosopher seeks after a proposition,
disentangling intellectual conceptions, framing new ideas in some collected form
into a speculative and philosophic God--a God of propositions; a God of attributes; a
God of syllogisms; a logical God; a rhetorical God; a demonstrative, conceptional
God. Whatever may come through the moulds of the intellect they employ in
building up a bloodless God, a soulless God, a God of abstractions; and they think
when they have hedged Him in with one and another and another distinction
sharply drawn, and have clearly rounded out their conception, that they have sought
after God, and that they have found Him--and God laughs. For who by such
searching can find out God; as if a man who never talked with you, who never
walked with you, who never worked with you, who never lived with you, and who
was never loved by you; as if one that had no personal acquaintance with you could
ever out of his own consciousness deduce a correct idea of what you are! Searching
for God with ones heart is the way to find Him out; for God is discerned by the
heart. That is the temple in the soul of God; and only they that enter into the
searching of God by the heart can come near to Him or know Him. All they who seek
after God then, irresolutely, occasionally, with fluctuating zeal, for selfish ends,
dreamily, imaginatively, poetically, or by speculation and the lines of a dry
philosophy--all such come short. They never can reproduce God. Only they who
have framed in themselves some conception of high moral qualities, and have
learned out of their own experience to frame a notion of God for the sake of making
that notion their governor, their schoolmaster--only they can reproduce God. Frame
a conception of God as of a Father full of pitifulness, full of tenderness, full of
gentleness, full of wrath, but wrath that protects; full of severity, but the severity of a
father for the cleansing of his son; frame a conception of God as reigning not to
destroy but to recover, not to beat down but to lift up, not to shut men in prisons but
to open the prison-doors, not to weld shackles or to impose them, hut to break
them; frame a conception of God which is eminent in characteristics of motherhood,
and give to it the magnitude of infinity; and then when these moral qualities are
once established in thy sympathy and in thy thought, and magnified by the
imagination, and lifted into the heavenly sphere, and thou mayest bow down before
it, and say to it, Thou God of reason, Thou God of compassion, Thou God of infinite
love, Thou God whose thoughts rain bounty, Thou God who livest not for Thyself but
for Thy creatures, Thee I behold; to Thee I submit, because Thou art infinitely good
beyond all conception- Thee I worship and Thee I obey. And then, having framed
some such initial conception of God, be thou trained into the same likeness, and
develop in thyself whatever is in harmony with this image of the Creator. You find
portrayed in the Gospels the mind and will of God. That men may know Him
personally, four lives are given of the Lord Jesus Christ, besides the interpretations
and comments that are found in the letters and epistles. Study earnestly that slight
yet wonderful sketch and portraiture of this superior Being. Keep it before your
mind until you have a distinct conception of the personality of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The critical and determinative question with you is this-Wilt thou have such an One
to rule over you? Are you willing to lift, in your conception, into the heavenly places,
such an idea of God as you derive from the Lord Jesus Christ? Are you willing to say,
Thy will, and not mine, be done? Are you willing to take this oath and covenant of
allegiance, never to be broken, I dedicate my life to the fulfilment of Thy
commands, and to the development in myself of Thy disposition? If you are, you
have found your God. The moment you have this conception of a loving Being, with
a determinate moral character, who requires of you a corresponding moral
character, and the moment there is in you a genuine volition and purpose to love
and obey such an One, the work is begun, and you have been introduced to your
Master. Now, after that, the very first step which you take in your attempt to act
justly, you will be environed by the bands and hoops of society; by its imperfections;
by the injustice which custom always imposes; and you will have a conflict with the
prevailing tendencies by which you are surrounded. Your large and Christian
conception of justice will stand in marked contrast with the contracted and worldly
conception of justice which is prevalent; and you will become a reformer; and you
will feel, I must take up my cross; and if I follow Christ I must suffer. Yes, you
must suffer if you would enjoy. Not that you are to suffer as if religion itself were a
suffering, for religion itself is just the opposite; but you are coming out of a state of
ignorance and bondage into a state of knowledge and freedom. You are going toward
the right; and having once come to the right, it will be a blessing; for the right is s
reward in over-measure. Your first impulse should be to act beneficently; and there
is to be a power of beneficence in your soul. You should have a feeling that you are
not your own. You that are strong should bear with the weak. You should carry one
anothers burdens. You should manifest towards your fellow-men the disposition of
love. Working out, then, your conception of God little by little; gathering
conceptions of the Divine Being from all that is good and high and noble in practical
life, and bringing back to yourself as motives in your own soul corresponding
qualities, that your nature in its measure may become like God, growing in grace
and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, you will find that your sense of the
Divine Presence purifies itself, cleanses itself, augments itself, makes itself more and
more powerful, until the time comes in which you can say, literally, I walk with
God. My God made the heavens and the earth He is a God of force, and a God of
tranquillity. My God is father and mother to my thought. He is all that is
transcendent in patience and meekness and goodness; and not because He is inert;
not because He is weak; for He will by no means clear the guilty. He upholds the
right. He stands for the oppressed. He is a God who is determined that good shall
prevail as against evil. But He works with a mother-heart, by tears, by groans, by
death itself. He gives Himself for the poor, and the outcast, and the sinful, and the
needy. He bore our sins in His own body; and by His stripes we are healed. (H. W.
Beecher.)

Seekers directed and encouraged

I. TO THE UNCONVERTED. Our text has a word for you. You have lost your God: you
m e at a distance from Him; your sins have separated you from your Maker, and
nothing will ever be really right--till you get back to your God. The prodigal said, I
will arise and go to my father, and some such spirit must be in you, or we cannot
hope well of you. You must search after the Lord. You are allowed to search for Him,
and what a privilege that is. When Adam sinned, he could not go back to Paradise,
for with a flaming sword in his hand there stood the mailed cherub to keep the way
that he might not touch the tree of life. But God, as far as the garden of His mercy is
concerned, has moved that fiery sentinel, and Jesus Christ has set angels of love to
welcome you at mercys gate. You may come to God, for God has come to you. He
has taken upon Himself your nature, and His name is Emmanuel, God with us.
Search for Him, and you must find Him, for so stands His own Word, Ye shall seek
Me, and find Me. The text, however, demands that our searching after God should
be done with all our heart. There axe several ways of seeking God which must prove
failures. One is to seek Him with no heart at all. This is done by those who take their
book and read prayers, never thinking what they say; or who attend a dissenting
place of worship, and hear another person pray, but never join in it. If any of you
have fallen into a formal religion, and seek the Lord without your heart, your
seeking is in vain. Some seek God with a false heart. Their piety is an affectation of
feeling, and not deep soul-work; it is sentimentality, and not the graving of Gods
Spirit upon the heart. God grant us to be saved from a lie in the heart, for it is a
deadly canker, fatal to all hope of finding the Lord. Some seek Him, too, with a
double heart--a heart and a heart, as the Hebrew puts it. If one oar pulls towards
earth and the other towards heaven the boat of the soul will revolve in a circle of
folly, but never reach the happy shore. Beware of a double heart. And some seek God
with half a heart. They have a little concern, and are not altogether indifferent; they
do think when they pray, or read, or sing, but the thought is not very intense.
Superficial in all things, the seed is sown in stony ground, and soon it is withered
away, because there is no depth of earth. The Lord save us from this! Now, ye that
are seeking Christ, remember that if you would find Him you must neither seek Him
without heart, nor with a false heart, nor with a double heart, nor with a half heart,
but Ye shall find Me, saith the Lord, when ye shall search for Me with all your
heart. What did Jesus say?--The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the
violent take it by force. Heavens celestial bastions must be stormed by downright
importunity. But why is it that when men search with all their heart they do find
God? I will tell you. The only way in which we can find God is in Jesus Christ. There
He meets with men, but nowhere else, and to get to Jesus Christ there is nothing on
earth to be done but simply to believe in Him. The saving Word is near thee, in thy
mouth, and in thy heart, and that is why when men seek the Lord with their whole
hearts they find Him, for before they called the Lord was ready to answer. Jesus was
always ready; but other wishes and other thoughts made the seeker unready. Sins
were there, and lusts of the flesh, and all manner of hamper to hinder the man.
When a man comes to seek God with all his heart, he lets those things go, and soon
sees Jesus. Then, too, a man becomes teachable, for when a man is in earnest to
escape from danger he is glad enough to be told by anybody. I charge you, then, you
that seek the Lord, to be whole-hearted in it, for you cannot expect peace and joy in
the Holy Ghost till all those straggling affections and wandering desires are tied up
into one bundle, and your entire being is eager in the search for God in Christ Jesus.

II. THE BACKSLIDER. Backsliders, you have left your Lord. Oh, you who once made
a profession of religion, I cannot understand how you can dare to think of the
judgment day, for you will not be able to plead ignorance, for you knew the truth
and professed to believe it. If a prince of the blood were sent to a common gaol, what
a misery it would be to him. I pity every man who has to work upon the treadmill, so
far as he can deserve pity, but most of all the man who has been delicately brought
up and scarce knows what labour means, for it must be hard indeed to him. Ah, you
delicate sons and daughters of Zion, you whose mouths were never stained with a
curse, and whose hands have never been defiled with outward sin, if your hearts be
not right with God, you must take your place with the profane and share with them.
What say you to this? Do you say, I would fain return and find acceptance in
Christ? To you the text speaks expressly. Then shall you find Me when ye shall
search for Me with all your heart.

III. My last word is TO YOU, THE MEMBERS OF THIS CHURCH. Thus saith the Lord,
Ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart. (C.
H. Spurgeon.)

Heart searchings
 1. Man, through all the ages of time, has been influenced by a principle of
reform. The pathway of the generations has been trodden amidst the Babel-
tongued shouts of Progress! True progress has ever been characterised by
diligent research. So we may well-nigh estimate the excellence of
acquirement by intensity of endeavour to attain, and calculate worth by the
economics of moral labour.
2. This searching is the child of necessity. For possession begets desire; the
perfecting of one design reveals the incompleteness of another, or the
converse; the failure of one scheme throws into bolder relief the success of
another.
3. The searching, to be successful, must also be thorough: with all your heart.
The discoveries of insincerity are accidental. Heart searchings are
illumined by the light of heaven.
4. Application--
(1) The ultimate and inevitable object of search, Me.
(2) The certainty of success assured, dependent only upon the one condition
named, i.e. earnestness, Ye shall find Me.
(3) Searching is not always strenuous exertion; study the might of
systematic inaction. Canst thou by searching (alone) find out God? Wait
patiently for Him. Stand still and see the salvation of God.
(4) Note the individual reference of the text: Ye shall seek Me, and find
Me, &c. (Preachers Analyst.)

Searching with all the heart

Kepler, first in fact and in genius of modern astronomers, deservedly called the
legislator of the heavens, sought with all his heart to solve astronomical problems.
With agony he strove to enter the straight gate and narrow way that led to the secret
chamber of science, and explain the enigmas of six thousand yearn Vainly did the
secrets of planetary and stellar worlds seek to elude him. He forged key after key,
that he might unlock the doors of these mysteries. His courage and patience
transfigured even failure into success. If one theory proved inadequate, there was at
least one less to try, and so the limits became narrower within which truth would be
found. He exhausted eight years of toil, only to prove worthless nineteen successive
experiments. At last, driven to abandon the circular orbit, he founded his twentieth
hypothesis on the curve which is next to the circle in simplicity, namely, the ellipse,
and as all the conditions were met, the problem was solved. Bursting with
enthusiasm, he cried: O Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!
Pressing his research further, he established his second and third laws, and, almost
wild with triumph, exclaimed: Nothing holds me! I will indulge my sacred fury! The
book is written to be read either now or by posterity; I care not which! It may well
wait a century for a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an
observer. If Kepler was the minister of science, Agassiz was her missionary. He had
no time to make money; but was found wandering alone on Pacific slopes, a pilgrim,
to gather specimens of flora and fauna, minerals and metals, shells and pebbles, for
the cabinets of science. What would not such zeal accomplish in religion! (A. T.
Pierson.)
Concentration of heart
A broken heart is a great blessing, when it is broken by contrition for sin; but a
divided heart is often a fatal disease. One secret of success in life is concentration;
and many of our young men find it out too late. The founder of the Vanderbilt family
bent his whole powers upon money-making, and left the richest family on the
Continent. Sir Isaac Newtons famous explanation of his splendid success was, I
intend my whole mind upon it. Prof. Joseph Henry, of Washington, our great
Christian scientist, used to say: I have no faith in universal geniuses: my rule is to
train all my guns on one point until I make a breach. In these days of hot
competition there is no room on the street for any man who puts only a fraction of
himself into his business.

JEREMIAH 30

JER 30:7
It is even the time of Jacobs trouble; but he shall be saved out of it.

Jacobs trouble
There is not a malady in human life, but we find its antidote in the Bible; not a
wound, but we find its balm; not a spiritual sickness, but we find its remedy there. If
there is no time of trouble to Jacob, what deliverance could Jacob want? Of what use
is a promise of rest to the weary and heavy laden, unless a man finds himself
burdened and oppressed? A promise of salvation is only of value for those who feel
their need of it; and an assurance of deliverance is only precious to such as are made
sensible of their danger. The language of our text relates primarily and literally to
the languishing state of the Church--to the captivity of Israels tribes--to Jacobs
trouble on account of the desolation of their city, and the destruction of their
temple; and it is not only promised to them that their trouble should be blessed to
them, but also that they should be saved out of it. We notice, first, the time of
Jacobs trouble; secondly, the timely deliverance promised, He shall be saved out of
it; and thirdly, the evidence and display of the truth and faithfulness of God
towards Israel and Jacob.
1. Some may inquire why the truth and faithfulness of God should be brought
forward. I do not intend to present you with a catalogue of Jacobs troubles;
they are too numerous. I will, however, mention a few.
(1) The trouble here spoken of is of a public nature. In its literal sense, it was
the distress, calamity, degeneracy, of the Lords people--the scattering
and desolation of His inheritance by captivity. I have but a sorry opinion
of that mans spirituality who is not troubled for Jacobs, not grieved for
Josephs, not afflicted for Zions low, degenerate, sunken, miry condition.
It is to my mind, amid all the enjoyments of my soul in Christ, a source of
daily trouble. But this degeneracy is not the worst feature in Jacobs
trouble. There is such an awful determination evinced to unite the
Church and the world, to amalgamate two whom God has separated in
His Word, purposes, and dispensations, with the highest and broadest
 wall of separation.
(2) But Jacobs trouble is not only of a public character; it is also of a
personal nature. There is spiritual trouble when a man is first awakened-
-when the Lord Jesus convinces him of sin, and discovers the spirituality
and extent of the Divine law. This is, indeed, a time of trouble; but here is
the mercy--he shall be delivered out of it. He that melted your heart will
form Christ there, the hope of glory. He that gave you the knowledge of
your sins will also give you the knowledge of His Son. Again, it is a time
of trouble when the soul is in legal bondage. What a time of trouble, of
fear, sorrow, anxiety, dread, gloom, and dismal forebodings do souls in
legal bondage pass through, till the Son of God comes Himself and makes
them flee. Again, it is a time of personal trouble when the soul is led into
the field of battle, and foiled by the enemy. Again, it is a time of personal
trouble when we are called to walk in darkness.
(3) Again, there is a time of providential trouble. It was a time of
providential trouble to Joseph when sold by his brethren, falsely accused
by his mistress, thrown into a dungeon by his master. It was a time of
providential trouble to David, when he was hunted by Saul, betrayed by
Doeg, threatened to be stoned by his own people, when Ziklag was
burned, when driven into the wilderness as a fugitive, and expelled from
his throne, family, and palace by his wicked son--but he shall be saved
out of it. There were times and troubles to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul,
and all the apostles.
2. The timely deliverance. He shall be saved out of it. There is a threefold
method in which God saves Jacob out of his trouble. Sometimes by causing
his troubles to terminate with a word. He speaks the word, Peace, be still,
and not s wave rolls, nor s wind breathes. Sometimes He causes their
troubles to terminate by taking the sons of Jacob out of them to glory, and
raising them above the reach of them for ever. Sometimes by teaching them
how to trust and triumph in Himself; as David says, Though I walk in the
midst of trouble Thou wilt revive me. What a marvellous deliverance God
effected for His people in the days of bloody Mary. Then there were
multitudes of godly men in prison, under sentence to the fire, and expecting
the faggots every moment to be kindled, when God suddenly summoned that
cruel queen into His presence. Elizabeth succeeded, and His people were
rescued Remember, whether trial is domestic, personal, spiritual, temporal,
or circumstantial, a Fathers wisdom directs it, a Fathers love superintends
it, and a Fathers word will scatter it. And remember, whatever method God
may adopt to save you out of your trouble, you, as a son of Jacob, will be
enabled to say, It is good for me that I have been afflicted. Sometimes He
delivers them by teaching them how to trust Him, and triumph in Him in the
midst of troubles. Look at Gideon and his conquest over the Midianites,
without a spear, a bow, dart, javelin, sword, arrow, lance, or any weapon of
war--with nothing but lamps and pitchers he overcomes them. How different
are the troubles of Jacob and Esau, of Isaac and Ishmael, of the Christian
and the worldling, of a child and an enemy. The troubles of the worldling are
not few. He is liable to all the calamities of life. He has no God to flee to, no
sympathising High Priest. Place a Christless man in my circumstances,
despair and anguish will be his portion; but s man that shall be saved if he
 has my God. Is there any relation to, any likeness to, Jacobs sons to be found
in you? Is there any distinction between you and Esau? Is there any personal,
spiritual difference between you and the world? Can you give an affirmative
answer to these questions? If so, the promise and oath of God are on your
side; and, however deep or long your troubles may be, you shall be saved out
of them. (J. Iron.)

JER 30:11
I will correct thee in measure.

Correction in measure

I. The text gives us GODS LAW OF CORRECTION; and remember, first of all, that it is
a law. It is not a passion; it is not a surprise on the part of the Ruler Himself: it is
part of His very goodness; it is quiet, solemn, inexorable, everlasting. The steadfast
law of the universe is, that though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not go
unpunished. This is s law, it is not a caprice; it is a necessity of goodness, and not a
burst of passion. All things fight for God; they are very loyal to Him. The stars in
their courses utter His testimony; the winds as they fly are vocal with His name; the
earth will open her mouth with eager gladness to swallow up the populations that
lift their hands against Him. Let us begin with things known, with the patent and
indisputable facts of life,--and amongst those facts you will find the hell which
follows broken law, the earth that casts out the sour that is not holy,--and thence
proceed step by step into the holy place where the altar is, and the speaking blood,
and the Father, and the strange light of eternity. There is but one true line of
progress: it begins with Moses, it ends with the Lamb--Moses and the Lamb: Law
and Grace; and in the last eternal song we shall find in one grand line, Moses and
the Lamb, a marvellous harmonisation, the up-gathering and reconciliation of all
things; the old ark built again; the law within, the mercy-lid covering it. Law and
Mercy--Moses and the Lamb--these combine the whole purpose of the movement of
the Divine mind and love.

II. So far we have looked at the stern fact of law: we now come to WHAT IS SAID
ABOUT IT. It is a law of measured correction: I will correctthee in measure. At this
point grace gets hold of law and keeps it back. Law can never stop of itself. The law
is the same at the end as at the beginning. It cannot palter, it cannot compromise, it
cannot make terms; it grinds, bruises, destroys. If a sinful world were left absolutely
to the operation of law, it would be crushed out of existence. But the law is under
mercy. We are spared by grace, by grace we are saved. The grace was accomplished
before the sinner was created. The atonement is not the device of an afterthought:
the Lamb was slain from before the foundation of the world. Have we penetrated the
gracious meaning of that astounding mystery? Before we can understand anything
of the atonement, we must destroy the very basis and the relations of understanding,
as it is too narrowly interpreted; we must think ourselves back of time, of space, of
foundations, worlds, sinners. Great is the mystery of godliness--God manifest in the
flesh. Correction in measure is Gods law now. May the time not come when the
measure will be withdrawn and the correction will take its unlimited course? That
will be hell, that will be destruction.

III. WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS MEASURE? It is the Gospel. There is a higher
law than the law of death. The law of life is not changed: it is enlarged over all the
sins and shortcomings and crimes of life. Where sin abounds, grace doth much
more abound. Grace says, There has been great sin: now for my enlargement.
And she enlarges her offers of mercy, and her signs of pity, and her opportunities of
return, until the sin flee away--that which is great becomes little. Life is more than
death, as the heaven is high above the earth. Death is only a partial law; the
universal law is life, and it is for God to set that infinite law in motion. Here we enter
upon the mysteries of Deity; here we touch the altar of the atonement. I will accept
my chastening; I deserve it. This is my sweet, great faith--that no punishment ever
overtakes me that is not a sign of Gods watchfulness, and of Gods care over my life.
I have never suffered lose, social dishonour, inward compunction, without being
able to say, This is the Lords doing, and not mans. The man did not know what he
was doing to me; he was seized by God and set to do this work for my punishment--
my education. Let us have no whining, no complaining, no retaliation. The man
that smote you was sent to smite you. Avenge yourself by deeper confession, by
larger, loftier prayer. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 30:17-19
I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord.

Gods love in restoration

Most times in Scripture the voice of God is the voice of love. The sterner words
come forth as of necessity, on compulsion. How wonderful in the text is the
tenderness with which God speaks, what marvellous considerateness for natural
human feelings, for the peculiarities, if I may so speak, of human feelings, when, in
promising to renew and to restore, He speaks not only of restoration, but of
restoration on the very spot, restoration with the least possible loss, the least
possible wrench to natural feeling,--restoration of the city on the ruinous heap, on
the old foundation; not merely life again, but life where they had lived of old, the
hearth to be raised where the hearth had burned of old, and home where home had
been, not one joy or sorrow of association being lost, no change of place, no
severance of old ties and thoughts, but all the round of life to begin again on the very
site where the days had gone round before. Great mercy would it have been, if the
decayed city, with its palaces and homes, had been rebuilt at all, and on other spots,
in other places not known or loved before; but as there would have been a certain
sorrow in changing the place of habitation, in making a new home, and on looking
back on the bare desert plots where the city had once stood, so God, promising
restoration, so promises it, that there should not be one cloud upon the heart in
seeing the walls again built, not one touch of sorrow and regret to mingle with the
joy. And how has it been with the Church of Christ, of which these words of the
prophet, in a second and a spiritual sense, doubtless speak? There is no branch of
the Church, alas! which has not failed at times in its high part, which has not at
times sunk down into listlessness and sloth, which has not at times had an evil
activity and an unwise zeal, which has not at times wasted its high gifts, spilt them
as it were like water on the ground, suffered its lamp to burn low or to glare with an
unhealthy light, which has not at times grudged alms, or been faint in prayer, or
worshipped the world, or dressed itself out in gorgeous robes of worldly greatness,
or been self-indulgent, or lax in its view of Christian verities. And yet no branch of
the Church has been without its calls and recalls, its revival, whether of its spiritual
life or of its form and order, its gracious renewings, its waterings from on high with
the heavenly dew, that it might again look strong, again battle with the world, again
bear noble witness, again do noble deeds, again shew the power of a living faith,
again unite itself with heaven by its warm and frequent prayers, again preach Christ
crucified by its own crucifixion of all earthly affections, and the manifestation of all
saintly ways and tempers. (Bishop Armstrong.)

Blessed promises for dying outcasts

The promises of this verse will be exceedingly sweet to those who feel their
personal need of them; but those who boast that they are neither sick nor wounded
will take no interest in this comfortable word.

I. Taken in connection with the verses which precede it, our text describes a class
of men and women who are in a SERIOUS PLIGHT. These people suffer under two
evils. They are afflicted with the distemper of evil, and also by dismal disquietude of
conscience. They have broken Gods commandments, and now their own bones are
broken. They have grieved their God, and their God is grieving them.
1. They are sick with sin, and that disease is one which, according to the fifth and
sixth verses, brings great pain and trouble into mens minds when they come
to their senses, and know their condition before God. Sin felt and known is a
terrible kill-joy: as the simoom of the desert smites the caravan with death,
and as the sirocco withers every herb of the field, so does a sense of sin dry
up peace, blast hope, and utterly kill delight. This disease, moreover, is not
only exceedingly painful when the conscience is smarting, but it is altogether
incurable, so far as any human skill is concerned. Neither body, soul, nor
spirit is free from its taint. At all hours it is our curse and plague; over all
places it casts its defiling influence; in all duties it injures and hinders us. To
those who know this there is a music sweeter than marriage-bells in these
words,--I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds
The incurable shall be cured; the insatiable malady shall be stayed. How
gracious is it on Gods part to pity a creature infected with this vile
distemper! How good of Him to regard our iniquity rather as a sickness to be
healed than as a crime to be punished!
2. I told you of a double mischief in this plight, and the second mischief is that
this person has been wounded for his sin. His wounds are of no common
sort, for we are told in the fourteenth verse that God Himself has wounded
him. There is such a thing as cruel kindness, and the opposite to it is a loving
cruelty, a gracious severity. When the Lord brings sin to remembrance, and
makes the soul to see what an evil it has committed in transgressing against
God, then the wound bleeds, and the heart breaks. The smart is sharp, but
salutary. The Lord wounds that He may heal, He kills that He may make
 alive. His storms wreck us upon the rock of salvation, and His tempests drive
us into the fair havens of lowly faith. Happy are the men who are thus made
unhappy; but this for the present they know not, and therefore they need the
promise, I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord. The blows are not
only on the conscience, but when God is in earnest to make men flee from
their sins, He will smite them anywhere and everywhere. He takes away the
delight of their eyes with a stroke; the child, the husband, the wife, or the
friend is laid low; for the Lord will fill our houses with mourning sooner than
leave us in carnal security.

II. A SPECIAL INTERFERENCE. The poor creature is in desperate dolour; but the
God of pitying love comes in, and I beg you to notice the result.
1. This interference is, first of all Divine. The infinite Jehovah alone can speak
with that grand Ego, and say, I will, and again, I will. No human
physician who was worthy of the name would speak thus. He would humbly
say, I will attempt to give you health; I will endeavour to heal your wounds;
but the Lord speaks with the positiveness of omnipotence, for He has the
power to make good His words.
2. Note, that since this interference is Divine it is effectual. What can baffle the
Lord? Can anything perplex infinite wisdom? Is anything difficult to
almighty power? He speaks, and it is done; He commands, and it stands fast.
When therefore God says, I will restore health unto thee, health will visit the
wretch who lies pining at deaths door. When He says, I will heal thee of thy
wounds, the deep cuts and gashes are closed up at once.
3. Observe that this interposition performs a work which is most complete, for it
meets the two-fold mischief. He will heal both disease and wound.
4. Notice, too, how sovereignly free this promise is. It does not say, I will
restore health unto thee if--No, there is no if; and there is no mention of a
fee. Here is healing for nothing. Jesus comes to give us health without money
and without price, without pence or penance, without labour or merit.
5. Notice that, although it be thus free and unconditional, yet it is now a matter
of covenant certainly, for God has made the promise, and He cannot turn
from it. To every guilty sinner, conscious of his guilt, who will come and
confess it before God, this promise is made to-day, I will restore health unto
thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds.

III. A SINGULAR REASON. He says, not Because you were holy, or Because you
had good desires; but Because they called thee an outcast. Who were they? Why,
the mockers and blasphemers: the Lord actually transforms the venom of asps,
which was under the tongues of the malicious, into a reason for His mercy. This
clearly shows how God hates the very notion of merit; but it also shows that He will
find a reason for mercy somewhere.
1. This roused the Lords pity. Oh, He said, has it come to this? Have they
dared to call My Beloved an outcast, and say that no man seeketh after her!
I will seek her, and heal her, and restore her, for I cannot endure such
tauntings. Now, if there is a poor sinner in the world, upon whom other
sinners, who are just as bad in their heart, begin to vent their scorn, and say,
She is an outcast; then the God of mercy seems to say, Who are you that
 you should talk like this? You are as vile yourselves, and yet you dare to look
down upon this poor, selected one, as if she were so much worse than you.
Therefore, I will save that despised one, and will have mercy upon the
rejected.
2. Gods jealousy is aroused against those who despise His people and speak ill
of them. It is one thing for a father to chasten his boy; but if, when he is out
in the streets, a stranger begins to kick him, his father declares that it shall
not be. He arouses himself to defend his child, the same child that just now
he smote so heavily. That is a fair parallel to the case of our God. He will
chasten His people in measure, but the moment that their enemies call them
outcasts He turns His anger another way and releases His people. Oh, how
blessedly does good come out of evil! How graciously He causes the wrath of
man to praise Him. He restores health to Zion, and heals her wounds
because she is called an outcast.

IV. A LITTLE SUITABLE ADVICE. I will suppose that I have those before me who
have felt their disease and their wound, and have been healed by the God of mercy. I
would recommend them to attend to certain matters.
1. Take care that you live very near your Physician. I notice that patients come
up from the country when they are suffering with serious complaints, and
they take lodgings near a medical man who is in high esteem for such cases
as theirs. Now, the Lord has healed your wound, and restored health to you,
therefore abide in Him; never leave Him, nor live far away from Him, for this
old disease of yours may break out on a sudden, and it will be well to have
the Healer close at hand. It will be best to entertain Him constantly beneath
your roof, and within your heart; for His presence is the wellspring of health
to the soul.
2. I recommend you often to put yourself under His searching examination. Go
to this great Physician, and ask Him to look into your hidden parts, to search
you, and try you, and see what wicked way may be in you, that He may lead
you in the way everlasting.
3. I recommend you from personal experience to consult with this Doctor every
day. It is a wise thing before you go downstairs into the worlds tainted
atmosphere to take a draught of His Elixir vitae, in the form of renewed faith
in Him. I am sure at night it is an admirable thing to purge the soul of all the
perilous stuff which has accumulated through the day by full confession and
renewed confidence.
4. Lay bare your case before Him; conceal nothing; beg of Him to deal with you
according to His knowledge of your case. Make a clean breast that Christ
may make a sure cure.
5. Then I should very strongly recommend you always to obey the prescriptions
of the great Healer. Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. The Lord Jesus
must be received as a whole, or not at all
6. Take care also to exercise great confidence in this Physician. Your cure is
working wondrously when you trust in Jesus heartily. Distrust is what you
have to fear; faith is your strength.
7. When you are healed, as I trust you are already, speak well of your Benefactor.
When you were restored from sickness the other day, you were quite able to
 inform your friends as to that new medicine which acted like a charm, and
you found a tongue to speak well of your doctor; and I am sure you have
ability enough to declare the wonderful works of the Lord in your case. Oh,
but I could not embellish the tale! Do not attempt to embellish it; for that
would only spoil it. Tell the story as simply as possible. I think it is of Mr.
Cecil that I have read the following incident. A friend came from some
distance to inform him of a medicine which was to relieve him of his
disorder. This friend told him all about it, and having done so, entered into
conversation upon the current matters of the day. The result was that Mr.
Cecil was greatly interested in the talk, and when his friend was gone, he
quite forgot every ingredient of the wonderful medicine. Beware of allowing
the many things to drive the one thing needful out of your friends mind. (C.
H. Spurgeon.)

JER 30:18-20
I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small.

The Churchs encouragement in times of depression

I. A representation cf the Church in a state of great depression and affliction.

1. Consternation and dismay are evinced. There is the voice of trembling, and
the agitation of fear, at the apprehension of approaching calamities. Every
man is represented with his hands upon his loins, the symptoms of
agonising pain; and all faces are turned unto paleness, the effect of extreme
alarm.
2. Desolation and ruin are also intimated. Their bruise was incurable, and their
wound was grievous; for they were wounded by the hand of an enemy,--
with the chastisement of a cruel one.

II. The encouraging promise here given to the Church of her restoration to peace
and prosperity.
1. Tranquillity and protection; or, peace in all her borders (Jer 30:10).
2. The renewal of her religious privileges (Jer 30:18; Jer 30:22).
3. The increase of her converts (Jer 30:19).
4. The joy of her members is next promised;--and this follows as a matter of
course.
5. The destruction of her enemies. (R. Bond.)

JER 30:21
And their nobles shall be of themselves, and their governor shall proceed from
the midst of them.
The choice of their rulers the privilege of the people
1. The power of choosing their own rulers is a privilege which but very few of
mankind have ever enjoyed. There is not one nation in all Asia and Africa
which enjoys the power of electing its own rulers; and scarcely one in all
Europe which enjoys this privilege in its full extent.
2. The power of choosing their own rulers is a privilege which all nations who
are destitute of it wish to enjoy.
3. It must be a great privilege to any people, to have the power of choosing their
best men to rule over them. Rulers who understand the genius and
disposition of their people, who are acquainted with their laws and
constitutions, who have a comprehensive view of their various interests and
connections, and who are men of tried integrity, are well qualified to fill
every department of government. No people can desire better rulers than
these; and such as these, the power of election gives them the best
opportunity of appointing to office.
4. It is a great privilege for a people to have a power of choosing their own
rulers, because good rulers are a very great blessing. They are the guardians
of all that a people hold most dear and sacred; and so can do them greater
service, and more essentially promote their temporal good, than any other
men in any other public or private stations of life.
Reflections--
1. No nation which chooses its own rulers can be enslaved without its own
consent. The privilege of election is the grand palladium of civil liberty.
2. If a people who choose their own rulers have not good rulers, it must be owing
to their own fault. If they choose their best men, there can be no doubt but
their rulers will be good.
3. A people who choose their own rulers, cannot reasonably expect to have
better rulers than themselves
4. This subject directs us where to look for the origin of the political distresses
and embarrassments in which we have been, and still are, involved. They
have originated from the abuse of the power of election.
5. This subject suggests to us the best, and perhaps the only possible way of
alleviating present, and of preventing future calamities. The way is, wisely
and faithfully to improve our important privilege of election, and commit the
direction of our national concerns to greater and better men. (N. Emmons,
D. D.)

The blessing of freedom

Our subject is the blessing of freedom; the advantages of that political condition in
which we are placed. There are various causes in operation which tend to lesson in
us the due sense of these advantages. Extravagance of praise; asserting too much
with regard to any principle; overdrawn statements of its nature, and perpetual
boasting of its effects, are likely in all cases, sooner or later, to bring about a
reaction. The abuses of the principle of liberty also; the out-breakings of popular
violence, mobs, and tumults, prostrating the law under foot; and the tyranny,
moreover, of legal majorities; and, withal, the bitter animosities of party strife, and
the consequent incessant fluctuations of public policy, constantly deranging the
business of the country; all these things are leading some to say, but with more
rashness than wisdom, I must think, that even political oppression and injustice,
which should make all strong, and firm, and permanent, would be better than that
state of things in which we live. Add to all this, that the blessings which are
common, like the air we breathe and the light of day--blessings which are invested
with the familiar livery of our earliest and most constant experience--are apt to pass
by us unregarded; while the evils of life, calamities and concussions of the elements,
shipwrecks, and storms, and earthquakes, rise into portentous and heart-thrilling
significance; and we see another and final reason why the advantages of our political
condition are liable to be undervalued. The first step which I shall take in defending
the ground which we as a nation have taken, win be carefully to define it. What is the
principle of a democratic or representative government? It is, that no restraints,
disabilities, or penalties shall be laid upon any person, and that no immunities,
privileges, or charters shall be conferred on any person, or any class of persons, but
such as tend to promote the general welfare. This exception, be it remembered, is an
essential part of our theory. Our principle is not, as I conceive, that no privileges
shall be granted to one person more than to another. If bank charters, for instance,
can be proved to be advantageous to the community, our principle must allow them.
It is upon the same principle that we grant acts of incorporation to the governors of
colleges, academies, and hospitals, and to many other benevolent and literary
societies: it is upon the ground that they benefit the public. And what is government
itself, but a corporation possessing and exercising certain exclusive powers for the
general weal? Again, I maintain that our democratic principle is not that the people
are always right. It is this rather: that although the people may sometimes be wrong,
yet that they are not so likely to be wrong, and to do wrong, as irresponsible,
hereditary magistrates and legislators; that it is safer to trust the many with the
keeping of their own interests, than it is to trust the few to keep those interests for
them. Let me now proceed to speak of liberty as a blessing, and the highest blessing
that can appertain to the condition of a people.
1. I value our political constitution because it is the only system that accords
with the truth of things, the only system that recognises the great claims and
inalienable rights of humanity.
2. I value our liberty, and deem it a just cause of thankfulness to Heaven,
because it fosters and develops all the intellectual and moral powers of the
country.
3. I value political liberty because of that which a free and unfettered energy
obtains, it gives the freest and amplest use. What is the effect, nay, what is
the design of a despotic Government, but to deprive the people of the largest
amount that it can, or dare, of the proceeds of their honest industry and
laudable enterprise? Under its grossest forms, it levies direct contributions;
in its more plausible administration it levies taxes; but in either case its end
is the same--to feed and batten a few at the expense of the many. Let me not
be told, that differences in the form of government are mere matters of
speculation; that they have very little to do with our private welfare; that a
man may be as happy under one form as another. I think it was on occasion
of our revolution that Dr. Johnson put forth some such oracle as this; but it
is not true; it may pass for good-nature, or for smooth philosophy, if anyone
pleases so to call it, but it is not true. What more obvious interest of human
life is there, than that a mans labour shall produce for him the greatest
 possible amount of comfort; that he should enjoy, as far as it is compatible
with the support of civil order, the proceeds of his toil? Labour, honourable
and useful as it is, is not so very agreeable that a man should recklessly give
it for that which is not bread. And that he emphatically does who gives it for
pensions, sinecures, and monopolies, and establishments, and wars, which
benefit him not at all.
4. I should not exhaust the subject, even in this most general view of it, if I did
not add one further consideration in behalf of freedom; a consideration that
is higher and stronger than any reason--I mean, the intrinsic desirableness
of this condition to every human being. In this respect, freedom is like virtue,
like happiness; we value it for its own sake. God has stamped upon our very
humanity this impress of freedom; it is the unchartered prerogative of
human nature. (O. Dewey, D. D.)

Who is this that engaged his heart to approach unto Me?--

Who is this?

I. The question of our text is asked TO DIRECT ATTENTION TO THIS GLORIOUS

PERSON. Who is this that engaged his heart to approach unto Me? saith the Lord.
The person who must draw near to God must be one of ourselves. It is clear that a fit
representative for men must be himself a man. In Adam we transgressed and died to
God: in another Adam must we be restored. Now, where is this man to be found?
Who is this? If he is to come of ourselves, where is he? Not among this
assemblage; nor if all the myriads that dwell on the face of the earth could be
gathered together would there be found one who could undertake this enterprise,--
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Nor is it merit alone that
is needed, for he that would approach unto the Lord as mediator must be prepared
with strength to suffer. Who can sustain the load of human sin? Who can endure the
indignation of the Lord against iniquity? Assuredly none of us could do it: the fire
would consume him as stubble. Oh, for an interposer; but where can he be found?
Now look at the context, and you will see that the person who must approach to God
for us must be a prince-priest; for He is called their glorious One and their
Governor, and yet it is said of Him, I will cause Him to draw near, which work of
drawing near is in other places ascribed to priests, for these God had set apart for
the service of His sanctuary. The person, then, must be a priest, and yet a prince.
Who is He, and where is He? You know Him--the true Priest of God, not of the order
of Aaron, and the King eternal, immortal, invisible, King of kings, and Lord of lords.
It is He that engaged His heart to draw near to God on our behalf. The question,
however, may be answered in another way, so as to bring out more clearly the
matchless Person whom our hearts adore. It was necessary that He who should draw
near to God should be chosen to that office by God Himself, and should be qualified
for it by Divine power. I will cause Him to draw near, and He shall approach to
Me. Now, is there any one among us all that God has ever chosen to represent our
fellow-men as their mediator, acting as the head of the race, and as such entering
into the immediate presence of God on his own merits? We have not, I hope, the
presumption to imagine such a thing. There is one Mediator between God and man,
the Man, Jesus Christ. Moreover, to close this description, He was not only
appointed of God and qualified, but He was one who was willing to undertake the
task and ready to pledge Himself to it. He voluntarily covenanted to do it, as it is
written, Lo, I come; in the volume of the Book it is written of Me, to do Thy will, O
God: yea, Thy law is My delight.

II. TO EXCITE ADMIRATION OF HIS MATCHLESS WORK. If Jesus Christ is to approach

to God for us, it is clear that He must come down into our condition, for He must
first descend or He cannot ascend. He descended into our depths to engineer a way
from the lowest to the highest, to come back from Bashan, and from the depths of
the sea, leading the van of the armies of His chosen as they return unto God with
songs and everlasting joy upon their heads. This lowly place being taken, behold our
Lord actually approaching unto the offended Majesty on high. Though found in
fashion as a man, and by reason of His becoming a curse for us, denied the presence
of the Father, so that He cried in anguish, My God, My God, why hast Thou
forsaken Me? yet He did approach unto God: He did come near; nay, He remaineth
near, able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him. Our Lord with
all His heart desired to do this: He engaged His heart to perform it. But why this
readiness, this eagerness? Love is the one reply. His heart was occupied with love to
God and love to man, and He could not rest till He had restored the broken concord
between these divided ones. With all the forcefulness of His Divine nature, and with
all the energy of His perfect humanity, He was resolved to bring men back to God.
Having thus determined that He would approach unto God on our behalf, He took
all the consequences. A correct reading of the passage would be, Who is this that
hath pledged his heart or his life to approach unto Me? saith the Lord. If you take
the meaning of the word heart to be life, since the heart is the source of life, then
we read that our Lord pledged His life, put His life in surety that He would approach
unto God, the Judge of all, and bring us near to Him. When He came as the
representative of sinful men--then vengeance with its sword must smite Him, and
He was willing to be smitten. And now to-day, beloved, Jesus Christ rejoices to think
that He has approached unto God on our behalf, and made eternal amity between
God and man Let us rejoice with Him. Let us become happy in fellowship with our
God.

III. TO AROUSE YOUR INTEREST IN THE SWEET RESULTS OF JESUS CHRISTS HAVING
APPROACHED TO GOD FOR US. The first result is found in the chapter. Read that
twenty-second verse. Who is this that engaged his heart to approach unto Me? saith
the Lord. And ye shall be My people, and I will be your God. That is, because our
royal High Priest approached unto God for us, therefore we who were called
outcasts, we whose wound was incurable and grievous, we that were utterly ruined
and undone; we, believing in this Jesus, shall in Him become the people of God. I
seem to see in my spirit that old legend of Rome worked out in very deed. So saith
the story: in the Roman Forum there gaped a vast chasm which threatened the
destruction of the Forum, if not of Rome. The wise men declared that the gulf would
never close unless the most precious thing in Rome was cast into it. See how it
yawns and cracks every moment more horribly. Hasten to bring this noblest thing!
For love of Rome sacrifice your best! But what, or who is this? Where is a treasure
meet for sacrifice? Then Curtius, a belted knight, mounted his charger, and rightly
judging that valour and love of country were the noblest treasures of Rome, he
leaped into the gulf. The yawning earth closed upon a great-hearted Roman, for her
hunger was appeased. Perchance it is but an idle tale: but what I have declared is
truth. There gaped between God and man a dread abyss, deep as hell, wide as
eternity, and only the best thing that heaven contained could fill it. That best thing
was He, the peerless Son of God, the matchless, perfect man, and He came, laying
aside His glory, making Himself of no reputation, and He sprang, into the gulf,
which there and then closed, once for all One great result of Christ s having died is
to leave us a way of access, which is freely opened to every poor, penitent sinner.
Come. Are you using that way of access? Do you use it every day! Having used it, and
thus having drawn near to God, do you dwell near to God! Do you abide in God? Is
God the main thought of your life, the chief delight and object of your being? (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

JEREMIAH 31

JER 31:1
At the same time, saith the Lord, will I be the God of all the families of Israel, and
they shall be My people.

Religion in the home

The family is a primal and universal institution, which stands alone distinct and
apart from all others. Men voluntarily create States or Churches, but God putteth
men in families. The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and
sister, are altogether different in origin and character from those of the ruler and the
ruled, whether in civil or religious society. They began when men was created. They
cannot and will not cease until the race ceases to exist. They are recognised,
therefore, and they are the only associations which are so recognised in the
announcement of those fundamental precepts of moral law, which we properly
separate from all the other rules given to the children of Israel through Moses, and
call the Ten Commandments. But it is not even in these solemn commands that the
sacred and impressive character of these relations is best gathered. It is rather their
frequent employment in one form or other to illustrate the relation which the Father
and our Lord Jesus Christ sustain to us, which invest them with peculiar sanctity
and suggestiveness. As we find the mothers self-oblivion and undying love to her
babe used to set forth the yet more enduring tenderness of God to us; so is the pity
with which the father regards even his sinful children made the type of that
inexhaustible compassion which pardons all human transgressions. As we hear our
blessed Lord addressing us as His brethren, and are taught that in order to make His
brotherhood complete He was tempted in all respects like as we are, or have the
ineffable love with which He regards His Church, and binds it to Himself in loving
fellowship represented by the union of the bridegroom and the bride, so is the family
the image of that glorious fellow-ship to which all true souls belong--the family in
heaven and earth called after the name of Christ.

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FAMILY RELATION. It is in the wise ordering of the

home, the purifying of the affections in which all its relations and influences have
their root, the upholding of the authority which ought ever to be maintained within
it, that States and Churches alike have the best security for their peace and
prosperity.
1. The feelings which are cultivated in well-regulated households and make men
good sons, husbands, and fathers, are those which, when exercised in a
different direction, make them good citizens and true patriots; whereas on
the other side the selfishness which brooks no restraint, listens to no voice
but that of its own passions, and seeks no end but their indulgence, is not
more hostile to the peace and purity of the home than it is fatal to the order
and progress of the nation. The most absolute collapse of a State which
modern times has seen was preceded by a weakening of family ties and
obligations, and the most extraordinary national development is that of a
people whose loyalty to their country is not less remarkable than their
devotion to their homes, and among whom, from the Emperor on the throne
to the meanest of his subjects, attention to domestic duties is placed among
the cardinal virtues, and the enjoyment of home happiness is esteemed one
of the choicest blessings.
2. While the home is the best training-ground for the citizen, even more, if
possible, ought it to be the best nursery for the Christian, and its teaching
and discipline the right preparation for the Church. At all periods and in all
countries where there has been any strong manifestation of the power of
godliness, the family has been one of its centres It is not suggested that
religious feelings can be transmitted. But it is manifest that the traditions,
the associations, the beliefs and practices, and the reputation of a family
may--where there is anything marked and distinctive--certainly will,
materially affect each of its members. The piety of Lois and Eunice could not
become the possession of Timothy, but who can doubt that he was affected
by it? It must have done much, to say the least, towards creating the
atmosphere by which his early life was surrounded, and so far have
influenced his subsequent career. To be born into a family, where the love of
God reigns is itself no small privilege. From the very dawn of intelligence one
thus situated is in the midst of circumstances all tending to produce in him
sentiments of reverence and devotion. He will not believe in Christ because
father and grandfather believed before him, and if he were, on this account
alone, to adopt a Christian creed and name, his faith would be as idle as the
words in which it might be professed. He does not, caroler become a man
eminent for goodness because the world or the Church looks to him thus to
uphold the honour of the family name, and if he sought to do so inspired by
no other motive, his life, with all the outward excellence he might discover,
would be nothing more than a hollow pretence, himself no better than the
whited sepulchres of the old Pharisaism. But with all this, who will undertake
to deny the power which even the family traditions Of goodness, and still
more the associations of the house set apart to God, must, in many cases,
exert? They are as a chain of forts, which defend the acid against the assaults
of sin. They are influences which predispose a man to listen to the truth, and
if they may be resisted, even if by some they are hardly felt at all, they must
surely place a man in a more favourable position than, if his first ideas of
religion were of a tyranny to be resisted, a fanaticism to be pitied, or an
hypocrisy to be despised, in every case a power which the soul should
steadily resist. They are voices speaking to the heart, and appealing to many
 of its strongest motives and best affections.

II. The way in which family piety is to be cultivated.

1. Its foundation manifestly is parental influence. The influence which a parent
exercises over his children may be composed of many elements, but the
predominant one in the majority of cases must ye personal goodness. I met
some time ago one, now himself the head of a household and the son of an
excellent father, whose praise, as I personally know, had long remained in
the church in which he was an office-bearer. As we were conversing of him,
the son addressing me with strong feeling, said, It was my fathers life which
saved me from being drawn away from the faith. I was, while yet a youth,
throw into the society of those who made a practice of sneering at religion as
a folly or a delusion, and at all its professors as hypocrites. I thought I knew
my father better, but they talked so confidently that I resolved to watch. For
two years I did watch with an anxious and ever-observant care, and in what I
saw of my fathers holy life I found an answer to the taunts and doubts of my
companions. It was a high testimony, and the truth of it was confirmed by
the consecration of a large family to the service of Christ. The thought it
suggests, indeed, may, in one aspect of it, be disquieting enough to parents.
If the eyes of their household are thus continually upon them, and if its
judgment on the Gospel be formed on the ground of what it sees in them,
what reason is there for anxiety, even for trembling, lest the impression
given be such as to prevent the truth from having its rightful power on the
hearts of their children and servants! Children, of all others, are quick to
detect a contrast, if such there be, between the outward deportment,
especially in the presence of Christian friends or on religious seasons, and
the predominant temper of the life; and the parent who thinks to atone for a
prevailing worldliness by occasional outbursts of religious emotion, may at
least be sure that his family will not be imposed on by these periodical fits of
devotion. But if they will not give credit for a high degree of piety because of
a few manifestations of spirituality which are out of accord with the general
tenor of life, neither will they be led by occasional imperfections, and even
inconsistencies, to ignore the evidence of spirit and character, supplied by
daily conduct.
2. It must be manifested, however, in the whole conduct of the family, and
perhaps in nothing more than in the ambitions which are cherished in
relation to it and the means adopted for their realisation. Professions of
supreme love to God, even though supported by many acts which are in
accordance with them, will tell for very little if there is abundant proof that
what a man desires, first and above all, for his children is not that they
should be true Christians, but that they should be rich, or fashionable, or
famous. Here is the secret of many failures, which at first seem almost
unintelligible. There are parents who, to outward appearance, and to the best
of their own belief, have trained their children in the nurture and admonition
of the Lord; but the teaching has not been successful, and those who are
disappointed in its results complain, or, at least, wonder, that the promise is
not fulfilled. They have given instruction in the doctrines of the Gospel; they
have led their children to the house of God; they have sought by precept and
entreaty to influence them on Gods behalf--but without success. What can
 be the cause? If they would look deeper and with less prejudiced eyes, it
would not be hard to find. Their children are what they have made them. I
have heard of some who have been more anxious about the manners and
deportment of their children or pupils; others more concerned about the
society into which they can get admittance; others more intent on their
outward prosperity than their religion. Ought they to be surprised if the
young learn the lesson and act accordingly?
3. I include under one point family influences, whether in the way of instruction,
or discipline, or worship. Two remarks only will I throw out.
(1) There should be a religion of the household; not only should the
individual members personally recognise and seek to meet the claims of
Christian duty, but there should be religious service rendered by the
family as a whole. There should be the family gathering for daily worship,
and the household, as a body, should present itself before God in His
house.
(2) There comes a time when the authority of the parent can be enforced
only by moral suasion, but in those earlier and more tender years, when
children are not simply to be advised, but ruled, the wise head of a
household will feel that he is but exercising the right which God Himself
has given, or rather, let us say, discharging the trust which God has
committed to him as a steward, when he gathers his children around
him, whether at the family altar or in the family pew. But this raises the
question of that parental rule which it was never more necessary to
maintain than at the present time. If the Son of God Himself learned
obedience by the things which He suffered. He has, by that submission,
taught a great lesson, which neither parents nor children should forget.
(J. G. Rogers, D. D.)

JER 31:3
I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I
drawn thee.

Everlasting love

I. OUR ONCE DESOLATE AND MISERABLE CONDITION BY NATURE. Were we not

captives? yea, bond-slaves? All our happiness consisted in forgetting ourselves.
Everything marked us as, in the worst sense, slaves. Some of us professed to despise
the opinions of men, and yet, what were we but the slaves of men? What did we
pursue? Nothing but the applause of men. What were we afraid of? Nothing but
their censure. How afraid of singularity, when we first perhaps had some thoughts
concerning our souls. What was this but slavery? Look at the lives we led. We lived
but for ourselves. Self was our Nebuchadnezzar, who took possession of the city, our
walls, and got all for himself. Self, perhaps, in some decent, moral form, but still
self; the fleshy, unregenerate, corrupt, carnal self. Was not this the greatest slavery?
And who was the master, the grinding tyrant of this slave? To whom had we sold
ourselves for nought? Who was it that led us captive at his will? (2Ti 2:25-26.)
 II. THE LOVE WHICH GOD HAS TOWARDS HIS TRUE ISRAEL. And what is its peculiar
character? It is Sovereign and Distinguishing.
1. It is a Love bounded by His Will. His most wise, righteous, and holy Will, (Ex
33:19).
2. It is personal and individual. I have loved thee. Thee, a poor sinner, a
prodigal; thee, a poor, unprofitable servant thee, a poor backslider in heart
too oft; thee, too much, too frequently ungrateful;--yet have I loved thee--
yes, thee, notwithstanding all; thee, singly and alone, as if there were no
other; thee, as one of the innumerable family, the many sons whom I will
bring to glory.
3. It is effectual and overcoming. With lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Ah,
how gently, how tenderly, how silently, sometimes mysteriously, but ever in
love.
4. This love is everlasting. Time never knew its beginning, eternity shall never
know its end. Closing remarks:--
1. All religion consists in individuality. Religion is a personal thing.
(1) It is so in our confessions (2Sa 12:13).
(2) It is so in our standing before God (Luk 18:13).
(3) So is it in the consolations of the Spirit (Gal 2:20).
2. All the blessings of present salvation spring from God s everlasting love. (J. H.
Evans, M. A.)

Secret drawings graciously explained

I. GODS DEALINGS WITH US ARE NEVER UNDERSTOOD TILL HE HIMSELF APPEARS TO

US. He must speak, or we cannot interpret His acts. Though all things in the field
and the garden show what the sun doeth, yet none of these fruits put forth by the
sun can be perceived till the sun himself reveals them. For first, man is not in a
condition to perceive God till God reveals Himself to him. By nature we are blind
Godward; yea, deaf, and in all ways insensible towards the great Spirit. The Lord
said of Cyrus, I girded thee, though thou hast not known Me; and even so may He
say of many an unconverted man, I warned thee, and aroused thee, and drew thee
when thou wast not aware of Me. Besides this, we are so selfish that, when God is
drawing us to Himself, we are too much absorbed in our own things to notice the
hand which is at work upon us. We crave the world, we sigh for human approbation,
we seek for case and comfort, we desire above all things to indulge our pride with
the vain notion of self-righteousness. And, therefore, we look not after God.
Moreover, God must explain His dealings to us by revealing Himself to us, because
those ways are in themselves frequently mysterious. He does not usually begin by
giving the man light, and peace, and comfort. No, but he sorely plagues him with
darkness that might be felt. He makes sweet sin to become bitter; He pours gall
into the fountains of his carnal life till the man begins to be weary of the things
which once contented him. Full often the Lord fitteth the arrows of conviction to the
string, and shooteth again, and again, and again, till the soul is wounded in a
thousand places, and is ready to bleed to death. The Lord kills before He makes
alive. But I say again, how could we expect unspiritual men to see the hand of the
Lord in all this? God must reveal Himself to the man, or else he will not discover the
hand of the Lord in the anguish of his spirit. This appearance of the Lord must be
personal. The Lord hath appeared of old unto me. True knowledge of God is
always a Divine operation, not wrought at second-hand by instrumentality, but
wrought by the right hand of the Lord Himself. No man can come to Me, saith
Christ, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him; and no man understands
those drawings except the same Father shall come unto him, and manifest Himself
to him. Till we know the Lord by personal revelation, we cannot read His
handwriting upon our hearts, or discern His dealings with us. This appearance
needs to be repeated. The text may be read as a complaint on the part of Israel.
Israel says, The Lord hath appeared of old unto me--as much as to say, He has
not appeared to me lately. Of old He was seen by brook, and bush, and sea, and
rock; when Jacob met Him at Jaddok, and Moses in the wilderness at the burning
bush; but now His visits are few and far between. The Lord hath appeared of old
unto me. Oh, that He would appear now! I pray at this time that those of you who
are mourning after that fashion may be able to rise out of it. It is not the Lords
desire that He should be as a stranger in the land, or as a wayfaring man that
tarrieth but for a night. He is willing to abide with us. His delights are with the sons
of men. This appearance is ever an act of mighty grace. The text might be read, The
Lord appeared from afar to me. So He did at the first. What a great way off we were
from God, but behold the Beloved came, like a roe or a young hart, leaping over the
mountains, skipping upon the hills! He came to us in boundless love when we lay at
deaths dark door, the fast-bound slaves of hell. He can and will come again. If He
came to us from far, He will surely come again now that He has made us nigh.
Expect Him to come to you on a sudden. Pray for the immediate revelation of God
Himself to your spirit in a way of joy and transport that shall set your soul in rapid
motion towards the Lord. Should the Lord return to you in gracious manifestation,
take care that you do hot, lose Him again. If the Bridegroom deigns to visit you, hold
Him fast.

II. When the Lord does so appear, WE THEN PERCEIVE THAT HE HAS BEEN DEALING
WITH US. The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee
with an everlasting love: therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee. What
exceeding love the Lord showed to us before we knew Him! Let us now look back
and remember the love of long-suffering, which spared us when we delighted in sin.
The Lord did not cut us off in our unbelief; therein is love. The next admirable
discovery is the Lords restraining grace. We now see that the Lord held us back
from plunging into the deepest abysses of sin. Blessed be God for those crooks in my
lot which kept me from poisonous pleasures! So, too, we now see the preparations of
grace, the ploughing of our hearts by sorrow, the sowing of them by discipline, the
harrowing of them by pain, the watering of them by the rain of favour, the breaking
of them up by the frosts of adversity. These were not actually grace, but they opened
the door for grace. We now see how in a thousand ways the Lord was drawing us
when we knew Him not. The text chiefly dwells upon drawings. I beg you to refresh
your memories by recollecting the drawings of the Lord towards you while you were
yet ungodly. Often these were very gentle drawings: they were not such forces as
would move an ox or an ass, but such as were meant for tender spirits; yet
sometimes they tugged at you very hard, and almost overcame you. Drawing
supposes a kind of resistance; or, at any rate, an inertness; and, truly, we did not stir
of ourselves, but needed to be persuaded and entreated. Some of you will recollect
how the Holy Spirit drew you many times before you came to Him. The Lord
surrounded you as a fish is surrounded with a net; and though you laboured to
escape you could not, but were drawn more and more within the meshes of mercy.
Do you remember when at last the Holy Spirit drew you over the line; when at last,
without violating your free will, He conquered it by forces proper to the mind?
Blessed day! You were made a willing captive to your Lord, led in silken fetters at
His chariot-wheels, a glad prisoner to almighty love, set free from sin and Satan,
made to be unto your Lord a lifelong servant.

III. WE PERCEIVE THAT LOVING-KINDNESS WAS THE DRAWING FORCE. Therefore

with loving-kindness have I drawn thee. At first we think God has dealt sternly with
us, but in His light we see light, and we perceive that the drawing power, which has
brought us to receive mercy, is the Divine loving-kindness. Love is the attractive
force. What multitudes of persons have been drawn to the Lord first by His loving-
kindness in the gift of His dear Son! The loving-kindness of God as seen in the
sacrifice of the Lord Jesus draws men from sin, from self, from Satan, from despair,
and from the world. Next, the hope of pardon, free and full, attracts sinners to God.
Thy sins, which are many, are all forgiven thee, makes a man run after Christ. I
have known others drawn to the Lord by another view of His loving-kindness,
namely, His willingness to make new creatures of us. The prayer of many has been,
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and they have been charmed by hearing that
whosoever believes in Jesus is born again, to start on a new life, ruled by a new
principle, and endowed with a new nature, sustained by the Holy Spirit. Oh, the
loving-kindness of the Lord! You may measure heaven; you may fathom the sea; you
may plunge into the abyss, and tell its depth; but the loving-kindness of the Lord is
beyond you. Here is an infinite expanse. It is immeasurable, even as God Himself is
beyond conception. It is everywhere about us, behind, before, beneath, above,
within, without. Every day the Lord loads us with benefits.

IV. THEN WE LEARN THAT THE GREAT MOTIVE OF THE DIVINE DRAWINGS IS
EVERLASTING LOVE. Lot your spirit lie and soak in this Divine assurance: I have
loved thee with an everlasting love. Take it up into yourself as Gideons fleece
absorbed the dew. Notice, the Lord has done it. It is an actual fact, the Lord is loving
you. Put those two pronouns together, I and thee. I, the Infinite, the
inconceivably glorious--thee, a poor, lost, undeserving, ill-deserving, hell-
deserving sinner. See the link between the two! See the diamond rivet which joins
the two together for eternity: I have loved thee. See the antiquity of this love: I
have loved thee with an everlasting love. I loved thee when I died for thee upon the
Cross, yea, I loved thee long before, and therefore did I die. I loved thee when I
made the heavens and the earth, with a view to thine abode therein: yea, I loved thee
before I had made sea or shore. There is a beginning for the world, but there is no
beginning for the love of God to His people. Nor does that exhaust the meaning of
everlasting love. There has never been a moment when the Lord has not loved His
people. There has been no pause, nor ebb, nor break in the love of God to His own.
That love knows no variableness, neither shadow of turning. I have loved thee with
an everlasting love. You may take a leap into the future, and find that love still with
you. Everlasting evidently lasts for ever. We shall come to die, and this shall be a
downy pillow for our death-bed, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. When
we wake up in that dread world to which we arc surely hastening, we shall find
infinite felicity in everlasting love. When the judgment is proclaimed, and the sight
of the great white throne makes all hearts to tremble, and the trumpet sounds
exceeding loud and long, and our poor dust wakes up from its silent grave, we shall
rejoice in this Divine assurance: I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Roll on,
ye ages, but everlasting love abides! Die out, sun and moon, and thou, O time, be
buried in eternity, we need no other heaven than this, I have loved thee with an
everlasting love! (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Three wonders

I. A great wonder.
1. The object mentioned. Thee. Most unworthy.
2. The attribute displayed. Love. What is it?
3. The person speaking. I, whom ye have--
(1) Doubted.
(2) Despised.
(3) Disregarded.

II. A GREATER WONDER. With an everlasting love. Wonderful to love us at all.

More wonderful to love us with such a love. This love is everlasting in its--
1. Counsels.
2. Conquests.
3. Continuance.
4. Consequence.

III. THE GREATEST WONDER. Therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee
To send food to the hungry, is gracious in the wealthy; but to bring the hungry in the
kindest manner to the royal table--this is wonderful indeed. We shall see here--
1. A wonderful display. I have drawn thee. Here is inferred our helplessness
and unwillingness to come. God draws by many means.
2. A wonderful instrument. Loving-kindness. The heavenly magnet. Kindness
does not always go with love. God saves us. Here is kindness. But He does so
in the best possible way. In the tenderest, most gentle manner.
3. A wonderful reason. Therefore. Gods reason is in Himself. Our salvation
the fruit of everlasting love, and nothing else. Should we not love Him? (W.
J. Mayers.)

Divine philanthropy before all time

I. UNCREATED MEN ARE THE OBJECTS OF DIVINE LOVE. Men in actual existence are
not everlasting; they are only creatures of a day, mere shadows passing upon the
earth. But in the mind of the Infinite they are eternal.
1. Because He loved them He created them.
2. Because He loved them He created them what they are. He made them
 capable of enjoying every kind of happiness of which we have any
conception.

II. Created men are the subjects of Divine love.

1. Gods love in nature has a power to draw men to Him. His love in nature
appears in two forms.
(1) In the form of utility. Nature ministers to mans necessities and
gratifications.
(2) In the form of beauty. What is beauty, but the costume of love, the
pictures and statues of love, nay the voice, the winning music of love?
2. God s love in mediation has a power to draw men to Him. The incarnation of
Christ is at once the effect, the channel, and the instrument of Divine love,
and the Divine love that draws with a moral magnetism of the highest
measure. (Homilist.)

Constraining love

I. THE LOVE OF GOD TOWARDS US. From everlasting to everlasting is the love, like
the existence, of the living God. Simple, childlike faith in this grand truth is an
essential element in all personal religion (1Jn 4:16). The life of the newborn soul
may be said to begin with the uprising of this knowledge, this faith.

II. The practical expression of Gods love.

1. An external revelation (Joh 3:16; 1Jn 4:9). Open your heart to the influence of
the Cross of Calvary, comprehend in some measure the sacred sorrow of Him
who there took the burden of our sins upon Him that He might bear them all
away, and you can never doubt the everlasting love wherewith the Father
loves you.
2. An internal force. Even in his Divine relations man is not a being to be
compelled by resistless force to move in any path chosen for him, but one
who is endowed with the wondrous power of yielding in response to
persuasive influence a free and willing service (Hos 11:4). That is the noblest
kind of persuasive influence which appeals not so much to our fears as our
desires, which awakens not terror but love. (Homiletic Magazine.)

Gods love for man

I. His love for man is PERSONAL. I have loved thee.

1. The distinguishing constitution He has given him. He has endowed him with
more faculties of enjoyment than any other creature in the universe
possesses. He has given him intellect, by which be can enjoy the pleasures of
meditation; social affection, by which he can enjoy the blessings of
friendship; religious affinities, by which he can have sympathy with the
source of all life and blessedness.
2. His wonderful mercy in the mediation of His Son.
 II. His love for man is ETERNAL.
1. Humanity had nothing to do with exciting it.
2. Christ had nothing to do with procuring it. Christs mediation was the effect,
not the cause of Gods love for man. His mediation was no afterthought. The
Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world.

III. His love for man is ATTRACTING.

1. How attracting it is in its nature! Kindness is always attractive; and its
attracting power is always in proportion to its spontaneity, disinterestedness,
and magnanimity.
2. How attracting it is in its manifestation! Look at it--
(1) In nature. The world overflows with Divine kindness.
(2) In revelation. (Homilist.)

Everlasting love revealed

This startling remembrance came to Israel at a time when her sorrows were very
great, and her sins were greater still. She dwelt with hope upon that Divine
assurance of irrevocable favour: I have loved thee with an everlasting love. When
earthly joys ebb out, it is a blessed thing if they make room for memories of heavenly
visitations and gracious assurances. When you are at your lowest, it may happen
that then the God of all grace comes in, and brings to your remembrance the love of
your espousals, and the joy of former days, when the candle of the Lord shone round
about you. At the same time, it was not merely a time of inward sorrow, but a period
of refreshing from the presence of the Lord; for Jehovah was speaking in tones of
sovereign grace, and pouring forth great rivers of promises, and seas of mercy.
Sometimes you pour water down a dry pump, and that sets it working so that it
pours forth streams of its own; and so, when our gracious God pours in His love into
the soul, our own love begins to flow, and with it memory awakes, and a thousand
recollections cause us to bring to mind the ancient love wherein we aforetime
delighted, and we cry, The Lord hath appeared of old unto me.

I. THE MARVELLOUS APPEARING. The Lord hath appeared of old unto me. Here
are two persons; hut how different in degree I Hers we have me, a good-for-
nothing creature, apt to forget my Lord, and to lira as if there were no God; yet He
has not ignored or neglected me. There is the High and Holy One, whom the heaven
of heavens cannot contain, and He has appeared unto me. Between me and the great
Jehovah there have been communications; the solitary silences have been broken.
The Lord hath appeared, hath appeared unto me. Do I hear some asking, How is
this? I understand that God appeared to Israel, but how to me? Let me picture the
discovery of grace as it comes to the awakening mind, when it learns to sit at the feet
of Jesus, saved by faith in the great sacrifice. Touched by the Spirit of God, we find
that the Lord appeared to each one of us in the promises of His Word. Every
promise in Gods Word is a promise to every believer, or to every character such as
that to which it was first given. Furthermore, The Lord hath appeared of old unto
me, in the person of His Son. God came to each believer in Christ Jesus. Say, Yes,
eighteen hundred years ago and more, the Lord in the person of His dear Son
appeared unto me in Gethsemane, and on Calvary as my Lord, and my God, and yet
my substitute and Saviour. Since that, the Lord has constantly appeared unto us in
the power of His Holy Spirit. Do you remember when first your sin was set in order
before your tearful eyes, and you trembled for fear of the justice which you had
provoked? Do you remember when you heard the story of the Crucified Redeemer?
when you saw the atoning sacrifice? when you looked to Jesus and were lightened?
It was the Holy Spirit who was leading you out of yourself; and God by the Holy
Spirit was appearing unto you. Now, we hold this appearance in precious memory:
The Lord hath appeared of old unto me. Many things are preserved in the
treasure-house of memory; but this is the choicest of our jewels. How gracious, how
glorious was the appearance of God in Christ Jesus to our soul! This appearance
came in private assurance. To me it was as personal as it was sure. I used to hear the
preacher, but then I heard my God; I used to see the congregation, but then I saw
Him who is invisible. I used to feel the power of words, but now I have felt the
immeasurable energy of their substance. God Himself filled and thrilled my soul. I
cannot help calling your attention to the fact, that the Lord came in positive
certainty. The text does not say, I hoped so, or I thought so; but, The Lord hath
appeared of old unto me, saying. To me it is bliss to say, I know whom I have
believed. My soul cannot content herself with less than certainty. I desire never to
take a step upon an if, or a peradventure. I want facts, not fancies.

II. THE MATCHLESS DECLARATION. The Lord hath appeared of old unto me,
saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.
1. Here is a word from God of amazing love. Jehovah saith, I have loved thee.
Think it over. Believe it. Stagger not at it. If the husband should say to his
wife, I have loved thee, she would believe him: it would seem only natural
that he should do so. And when Jehovah says to you, a feeble woman, an
unknown man, I have loved thee, He means it.
2. Note, next, it is a declaration of unalloyed love. The Lord had been bruising,
and wounding, and crushing His people, and yet He says, I have loved thee.
These cruel wounds were all in love.
3. This statement is a declaration of love in contrast with certain other things.
What a difference between the false friend-ship of the world and sin, and the
changeless love of God! You have provoked Him to jealousy by gods which
were no gods, but He has never ceased His love. What a miracle of grace is
this! How sweetly does immutability smile on us as we hear it say, Yea, I
have loved thee with an everlasting love!
4. Thus, our text is a word of love in the past. I have loved thee. We were
rebels, and He loved us. We were dead in trespasses and in sins, and He
loved us. We rejected His grace, and defied His warnings, but He loved us.
The matchless declaration of the text is a voice of love in the present. The
Lord loves the believer now. Whatever discomfort you are in, the Lord loves
you. The text is a voice of love in the future. It means, I will love thee for
ever. God has not loved us with a love which will die out after a certain
length of time: His love is like Himself, from everlasting to everlasting.
This is a declaration of love secured to us--secured in many ways. Did you
observe in this chapter how the Lord secures His love to His people, first, by
a covenant? Further, this love is secured by relationship. Will you dart your
eye on to the ninth verse, and read the last part of it? I am a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is My firstborn. A man cannot get rid of fatherhood by any
 possible means His love is pledged again by redemption. Read the eleventh
verse, For the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand
of him that was stronger than he. Would you see the indenture of Gods
covenant love? Behold it in the indented hands and feet of the Crucified
Redeemer. This is a declaration of love Divinely confessed. The Lord has not
sent this assurance to us by a prophet, but He has made it Himself--The
Lord hath appeared. Notice, that it is love sealed with a yea. God would
have us go no further in our ordinary speech than to say ,yea, yea; and
surely we may be content with so much from Himself. His yea amounts to
a sacred asseveration: Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.

III. THE MANIFEST EVIDENCE. I have loved thee with an everlasting love;
therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee. Here are drawings mentioned.
Have you not felt them? These were drawings resulting from love. He drew us
because He loved us with an everlasting love. Other drawings of Divine goodness are
resisted, resisted in some cases to the bitter end, and men justly perish; but the
drawings of everlasting love effect their purpose. Here are drawings mentioned:
these were drawings from God. How sweetly, how omnipotently, God can draw! We
yield to the drawings because they come from the Lord s own hand, and their power
lies in His love. As the drawings come from God, so are they drawings to God.
Blessed is he whose heart is being drawn nearer and nearer to the Most High. The
Lord assures us that these are drawings of His loving-kindness. However He draws,
it is in love; and whenever He draws, it is in love. These drawings are to be
continuous. With loving-kindness have I drawn thee; and He means to do the
same evermore. Such a magnificent text as ours ought to make us consider two
things. The first is, Is it so? Am I drawn? If God loves you with an everlasting love,
He has drawn you by His loving-kindness: is it so or not? Has He drawn you by His
Holy Spirit, so that you have followed on? Are you a believer? Do you carry Christs
cross? You have been drawn to this. Then take home these gracious words: I have
loved thee with an everlasting love. If you have not been so drawn, do you not wish
you were? But, child of God, if you know these drawings, and if it be true that God
loves you with an everlasting love, then are you resting? I have a feeble hope, says
one. What? How can you talk so? He who is loved with an everlasting love, and
knows it, should swim in an ocean of joy. Not a wave of trouble should disturb the
glassy sea of his delight. What is to make a man happy if this will not? (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

The Christian drawn unto God

I. I HAVE LOVED THEE. The love of God differs from ours, and this in two
respects
1. It is more abundant. Our love partakes of this narrowness of our nature--it
can embrace but a few objects and it cannot travel far. But God is an infinite
Being. He fills all space with His presence; there is no limit to His
capabilities. His love is accordingly an infinite love. Our love is a taper,
shining on a few objects only and on those dimly; the love of God is a sun,
throwing its light wide as it is His good pleasure to throw it, pervading His
universe, brightening and warming and gladdening millions on millions of
objects as easily and effectually as one.
 2. It is also a free, self-moving love. It rises spontaneously in His mind, as water
rises in a fountain. It requires nothing in any object, no merit or amiableness
or beauty or anything else, to call it forth.

II. I HAVE LOVED THEE WITH AN EVERLASTING LOVE. There never was a period
when God did not live and did not love you. He loved you before your father or
mother or any one else loved you; He loved you before you were born; He loved you
before the earth or the heavens were created; He loved you in the very first moment
He loved at all. Would you tell how old His love to you is? You must first tell how old
the Ancient of days Himself is. Would you measure His love to you? It must be with
a line which can stretch to the beginning of eternity on the one hand, and reach to
the end of it on the other.

III. I HAVE DRAWN THEE, the Lord says; and this is very naturally and beautifully
said here. Real love, we know, is always of a drawing nature. Its tendency ever is to
bring near to us, or to lead us near to the object we love. Give me my infant, the
tender mother says. Let me if possible have my children around me, says the
affectionate father. So the Lord says here, I have loved you, and therefore, because I
have loved you, I have drawn you, drawn you to Myself. When the soul at last turns
to Christ and through Christ to God, it is because God in some way is working on
that soul, and attracting and drawing it.

IV. The Lord tells us in the text HOW HE DRAWS HIS PEOPLE TO HIM. With loving-
kindness have I drawn thee. My love to thee is so strong, that it not only impels Me
to draw thee to Me, but it influences Me in all My conduct while drawing thee. We
may assign a twofold meaning to the words, regarding them as descriptive both of
the means which the Lord employs to bring His people to Him, and of the manner in
which He deals with them while bringing them. He will draw them by His loving-
kindness, and He will draw them by that lovingly, most kindly and tenderly. (C.
Bradley, M. A.)

New revelations of old truths

I. A REVELATION HAS BEEN MADE TO US OF DIVINE TRUTH. In a strange land, when

the shadows of evening come on, the traveller has sometimes the consciousness that
he is passing through the fairest scenes, he instinctively feels that the darkness is
hiding from him the most wonderful revelations of nature. So we sometimes feel
that we are in the presence of great truths, that have yet to be revealed to us. We
feel, long before we understand. Our hearts burn within us, when we listen to words,
the full meaning of which we do not comprehend. How strange it is, that when we
have listened to the words of truth, we sometimes feel as if visions we had dimly
seen were realised, or our confused thoughts were put into shape, and expressed in
words, as if this was what we had heard before, or were on the point of thinking out
for ourselves. Truth seems like the language of childhood, as if we were familiar with
its tones, and had lived a former life, where we had heard its voice before. The heart
recognises it as Divine.

II. WE HAVE NEW REVELATIONS OF AN OLD TRUTH. With every Divine appearance
came a revelation. He who appeared of old to the Church breathing words of love,
hath in these last days spoken unto us. That last appearance was the most perfect
expression of love, that last revelation left nothing unsaid that even Divine love
could say. How much has love said in this world--how much it says to you this day.
You have not found out yet the depth, the full significance of its revelations. You
know something, you may know far more. The more you love, the more you will be
capacitated for manifestations of love. We need new, constant assurances of the
Divine love. We cannot live in the past alone. Do you ask why are new revelations
necessary? Why is it not enough to be told once that God loves us? Why must we be
told again and again? I answer, we should require assurances of love from a friend if
we felt that our affinities with his pure nature were anything but entire, that we
often pained him by our recklessness, and prevented his intercourse with us by our
indifference; and surely, with all my frailties and sins, with the deep consciousness
of my unworthiness, I need God to tell me that He loves me, and I want Him to
repeat the assurance. There is, moreover, a peculiar sensitiveness about love; it
craves for fresh utterances, for strong, unequivocal assertions, just as Jonathan
caused David to swear again, because he loved him as his own soul; so the love of
God is so essential to us that we cannot live without it, we prize it above all things,
and hence we long to hear, in the depths of our souls, the words, Yea, I have loved
thee with an everlasting love.

III. THE LOVE OF GOD IS EVER NEW. It is an everlasting love. God loved you long
before you realised His love. You have, perhaps, sometimes thought that He loved
you because you loved Him; it is quite the reverse; you love Him because He first
loved you. God will still love through all changes--in sorrow, in sickness, in old age,
in death. God will love us for ever. His loves is always fresh; it is the same to-day as
yesterday, and to-morrow it will be as to-day.

IV. IT IS GODS LOVE THAT ATTRACTS MEN. This love draws. Men yield to this
Divine power. This is the power of the Gospel; this subdued, this won you. What
melted that heart of ice,--what, but the warm breath of love? What drew you, but the
cords of love that were entwined about your heart! (H. J. Bevis.)

Love everlasting
What is love? Is it not delight in an object, and is it not desire to promote the well-
being of an object? The love of God answers to these definitions. Some resolve love
into self-love. We delight in what we love, therefore, say some, we love for the
delight. But this is a serious error which may be refuted by a thousand facts. Just
think of the facts by which you may refute this error. And let me here make two
remarks concerning love generally,--First, its existence is universal, except as sin
reigns and checks it; and, secondly, its work and its service are multiform and
extensive. Men love, angels love, and God is love, We feel, and observe, and mark its
existence on earth; we hear of it in heaven; and we know that there is but one place
tenanted by beings capable of love who do not love, and that place is hell; and we
also know that there is but one class of human beings from which it has departed,
namely, souls that are lost. Love! It gushes forth from the throne of God, flows
round the universe, and rises again to the level of its source. Like an inverted tree, it
roots in heaven, and yet drops its fruit upon this wide world, and upon beings in the
lowest terrestrial estate. Nor is love, to drop our figure, inactive or useless among
the children of men even in their low estate. It unites, as in conjugal life, two
streams of being and makes them one,--it causes the mother to forget her anguish
and to make her bosom the refuge and the strength of helpless infancy--it makes
parents ministering angels, and children bright morning stars in the household
firmament--it creates all that is meant by home--it impoverishes itself to enrich
others, and exposes itself to danger to protect and otherwise to serve others--it feeds
the hungry; clothes the naked; shelters the homeless; takes charge of the orphan;
attends at the sick-bed in the face of contagion; visits the captive in prison; weeps at
the grave; builds hospitals; erects almshouses, asylums, and places of worship--it
instructs, warns, entreats, reproves, consoles, and in ton thousand forms ministers
to the creature while it worships the Creator--it renders benefits to the sinner and
serves the Saviour; it intercedes on earth and it offers praise in heaven; it weeps
here, it rejoices in the world above. Thus love, sanctified and directed by the Saviour
of man and by the Spirit of all grace, makes God dwell in the man, and it causes the
man to dwell in God. Such, speaking generally, is love. And love is everlasting. It is
eternal--it ever will be, as it always hath been. As a principle it is eternal. It will
never die. It will never die from the human heart. In all redeemed human spirits
love will live an eternal life. Some emotions will pass away as the clouds; others will
abide as the blue firmament itself; and among these love in redeemed humanity will
have the pre-eminence. Now, connect these ideas of love with the everlasting love of
God. Jehovah here says, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. Only the love of
God is from everlasting. The love of unfallen angels and of redeemed men hath
immortality--it is to everlasting, but not from everlasting. Gods love alone hath
eternity--eternity embracing past, present, and future. There are four things which
we would notice here concerning the everlasting love of God.
1. It is not derived, or imparted, or excited by us in the sense of being awakened
by us. We are the occasion in part of its being aroused and expressed, but it
is not a derived or imparted love. Ours is a love that is as a spark from the
great fire that burns in Gods heart, fire of love that is underfeed, self-
existent, independent.
2. It is perfect, it is impossible to add anything to it, nor could anything be taken
from it without rendering it imperfect, it is as complete as love can be found.
3. Instead of being divorced from the other attributes and affections of God, it is
allied with them all--love and self-existence, love and independence, love
and omnipotence, love and boundless wisdom, love and unspotted purity,
love and undeviating righteousness.
4. In all respects is the love of God, Godlike--equal with God. Verily, that man is
loved whom God loves. What though no creature may care for him, if God
loves him he is loved for ever, and infinitely loved; he is loved with all the
strength of the Divine affection; on the other hand, he knows not what it is to
be loved in perfection, who does not know and believe the love of God for us.
Just look further, at the love of God when embracing sinful men, and notice three
things about it.
1. It is personal in its objects. He loves you individually; and His loving a large
number is by His loving each one in that number.
2. Although embracing sinners, the love of God is discriminating, and pure, and
righteous love. It delights where it can delight, and seeks the good of its
object in every form, and in the highest degree.
 3. The love of God follows those whom it embraces. It was prolonged to the seed
of Abraham beyond numerous apostasies and spiritual adulteries; it is
prolonged to us beyond seasons of declension and of backsliding. The love of
God goes after us. It follows us into every new relationship, into every new
duty, into every new trial, into every new temptation, into fresh provocation,
and claims upon Gods forbearance; it follows us through life into death, and
through death into immortality. (S. Martin.)

Divine love

I. DIVINE LOVE IS A FACT; there can be no doubt of the teaching of Scripture on this
subject. The God of the Bible is a God of love, He is a Father in heaven, He cares for
men, watches over them, guides them, saves them. What more beautiful symbols of
Divine love and watchfulness can there be than that of the Good Shepherd in search
of those who have wandered away from Him--of the lost sheep; and when He finds
the lost one He lays it on His shoulder rejoicing. This attitude of Divine love is the
very core of the Gospel; and it is surely a blessed truth for us, although it is
sometimes hard for us to realise it.
1. It may seem strange, yet it is true, that there are hearts who can more readily
feel that God is angry with them than that God really loves them. The instinct
of conscious guilt is fear, and when the sense of sin is strongly awakened, we
are apt to turn away from God and to feel as if God must hate us.
2. We feel, as it were, in other moments that the human heart is strangely
inconsistent. We feel as if the powers of nature were strong in us, and the
sense of sin dies down; we feel as if God would overlook our sins, and that we
are not so sinful after all; we feel as if we might trust to His goodness, as if it
were, so to speak, good nature. But this is equally inconsistent with true
spiritual experience. To all that is evil in human life and human history,
whether in Gentile or in Jew, God is a consuming fire.

II. GOD LOVES US EVERLASTINGLY. The fact of Divine love is not only sure in itself,
it is never uncertain in incidence. Whatever appearances there may seem to the
contrary, it is still there. No cloud can extinguish it, however it may obscure it; no
misery, born of the depths of human despair, no tragedy of human agony or of
human crime, can make that love doubtful; it is still there, it is around us, it is with
us; its everlasting arms are holding us even when we cannot feel it, and grasping us
in its soft embrace although our feet may be bleeding and sore with the hardness of
the road along which we travel. All sorrow is a gift, and every trouble that the heart
of man has, an opportunity. You may not know this now, you may never know it,
and yet it is true. Gods love knows no relenting. My will for you is a will of good
without variableness or shadow of turning. Yea, I have loved thee with an
everlasting love. Just a few words only as to the last point--I have loved thee;
therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee.

III. THE LOVE OF GOD IS INDIVIDUAL; it is personal; it is the love of one loving
heart to another; it is no mere impersonal conception of supreme benevolence; it is
the love of a father to a child, the love of a mother to a daughter; it would not be love
otherwise, for it is a distinguishing idea of love that it discriminates its object. How
personal always was the ministry of our Lord! Come unto Me. Take up My cross.
Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me? (Principal Tulloch.)

The love of God

I. A DECLARATION OF GODS LOVE. God is love; that is His nature--love in the

abstract; not simply loving, kind, tender, benevolent, good, but love. This love
displays itself in Christ. The fatherhood of God is nowhere seen in its royalty, but it
is in its exhibition in Jesus Christ. This love He declares has this peculiarity--that it
is everlasting.
1. It had no birthday. Go back through a past eternity, still you find no date for
its commencement. Find out a day when the Lord Jesus was not loved by the
Father, and you have the day when the Church was not loved by Him; you
will arrive at the time when His love first began to the Church, for He says,
Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved me, and Thou lovedst Me before
the foundation of the world. It foresaw all the rebellion, backslidings,
frailties, sins, infirmities--everything that would characterise the individual
upon whom that love rested; and yet the Lord loved you, because He would
love you; and that is the only reason that love itself can assign, because He
would keep the covenant which He made with His own Son for you.
2. As it had no birthday, so it has no changing day. Like its Author, it is
immutable, unvarying. There is nothing that can occur in reference to the
objects on whom God s love is fixed that He did not foresee, and there is no
change that can occur in the Divine mind as to any improvement in His plan
and order of government, or manifestation of mercy to man.
(1) This love bestowed upon you the greatest blessings before conversion.
Strange to say, and yet it is a great and solemn truth, that while you were
an enemy it gave you Christ-gave you the Spirit to regenerate you. Love,
ere you were born, was manifested towards you--made the covenant,
formed the plan of mercy by which you might be saved.
(2) This love changes its dispensations, not its nature. Who questions a
fathers love when he corrects a rebellious son? Who doubts the teachers
love when he compels his pupil to apply his mind to the subject of
instruction? So God acts. If it be necessary to make you diligent in His
service, to overcome temptation, to draw you away from the world and its
vanities and its corruptions, He may deprive you of property, He may
remove an idol, He may stain your pride, He may bereave you of one who
is as your own soul, He may prostrate your honour in the dust, He may
suffer your own family to rise against you; and the very spring of all this
is love.
3. It has no dying day. Love is a golden chain, one end of which is fixed to God s
throne in eternity past, and the other end to His throne in eternity to come.
This love of God is a bond not to be dissolved, a union never to be broken, a
depth which cannot be fathomed, a height which can never be scaled, a
length which can never be traversed, a breadth which cannot be measured, a
science that passeth all knowledge, a fire which many waters cannot quench,
a flame which the floods cannot drown, a sovereign stronger than death, a
constrainer which cannot be overcome, a breastplate which cannot be
 pierced, a safeguard which casts out all fear, an inhabitant that can never be
removed, a preventive to every evil, a catholicon for all woe. For I am
persuaded, that neither death, nor life, &c.

II. THE MANNER IN WHICH THIS LOVE IS DISPLAYED, or the evidences by which we
may ascertain that we possess it.
1. See how with loving-kindness He has drawn you in the paths of providential
arrangement! Begin with the earliest dawn of memory: why were you drawn
to such a school? Why did you form such friendships? Did not that love draw
you to a situation, a locality as foreign co your thoughts as can well be, give
you prosperity, make you influential, happy and blessed, and a blessing to
others? What a constraint, often inexplicable, has it put upon your
inclinations to accomplish an object which, had it been granted, you
afterwards saw would have been your ruin! But the cord stayed you, the love
was thrown around you to keep you back. Afflictions, too, have been some of
the most beneficial cords of love that have visited you--cords which confined
your aspirations and checked your vanity, taught you to pray, taught you to
sympathise with others, taught you to love.
2. In the progress of regeneration this is wondrously manifested.
3. In the experimental enjoyment of His favour we see this Divine discovery.
Your life has consisted of so many steps from one manifestation of Divine
love to another.
4. Practical remarks.
(1) Every soul who hears me may be interested in this love.
(2) How humbling the contrast of our love to God! How inconstant, how
feeble, how spiritless is our level
(3) Let us imitate God in His dealings with us. If we would prevail with
others, we shall find that the cords of love are better than the rod of
Moses. Neither ministers nor private Christians can scare men into the
ways of godliness; no threats will frighten a man to be holy. (J.
Sherman.)

Everlasting love

I. THE GREAT SOURCE OF REDEMPTION--everlasting love--love without beginning,

love without change, and love without end.
1. Everlasting love is love without a beginning. The eternity of Divine love is a
subject which we cannot fathom, but we may look at it in relation to our own
being. Go back behind creation, before the Divine will had generated a single
atom of matter, and in that very we discover ourselves in a perfect, living,
actual conception, subjective being was embraced, nourished, and delighted
in by everlasting love. The love of God is not an emotion of delight created
by the appearance of comeliness, but delight itself; not an emotion excited by
beauty, but beauty itself. There is a tendency in the human mind to thrust
itself behind the birthday of time, and fall--where? Into the arms of
everlasting love.
2. Everlasting love is love without change. Man, in relation to the eternity of
 God, must be regarded as a whole. Everlasting love embraces that whole.
Our first impulse is to regard it as encircling the pure and the innocent, but
turning aside from the disobedient and simple. It is not so, for the Word
says, God so loved the world. Sin has transformed a paradise into a
wilderness, a heaven into a hell, but sin cannot change everlasting love.
That explains it all.
3. Everlasting love is love without end. On every Mohammedan tombstone the
inscription begins, He remains, i.e., God. To-day we will write on every
gravestone, The love of God remains. Ah, there are many gravestones besides
those in the churchyard. You may imagine inscriptions like these: To the
memory of friendship; To the memory of parental and filial affection; To
the memory of marriage sacredness and devotion. But those fires, which
once burnt brightly, have gone out for want of fuel, or for something that is
worse. Should there be an aching void or bitter disappointment because
former sources of affection have dried up, let us not turn to the devil to
supply their places, but let us turn to the everlasting love of God.

II. THE METHOD OF REDEMPTION. Therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn

thee. We sometimes think that our Heavenly Father deals with us harshly, or
unkindly. Yes, why the cross and not the crown? You see the child running in from
the garden full of tears, and saying, Something has hurt me. On examination it is
found that a thorn is in one of the fingers. Then the gentlest of hands will endeavour
to extract it. When she is doing so, the child will cry out, Oh, mother, you hurt me.
Ah, it is not the mother that hurts, but the thorn. When God takes out the thorn, we
think that He hurts us. Not so, it is the thorn. Even God cannot take sin out of the
heart but that it will give pain.
1. In dealing with the attractions of everlasting love, we must bear in mind the
fact that we can only be saved by attraction. Grace begins its work by
transforming the heart into the image of the Son of God. One grain of the
Saviours love in that heart will leaven the whole. The sinner must be made
willing to part with his sin. The power to effect this comes from God, but it
can only be applied when the willing cry rends his heart, Lord, save, or I
perish.
2. Consider the particular form which Gods loving-kindness has assumed in
order to attract man to virtue. Under what aspects has mercy appeared unto
men? We look back, and see an altar, and a victim, and a priest. But we soon
learn that these are only types, yet, Gods mercy pursued man in times of
yore, and does now, and everywhere. To-day, it is not altar, victim, or priest;
but the Son of God, in a body like our own, and bearing up under the
vicissitudes of life. In Christ Jesus we have the picture of loving-kindness.
Sometimes that picture is in words of sympathy, of love, of encouragement,
and inspiration. Never man spake like this Man. At other times the picture
is in deeds,--the most gracious and marvellous. The sick are healed. The
blind see. The deaf hear. The dead live. Is the picture overdrawn? (T. Davies,
M. A.)

The place of love among Divine attributes

According to the Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, God is a Spirit,
infinite, eternal, unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice,
goodness, and truth A very comprehensive and noble definition, no doubt I yet did
it never strike you as strange that there is no mention of love here? This appears a
very remarkable omission, as remarkable as if an orator, who undertook to describe
the firmament, left out the sun, or an artist in painting the human face, made it
sightless, and gave no place on the canvas to those beaming eyes which impart to the
countenance its life and expression. Why did an assembly, for piety, learning, and
talents, the greatest perhaps that ever met in England, or anywhere else, in that
catalogue of Divine attributes, assign no place to love? Unless we are to understand
the term goodness as comprehending love, the omission may be thus explained
and illustrated. Take a globe, and observing their natural order, lay upon its surface
the different hues of the rainbow; give it a rapid motion around its axis, and now the
colours vanish. As if by magic the whirling sphere instantly changes into purest
white, presenting to our eyes a visible and to our understanding a palpable proof
that the sunbeam is not a simple but a compound body, thread spun of various rays
which, when blended into one form light; so all the attributes acting together make
love, and that because God is just, powerful, holy, good, and true, of necessity,
therefore, God is love. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

The wonder of Divine love

Is it not an unheard-of wonder that so strong a stream of infinite love should run
underground for so many years, and that so many rebellions all that while should
not dam it up, but that it should hold on its course uninterrupted, and work out all
that had obstructed the current of it, and at last bubble up at a time designed, and
save, and wash, and purify the wretched, defiled creature? (T. Goodwin.)

The love of Christ perennial

They tell us that the sun is fed by impact, from objects from without, and that the
day will come when its furnace flames shall be quenched into grey ashes. But
Christs love is fed by no contributions from without, and will outlast the burnt-out
sun, and gladden the ages of ages for ever. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The love of God suggested by human love

Would that we might understand the meaning of the expression, The love of
God. It is hinted at in this world. Passing along the streets, one hears the words of a
song or catches the strains of a piece of music being played, and he says, That is
from Beethoven or Mozart, I recognise the movement. So in this life, we catch
strains of the love of God. We behold it in the mothers disinterested, self-denying
love; we see it in the lovers glow and in the little childs innocent affection; but these
things are only hints.
The magnetic influence of Gods loving-kindness
What a delightful thing it is to be drawn. Scarcely anybody likes to be driven, but
there are very few who dont in their hearts enjoy the drawing process. Cast round
about the heart those mysterious cords of love, as soft as silk, and yet as strong as
steel; ah! they cant be resisted, and the wonder of it is that there is any desire to
resist them. Love has conquered us. These cords have been let down from heaven to
encircle us and lift us up out of the pit, just as was done to Jeremiah when he was in
the pit; they let ropes down, and presently he was drawn up to life and liberty again.
Ah, yes, it was the Cross that drew most of us. What a magnet is the story of the
Cross! The power of the atonement has been felt by all of us who have believed, so
that we were made willing to enter into the blessing of God. Some of us scarcely
know how, but we found ourselves beneath the blood-stained tree. We turned our
back upon it for many a year, but it turned us round at last. Blessed be the name of
our loving Saviour! these cords are still drawing men to Jesus. I wonder how any
one can resist the love of God in Jesus Christ! I saw some little children in a Brixton
street the other day playing with a magnet. It was evidently a new toy, and they
found much pleasure in this little instrument. What amused me was, that one child
ran and brought a stone, another a piece of glass, to see if the magnet influenced
them. You know, of course, the result; but the children did not know--they were
experimenting. It seems as if we ministers are too much like those dear little ones.
We have a magnet, but oh, how few there are who yield to the attracting power! The
fault is not with the instrument, for Christ has said, I, if I be lifted up, will draw all
men unto Me. Your hearts need changing; there is not as yet in you anything that
responds to the call; nothing that answers to the message of His love. Oh! I pray you,
ere you rest to-night, fall on your knees and implore God to touch your heart till the
story of the Cross moves it and Jesus wins it. (Thomas Spurgeon.)

The attractive power of kindness

A new teacher came to the little school district, who was the beginning of a new
order of things to others as well as Dwight L. Moody. She opened the exercises the
first morning with prayer, and that made s great impression upon the boys. But they
were still more astonished when she told them that she intended to have good order,
and yet have it without whipping any one. Ere long, Dwight had broken one of the
rules, and was asked to remain after school. He supposed she had decided to whip
him in private, and expected the usual punishment. To his surprise, as soon as they
were alone, the teacher began to talk in the kindest way to him, telling him how it
grieved her to have him disobey. This was harder on Dwight than a whipping.
Finally she said, I have made up my mind that if I cannot rule the school by love, I
will give it up. I will have no punishment. If you love me, try and keep the rules, and
help me in the school This was too much for Dwight, and he surrendered at once.
You will never have any more trouble with me, he answered, and I will whack the
first boy that makes you any trouble! And whack him he did, the very next day, to
the surprise of his companions and the consternation of the teacher.

JER 31:6
Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

The watchmans message to Israel

I. The message of the watchmen.

1. The Jewish people had been overthrown, taken captive, and dispersed. They
were therefore to all appearance a forsaken people, their land bereft of its
inhabitants was desolate, and they were removed from all they held most
 dear to them on earth, from the glory of their former national independence,
and from the temple in which they and their fathers had worshipped through
many generations. But they were to be restored to their old places, to the
land of all others they held most sacred, to their former worship with all its
wondrous beauty, and to the national distinctions and privileges which had
so long marked their history. Some effort on their part was however
necessary, they were to arise and then go up to Zion unto the Lord their God.
And in Him too we find the motive of all our efforts to arise from
thoughtlessness and folly, and the object worthy of our lifes battle and of our
lifes journey. We pray you to think upon this. When you are asked to awake
out of spiritual sleep,--when you are told the night is far spent and the day of
Gods judgment is fast coming,--when any public or private duty is urged
upon your attention,--when we utter warning voices, in the midst of homes
and friends, at the most gladsome times,--it is that you also should arise, and
go--not unto the priest alone, not unto the altar alone, not unto the Church
alone, but that you first and chiefly should go unto the Lord your God.
2. It is true this message may be regarded in a prospective point of view. For, it
is said, there shall be a day, &c. To us the message is a present one. At the
birth of Christ a new era of life and liberty commenced for the Gentiles and
for all the families of earth. We live amid the ruins of our own inherent
depraved nature. We have the evidence within and around us that we are in
bonds. But the cry of the watchman is sent to us now: and if we will be only
wise enough to exercise our common senses, and rouse ourselves up from
our spiritual lethargy, and seek for Gods help and mercy, we may arise, and
go up among the congregations of His people, and realise in our hearts the
great blessedness of His personal favour and presence of love.

II. Lessons.
1. One lesson to be inferred is the groundwork for the present aspiration of the
Jew, and we may add, in another sense, the present aspiration of the
Christian. The testimony of the prophecies of the Old Testament is supported
by the testimony of providence. Even if the Jew should care but little, if
anything, about the ancient prophecies, yet he is moved by the signs of the
times. And more, he is influenced by feelings which he cannot account for,
but which, when examined by the light of prophecy, receives an explanation
in God s interposition by some means either direct or indirect. The Christian
knows in a thousand ways that this earth, with all its gold, and honours and
pleasures, is not our rest, and therefore how natural, like the Jew, that he
should turn the eye of his faith to the city of his love, even in the heavens, the
place which God has promised him for evermore. It is but reasonable that he
should long for that.
2. Another lesson we are taught by the text is, namely, that the Almighty and
Eternal Saviour of His people is to be found in the use of the ordinances of
His Church. (W. D. Horwood.)

JER 31:9
 They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them.

The penitent sinner returning to his God

I. Some of the first steps by which a sinner returns to his offended God.
1. Contrition; a heartfelt sorrow and grief on account of his sins. Many causes
may conspire to awaken the sinner; but, as soon as the natural blindness of
his heart begins to be removed, fear and alarm will be among the earliest
effects. The apprehension of Gods future judgment stops him in his course;
fills his heart with terror, and his eyes with tears. He has also a more
immediate cause of alarm, in the state of his own mind and heart. Beginning
now, for the first time, to abhor iniquity, he is confounded on discovering its
power and dominion within him. Something more than this is required, in
order to make a true and lasting penitent. After trembling under the
condemnation of the law, and mourning over your corrupt nature, you must
look upon Christ, and behold in Him the effects of your guilt.
2. From penitent tears, the next step is to fervent prayer.

II. Abundant aid is promised to those who are setting out on their return to God.
1. God will help the repenting sinner by holy influences; by inspiring him with
holy desires, and restraining the corrupt inclinations of the natural mind.
2. He will come to your aid with His refreshing consolations. These are the
rivers of waters, by which He will cause you to walk.
3. The repentant sinner is assured of instruction, sufficient to guide him on his
way, and easy to be comprehended and followed.
4. He, who leads the sinner into the way of light and consolation, will also
uphold him therein. (J. Jowett, M. A.)

Christian pilgrims

I. Their character.
1. There is no discouragement which God will not enable us to surmount.
2. God has chosen those who arc in the most discouraging circumstances on
purpose that His own power may be the more displayed and glorified.

II. Their journey.

1. Its commencement
2. Its progress. Address--
(1) Those who yet are in a state of bondage.
(2) Those who are travelling towards Zion. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

In a straight way, wherein they shall not stumble.

A beaten track
Here there is a well-beaten track under our feet. Let us keep it. It may not be quite
the shortest way; it may not take us through all the grandeur and sublimity which
bolder pedestrians might see: we may miss a picturesque waterfall, a remarkable
glacier, a charming view: but the track will bring us safe to our quarters for the
night. (R. W. Dale, M. A.)

JER 31:10-11
Hear the Word of the Lord, O ye nations.

Gods Word

I. The word of the Lord.

1. The sublimity and mystery of the doctrine it reveals.
2. The purity and spirituality of its doctrines.
3. The harmony of its different authors.
4. The fulfilment of its predictions and promises.
5. The enmity that is in the carnal mind against it.
6. The power that it has upon the human heart.

II. The preachers word.

1. To be preached wholly. Doctrine, experience, and practice.
2. To be preached freely.
3. To be preached affectionately and warmly.
4. To be preached constantly.

III. The duty of the hearer--to hear.

1. To prepare in the closet for hearing.
2. To believe what is heard.
3. To reduce what is heard to practice. (G. J. Till.)

He that scattered Israel will gather him.

Development by crises
This is an entirely reassuring message for a nation passing through an
ecclesiastical crisis. It tells us that vast upheavals of thought and life have their place
in the plan of God, advance under His sovereign leadership, and are compelled to
contribute to the carrying-out of His purpose to redeem, remake, and reunite with
Himself, the whole race of man. It is a rigid truth, God scatters Israel; the Israel
He Himself called and created; and his an infinite solace to know that the
scattering is His and not anothers. It is an equally indisputable fact that the God
who scatters Israel gathers him again and keeps him as a shepherd his flock. He
gathered before He scattered, and He will gather again after He has scattered. Israel
will not perish. Never! The social and ecclesiastical moulds in which her life is cast
may be broken again and again; but the life endures. God is the God of salvation. He
is always mindful of His own. Hope in Him, and hope for evermore! That swift
upleap of faith and hope to the summits of clearest vision is vindicated by the whole
story of the Exile. The joy that was set before the strong soul of the seer in these days
of crushing disaster was realised in the experiences of the succeeding centuries. The
prophecy was fulfilled. The crisis was educational, purifying, expanding, uplifting,
and unifying; divisive for the day and the hour, but uniting on purer principles and
for broader and higher ideals for evermore. As men are educated by their mistakes,
and even their sins become as staves in a ladder by which they climb to God, so the
Israelites rose on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. The
sevenfold blessing of the Exile stands written in the unimpeachable Chronicles of
Israel, and the world. But, a greater than Jeremiah, describing the facts of His own
day and ministry, says, The wolf scattereth the sheep. For again, nearly six
hundred years after the time of the prophet, mere was another crisis in the Church
of Israel, and another exile was at the doors. Once more the holy city was to be
trodden under foot of men, and the holy people were already seized by the wolf,
and about to be scattered to the ends of the earth! The significance of the first exile
was forgotten. The lessons of experience were unheeded by the leaders of the Jewish
people. Priest, and scribe, and Pharisee had corrupted religion again; taught that the
outward rites of worship were of more importance than keeping the commandments
of God; substituted ceremonialism for obedience, and the use of the sacraments for
loving service of man. And so the sheep were scattered. But this is exactly the same
spirit which broke the heart of the prophet Jeremiah until he saw it overtaken by the
Divine punishment; and then, passing by the iniquity of the leaders of the people,
and looking at the penalty which, because it was inflicted by God, had in it an
element of recuperation and of hope, he said, God scatters; but He that scattered
Israel will gather him. These are, then, two ways of regarding two similar crises,
and both are necessary to a just and full interpretation of their meaning. Jesus,
speaking to the authoritative religious leaders of Israel, who have, sincerely enough,
it may be, but mistakenly, made themselves the foes of God and men, seeks to lay
bare their guilt, and therefore fixes upon and exposes the wolf-like ravages wrought
on the religious life of the people by their absolute want of the veriest shreds of real
religion. His aim is to convict these leaders of the wrong they are doing to their God
and to their country. Not so Jeremiah: he is anticipating the great word, Comfort ye
My people; speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is
accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; that she hath received of the Lords
hand double for all her sins. But the richest draught of consolation in Jeremiahs
Gospel is in the assertion of the principle on which these national and institutional
changes proceed. Gods goal, he says, is always constructive, not destructive; the
gathering together in one the children of God that are scattered abroad, and not the
driving them away from home and fatherland. He shatters the social form of Israels
life for the sake of the more perfect and adequate rebuilding of the nobler Israel on
the basis of His original redemptive idea. This law is older than all Churches, more
fundamental than all States, and as wide and deep as our human life. It is the vital
condition of progress. God is at war with the obsolete. He is the living God, and
seeks life, and promotes life. The Churches are secondary to the kingdom. They exist
for religion, and not religion for them. As words are to ideas, tools to service, so are
Churches to the kingdom of God and the service of man, and therefore the crisis in
the Church is not likely to be inimical to religion in the end. It will promote real
religion, expand it, clear it of the accretions of the past, set it free of the false
alliances into which it has entered, convert it from its paganisms, and restore it to its
original purity and vigour. And now, what is to be our attitude to these crises in the
religious life of our country? Surely, not merely one of silent acquiescence in and
gratitude for the work of God, but rather of intelligent, prayerful, large-hearted, and
wise co-operation. We are called to be co-workers with Him, to fall in with His laws,
to take part in the furtherance of His beneficent work of scattering and gathering
His Israel. Our first business is to get on the side of His laws, of His justice and
righteousness, at all costs; not to seek the pleasant paths of neutrality and
indifference, but to accept boldly the responsibilities placed upon us by our
subjection to Christ, and by the exposition and application of His Gospel to the
manifold needs of our time. We must begin with ourselves. He who would free
others must himself be free. (J. Clifford, D. D.)

Gods grace shown to Israel

I. Gods dealing with them in the past.

1. Redeemed them (verse 11).
2. Remembered them (verse 20).
3. Loved them (verse 3).
4. Drew them (verse 3).

II. GODS PROMISE TO THEM IN THE FUTURE. He will forgive them (verse 34). He
will forget their sin (verse 34). He will gather them out (verse 8). He will keep them
near (verse 10). He will lead them on (verse 9). He will prosper them in the way
(verse 12). He will satisfy them fully (verse 14). He will watch over them continually
(verse 28), (C. Inglis.)

JER 31:12
Their soul shall be as a watered garden.

The watered garden; or, the possibilities of soul life

The watered garden has three characteristics.

I. ITS FRESHNESS. Rapid evaporation in hot, dry seasons in the East. Unwatered
surface; hard, dry, crusted over, and perhaps cracked. In the watered garden,
vegetation continues to spring fresh and joyous. So a Christian man may be fresh
and vigorous in soul in the midsummer heat of business life, and in seasons of
spiritual drought in the Church. Even when the hot winds of temptation blow
directly from the burning desert of sin, his leaf shall not wither, and the
manifestations of his spiritual life shall not shrink nor be corrupted (Psa 1:3).

II. ITS FERTILITY. Water is always a fertiliser. It contains some sediment. The Nile
has spread from thirty to forty feet of alluvium over the surface of Egypt. In
England, artificial fertilisers are distributed to the soil by irrigation. It is therefore a
fine figure by which the increased fertility of a watered garden represents the
possible fruitfulness of a Christian soul. If it be objected that the illustration will not
hold, since fertilisers increase the capacity of a soft to bring forth weeds as well as
grain, it is answered, A watered garden is always a cultivated garden. Abundance of
grace in the heart will both increase and insure faithfulness.

III. ITS BEAUTY. It is said when the Spaniards invaded Mexico they were
astonished at the beautiful gardens of the Aztecs. These western people had
constructed a finer system of irrigation, and brought horticulture to a degree of
perfection unknown to haughty Spain. The religion of Christ develops the finest,
strongest, noblest capacities of our being. (J. C. Allen.)

A watered garden
To make a good garden four things are necessary. See what they teach about soul
culture.

I. GOOD SOIL. A minister in London was conducting a series of special religious

services for young people. At the close of one of them a young lady, the daughter of
one of the church officials, came into the inquiry room in great trouble. He was
surprised to see her, as he had always thought her to be a good girl. Oh, sir, she
said, I have such a wicked heart; how can I be saved? The Holy Spirit had shown
her the first necessity.

II. GOOD SEED. Sow nothing ugly, harmful, or useless. Be fragrant like the rose,
humble like the lily, useful like the myrtle.

III. WELL WATERED. Souls need refreshing. If we would keep them alive for God,
we must use the means of grace.
1. The Bible.
2. Private prayer.
3. Public worship.

IV. Well weeded.

1. Early.
2. A little every day.
3. By the roots. (W. H. Booth.)

Spiritual prosperity

I. Some ideas suggested by the comparison of the soul of the righteous or godly to
a garden.
1. A garden is a spot of ground upon which extraordinary cultivation is
employed; it is usually separated and enclosed from common ground, and
much labour and attention are employed to improve its soil, and to enrich it
with those fruits and vegetables which are pleasant and profitable; and such
is spiritually the state of every pious soul. Every real Christian is a garden
 walled around-chosen, and made peculiar ground.
2. A garden is generally stored with various kinds of those vegetable productions
that are either useful or ornamental. So out of the soul renewed by grace,
does the Lord cause to spring up and grow every Christian virtue and
heavenly grace that is either pleasing to God, or useful to man.
3. A garden does not arrive at its full perfections and glory at once. So it is with
the Christians graces; at first they are weak and small. His knowledge is very
contracted and confused, he sees men as trees walking; his faith is
unsteady and wavering, his love is limited within narrow bounds, and his
hope too often droops and hangs its head.

II. Those Divine influences by which this spiritual garden is watered.

1. The influences of the Spirit of God are imparted to every real Christian, and
produce effects that resemble those which warm and refreshing showers
have upon the productions of a garden (Isa 64:3).
2. These influences are enjoyed and conveyed to the soul by the means of Gods
Word and ordinances.

III. How much this happy state and these enriching influences are to be desired
by every immortal soul,
1. Till we attain these, we are in a most desolate, wild, barren condition; yea, in
an accursed and ruined state.
2. It is only by attaining this state, that we can arrive at true happiness either
here or hereafter.
3. Unless we are in this state we cannot glorify God, nor be useful to our fellow-
creatures as we ought. Learn from the whole, the need, the abundant need,
we have daily to ask for Divine influences; and we should seek these
influences sincerely. Ask evangelically; that is, according to the Gospel
method of approaching unto God; with entire dependence upon the
mediation of Jesus Christ. Ask importunately; that is, persevere till you
obtain the blessing, and the more you have wrestled for it, the more you will
value it when obtained. Ask believingly; that is, in constant expectation of
obtaining; do not question His power, His goodness, or His faithfulness. (J.
Sewell.)

Soul culture
The prophet is predicting the time when Israels captivity shall end and prosperity
shall crown adversity and want and poverty shall be no more. The prospect
describes not only material, but also spiritual abundance, and both conditions are to
be realised through painstaking diligence. The soul--what is it? That which is the
highest and noblest part of our nature; which is the seat of reason, affection,
conscience, and will; which gives us affinity with things unseen and Divine. We are
strangely indifferent at times to the interests of this valuable possession. We have
gymnasiums and systems of calisthenics and rules of diet and habit for the body; we
are very eager to devise the most expeditious methods of promoting the education of
the mind; but we do not give a commensurate emphasis to the discipline of the
spiritual. But as a man cannot have a sound and well-grown body or a mature and
well-equipped mind without training, so is it impossible for him to have a healthy,
thoroughly developed soul without process of cultivation. Let us inquire as to what
means are necessary for the unfolding of the spiritual nature.
1. First of all we may mention the need of religious thinking. He is the best
business man who can not only adapt himself to the routine and mechanism
of his work, but can also discern the underlying principles of it, appreciate its
wider relations and foresee its possibilities, who is not only the business
actor, but the business thinker. Likewise one must consider religious facts
and principles and truths in order that he may appropriate them and become
wisely, fundamentally religious. Theology is, as it always has been, the most
commanding of sciences; for it is mans thought about God, and man is
always restlessly inquisitive in his attempts to search out the secrets of the
Infinite. If one is to be large minded he must think large thoughts, and the
greatest ideas that can enter the mind are the religious ideas. Again, it is to
be urged that this religious intelligence is important for the sake of religious
conduct. We hear it said that it matters not much what a man thinks,
provided he does what is right, a statement which is entirely lacking in
wisdom, because there is an inevitable sequence of cause and effect between
thinking and doing. To give a single instance, whatever righteousness there
was in the Jewish life was the reflection of the Ten Commandments--the
Jewish conception of righteousness. We must see that our religious thinking
has its basis in Scripture. We must take our start in the accepted record, if we
would be true and wise, for Christianity is, first of all, not a philosophy, but a
history. And the stimulus which the Bible gives us will come not only from
being acquainted with its facts and principles and truths, but from breathing
the atmosphere which emanates from its pages. It is a book instinct with life.
2. Another means of religious culture is prayer. No man can be truly religious if
he does not pray, for religion is a personal relationship between man and
God; and prayer is the one supreme act by which the door is opened, and one
stands in the conscious presence of his Maker.
3. Still another means must be adopted in the cultivation of the spiritual life,
and that is public worship.
4. To all other means implied in the spiritual culture there must be added
rightness of action. No man can be truly religious whose devoutness is not
rooted in integrity. There is a religiousness which easily lifts itself into
ecstasies, which has no connection with the life. A new commandment I
give unto you, Christ declares, that ye love one another. Oh, to live out of
ourselves; to spend and be spent; to plan and work that we may do good to
our homes, to our Church, to our community, and to all our fellow-men--that
is to make our spiritual life real and abundant. May we ever be refreshed by
that Divine presence, that we may grow in grace and in the knowledge of the
Lord, and that our souls may be luxuriant and fruitful as a watered garden.
(H. P. Dewey.)

The garden of the soul

A watered garden suggests the idea of--

I. A FRAGRANT FRESHNESS. What a difference there is in the plants of a garden

after they have been watered by the dews or showers, or by the hand of the
gardener! The flowers lift their drooping heads; the leaves, set free from dust, put on
a brighter aspect; the plants look as if they had taken a new lease of life, and you
might almost fancy that they were entering with new zest into the enjoyment of their
existence! Now, the characters and lives of the people of God ought to be marked by
a similar freshness. There ought to be a certain fulness of life in the soul of the
Christian, making itself felt by those around him. Godliness tends to keep the soul
from withering, and replenishes the springs of the deepest life. There is a perennial
freshness in unselfish affections and unworldly aims. The eternal life never grows
old. Each new day is a new gift from the Fathers hand, and brings with it new
opportunities of serving the Master and helping the brethren. The faith of the
Gospel tends to produce the childlike heart; and to the childlike all is not vanity and
vexation of spirit. Oh! if we would only look at this human life of ours in the light of
God, it could scarcely ever lose the freshness of its interest; and if we ourselves were
only saturated with the love of God and the love of man, our own souls would be
ever full of life, and fresh as a watered garden. And this freshness of the Christian
life is a fragrant freshness. It is a freshness which may co-exist even with physical
weakness, sometimes even with disappointed expectations. There are souls which,
like the thyme, give out their sweetest perfume when they have just been bruised.
And how refreshing it is to see an aged Christian manifesting a fresh and kindly
interest in the welfare of others, and especially in the pleasures of the young, and
rejoicing in a daily sense of the presence and love of God!

II. A VARIED BEAUTY. In a well-kept garden there is beauty of colour and of form;
beauty of order and of tasteful arrangement; beauty of stem, and leaf, and flower;
and amongst the flowers themselves a varied beauty, resulting from manifold
varieties of form and colour. Flowers do more for people--and especially for some
people--than they themselves are aware of; and the blossoming of Christian
character has its own subtle influence in the world. There are times when a man may
get more good from the flowers of the garden than even from its fruits. And there is
a kind of good which a man may get from the sight of a daisy, which he cannot get
from the sight of the sturdiest oak. And, even so, the lovelier features of the
Christian character have their own peculiar charm and peculiar power. See how
these Christians love one another! was the admiring cry of the heathen, as they
watched the flowering of brotherly affection in the early Church. And certainly there
is no beauty to be compared with that of moral and spiritual character. It is said of
Linnaeus that the first time he saw the gorse in bloom he knelt down upon the
ground in grateful rapture, and gave God thanks for the sight. And have not we
ourselves sometimes--after hearing of some chivalrous and generous deed, or after
enjoying the company of the pure-minded and the tender-hearted--gone home to
thank God upon our knees for the grace which can clothe human character with so
much beauty? No rose of the garden is so beautiful as human love when it is both
passionate and pure. No geranium, with its contrast of scarlet and green, is so lovely
as an open frankness associated with a quiet modesty. No apple-blossoms are so fair
as the kindly sympathy which is the natural forerunner of the fruits of well-doing.
No lily of the valley is so beautiful as the sweet dignity which half hides itself in
humility and tenderness.

III. A RICH FRUITFULNESS. Even the beauty of spiritual character has, as we have
just seen, uses of its own, and is, therefore, in a sense, fruitful of good. But, over and
above all this, Christians ought also to be putting forth practical endeavours for the
promotion of Christs kingdom, and for the welfare of human hearts and lives. If
only you were more generous with your time or with your money, or if only you were
more consistent in your conduct out in the world, or if only you were more earnest
in the training of your children, or if only you took a deeper interest in the cause of
Him who died for you, would not your life be much more fruitful of good (T. C.
Finlayson.)

JER 31:13
I will turn their mourning into Joy, and will comfort them, and make them
rejoice from their sorrow.

Transfigured troubles
In one of the German picture galleries is a painting called Cloudland. It hangs at
the end of a long gallery, and at first sight it looks like a huge, repulsive daub of
confused colour, without form or comeliness. As you walk towards it the picture
begins to take shape. It proves to be a mass of exquisite little cherub faces, like those
at the head of the canvas in Raphaels Madonna San Sisto. If you come close to the
picture you see only an innumerable company of little angels and cherubim. How
often the soul that is frightened by trial sees nothing but a confused mass of crushed
hopes! But if that soul, instead of fleeing away into unbelief and despair, would only
draw up nearer to God, it would soon discover that the cloud was full of angels of
mercy. In one cherub face it would see, Whom I love I chasten. Another angel
would say, All things work together for good to them that love God. In still another
sweet face the heavenly words are coming forth, Let not your heart be troubled: in
My Fathers house are many mansions. (T. L. Cuyler.)

JER 31:14
My people shall be satisfied with My goodness.

A promise for Gods people

I. ASCERTAIN THE RIGHT APPLICATION OF THE PROMISE. My people. The term is

restrictive. Only the people of God. And it is universal: all, everywhere, in every age.
Who, then, are they? The phrase denotes covenant relationship. As man is alienated,
it implies reconciliation,--acceptance. The covenant by which this is effected is that
of mercy in Christ. As children of the covenant, we have received its visible seal,--
have been instructed in its obligations and blessings. Repentance and faith required.
These produce continued obedience,--and so we become, so we continue to be, the
people of God.

II. WHAT IS THE PROMISE MADE TO THEM? They shall be satisfied, &c.
 1. There is the goodness of God. The phrase sometimes refers to His essential
goodness; He is good. But here, to its bestowments;--He doeth good.
(1) The condescending manifestation of pardoning mercy, and adopting love
to the conscience.
(2) The various gifts of grace, and blessings of providence, all flowing from
paternal love.
(3) The blessings of glory, future, and to be waited for; but brought near by
good hope, given by God who hath loved us.
2. With this they are satisfied.
(1) The effect of manifested mercy is true satisfaction--peace, joy, delight.
We possess what we feel is our true portion.
(2) And, preserving this feeling,--living as penitent, pardoned believers,--we
rejoice in the ordinary gifts of providence; even in chastenings we joy,
knowing, their source and object; we rejoice in the overflowing fountain
of grace; we joy in the foretastes of glory.
Lessons--
1. See the inestimable value of religion Other gifts vain without this. This of itself
all in all.
2. Oh, the unutterable folly of sin! You refuse bliss; choose misery; and for what
? The fountains of living waters,--for broken, even empty cisterns.
3. Seek religion now. Live in full possession of it. (G. Cubitt.)

Gods people satisfied with His goodness

I. MY PEOPLE. Who are now Gods people? All, whether of Jewish origin or of
Gentile extraction, who--
1. Have repented of sin, and turned to the Lord with weeping and supplication
(Zec 12:10; Jer 31:9; Act 2:38; Act 3:19).
2. Have received Christ, and believed on Him to the salvation of their souls (Joh
1:11-13; Joh 3:18; Joh 3:36).
3. Have been regenerated by the Spirit and the truth of God (Joh 3:5-8; Tit 3:3-
7; 1Pe 1:1; 1Pe 1:9; 1Pe 1:23).
4. Have the assurance of their adoption into the family of God (Rom 8:14-17; Gal
4:4-7).
5. Who worship God in spirit and in truth (Joh 4:24; Php 3:3).
6. Who keep His commandments, and are zealous of, and careful to maintain,
good works (Joh 14:21; Joh 14:24; Tit 2:14; Tit 3:8; Jam 2:14-26; Rev 22:14).
7. Who have their thoughts and affections set on things above, and who are ever
looking for the coming of their Lord (Col 3:1-4; Php 3:20-21; Tit 2:13; 2Pe
3:10-14; Rev 22:20). My people--

II. SHALL BE SATISFIED. Satisfaction is the rest of the desiring faculties. To be

satisfied is to be filled, contented, and gratified to that degree, that nothing more is,
or can be desired. The primary idea of the Hebrew word lies in abundance of
drink, although in the common usage of the language this verb is more frequently
applied to food than to drink. Thus of one sated with food, De 31:20; Rth 2:14; Isa
44:16; Jer 31:14. It is spoken of the Spirit, Ecc 6:3; and metaphorically of the eye, as
not satisfied with seeing, Ecc 1:8. Compare Isa 53:2; Psa 17:15.--Geseniuss Heb.
Lex. Our spiritual need is often set forth in Scripture by our bodily necessities; and
our spiritual supplies are spoken of in similar terms, to the supplies of our temporal
wants (Isa 25:6; Isa 55:1-3; Isa 66:10-14; Zec 9:15-17; Mat 5:6). They shall be
satisfied; for
1. Their minds shall be filled with knowledge, confidence, and hope, in reference
to Divine, Spiritual, and eternal things. They shall be free from perplexity,
doubt, and fear. They shall have the full assurance of understanding, to the
acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ
(Col 2:2). They shall to God draw near in full assurance of faith, having their
hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and their bodies washed with pure
water (Heb 10:22). And they shew the same diligence unto the full
assurance of hope unto the end (Heb 6:11). These three full assurances
satisfy the saints.
2. Their souls shall be filled with holiness.
3. Their hearts shall be filled with love (1Jn 4:16-19).
4. Their lives shall be filled with good deeds (Php 1:10-11; Php 2:14-16; Mat 5:13-
16). Shah be satisfied--

III. WITH MY GOODNESS, SAITH THE LORD. The goodness of God here means His
kindness, benignity, and beneficence, as it does in Psa 25:7; Psa 27:13; Psa 31:19;
Psa 145:7, and in many other places.
1. They shall be satisfied with Gods favour. O Naphtali, satisfied with favour,
and full of the blessing of the Lord (De 33:23). In His favour is life (Psa
30:5). In His favour there is pardon and peace, purity and hope, love and joy,
protection and honour (Rom 5:1-5; Psa 4:7-8; Psa 5:12; Psa 32:1; Psa 23:2;
Psa 89:15-18; Psa 106:4-5).
2. They shall be satisfied with His goodness in their meditations on God (Psa
63:5; Psa 36:6; Psa 104:34; Psa 119:14-16).
3. They shall be satisfied with Gods goodness in His worship and service (Psa
65:4; Psa 36:7-9; Psa 36:34).
4. They shall be satisfied with Gods goodness in fellowship and communion
with Him (1Jn 1:3-4). Fellowship with God and His Son Jesus Christ consists
in our being partakers of the Divine nature; in constant intercourse and
communion with the Divine being; in community of interest; and in mutual
possession. In this blessed fellowship we are satisfied; for we are filled with
all the fulness of God, and are blessed with all spiritual blessings in
heavenly things in Christ.
5. They shall be satisfied with Gods goodness in heaven for ever and ever (Psa
17:15). Then shall we be satisfied, fully satisfied, eternally satisfied (Rev 7:14-
17).
6. The certainty that Gods people shall be satisfied with His goodness. We have
no ground for doubt; for God says it, whose word cannot fail. Are we Gods
people? If so, we shall be satisfied with His goodness; but if not, we cannot
be satisfied. Literature, art, and science cannot satisfy the soul. Wealth,
 honour, pleasure cannot satisfy the immortal mind. Believe me, nothing can
satisfy us but the goodness of God. (H. O. Crofts, D. D.)

JER 31:15-17
A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping
for her children.

Innocents day
Undoubtedly it seems strange, that one of the earliest consequences of the
incarnation of Him, who afterwards declared that He came not to destroy mens
lives, but to save them, should thus have been the murder of so many unoffending
little ones. A few days ago we assembled around the cradle of the newborn King, and
now the ground round about us is strewed with the bodies of the young ones,
slaughtered, as it were, in His stead. Well might He afterwards declare, that He
came not to send peace, but a sword upon the earth; seeing that, while yet a nursling
in His mothers arms, He is the occasion of the sword being fleshed in numbers who
least deserved to die. And the thing most remarkable in this transaction appears to
us to be, that the permission of the slaughter was in no sense requisite to the safety
of Christ. Joseph, and Mary, and the Child had departed for Egypt, before the fury of
Herod was allowed to break out. How easy does it seem that Herod should have
been informed of the flight, and thus taught the utter uselessness of his cruel decree.
Let us see whether there be really anything in the facts now commemorated at
variance with the known mercy of God. If, indeed, we were unable to discover that
the slaughter of the innocents was a means to ensure wise ends, we shall be
confident, from the known attributes of God, that there was such an end, though not
to be ascertained by our limited faculties. This, however, is not the ease. And they
who think at all carefully will find enough to remove all surprise that Herod was not
withheld from the slaughter. Let it be first observed, that prophecy had fixed
Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Christ, and had determined, with considerable
precision, the time of the nativity. It were easy, therefore, to prove that no one could
be the Messiah who had not been born at Bethlehem, and about the period when the
Virgin became a mother. How wonderfully, then, did the slaughter of the innocents
corroborate the pretensions of Jesus. If no one could be Messiah unless born at
Bethlehem, and at a certain time, why, the sword of Herod did almost demonstrate
that Jesus was the Christ; for removing, perhaps, every other who could have
answered to the test of time and place of birth, there seems only Jesus remaining in
whom the prophecy could be fulfilled. Besides, it should be carefully marked, that
Jesus was to live in comparative obscurity, until thirty years of age; He was then to
burst suddenly upon the world, and to amaze it by displays of omnipotence. But,
brought up as He had been at Nazareth, it was very natural that when He emerged
from long seclusion, He should have been regarded as a Nazarene. Accordingly we
find so completely had His birthplace been forgotten, that many objected His being
of Nazareth, against the possibility of His being the Messiah. They argued rightly,
that no one could be the Christ who had not been born at Bethlehem; but then they
rashly concluded, that Jesus wanted this sign of Messiahship, because they knew
Him to have been brought up in Galilee. And what made them inexcusable? Why,
the slaughter of the innocents. They could not have been uninformed of this event;
bereaved parents were still living who would be sure to tell the story of their wrongs;
and this event marked as with a line of blood the period at which the Christ was
supposed to have been born. A moments inquiry would have proved to them that
Jesus was this Child, and removed the doubt which attached to Him as a supposed
Galilean. And, therefore, not in vain was the mother stirred from her sepulchre by
the cry of her infant offspring; the echo of her lament might still be heard in the
land, and those who listened not to the witness of the birthplace of Jesus stood self-
condemned, while rejecting Him on the plea, Can any good thing come out of
Nazareth? There are yet more obvious reasons why God should have allowed this
act of cruelty. We may believe that God was leaving Herod to fill up the measure of
his guilt. Add to all this, that God was unquestionably disciplining the parents by the
slaughter of the children. There was at this time a great and general expectation of
the Messiah, and the Jewish mothers must have more than ever hoped for the
honour of giving birth to the Deliverer: but of course such a hope must have been
stronger in Bethlehem than in any other town, seeing that prophecy was supposed to
mark it as the birthplace. Hence we may readily believe that the infants of
Bethlehem were objects of extraordinary interest to their parents--objects in which
their ambition centred, as well as their affection. And, if so, we can understand that
these fathers and mothers stood in special need of that discipline which God
administers to parents through the death of their children; so that there was a
suitableness in the dispensation as allotted to Bethlehem, which might not have
been discoverable had another town been its subject. Now all this reasoning would
be shaken, if it could be shown that a real and everlasting injury were done to the
innocents themselves. Let us now, then, consider the consequences of the massacre,
so far as the innocents themselves were concerned. There is much here to require
and repay your careful examination. We have an unhesitating belief in respect of all
children, admitted into Gods Church, and dying before they know evil from good,
that they are saved by the virtues of Christs propitiation. We never hesitate to tell
parents sorrowing for their dead children, who had been old enough to endear
themselves by the smile and the prattle, but not old enough to know moral good
from moral evil, that they have a right to feel such assurance of the salvation of their
offspring, as the best tokens could scarcely have afforded had they died in riper
years. And however melancholy the thought, that so many of our fellow-men live
without God, and therefore die without hope, it is cheering to believe, that perhaps a
yet greater number are saved through the sacrifice of Christ. For as a large
proportion of our population die before old enough for moral accountableness; how
many of the Christian community are safely housed ere exposed to the blight and
tumult of the world! Oh, the magnificent possession would not want inhabitants if
all, who could choose for themselves, chose death, and not life; heaven would still
gather within its capacious bosom, a shining multitude, who just descended to earth
that they might there be grafted into the body of Christ, and then flew back to enjoy
all the privileges of membership. And we may believe of this multitude that it would
be headed by the slaughtered little ones of Bethlehem--those who, dying, we might
almost say, for the Saviour, won something like the martyrs crown, which shall,
through eternity, sparkle on their foreheads. Who, then, shall say that Herod was
permitted to do a real injury to those innocents, and that thus their death is an
impeachment either of the justice or the mercy of God? We may be assured that they
escaped many cares, difficulties, and troubles, with which a long life must have been
charged; for, had the sword of Herod not hewn them down, they might have
remained on earth till Judahs desolation began, and have shared in the worst woes
which ever fell on a land. The innocents of Bethlehem have always been reckoned by
the Church amongst the martyrs; for, though incapable of making choice, God, we
may believe, supplied the defect of their will by His own entertainment of their
death. And it is beautiful to think, that as the spirits of the martyred little ones
soared toward heaven, they may have been taught to look on the Infant in whose
stead they had died; to feel that He for whom they had been sacrificed was about to
be sacrificed for them; and that they were mounting to glory on the merits of that
defenceless Babe (as He seemed then), hurrying as an outcast into Egypt. (H.
Melvill, B. D.)

Rachel weeping for her children

The death of young children is among the saddest bereavements of life. The sight
of a suffering, dying child is painful. The mystery distresses us. Affection yearns in
vain. The death of a young child is a sore disappointment. The fond parents cling
round it through life, like bees about a flowers wine-cup. What dreams of long life,
and rich fortune, and untold happiness beguile their days! Their cherished hopes are
blighted, and the future is a scene of clouded prospects and changed plans. The
death of young children is often one of the hardest things to endure. Like the
weeping Rachel, the bereaved parents are inconsolable. What bitter words of
rebellion are sometimes spoken, instead of words of sweet resignation! Never is the
weakness of all earthly props more manifest than under such circumstances. No
considerations save such as the Bible supplies can give to the soul strength and
peace. Still you remember your dead. Your experience ripens into that of Vaughan--
They are all gone into a world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
Although the death of young children is such a sore loss, there are sources of
comfort--considerations which constrain us to say, Thy will be done.

I. IN THE EARLY REMOVAL OF CHILDREN GOD ACTS AS A FATHER. In one of our

English churchyards there is this inscription on a childs tombstone: Who plucked
that flower? cried the gardener, as he walked through the garden. His fellow-servant
answered, The Master, and the gardener held his peace. There is an Eastern story
of a rabbi, who, having been absent all day, returned home in the evening, and was
met by his wife at the door. With her first greeting she told him how she had been
perplexed during the day, because a friend, who years ago had entrusted some rare
jewels to her care, had that day come for them from her long possession of them
they seemed almost her own, and she felt loth to give them back. They were only
lent, replied her husband; be thankful that you have had the use of them so long.
Your words are good, said she; may we now and always follow them! Then,
leading him into an inner chamber, she showed him, stretched upon one bed, their
two children who had that day died. Forthwith he knew the jewels which God had
lent him, and now resumed, and his heart said, The Lord gave, &c.
 II. CHILDREN WHO DIE YOUNG ARE REMOVED FROM ALL POSSIBLE SORROW AND
HARM TO LIVE THE PERFECT LIFE ABOVE. Their sufferings, perhaps, were great, and
you would fain have suffered in their stead; but their day of suffering was short.
There was mercy in their death. Had they lived, some wild and withering anguish
might have sered their summers earliest leaf; the sickness of hope deferred might
have given them a disgust of life. They have escaped these and all other woes--
escaped them for ever. They are, moreover, taken away from all possible sin. They
might have lived to be a curse to their parents and to the world. We know little of
their future life; but we know as much as this--that all which can make life worth
living is theirs. Your fondest love could not wish more for them than they enjoy.
Selfishness might desire their return; love never can. All that was imperfect in them
is left behind; and they are as the angels of God for ever.

III. THE DEATH OF YOUNG CHILDREN IS OFTEN A MINISTRY OF BLESSING TO THE

BEREAVED PARENTS. Just as we make idols of other objects that we regard with
undue affection, so we are in danger of making idols of our children. If we allow
them to estrange our affections from God, to interfere with our religious duties--to
withdraw our sympathies from the poor and suffering around us, then our love is of
the nature of idolatry; and it is a proof of Gods love that He removes the idols. In
one of his letters, Dr. Judson writes thus: Our only darling boy was, three days ago,
laid in the silent grave. Eight months we enjoyed the precious little gift, in which
time he had so completely entwined himself around his parents hearts, that his
existence seemed necessary to their own. But God has taught us by afflictions what
we would not learn by mercies, that our hearts are His exclusive property, and
whatever rival intrudes He will tear it away. Edward Irving exclaimed, after his
childs death, Glorious exchange! God took my son to His own more fatherly
bosom; and revealed in my bosom the sure expectation and faith of His own eternal
Son. Dr. Bushnell once said, I have learned more of experimental religion since my
little boy died than in all my life before. The shepherd of the Alps who cannot get
his sheep to climb the higher ascents of the mountains, will take the lambs and
throw them up to the shelving rocks, when their dams soon spring up after them. By
somewhat similar methods the Shepherd of Israel gathers His flocks on the hills of
glory. He removes your children to heaven, that you may follow them thither.

IV. CONSIDER, FURTHER, THE JOY YOUR CHILDREN GAVE YOU WHILE THEY LIVED. Of
course, the memory is touched with sadness; but there is room for gratitude. Be
thankful that they were yours so long. You were rich in their possession; and you are
all the richer for them, even though God has taken them away. Your heart has been
enlarged. A fount of feeling has been opened in your nature that never can be dry
any more. You are richer in sympathy and in hope; richer towards society and God.
In a deep and true sense, your dead children are with you still (W. Walters.)

JER 31:16-17
Refrain thy voice from weeping.

Bereaved parents comforted

 I. IT IS NOT SINFUL FOR PARENTS TO BE GRIEVED AND SORROWFUL FOR THE DEATH OF
THEIR CHILDREN. If we do not grieve when we are thus stricken of God, it is an
evidence that we do not feel the heavy calamity which His providence hath inflicted,
and how can there be any probability that we shall be profited by it? It is by the
sadness of the countenance that the heart is made better. It is in consequence of the
affliction being for the present not joyous, hut grievous, that, through the Divine
blessing, it bringeth forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness in them that are
exercised thereby.

II. Parents should refrain from immoderate and excessive grief for the death of
their children, when they consider that THIS EVENT FLOWS FROM GODS WISE AND
SOVEREIGN APPOINTMENT. If our children be interested in that covenant which is
ordered in all things and sure, let no one say that their death is premature or
unseasonable. God hath a method, which we cannot explain, of ripening those for
heaven whom He gathers into it in the beginning of their days.

III. Disconsolate parents should moderate their grief for the death of their
children, when we consider that OUR LOSS IS THEIR UNSPEAKABLE GAIN. Infant
children, born as it were into this world only to suffer and to die, are striking
evidence of the dreadful effects of sin. They are objects of compassion to the human
heart, much more to the Father of mercies. It is natural, when our children are taken
away, if their faculties have begun to unfold themselves, to review the little history of
their lives, and to reflect with melancholy pleasure on many passages unheeded by
others, but carefully marked and remembered by parents; and if any good thing
towards the Lord was found in our child, the remembrance is full of comfort. If we
found their hearts grateful and affectionate for our care, and submissive to our will,
these were the seeds of an amiable and humble spirit. If they had a tenderness of
conscience, so far as they knew good and evil, and stood in awe of offending; if they
loved and hearkened to instruction; if they had a deep veneration for the Bible, as
containing the revelation of Gods mercy and goodness to His children; if they had
some views, however faint, of a state of blessedness into which pious and good
children enter after death; in a word, if to the last they grew in favour with God and
man, this is an anchor of hope to disconsolate and afflicted parents.

IV. Parents should moderate their grief for the death of their children, when they
look forward to A JOYFUL AND BLESSED RESURRECTION. Our children shall come
again from the land of the enemy. The husbandman doth not mourn when he
casteth his seed into the ground, because he soweth in hope. He commits it to the
earth with the joyful expectation of receiving it again with great improvement; so
when we commit the precious dust of our relations to the earth, we are warranted to
exercise a joyful hope that we shall receive them again unspeakably improved at the
resurrection.

V. Parents should moderate their grief for the loss of their children, when they
consider WHAT BENEFICIAL EFFECTS THIS IS CALCULATED TO PRODUCE IN THEIR OWN
SOULS. David thankfully acknowledges it is good for me that I have been afflicted.
God deals with us as a wise parent deals with froward and undutiful children. When
counsels and admonitions produce no effect, He finds it necessary to correct us with
the rod; and when the strokes of providence inflicted on other families have been
slightly regarded by us, He finds it necessary to smite us in our own bone and flesh.
It would be highly ungrateful, then, to murmur against God when He acts a fathers
part toward us, and is chastening and correcting us for our spiritual profit and
advantage. The impatience with which we bear the stroke, is an evidence that our
affections were rooted many degrees deeper in the creature than we were aware of.
Our merciful Father doth not measure out one drop from the cup of affliction, nor
inflict one stripe with His correcting rod, more than He sees indispensably necessary
for His childrens profit and happiness. We should take in good part every trial with
which we are visited, as coming from a parents hand and a parents heart.
Conclusion--
1. Let us learn resignation to Divine providence under our affliction.
2. From the death of our children, let us learn to exercise a lively faith on that
state of life and immortality which is brought to light by the Gospel.
3. The death of our children should teach us to live mindful of our own death. (J.
Hay, D. D.)

There is hope in thine end, saith the Lord.

Good hope
There are some who cannot endure the thought of looking forward to the end; and
this in a great variety of particulars. None but Christians contemplate with delight
the end of their woes, and the reason is, that they have no well-grounded hope as to
the end. If a hope exists, it becomes us closely to examine on what it is founded.

I. If I were asked WHAT CONSTITUTES MY HOPE AS A CHILD OF GOD, as a Christian,

as an heir of glory, I should not hesitate for one moment to state that it consists of
three things--the constancy of my Fathers love, the official faithfulness of my Elder
Brother to His engagements, and the ministerial operations of the Comforter,
pledged for the eternal salvation of my soul

II. NOTICE HOW THIS IS OWNED BY JEHOVAH HIMSELF. Saith the Lord. This is a
phrase of personal importance. He hath not only said it here in the volume of
inspiration, but He saith it repeatedly, continually, powerfully unto the souls of His
people when He speaks to them. What paternal tenderness is here! what paternal
condescension! There are numbers of little children in different families who would,
in many instances, be disposed to disregard a great deal that a servant might say, or
that a stranger or a visitor might say; but when the father speaks, his voice has some
weight and authority. Moreover, when Jehovah thus speaks with paternal
tenderness, there is hope in His name. Suppose the case of crosses and cares, trials
and anxieties, difficulties and perplexities, threatened ruin or discomfort, or the loss
of domestic harmony; only let the Lord speak, and there is hope in the end, saith
the Lord. In the next place, just mark, that when Jehovah speaks, when Jehovah
Himself comes with His Thus saith God, it is by revealing the hope of Israel. This
is the express business and ministry of God the Holy Ghost, to reveal the glorious
Person of the Redeemer, under the appellation of the hope of Israel, and the
Saviour thereof in the time of trouble. I beseech you to mark one more point in
connection with the Lords owning this hope to exist in reality in the soul; I refer to
the testimony of the internal witness of the Holy Ghost. The Spirit Himself beareth
witness with our spirits that we are the children of God. His testimonies have
always a sanctifying tendency. (J. Irons.)

JER 31:18-21
I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself.

Repentant Ephraim
The real turning-point in mans spiritual history is when he begins to accuse
himself and to justify God. From self-accusation the soul is led on by the Spirit of
God to self-condemnation. Mark, in the first place, what it is that Ephraim bemoans.
It is himself. To mourn sinful acts is one thing, and may be done by even a Judas.
To mourn over a sinful nature, an evil heart dwelling within, of which the act is only
an expression, is quite another. The one may be the work of the natural conscience
unenlightened by the Spirit of God: the other is the genuine mark of a soul that has
been under the leading of that Spirit, and has passed from death unto life. Mark it
in the case of Ephraim. I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself. It is no
mere surface work. It is Ephraim under conviction of sin. It is Ephraim taking up the
prophets words, Woe is me, for I am undone. Mark the three times the word
surely occurs here. I have surely heard Ephraim; surely after that I was turned,
I repented; I will surely have mercy. These are the sure mercies of David, given
to the soul under the training of the Spirit of God. There is the sure ear of God, the
sure repentance of the soul, and the sure mercy to meet it. Why is this? Because the
work is Gods. It is a thorough work. Observe, next, how God often brings the soul to
the knowledge of itself. Thou hast chastised me. It is through the sharp strokes of
trial and discipline. Ah! these do Gods work often when nothing else will. Let God
draw near and lay His hand upon us, then the true character of the heart will display
itself. That character is unchangeable--enmity to God. Blessed be God when we are
brought to see and feel it! Then, like Ephraim, we say, Turn Thou me, and I shall be
turned. And what is the ground on which this is urged? For Thou art the Lord my
God. What a plea! What sweet assurance! What trust! What knowledge of Him
these words imply! Oh, to draw near at all times with this on the lips! Then will the
bow of peace span the darkest cloud, and light and peace and joy be the heritage of
the soul. Observe the next clause. God turns the soul, then there is true
repentance. Then He instructs that soul by His Spirit. It goes on learning deeper
lessons of Him and of His wondrous grace. But mark the direction which this
instruction takes, and the spirit it begets in the soul. After that I was instructed,
&c. How the instruction increases humility! How the soul begins with smiting, and
goes on to shame and confounding! Mark, next, the Lords language to the returning
child. Ephraim, My dear son; a pleasant child; for since I spake against him, I do
earnestly remember him still: therefore My bowels are troubled for him: I will
surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord. How beautifully the history of the
prodigal son confirms this! Set thee up way-marks; make thee high heaps. Make
thee finger-posts to guide thee to heaven. How many a thing the believer may set
before him each day to help him onward. How many a passage of Scripture stored
up in memory may preserve the soul in dangers hour, and send it on its way more
than conqueror! How many a secret prayer sent up to God has been a way-mark,
leading the soul into a right path when all was perplexity and darkness! Yes, not only
set thee up way-marks, but make thee high heaps. A high heap is one that can
easily be seen. Oh! it is a great thing when we come to some perplexity in life, when
we come to some turning-point in our history, to have something ready to hand. It is
a blessed thing not to have to search about for it, not to be hindered in the course by
delay, but to see the path plainly and clearly before us! And what is the last word in
this passage to Ephraim? Turn again, O virgin of Israel, turn again to these thy
cities. It is a prophetic word, bidding that exile from her long-lost home look back
again in hope. It is the climax of all that has gone before. It is that blessed hope,
the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. What a glorious prospect awaits the despised
and downtrodden nation of Israel! What a glorious prospect awaits the Church of
the living God--the Bride of the Lamb! (F. Whitfield, M. A.)

The picture of a true penitent

I. THE PICTURE OF A TRUE PENITENT. The piteous lamentations,--the bitter self-

accusations, the tears and prayers of the broken-hearted are delineated with a force
and accuracy which transport us to the scenes described.
1. His position is solitary, bemoaning himself. It is not an easy, but it is an
indispensable process, that all sources of relief should be forsaken but those
which are in God Himself, when man is seeking the pardon of sin and the
salvation of the soul.
2. Self-reproach. Shame at having acted so unworthy a part,--so contrary to one
s own best interests,--so ungrateful to the Heavenly Benefactor, so
derogatory to His glory,--so injurious to the welfare of others,--so morally
bad in its defilement,--so insufficient in its motives,--so degrading in its
results.
3. The true penitent refers his state to God. If the events of life are in our esteem
only the outcome of fixed laws, altogether detached from an intelligent and
personal control, they yield us no profit. If, on the other hand, we trace them
to God, they become luminous in the instruction which they furnish, and the
whole discipline of life resolves itself into a system in which goodness and
mercy, wisdom and power, are most effectively taught.
4. It is a favourable sign of this true penitent that he mingles with his self-
reproaches the language of childlike interest in God. For Thou art the Lord
my God.

II. THE PROCESS OF RESTORATION. In the case of Israel it was as it is often now; by
means of affliction God awakened him to spiritual things. The discipline of affliction
is not, however, limited to that part of the Christian life which precedes conversion.
They have a most important office to perform in the training and perfecting of the
sons of God.
1. They are employed as preventive. The condition of life may be very limited,
but its limitation is to a godly man a source of security. The suffering in
which he is involved may be very acute, but it makes prayer exceeding real,
the Bible very sweet, and the consolations of Christ abound as the sufferings
of Christ abound (2Co 1:6). It is better, says an old divine, to be preserved
 in brine than to rot in honey.
2. The treatment which God adopted with Ephraim He still employs with His
people, inasmuch as He makes their sorrows and trials restorative in their
character. The scalpel may cause the patient to wince, but it will cut away
incipient corruption and death. The sharpest winters are followed by the
most fruitful summers.
3. All the trials of the present world are employed by Divine wisdom as
preparatives for the future of the Christian. (W. G. Lewis.)

Ephraim bemoaning himself

I. A sinner bemoaning himself.

1. Bowed down with a peculiar grief. Inward sorrow. True repentance.
2. Well-founded sorrow. Over guilt, outrage on Gods goodness and grace.
3. Humble sorrow. Not excusing or flattering himself, or making new
resolutions; but bemoaning.
4. A thoughtful sorrow.
5. A hopeless yet a hopeful sorrow.

II. The lord observing him.

1. God heard all Ephraim had to say. It may be but a stammering cry. Broken
prayers are the best.
2. God delights in the broken and contrite spirit.
3. God is full of compassion.

III. The lord working in his effectual grace.

1. The only turning in the world that is saving and Divine, is the turning of the
heart.
2. The Lords way of turning men varies in each case.
(1) A distinct sight of wrath to come stops a sinner.
(2) Or the awakened conscience is led to see the real nature of sin.
(3) The grand turning-point is the sight of Christ on the Cross.
(4) One of the most blessed ways by which God makes a sinner turn is, He
manifests His everlasting love to him. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The cry of the penitent

Amidst all the confused and discordant sounds that are for ever rising from this
fallen world of ours into the ears of the Most High God, there is one to which He can
never be indifferent; and that is, the voice of a stricken and contrite sinner
bemoaning himself. He finds that from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot
there is no soundness in him. He is out of heart with himself altogether, and
despairs of being able to improve his position. O wretched man that I am! he
exclaims, who will deliver me from the body of this death? And thus by his very
perplexity and helplessness he is drawn to look out of himself for assistance. Oh, you
who are bemoaning yourselves, here is comfort for you. You never would have come
to that point, you would have been even now either excusing or endeavouring to
amend yourselves, but for the blessed influence of the Divine Spirit, who has shown
you your true condition and brought you to an end of yourself, and thus put you m a
position to begin with Him. Oh, thank Him for it, and since He has brought you thus
far, trust Him to bring you farther. Come, let us return unto the Lord: for He hath
torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up. But here I want
you to observe one feature specially of the perplexity and distress which leads
Ephraim so to bemoan himself. He makes the humiliating discovery that not only
has his past life been full of sin, but that his very efforts to repent and turn to God
have also been characterised by a strange and fatal perversity. His repentance itself
has to be repented of. This attitude of moral perversity is illustrated in our text by a
remarkable and suggestive metaphor. Thou hast chastised me, exclaims Ephraim,
bemoaning himself, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke--a
bullock unaccustomed to the yoke--an unbroken bullock! Of all the perverse things
to be found in the world, where will you find anything more unmanageable than
this? Here Ephraim sees a picture of himself, and here also too many an awakened
sinner finds himself represented. How often does such a one adopt a course exactly
the reverse of that which God would have him take! How often does he insist on
adopting the course of action least appropriate to his spiritual condition, and as a
result he has to feel the chastening goad, and only by stern discipline of sorrow has
he to be brought to the obedience of faith and the submission of the will, to see and
acknowledge his own folly, and to yield himself to God. At last, Ephraim does the
wisest thing that he could do, and what he should have done long before. Having
reached the point of self-despair; having seen the folly of his own attempts to better
himself, and having repented of his own perversity, he just puts the whole thing into
the hands of God. O Lord, I have tried my best, and my best has failed me: Thou
hast chastised me, and I was chastised; but still, like a bullock unaccustomed to the
yoke, I have continued to make mistakes and to do the wrong thing; now in my
helplessness I must make the whole matter over to Thee. Turn Thou me, and I shall
be turned: for Thou art the Lord my God. Ah, that is the only true solution of the
difficulty. Here is the turning-point in our experience, here is the moment of victory
for the helpless. Let a man once put himself thus unreservedly into the hands of his
God, and all the devils of hell cannot keep him from the blessing. His present
salvation is at once secure, because the honour and truth of the everlasting God are
pledged for the safety of the man who trusts himself to God. O God, cries the
penitent and self-despairing sinner, I cannot turn myself, I cannot change my own
nature, but I believe that Thou canst, so I put myself completely in Thy hands to do
it for me. How often have I hindered Thy work by endeavouring to do for myself
what only Thou canst do; how often in my very efforts to turn myself have I, as it
were, turned the wrong way. Lord, if I am to be saved at all, Thou must save me, for
I cannot save myself. Turn Thou me, and I shall be turned: for Thou art the Lord
my God! And who is there that God cannot turn when he is thus submitted to Him-
-who so far gone, so deeply sunk, that God cannot change him? The things
impossible with men are possible with God; and often when the change has been
beyond all human hope, God has done it to the glory of His own great name. (W.
Hay Aitken, M. A.)

The inner side of conversion

 There are turning-points in most lives. We go on in a straight line for a certain
distance, but suddenly we come to a place where we must make a choice of roads. All
the rest of our journey may depend upon what we do at those particular points.
Character often hinges on a days resolve. An interesting book has been written upon
Turning-points in life, and it is capable of indefinite extension. According to a
mans station and disposition, those turning-points take place at different periods;
but whenever they are before us, they call for special prayer and trust in God. There
is, however, one turning-point, and one only, which will secure salvation and eternal
life; and that is what we call conversion, which is the first apparent result of
regeneration, or the new birth. The man being renewed, the current of his life is
turned: he is converted.

I. First, here is MAN AT THE TURNING-POINT AS GOD OBSERVES HIM. Is not that a
wonderful word of the Lord, I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself? Of
a certainty the Lord hears all the sorrowful voices of men. The Lord hears surely:
that is to say, He hears the sense and meaning of our wordless moans: He puts into
language that which no words of ours could express. The Lord understands us better
than we understand ourselves.
1. Concerning the man here described, we note that he is in a state of great
sorrow about himself. The grief is within. All the water outside the ship is of
small account; it is when the leak admits the water to the hold that there is
danger. Let not your heart be troubled: it matters something if your
country or your house be troubled; but to you the trying matter is if your
heart be troubled. The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a
wounded spirit who can bear? This is what the Lord tenderly notes about
the sinner at the turning-point, that he bemoans himself.
2. This bemoaning was addressed to his God. This is a very hopeful point about
it: he cried to Jehovah, Thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised. It is a
blessed thing when a man in his distress turns to his God, and not from Him.
3. Notice how Ephraim in the text has spied out his God as having long ago dealt
with him. He tells the Lord that He has chastised him. Thou hast chastised
me, and I was chastised. The man had not before observed the hand of God
in his suffering: but he does now. I have hope of that man who sees Gods
hand, even though he sees only a rod in it.
4. But the mourner in our text means more than this by his bemoanings: he
owns that the chastening had not set him right. Thou hast chastised me, and
I was chastised; and that was all. He had smarted, but he had not
submitted. He had not obeyed, but had still further rebelled.
5. Yet there is something better than this; the mourner in our text despairs of all
but God. He cannot turn himself, and chastisement will not turn him; he has
no hope left but for God Himself to interpose. Turn Thou me, and I shall be
turned.
6. To all this confession poor bemoaning Ephraim adds another word, whereby
he submits to the supreme sway of Jehovah his God, For Thou art the Lord
my God. He does as good as say, Man cannot help me. I cannot help myself.
Even Thy chastenings have not availed to turn me. Lord, I appeal to Thee,
Thyself! Thou art Jehovah. Thou canst do all things. Thou art my God, for
Thou hast made me; and therefore Thou canst new-make me. I pray Thee,
 therefore, exercise Thine own power, and renew Thy poor, broken and
defiled creature.

II. MAN AFTER THE TURNING-POINT. Here you have the description in the
nineteenth verse. It begins with Surely. Is it not very remarkable that each of these
verses should be stamped with the hall-mark, and each one bear the word surely?
The Lord said He had surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself; and here
Ephraim says, Surely after that I was turned, I repented.
1. See, before us, prayer mixed with faith soon answered. Not many moments
after Ephraim had said, Thou art the Lord my God, he felt that he was
turned. My friend, do you remember when you were turned? Do you know
your spiritual birthday, and the spot of ground where Jesus unveiled His face
to you? Some of us do, although others do not. The main point is to be
turned; to know the place and time is a secondary matter.
2. Yet I say some of us know when we were turned; and here is one reason why
we remember it, for repentance came with turning. After that I was turned,
I repented. He that is truly turned turns his face to the wall to weep and
pray. Thou canst not make thyself repent; but when God hath changed thy
heart, thou wilt repent as naturally as the brook flows adown the valley when
once its bands of ice are thawed. After that I was turned, I repented.
3. Deep sorrow followed upon further instruction. The Holy Spirit does not leave
the convert, but gives him further instruction; and out of that comes a sorer
regret, a more complete self-abasement. After that I was instructed, I smote
upon my thigh. Want of knowledge tends to make men hardened, unfeeling,
self-complacent, and proud; but when they are instructed by the Divine
Spirit, then they are ready to inflict wounds upon themselves as worthy of
buffetings and blows. God be merciful to me, a sinner is a fit prayer for the
instructed, and the lowliest posture well becomes such a one.
4. To this deep sorrow there followed shame. Ephraim says, I was ashamed,
yea, even confounded. This man knew everything before; now he knows
nothing, but is confounded. Once he could dispute, and dispute, and dispute;
but now he stands silent before his Judge. He stands like a convicted felon,
who, when he is asked by the judge if he has anything to say in stay of
sentence, lays his hand on his mouth, and, blushing scarlet, confesses by his
silence that he deserves to die. This is the man with whom mercy can work
her will.
5. Lastly on this point, memory now comes in, and revives the reproach of youth
Memory is a very terrible torture to a guilty heart. Son, remember! is one of
the voices heard in hell. I was ashamed, yea, even confounded, because I did
bear the reproach of my youth. I can only compare the sinner with a
quickened memory to one who is travelling across the plains of Russia
dreaming in his carriage, and on a sudden he is aroused by the sharp bark of
a wolf behind him; and this is followed up by a thousand cruel voices of
brutes, hungry, and gaunt, and grim, all eager for his blood. Hearken to the
patter of those eager feet I the howls of those hungry demons! Whence came
they? You thought that your sins were dead long ago, and quite forgotten.
See, they have left their tombs! They are on your track. Like wolves, your old
sins are pursuing you. They rest not day nor night. They prepare their teeth
 to tear you. Whither will you flee? How can you escape the consequences of
the past? They are upon you, these monsters, their hot breath is in your face;
who can now save you? Only a miracle can rescue you from the reproach of
your youth; will that miracle be wrought? May we dare to look for it? We
have something better than a mere hope to set before you. Jesus meets these
packs of wolfish sins. He interposes between us and them! He drives them
back! He scatters them! There is not one of them left!

III. Now we will turn, and HEAR GOD AT THIS TURNING-POINT. Is Ephraim My
dear son? is he a pleasant child? Does this look like a question? The answer has
been already given in the ninth verse: I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is My
firstborn. The gracious Lord sees Ephraim sore with chastisement, spent with
weeping, pale with shame, and moaning with agony, and then his sonship is
acknowledged. He bends over the crushed one, and cries, This is My son. This is My
dear child. How gracious on Gods part to acknowledge the guilty rebel as a son!
See here is love acknowledging the object of its choice, love confessing its near
relationship to one most unworthy and most sorrowful. Then behold the same love
well pleased. The Lord does not merely say, Ephraim is My son; yea, he is My
child; but He calls him My dear son, a pleasant child. A pleasant child! Why, he
has been full of rebellion from his birth! Yes; but he confesses it, and mourns it; and
he is a pleasant child when so much holy sorrow is seen in him. Love takes delight in
repenting sinners. Notice, in this case, love in earnest. The Lord says, Since I spake
against him, I do earnestly remember him still God in earnest--that is a great
conception! God in earnest over one moaning sinner! God earnest in thoughts of
love, even when He bids the preacher tell the offender of the wrath to come. Notice,
next, love in sympathy. Ephraim is bemoaning himself, and what is the Lord doing?
He says, My bowels are troubled for him. Gods heart is wounded when our hearts
are broken. Then comes love in action: I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the
Lord. I am so glad to think that the surely is found again in this place. Surely
God heard Ephraim bemoaning; Surely he said that he was turned, and now God
says, Surely I will have mercy upon him. The Lord God puts His hand and seal to
it. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Presumptuous sins call for profound repentance

The will of man is a sour and stubborn piece of clay, that will not frame to any
serviceable use without much working. A soft and tender heart, indeed, is soon rent
in pieces, like a silken garment if it do but catch upon any little nail; but a heart
hardened with a long custom of sinning, especially if it be with one of these
presumptuous sins, is like the knotty root end of an old oak that has lain long a-
drying in the sun. It must be a hard wedge that will enter, and it must be handled
with some skill too to make it do that; and when the wedge is entered, it will endure
many a hard knock before it will yield to the cleaver, and fail in sunder. And indeed
it is a blessed thing, and to be acknowledged a gracious evidence of Gods
unspeakable mercy to those that have wilfully suffered such an unclean spirit to
enter in and to take possession of their souls, if they shall ever be enabled to out him
again, though with never so much fasting and prayer. (Bp. Sanderson.)

Thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised.--

Chastisement resulting in penitence

I. An acknowledgment.
1. Inefficacy of former corrections.
2. Though corrections are calculated to produce amendment, it is evident, from
observation and experience, they often fail in accomplishing the effect.
3. Ephraim is here represented as reflecting upon it. (Proximate causes of the
inefficacy of correction by itself.)
4. Inattention to the hand of God, and, as a natural consequence, their
neglecting to pass from the contemplation of their sufferings to their sins.
Religion begins with consideration.
5. In the serious purpose of a religious life, formed under afflictive
dispensations, too many depend entirely upon resolutions formed in their
own strength. To such purposes may be applied the beautiful image of
Nahum: And as the great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the
cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not
known.

II. The prayer.

1. The plea of necessity. There is no other resource.
2. To entreat God to turn is not to ask an impossibility. The residue of the Spirit
is with Him.
3. It is worthy of His interposition. The turning of the heart is a fit occasion on
which Omnipotence may act.
4. The plea may be enforced by precedents. It implies no departure from His
known methods.
5. We may force it by a reference to the Divine mercy. (Robert Hall, M. A.)

To the penitent.

I. The soliloquy of the penitent.

1. He reflects on his misimprovement of the dealings of God with him.
2. He prays for converting grace.
3. He describes the working of his mind.
4. He assigns special prominence to his youthful sins.

II. The address of God to him.

1. He owns him as a son.
2. He declares that he has a place in His memory.
3. He expresses His sympathy with him.
4. He promises him mercy. (G. Brooks.)

The cause and design Of affliction

 I. GOD IS TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED AS THE AUTHOR AND DISPENSER OF ALL
AFFLICTIONS. He consented to all those disarrangements of the creation that inflict
numberless ills and distresses, that He might have materials ever at hand for the
affliction of the children of men for sin, in a state of probation, and for urging them
to use the means provided for their recovery. He dispenses all the particular causes
of affliction, in their movements and operations: they are all His servants, and obey
His orders, however complicated their movements, however long or short the series
in which they are connected with each other, and made dependent the one upon the
other: they are all a large army, whose movements, individually and collectively, are
according to His plans and His will.
1. This truth approves itself to our reason. It follows from the fact of His
sustaining care over the world, as necessary for its provision: for all created
things depend on Him; they could do nothing without His permission.
2. This truth is further confirmed by the consideration of the meritorious cause
of affliction, which is sin. For sin is originally committed against God: it
violates His law, contemns His authority, and despises alike His favour and
HIS frown. Who, then, is to dispense affliction as the punishment of sin, but
He who is its supreme avenger?
3. This is a truth, which when once confirmed by our reason, is recognised
throughout Scripture. There you find that the afflictions of the children of
men are dispensed to them in number and in measure.

II. THE DESIGNS OF GOD IN AFFLICTIONS ARE VERY MERCIFUL AND BENEFICENT.
Afflictions never sow the seed of religion in the soul; they cannot do this: but they
may soften the soil to receive it, and subserve the growth and the expansion of the
seed when sown. They are lessons of instruction to the mind through the senses;
corroborating those lessons of truth from revelation to the mind alone; and which
are responded to by the conscience.
1. Afflictions are to bring men to become the people of God.
(1) That this is their design will appear from their nature. For what is the
obvious drift of that disappointment through the whole course of life, in
finding happiness from the world--what is the drift of it but to cure us of
that mistake, to direct our attention from that object, and to lead us to
Him in whose favour is life? What is the apparent design of certain
miserable effects to certain sins, but to breed in us remorse for those
sins, and wean us from them? Again, what is the obvious design of those
particular evils that belong to our individual condition? What are they,
what can they be, but a thorn planted in our earthly nest, to make us
arise and go out of it, and seek for happiness in some higher quarter?
(2) That such is their design, is evident from the result of them in many
cases.
2. When men become the people of God, afflictions do not cease; on the
contrary, there are new reasons for the continuance of the former ones, and
even for the addition of others to them. But these reasons are all wise and
good, and the ends they have in view are so benign and gracious, as far more
than to reconcile us to them.
(1) They are to prevent them from degenerating, so as to settle in a state of
declension and backsliding from God. And this they do by bringing their
 sins to their remembrance in a timely way, before they can make head
against them.
(2) They are employed to recover man from a state of backsliding. (J.
Leifchild.)

Discipline
There are chastisements in life which cannot be classed amongst great afflictions.
There are little checks, daily disappointments, irritations, defeats, and annoyances
shadows which cherquer what else would be a sunny way--things which themselves
cannot be treated with dignity, yet they tease and wear the heart.

I. HUMAN LIFE IS ESTABLISHED UPON A DISCIPLINARY BASIS. There is a yoke

everywhere--in sin, in repentance, in grace. No one can have everything just as he
wants it. Man is made to feel that there is somebody in the world besides himself.
We are made to feel that our very life is a vapour, and that every respiration is but a
compromise with death. We should ask ourselves the meaning of these things.
Discipline touches the whole scheme: boy at school, going from home, bodily
affliction, oversights and miscalculations, losses, &c.

II. The value of discipline depends upon its right acceptance.

1. We may become desperate under it: as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke.
Men may mourn, complain, rebel; they start arguments against God; they
justify themselves; they become lost in secondary, agencies and incomplete
details.
2. Then there is a better way. Ephraim bemoaned himself, repented before
God, and said, Turn Thou me, and I shall be turned. In this state of mind
see--
(1) Self-renunciation.
(2) Devout and joyful confidence in Gods sovereignty and graciousness.
Application--
1. There is a yoke in sin. The way of transgressors is hard.
2. There is a yoke in goodness. It is often difficult to be upright, noble, holy.
3. God helps the true yoke-bearer. We must bear a yoke; say, shall it be the bad
yoke, or the yoke of Jesus Christ? (J. Parker, D. D.)

Sanctified affliction

I. The acknowledgment made by the people of God in times of trouble.

1. That the affliction is from the Lord.
(1) It is this circumstance--this perception of God, as connected with
affliction--which imparts to the afflicted an air of something more than
solemnity and seriousness, as if the man had sustained a loss--were
deprived of what was agreeable to him. It invests him, in some measure,
with a character which inspires awe. He knows that God has been dealing
with him. And yet, on this part of my subject, let me offer a word of
counsel to the people of God. It is true that you believe that all afflictions
 come from the Lord.
(2) Beware of resting satisfied with this as a part of your creed. Take care lest
you do no more than in words acknowledge that the Lord is the author of
your trouble.
2. That there is a necessity for improvement. This is the direction which the
gracious soul takes, when its afflictions are in the way of being sanctified. It
is submissive: it cannot question the act of the Lord: it is solemnised. But it
is more than all this. There is a disposition and desire to make the
dispensation an instrument of spiritual benefit and glory to God. To this
spirit and exercise believers are brought by several considerations.
(1) That the Lord does nothing in vain.
(2) That this is the declared purpose of the Lord in the visitations of trouble.
He calls His afflictions chastenings.
(3) That improvement and reformation have been the effects produced by
chastisement upon many.
(4) There is a felt necessity for improvement, as well as experience derived
from affliction in the past.

II. Some of the uses of sanctified affliction.

1. Thus do believers become intimately acquainted with their God. God is then
set before them in various aspects.
(1) In the character of a Sovereign.
(2) In the character of a Comforter.
2. Believers, when in affliction, know experimentally the value of their Saviour.
3. By affliction believers are weaned from the world. This is the result of their
consideration of the Lords dealings with them, and the work of His Spirit in
them. Affliction of itself will not wean us from the world. Some it only glues
more closely to that which is left. But when the solemn question upon a trial
or a bereavement is, What meaneth the Lord by this? the effect is
necessarily happy and useful. The meditation leads to the conclusion, that
these objects we have lost are but creatures--that as creatures they must be
regarded--and that God must have the first place in our affections and
hearts.
4. By affliction believers are quickened in the performance of duties.
(1) They are quickened in the duties which they owe peculiarly to God.
(a) They are quickened so as to be more serious and frequent in their
thoughts of God.
(b) They are quickened so as to inquire after Him in His Word.
(c) They are quickened in prayer. They pray after another fashion. They
pray as the needy to the God who hears.
(2) They are quickened in their duties to others. Sanctified affliction creates
a tender feeling for others. (J. Thorburn.)

Turn Thou me, and I shall be turned; for Thou art the Lord my God.
A pattern prayer for the penitent

I. A CONFESSION OF MORAL INABILITY. Gods words and mans thoughts both

declare this: the difference lies here that God does not let it be any reason for our
despair. Comp. Jer 13:23; Jer 17:1; Jer 17:4, with the saying of George Eliot, The
world does not believe in conversion, and the world is mostly right; and with this of
Cotter Morrison, The sooner it is perceived that bad men will be bad, do what we
will (though, of course, they may be made less bad), the sooner shall we come to the
conclusion that the welfare of society demands the suppression or elimination of
bad men and the careful cultivation of the good only There is no remedy for a bad
heart, and no substitute for a good one.

II. A PRAYER FOR DIVINE HELP. There is no hope for the sinner but in God. The
more absolute seems our own helplessness the more earnestly must we cry to Him.
God requireth that we do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with Him; but
He must give what He asks.

III. AN ALL-PREVAILING PLEA. For Thou art the Lord my God. Our confident
appeal is to Gods own nature as revealed by His Word, and with so much the more
assurance as His revelation is now more perfect (Heb 1:1-4). In Christ crucified and
risen is the supreme unfolding of Gods heart. As we look at Him we learn godly
sorrow for sin, and heart-trust in the abundance of the Divine pardon, while we are
quickened with His life given for us, and kindled by the flame of His love. (C. M.
Hardy, B. A.)

The stubborn sinner submitting to God

I. THE FEELINGS AND CONDUCT OF AN OBSTINATE IMPENITENT SINNER, WHILE

SMARTING UNDER THE ROD OF AFFLICTION. In this situation he is like a bullock
unaccustomed to the yoke; wild, unmanageable, and perverse. That such is the
natural temper of man, must be evident to parents and all others who are concerned
in the education of children. How soon do they begin to discover s perverse and
stubborn temper, a fondness for independence, and a desire to gratify their own will
in everything! and what severe punishments will they often bear, rather than submit
to the authority of their parents and instructors! This disposition, so strong in us by
nature, grows with our growth and strengthens with our strength; and to subdue it,
is the principal design of all the calamities with which we are in this world afflicted
by our Heavenly Father. Sometimes He afflicts sinners by taking away their property
and sending poverty, as an armed man, to attack them. At other times He corrects us
by depriving us of our relatives, who rendered life pleasant, by sharing with us its
joys, or helping to bear its sorrows. If these afflictions do not avail, He brings the rod
yet nearer, and touches our bone and our flesh. Then the sinner is chastened with
pain upon his bed, and the multitude of his bones are filled with strong pain; so that
his life abhorreth bread and his soul dainty meat. All these outward afflictions are
also frequently accompanied with inward trials and sorrows, still more severe.
Conscience is awakened to perform its office, and fills the soul with terror, anxiety,
and remorse. Now when God visits impenitent sinners with these afflictions, they
usually murmur, struggle, and reluctate, like a stubborn bullock unaccustomed to
the yoke, or a wild bull entangled in a net. This perverse and rebellious temper
manifests itself in a great variety of ways, as persons circumstances, situation, and
dispositions vary. Sometimes it displays itself merely in a refusal to submit, and
sullen, obstinate perseverance in those sins which caused the affliction. At other
times, impenitent sinners manifest their rebellious dispositions under the rod by
flying to the world for comfort, and plunging with increased eagerness into its
pleasures and pursuits, instead of calling upon God agreeably to His command, and
repenting of their sins. With others this disposition displays itself in a settled formal
endeavour to frustrate the will of God by sinning against Him with a high hand, in
open contempt of all His inflictions and threatenings. But the perverse, unreconciled
disposition of impenitent sinners most frequently appears in the increase of hard
thoughts of God, and proud, angry feelings towards Him, as if He were severe,
unmerciful, or unjust.

II. The new views and feelings which, through Divine grace, His afflictions were
instrumental it producing.
1. We here find the once stubborn and rebellious, but now awakened sinner
deeply convinced of his guilt and sinfulness, and deploring his unhappy
situation. He still complains indeed, but it is of himself and not of God. He
acknowledges the goodness, condescension, and justice of God in correcting
him. Perhaps more are convinced of sin, and brought to repentance, by
reflecting on their impious, unreconciled feelings under affliction, than by
reflecting on any other part of their sinful exercises.
2. We find this awakened, afflicted sinner praying. Convinced of his wretched
situation, and feeling his need of Divine aid, he humbly seeks it from his
offended God.
3. We find this corrected, mourning, praying sinner reflecting upon the effects of
Divine grace in his conversion. Surely, says he, after I was turned, I repented;
and after that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh: I was ashamed, yea,
even confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth. It is worthy
of remark, my friends, how soon the answer followed the prayer. In one
verse, we find Ephraim calling God to turn or convert him. In the very next,
we find him reflecting upon his conversion and rejoicing in it. And what were
the effects of this change, thus suddenly produced by Divine grace? The first
was repentance. The second was self-loathing and abhorrence.

III. A CORRECTING, BUT PASSIONATE AND PARDONING GOD, watching the result of
His corrections, and noticing the first symptoms of repentance, and expressing His
gracious purposes of mercy respecting the chastened, penitent sinner. In this
description God represents Himself--
1. As a tender father solicitously mindful of his penitent, afflicted child.
2. As listening to his complaints, confessions, and petitions. Certainly nothing in
heaven or earth is so wonderful as this; and if this language does not affect us
and break our hearts, nothing can do it.
3. God declares His determination to pardon him: I will surely have mercy upon
him. (E. Payson, D. D.)

Surely after that I was turned, I repented.--

Evangelical repentance

I. THE CONSTANT WAY AND MANNER WHEREIN TRUE GRACE DISCOVERS ITSELF, WHEN
ONCE IT IS IMPLANTED IN THE HEART. I repented, surely I repented. Agreeable to
this is the language of the prodigal (Luk 15:18). Old things are passed away with the
man that is born of the Spirit; his face is turned Zionward, and his eager steps show
how desirable and delightful are wisdoms ways to his renewed soul.

II. THE ONLY SPRING FROM WHENCE THIS AMAZING CHANGE DOTH ALWAYS PROCEED.
Surely after that I was turned, I repented. Grace first enters the heart, before it can
be discovered in the life and conversation. The God of all grace first of all draws us,
or else we shall never move towards Him (Joh 6:44). Had not the same mighty
power which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, been
exerted toward us, we should still have continued in the same conversation which
we had in times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of
the mind. But quickening grace opens the way to godly sorrow, and this always
issues in evangelical repentance (2Co 7:10).

III. An account of the progress of this great work in the hand cf the Spirit;
wherein the true nature of repentance unto life is clearly described.

I. What are the things in which the soul is instructed by the Spirit, when a
principle of grace is wrought in the heart?
(1) The Spirit begins His work, with leading the soul to the knowledge of sin.
(a) The Spirit shows us the nature of sin, as attended with guilt, whereby
we are obnoxious to the curse of the law.
(b) The Spirit shows the sinner the defiling nature of sin, as opposed to
the holiness of that God with whom he hath to do.
(c) The Spirit shows the sinner the many heinous aggravations
wherewith his sins in particular have been attended.
(2) The Spirit instructs the soul in the nature of pardoning grace and mercy,
which is the sweetest sound that an awakened conscience can ever hear;
the most agreeable message a self-condemning sinner can ever receive.
(a) The Spirit instructs the sinner that the privilege is attainable; that
there is forgiveness with God, that He may be feared.
(b) The Spirit instructs the sinner in the only way through which His
grace and mercy is to be attained; lets him know that an absolute God
is a consuming fire; and directs him to Christ Jesus, who is the way,
the truth, and the life.
(c) The Spirit instructs the sinner into the way through which pardon is
communicated to him. That it was obtained by Christ; that it is
received by faith; and that whosoever will, may take of the water of
life freely.
(d) The Spirit further instructs the sinner who the persons are to whom
this pardoning grace and mercy are applied. This He teaches, by the
absolute promises of the Word, which reach the case of the most
rebellious criminals.
 2. What are the various actings of the soul in consequence of these instructions?
(1) The soul thus instructed sorrows after a godly sort. This is the first
thing in which Gospel-repentance discovers itself to be genuine and of
the right kind; of which smiting upon the thigh is very expressive.
(2) The soul thus instructed is filled with shame and confusion of face,
attended with an utter hatred of the sins he hath been guilty of. was
ashamed, yea, even confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my
youth.
(3) The soul thus instructed hath an abiding sense of these things. He is not
weary of his rags to-day, and pleased with them again to-morrow;
humbled for sin now, and wallowing in the same mire and dirt anon: No,
I did bear (saith Ephraim) the reproach of my youth.
(4) The soul thus instructed is most sensibly affected with those sins to
which he hath been most addicted. Heart sins are bewailed by the sincere
Christian, and youthful transgressions are never forgotten by him.
(5) The soul thus instructed always applieth to the blood of Christ for
pardon. (J. Hill.)

The repentance of the truly converted

1. We notice this about the cry of the wanderer of the Old Covenant, resembling
herein the prodigal son of the New Testament--it is not like the utterance of
the heathen who had never known God. The powerlessness of man is indeed
brought out; for the words are, Turn Thou me, and I shall be turned; but
there is the remembrance still of a Father, of a Divine promise, a heavenly
home though long despised.
2. The text goes on to speak of the effect of this conversion, of the result of this
homeward journey: Surely after that I was turned, I repented. It is not a
sign of the truly converted heart, to spring at a bound from the
rebelliousness of a sinner to the rejoicing of a saint. Those who go most
frequently to the Holy Communion know best the gulf which separates the
two--they know in that nearness to Jesus Christ how far off they have been,
how unworthy they are.
3. It takes much teaching, much fatherly correction and chastisement, many
humble approaches to that altar which reveals the greatness of our burden,
ere the soul can thus fully and heartily repent. Most of us, like Ephraim, are
so unaccustomed to the yoke, through the easy, careless life we lead, that we
need much application of doctrine to ourselves, much reproof of our
personal faults, much instruction in righteousness.
4. It often happens that contrition of heart is granted long after maturity is
reached--so that much recollection is needed ere the whole life can be
reviewed before God. What is it which then disturbs us most? The
remembrance probably of those precious years wherein the character was
being formed--those priceless years, which might have witnessed the
moulding of our yet pliant will into the thorough obedience of Christ, but
which have been marked, instead, by a growing hardness and indifference
and selfishness, scarcely to be altered afterwards. I was ashamed, yea, even
confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth.
 5. God means us to feel the weight of these old chains: He speaks against us in
our wonderfully responsive conscience, writes the most painful truths
concerning us in His heart-piercing Word--and why? Exactly for the opposite
reason to that which makes Satan stand at our right hand to resist and
accuse us. God smites on purpose that He may Himself be troubled for us,
Himself have mercy upon us, Himself create a new thing in the earth, the
Incarnation of His own Eternal Son, to be the propitiation for our sins, the
renewer of our wasted youth and misused talents, the restorer of paths to
dwell in. (Canon Jelf.)

Repentance

I. REPENTANCE IS AN ABIDING CHARACTERISTIC, OR PRINCIPLE OF THE NEW HEART.

The heart itself is, by nature, impenitent. It has a natural fitness to sin, without
shame or ingenuous sorrow. The heart itself, by grace, is penitent, broken, contrite.
It has a fitness to repent, an aptitude to mourn ingenuously over sin. This is a
permanent principle, or source of sorrow for sin, and of turning from it unto
holiness.

II. Repentance is the gift of God.

1. The mind, to which God has granted repentance unto life, has a just sense of
its sins.
2. Another trait of the mind to which God has granted repentance, is an
appreciation of His mercy through Christ.
3. Another characteristic of the penitent man is, that he turns from sin.
4. Another particular in this state of the penitent man, is a constant endeavour
to obey God.

III. WHAT ARE THE EVIDENCES OF REPENTANCE UNTO LIFE? There are individuals
who seem to suppose that a serious attendance on the duties of private and public
prayer--a diligent reading of the Scriptures--a reverent hearing of the Word--and a
celebration of the ordinances appointed by God--are an evidence that they are born
of the Spirit. This is ample evidence of their love to the forms of religion, but no
proof of its power. It has dwelt in thousands whose hearts were not right with God.
There are others who seem to suppose that the abandonment of some external vice
is to be regarded as evidence of repentance unto life. Repentance unto life is, indeed,
attended by a reformation of morals, in all those who spiritually mourn over their
sins. But this reformation is the effect of an internal change. The soul of the penitent
man is careful to discriminate between good and evil--between light and darkness. It
struggles against every unholy propensity, and every sinful habit, and toils through
grace to extirpate them from the bosom. He exercises himself to have a conscience
void of offence, both towards God and man. These powerful principles in the
penitent heart diffuse their odour through the whole man, and cause him to be
widely different from what he was previously. Nor is this a temporary change in his
life. The whole course of an individual who is brought into the kingdom of God, is a
course of repentance. So permanent is it in this life, as not to be completed till the
saints are made perfect in glory. (J. Foot, D. D.)
Mercy to penitents

I. The favoured OBJECTS of Divine mercy. True penitents; men whose hearts are
humbled under a deep sense of sin; and who, by the Spirit and grace of God, are
brought to their right minds.

II. The abundant EXERCISE of Divine mercy.

1. In bestowing pardon.
2. In promoting peace; that rest of conscience which is the close attendant of
pardon, and accompanies the scriptural hope and evidence of it.
3. In affording preservation.

III. The absolute CERTAINTY Of Divine mercy.

1. The greatness of God secures it.
2. The goodness of God secures it.
3. The faithfulness of God secures it.
(1) He is faithful to His covenant; to His own solemn and voluntary
engagement to save guilty man, according to a prescribed method; and
this method is all of mercy, of abundant mercy, especially to the broken-
hearted penitent.
(2) He is faithful to His Word. This is the revelation of His covenant; its
statement to us in direct promises and positive assurances.
(3) He is faithful to His Son.
(4) He is faithful to Himself. The whole scheme of Divine mercy is adapted
and intended to display the glory of the Divine perfections; and can we
suppose that this end will be frustrated?
From the whole--
1. Let the impenitent tremble.
2. Let the humble hope.
3. Let the believer rejoice. (T. Kidd.)

Set thee up way-marks.--

Spiritual way-marks
Here is an invitation--

I. TO FOLLOW AN ANCIENT CUSTOM. Not all old customs bad, the good filtrates
through all time. It is a holy duty to follow in the good, tried paths of the just men
made perfect.

II. To keep alive our spiritual experiences.

1. While faith obeys implicitly, aids are not rejected.
2. To recount becomingly our experiences serves two ends: we put God in
remembrance; we keep Him in remembrance.
3. Our experiences may be such as--
 (1) Past grace received.
(a) The grace to know,
(b) And the grace to love.
(2) Past strength renewed.
(3) Wonderful deliverance from fears.
(4) Help in trouble.
(5) Times of sweet communion. Thus we put in practice the word, forget
not all His benefits.

III. To put up lasting memorials.

1. All our spiritual privileges may be as way-marks set up.
2. Blessed hours of devotion and times of sweet communion.
3. The Gospel of a holy life in the common lot for ever.

IV. TO HAVE A REGARD FOR POSTERITY. Sinners will need directing, saints will
require comforting, workers with flagging energies must be stimulated. Then set up
your way-marks. The records of our experience will stand out like milestones, and
all shall be as inspiring testimony to the faithfulness of Him who has promised
neither to leave us nor forsake us. (John Jones.)

I did bear the reproach of my youth.--

Sin the reproach and shame of youth

I. Sin is of a reproachful nature.

1. It flings an unrighteous reproach on God and others.
(1) Let us begin with others. Friends and families are often disgraced by the
sinners that belong to their houses: They are frequently ashamed of
them, and reproached for them; they are ashamed to think, speak, or
hear of them, to see or own them; and many are apt to reflect, sometimes
indeed with too much reason, but at others without cause, as if their
parents, their masters, or their other relations and friends, who have
been most conversant with them, and might have had the greatest
influence over them, have not taken proper care to counsel, caution, and
restrain them.
(2) But what is still infinitely worse, is that their iniquities throw the most
vile and unrighteous reproach upon the holy and blessed God Himself, as
if He were not what He is, and were not to be treated with the reverence
and honour that are His due. Sin reproaches Gods perfections, His name
and His image, as if they were not worthy to be maintained with honour;
it reproaches His workmanship in man, as if a creature had come out of
His hand unworthy of Himself to be the author of; and it furnishes
occasions to other sinners to reproach and blaspheme His blessed
majesty.
2. It is a just reproach upon sinners themselves. It is the disgrace of their nature,
it disrobes it of all its glory, defaces the beauteous image of God in which it
was at first created, and debases it into the odious likeness and deformity of
 the devil, and of the brute.

II. THE SINS OF YOUNG PERSONS MUST NEEDS BE THE REPROACH OF THEIR YOUTH.
Youth is indeed the most amiable age of life. It is the time for beauty and ornament,
for activity and vigour, for gathering and improving in all that is excellent and
desirable, and for pursuing after everything that is honourable and glorious. It is the
time of expectation and hope, and the time of their own chief delight, and of others
delighting in them. But sin stains all this glory of their youth, it sweeps away their
lovely bloom, it depraves and perverts their vigorous powers, and makes them only
so much the more capable of becoming despicable and vile; they are thereby daily
heaping to themselves infamous and destructive things; they glory in their own
shame; sport themselves in their own vain and foolish deceivings; and give
melancholy prospects of growing up, the shame and torment of their friends, and
the pests, instead of the blessings, of the rising generation; and they arc in the direct
way of entailing all misery, for this world and the next, upon themselves.

III. A time is coming, when, one way or other, they will bear this reproach.
1. There is a bearing it, in the fruits and effects of their sins. They are the source
of many sorrows; they often bring great and numerous distresses upon
sinners in the way of Gods righteous judgment, and by the natural operation
of their iniquities themselves.
2. There is a bearing the reproach of youth, in being reproached by others for
their sins. Some sins bring such a reproach upon young men and women, as
they can never get rid of all their days (2Sa 13:12-13; Pro 6:32-33).
3. There is a bearing the reproach of youth, in the reflections of their own
consciences upon their sins.

IV. When they come to bear the reproach of their youth, they will be ashamed,
yea, even confounded at it.
1. Young people will be ashamed, yea, even confounded at the reproach of their
youth, when they come to bear it in the way of Gods mercy to them.
2. Young people will be ashamed, and even confounded at the reproach of their
youth, when they come to bear it in the way of Gods wrath against them.
Reflections--
1. Let young and old think seriously with themselves, which of these is, or is like
to be their condition.
2. How should Christ and His Gospel be prized and improved, to take away the
reproach of your youth! (John Guyse, D. D.)

Is Ephraim My dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spake

against him, I do earnestly remember him still.--
A pleasant child
Within one circle, one limited circle, a pleasant child is always a centre of the most
engrossing interest and delight. Nor is the blessing of such a child confined
exclusively to the home circle. The neighbourhood, the community, the Church of
God are sharers in it. Along the street, in all the modest duties and interchanges of
daily life, in the hour of play, and wild exuberance of youthful feeling, in the Sunday
School and sanctuary--everywhere and in all places, s pleasant child is a perpetual
comfort. Heaven lies about him.

I. CHEERFUL OBEDIENCE IS A CONSPICUOUS TRAIT IN A PLEASANT CHILD. Cheerful, in

distinction from compulsory obedience. It will not be a sacrifice, forced out of him
by overstrained prerogative, or rigorous compulsion, but rather the spontaneity of a
loving, loyal heart. It will be a high sense of what is due from the offspring to the
progenitor--a willing and cheerful consent to the known precepts and principles
established at home. It not only yields readily to each expressed and absolute
command, but goes beyond and acts continually upon what is implied, and
expected, under the parental rule. It anticipates the audible prohibition: it waits not
for the check or caution, for the law once revealed is thenceforth written on the
mind and heart. Knowing that to do right, is the measure of that law, the constant
aim will be to do right, whether it is expressly required or not. What a contrast there
is--what a vital and tremendous difference--between such a child and his opposites
son whose nature revolts at all the proper constraints of home, and puts scorn upon
its holiest claims of honour and duty; a petulant, self-willed, wrongheaded son, who
lives in his father s house, like a wild beast in a cage; who files in the face of
authority, and bursts into uncontrollable fits of rage at the slightest reproof, and
dares to turn upon those who support and cherish him, with words of abuse and
malediction; a son who can look into the pleading face of the mother that bare him
and laugh at her counsels, or the father that begat him with open contempt and loud
dispute, and oh, the difference, who can measure it? Often have agonized parents
been known to declare, that to have laid the child in his grave, would have been far
easier than to have borne the daily inflictions of his wilfulness and evil behaviour
(Pro 22:25). Nor is this without an impressive lesson for parents. Remember this
solemn truth--the obedience due to you is enshrined in a universal and unqualified
law. What is your example--what is your course of life? Your children are
commanded to honour you, and they will usually do so, by adopting your practice.
What is it?

II. REVERENCE IS A PRINCIPAL FEATURE IN THE CHARACTER AND DEPORTMENT OF A

PLEASANT CHILD. It is not servility of which I speak, or an abject, self-distrusting
spirit, which shrinks and cringes in the presence of authority or age. I would rather
define it to be a due and noble appreciation of what belongs to parents and all
superiors, including also a chastened respect for whatever is sacred or august. The
true filial sentiment, as an excellent writer has said, will show itself in the tone of
manners. You may detect the grace of this living sentiment, in the unnumbered
offices that diminish a fathers or a mothers care, or relieve their troubles. What
exceeding beauty is there in the gentle, modest kindnesses that childhood and youth
may throw around the hearthstone--the refined address--the unobtrusive
attentions--the willing proffers of service! Do you ask if this be reverence? Yes--and
but one rivulet from the fountain-head, for children have it in their power, if they
have it in their hearts, not only to sweeten home with their courteous demeanour
and ready will, but to be like attending angels there, in all that contributes to
household peace and order: and when amidst the uncertainties of this mortal life,
adversity or sickness invade their circle, and a shadow falls, what a blessing may
arise from their hushed solicitude and consideration--what relief, more potential
than all the arts of medicine, may they bring to the aching pillow, or the chamber of
convalescence, by their tender assiduities. But more than this, a truly reverent child
will ever be glad to adapt himself to all the varying circumstances and conditions of
his fathers house. If the sun of prosperity cease to shine upon it, or a necessity for
frugal expenditures suddenly arise, he will not deepen the trial by a murmuring
reluctance. The habit of obeisance and affectionate respect thus cultivated at home,
will be displayed abroad and upon all occasions. Reverence will beautify all the ways
of a pleasant child, and become his characteristic mark.

III. EARLY PIETY. Hitherto your attention has been drawn only to the branches
and specimens of the fruit--this is the root of the tree. If the trunk is vigorous, if the
boughs are luxuriant and well laden, hanging over the wall of the domestic garden,
so that even the wayfarer may delight in their shade, it is altogether traceable to a
spring of fatness, a hidden life beneath the ground. In like manner, the mind and
affections of childhood, nurtured by godly counsels, quickened and enlightened
beneath home culture, pleased and persuaded by the gentle tones of a mothers
voice, and freshened by the ever-descending dews of heavenly grace, will steal forth
upon the outward life in visible forms of fruit and flowers, and manifold
attractiveness. We shall see that conscientiousness--that sense of the Divine
presence--that shrinking from sin, because it is offensive to God--that love of purity
and truth, which is so much to be admired--that interest in whatsoever things are
lovely and honest, and of good report--that trusting, prayerful, guileless temper,
which looks upward for help, and would not willingly go astray. Who can express the
comeliness and beauty which rest upon such a child? (W. F. Morgan, D. D.)

The Divine mercy to mourning penitents

The text naturally resolves itself into three parts. First, we find the careless,
resolute, impenitent, reduced by chastisement to a sense of his danger, and the
necessity of turning to God; and yet sensible of his utter inability, and therefore
crying for the attractive influences of Divine grace. The attractive influences of
Divine grace are granted, and he is enabled to return; which introduces the second
branch of the text, in which the new convert is represented as reflecting upon the
efficacy of converting grace, and the glorious change wrought in him by it. While the
returning prodigal is venting himself in these plaintive strains in some solitary
corner, his Heavenly Fathers bowels are moving over him. The third part of the text
represents the blessed God listening to the cries of His mourning child.

I. THE RETURNING SINNER UNDER HIS FIRST SPIRITUAL CONCERN, WHICH IS

GENERALLY PREPARATORY TO EVANGELICAL REPENTANCE. Where shall we find him?
What is he doing? He is not congratulating himself upon the imaginary goodness of
his heart or life, or priding himself with secret wonder in a rich conceit of his
excellences; but you will hear him, in his sorrowful retirement, bemoaning,
condoling himself. He sees his case to be really awful and sad, and he, as it were,
takes up a lamentation over himself. He is no more senseless, hard-hearted, and
self-applauding, as he was wont to be; but, like a mourning turtle, he bewails
himself. Thou hast chastised me. This, as spoken by Ephraim, had a particular
reference to the Babylonish captivity; but we may naturally take occasion from it to
speak of those calamities in general, whether outward or inward, that are made the
means of alarming the secure sinner. There are many ways which our Heavenly
Father takes to correct His undutiful children until they return to Him. Sometimes
He kindly takes away their health, the abused occasion of their wantonness and
security, and restrains them from their lusts with fetters of affliction (Job 33:19,
&c.). Sometimes God awakens the sinner to bethink himself, by stripping him of his
earthly supports and comforts, his estate, or his relatives, which drew away his heart
from eternal things, and thus brings him to see the necessity of turning to God, the
fountain of bliss, upon the failure of the streams (2Ch 33:11-12). Thus also God
promises to do with His chosen (Eze 20:37; Psa 89:32; Pro 22:15; Pro 29:15). But
the principal means of correction which God uses for the end of return to Him is
that of conscience; and indeed without this, all the rest are in vain. It is conscience
that makes the sinner sensible of his misery and scourges him till he return to his
duty. Conscience is a serpent in his breast, which bites and gnaws his heart; and he
can no more avoid it, than he can fly from himself. Its force is so great and universal
that even the heathen poet Juvenal, not famous for the delicacy of his morals, taught
by experience, could speak feelingly of its secret blows, and of agonising sweats
under its tortures. Let not such of you as have never been tortured with its remorse,
congratulate yourselves upon your happiness, for you are not innocents; and
therefore conscience will not always sleep; it will not always lie torpid and inactive,
like a snake benumbed with cold, in your breast. It will awaken you either to your
conversion or condemnation. Therefore now submit to its wholesome severities,
now yield to its chastisements. Such of you as have submitted to its authority, and
obeyed its faithful admonitions, find it your best friend; and you may bless the day
in which you complied with its demands, though before Divine grace renewed your
heart, your wills were stubborn and reluctant; and you might say with Ephraim, I
was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke. You see the obstinate
reluctance of an awakened sinner to return to God. Like a wild young bullock, he
would range at large, and is impatient of the yoke of the law, and the restraints of
conscience. He loves his sin and cannot bear to part with it. He has no relish for the
exercises of devotion and ascetic mortification; and therefore will not submit to
them. The way of holiness is disagreeable to his depraved heart, and he will not turn
his feet to it. But the happy soul, on whom Divine grace is determined to finish its
work in spite of all opposition, is suffered to weary itself out in a vain resistance of
the chastisements of conscience, till it is obliged to yield, and submit to the yoke.
And then with Ephraim it will cry, Turn Thou me, and I shall be turned. This is the
mourning sinners language, when convinced that he must submit and turn to God,
and in the meantime finds himself utterly unable to turn. Never did a drowning man
call for help, or a condemned malefactor plead for pardon with more sincerity and
ardour. If the sinner had neglected prayer all his life before now, he flies to it as the
only expedient left, or if he formerly ran it over in a careless unthinking manner, as
an insignificant form, now he exerts all the importunity of his soul; now he prays as
for his life, and cannot rest till his desires are answered. The sinner ventures to
enforce his petition by pleading his relation to God, Turn me; for Thou art the Lord
my God. The awakened sinner is obliged to take all his encouragement from God,
and not from himself. All his trust is in the Divine mercy, and he is brought to a
happy self-despair.

II. AS REFLECTING UPON THE SURPRISING EFFICACY OF GRACE HE HAD SOUGHT, AND
WHICH WAS BESTOWED UPON HIM IN ANSWER TO HIS PRAYER. When the Lord exerts
His power to subdue the stubbornness of the sinner, and sweetly to allure him to
Himself, then the sinner repents; then his heart dissolves in ingenuous disinterested
relentings we learn from this passage, that the true penitent is sensible of a mighty
turn in his temper and inclinations Surely after that I was turned, I repented. His
whole soul Is turned from what he formerly delighted in, and turned to what he had
no relish for before. Particularly his thoughts, his will, and affections are turned to
God; there is a heavenly bias communicated to them which draws them to holiness,
like the law of gravitation in the material world. The penitent proceeds, After that I
was instructed, I smote upon my thigh. The same grace that turns him does also
instruct him; nay, it is by discovering to him the beauty of holiness, and the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ, that it draws him. And when instructed in these, He
smites upon his thigh. This gesture denotes consternation and amazement. He is
struck with horror to think what an ungrateful, ignorant, stupid wretch he has been
all his life till this happy moment. The pardoned penitent proceeds, I was ashamed,
yea, even confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth. We are
ashamed when we are caught in a mean, base, and scandalous action; we blush, and
are confounded, and know not where to look, or what to say. Thus the penitent is
heartily ashamed of himself, when he reflects upon the sordid dispositions he has
indulged, and the base and scandalous actions he has committed. He blushes at his
own inspection; he is confounded at his own tribunal.

III. THE TENDER COMPASSION OF GOD TOWARDS MOURNING PENITENTS. While they
are bemoaning their case, and conscious that they do not deserve one look of love
from God, He is represented as attentively listening to catch the first penitential
groan that breaks from their hearts. What strong consolation may this give to
desponding mourners, who think themselves neglected by that God to whom they
are pouring out their weeping supplications! He hears your secret groans, He counts
your sighs, and puts your tears into His bottle. His eyes penetrate all the secrets of
your heart, and He observes all your feeble struggles to turn to Himself; and He
beholds you not as an unconcerned spectator, but with all the tender emotions of
fatherly compassion: for, while He is listening to Ephraims mournful complaints,
He abruptly breaks in upon him, and sweetly surprises him with the warmest
declarations of pity and grace. Is this Ephraim? &c. This passage contains a most
encouraging truth, that, however vile and abandoned a sinner has been, yet, upon
his repentance, he becomes Gods dear son, His favourite child. He will, from that
moment, regard him, provide for him, protect him, and bring him to His heavenly
inheritance, as His son and heir (Rom 8:38). (President Davies.)

The contrite comforted

What is it that wins back the heart to God? It is Gods free, full, everlasting mercy.
This attracts the sinner, melts, transforms, comforts, saves him.

I. A BROKEN HEART. Such was Ephraims; he had departed far from God, he had
fretted against the Lord, he had refused for a time to submit, but chastisement after
chastisement in mercy came, and at length he received instruction.
1. His froward course is strikingly set forth. A bullock unaccustomed to the
yoke, Ephraim had spurned the hand that would have guided him.
2. There was insight into, and confession of his guilt. Nothing so fit to describe
his state, am it was seen by his now enlightened eye, as the untamed bullock;
 like Asaph, his heart is grieved, he is pricked in his reins; like him he is
ready to exclaim, So foolish was I and ignorant, I was as a beast before
Thee.
3. There were the true breathings of prayer. Turn Thou me.
(1) The source is acknowledged whence this godly sorrow flows. After that I
was turned.
(2) There is application for mercy. Turn Thou me.
(3) Faith was in exercise in this prayer of Ephraim. Thou art the Lord my
God.

II. HEALING MERCY. The mercy that God gives is Godlike mercy; yea, He giveth
Himself to the believing soul in and by Jesus Christ.
1. God makes no mention of his sins.
2. He transcribes a fair copy of his confessions.
3. He treasures up his groans.
4. He addresses by the titles of affection the once wayward but now bemoaning
Ephraim.
5. God answers the one desire of the contrite heart. (F. Storr, M. A.)

Gods tender mercy to the penitent

We have in this passage two speakers, two personalities. It is so everywhere. All
religion which is worthy the name is the meeting, the intercourse, the converse and
conversation of two spirits; till they come into communication and contact there is
no religion, no possibility of religion in any but a barren and lifeless sense--the spirit
of the man, and the Spirit of his God. Ephraim is bemoaning himself, but it is in
Gods presence. I have surely heard him, God says, and that, not only because He
who made the ear must hear all things, but because the self-bemoaning is addressed
to God, as concerned, and interested, and acting in all. Thou hast chastised me, and
I was chastised; turn Thou me, and I shall be turned. Oh, let Ephraim never
bemoan himself in solitude. Let him shut the world out, but not shut self in. Let God
hear him. Let him lay bare the sins and the sorrows which follow the sins, in the
presence, consciously, discerningly--in the presence of the God against whom the
sins are committed, and from whom the consequent sorrows come. We know not
how it is, yet we do know that the whole character of the self-bemoaning is changed
at once by the thought that God hears it. Oh, when I bemoan myself upon my knees,
for the darkness in which sin has wrapped me round and round, for the chain which
binds me, for the misery which chills me, for the weakness which bathes, and the
experience of evil which paralyses me--when I do this upon my knees, there is a
glimmering at once, and peradventure at least, at once of hope that I am so made as
to feel that there is light in heaven, and that He before whom I kneel is already, in
virtue of creation, Himself what Ephraim here called Him, the Lord my God. We
pass from the one speaker of the text, and the one personality to the other, and,
having listened to the self-bemoaning of Ephraim in Gods presence, have yet to give
audience to the most pathetic words in all the Bible: Is Ephraim My dear son? God
is the speaker. Is he a pleasant child? for since I spake against him, I do earnestly
remember him still: My heart is troubled for him: I must surely have mercy upon
him, saith the Lord. You will not easily persuade us that the words were spoken of
Ephraim the tribe, or of even the ten tribes, and not of Ephraim the individual and
the man. It is because God feels thus towards man, that He feels thus towards the
nation. Never let us lose the collective life in the individual; never let us rob the
collective life whether of Israel or of England, of the precious promises written of it
in the Word. On the other hand, let us see an argument, as it were a fortiori, of the
love of God to the responsible sin-suffering soul in all that He speaks in the Bible of
that aggregate of souls which is the corporate being. We cannot err in taking the
words home. We honour God when we clasp to our bosom any one of His
utterances. It was for us if we can make it our own--and we can make this our own.
There is something unspeakably affecting in that thought, that the very heart of God
is, as He here says, troubled for the sinner that He has been obliged to speak against.
He would not have been true, He would not have been righteous, He would not have
been gracious, He would not have been God, if He had not spoken against him
whilst he was going astray. He must speak against him while he is bent upon his own
ruin; but oh! to hear Him saying that He earnestly remembers him still, even while
He speaks. Earnestly remembers him! What about him? We can answer that
question. He remembers that He made him in His own image; He remembers what
He made him for--holiness, happiness, a delightful life, full of love and joy, and
growing, maturing, expanding beauty, one day to shine as the sun in the kingdom of
his Father. But more, and much more than this. He remembers the man himself,
just as a parent remembers a son far away serving his country in India or Egypt; or a
son gone into the unseen country, oh! how to be missed and mourned; or a son--for
this is more appropriate--a son who has given him trouble, for whom he has had
endless anxiety, for whom his own pillow has been wet, night after night, with tears.
Yes, Ephraim has given God trouble. For Ephraim God left heaven, went after him
into his exile, shed His lifes blood for him. St. Paul said so at Miletus. What more
could He have done for him that He has not done! and, though it has been for a long
time in vain, though neither gentleness nor severity has succeeded with him, though
He might, if He had been a human parent, long ago have given him up, yet, being
God and not man, He earnestly remembers him still (Dean Vaughan.)

JER 31:29
In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and
the childrens teeth are set on edge.

The bequethment of the ungodly

There is this great difference between moral and physical evil--that men will use
all their carefulness to avoid the one, while every imaginable prohibition is
ineffectual to deter them from the other. It is quite evident that there is not in our
nature a principle of what we may call a moral self-preservation. Hence it is that,
whilst the Governor of the universe has not thought it necessary to interpose the
precepts of the statute-book that we may be warned against physical evil, He has
heaped together edicts and motives which all bear on the avoidance of moral evil.
We know, indeed, that such is the desperate proneness of man to misdoing, that all
this mighty instrumentality is practically of no effect; but it is singular to observe
how every motive by which our nature can be plied is brought into play, so that the
Divine Legislator has left nothing untried in order to save us from iniquity. If a man
be wrapt up in selfishness, why, he is told that health, and peace, and reputation will
be best consulted by his seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
Then, if he care only for himself--if he would not hate his own flesh, and mar his
own happiness, let him cultivate that godliness which hath the promise of the
present life, as well as that which is to come. And if a man be inaccessible to this
kind of attack--if he can be contented, for the gratification of his senses and the
indulgence of his passions, to brave the penalties of the law of the Almighty, the
Bible will open upon him another battery, and seek to move him by his affection for
others. Those yet unborn may be sufferers by your sin; for the days spoken of in our
text are assuredly not yet come--the days in which they shall say no more, The
fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the childrens teeth are set on edge. Yes, you
may say, it is not to be denied that God doth visit on the children the iniquity of the
fathers; but is this just? The innocent seem made to suffer for the guilty. Can this be
right? No, it cannot be just that the innocent should suffer for the guilty. If you can
show the children to be innocent, and therefore deserve nothing of what they
receive, you will make good your point--that the visitation is unjust; but to maintain
the thorough innocence of the children would be to maintain the purity of human
nature. If in themselves they deserve not to be visited with calamity, they must be
exceptions to the rule that men are born in sin and shapen in iniquity. It is certain
that every one born into the world is born in a state of wrath and condemnation: the
child, whether of believing or unbelieving parents, has not a particle of right to one
solitary blessing; and if, therefore, whatever be His reasons for making a distinction,
God withholds many blessings from this or that child, He withholds nothing to
which the child has a claim; and if He permits many calamities to fall on the child,
He permits nothing which is wholly undeserved. Wherein, then, can lie the violation
of justice if nothing be kept back to which there was right, nothing inflicted but in
the way of retribution? But still if you allow the strict justice of the measure, yon
may profess to think it hard that the child should have to endure what, but for the
parents offences, it would have escaped. Let us not, however, be carried away by
appearances. The child, for example, is of a diseased constitution, of a dishonoured
name, of broken fortunes; these constitute that setting the teeth on edge, which
you think it so hard that the fathers eating the sour grape should have caused. But
who can prove to me that the child is injured by the visitation? Nay, who can prove
to me that the child is not really advantaged? Are penury and affliction never
overruled for good? Is it necessarily an evil to have been born poor in place of rich--
to be of weak health instead of strong--to struggle with adversity, in place of being
lapped in prosperity! No man who feels himself immortal, who is conscious that this
confined theatre of existence is but the school in which he is disciplined for s higher
and nobler, will contend for the necessary injuriousness of want and calamity. We
are poor judges of injuries. What seems to be injurious, is so capable of being
overruled for good, that it may turn out beneficial. There may be many a tongue
which would never have been tuned to the high praise of God, had not the teeth
been set on edge by the sin of the father. Now there would seem no more important
and practical application of this subject, than the pressing home on parents the
duties which they owe to their children. Fathers of the present day will rise early
and late take rest, they will ply without ceasing at laborious occupations, and the
strength of intellect, and the powers of muscle shall be devoted with a like
prodigality; and the animating thing throughout the unwearied enlistment of every
talent and every moment in one engrossing pursuit shall be the upholding of a
family in sufficiency and obtaining the means of future independence. And it may
never occur to these fathers that if they so indulge the passion of accumulation as to
become the slaves of covetousness, or if they so engross themselves with the wharf
and the exchange as to leave comparatively no time for the Church and the closet--
or if the resolve to be rich induce them to depart from high-toned rectitude, and to
carry on trade with those shuffling and underhand tricks by which it is often
deformed--it may never, we fear, occur to them that in their zeal for their childrens
welfare they may be storing up for them calamity, and that with every pound they
lay by, they may lay by a worm which, if it sleep till their own death, shall then
struggle into life and gnaw at the core of their familys happiness. Yet, if then be
truth in the text, the father s sin goes down to his posterity: and where shall be the
profit of a large bequeathment of land or consols if there be fastened to it the
entailment of the Almightys displeasure? God has ordained that wickedness shall
defeat its own end; He may allow you to heap up wealth, but He puts the stamp of
His anger on the silver and the gold; and the nothing which s pious beggar has to
leave were a better inheritance than the coffers of ingots on which were impressed
the stamp of the Lords indignation. The days are not yet come, in which it shall no
longer be mid, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the childrens teeth were
set on edge. But the days shall come when the prophecy shall be accomplished,
even as will be that which asserts the universal extinction of war; though nation is as
yet ready to rise against nation, and no signs appear of the sword being beaten
into the ploughshare. Prophecies like these are commands as well as prophecies;
and their being fulfilled as predictions may greatly depend on their being obeyed as
precepts. Here is a clear practical lesson for parents. Would you save your children
from the having the teeth set on edge? Take heed, then, that you eat not the
sour grape yourselves! You may be sure that you then consult best for the interests
of your families when you consult most your own souls. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

The hereditary principle in Gods government of humanity

I. Man has been subject to this hereditary principle of government through all
past ages.
1. Its necessary working is secured by the connection existing between the
members of our race.
(1) How close is the tie of physical relationship subsisting between men and
generations! We are all made of the one blood, all descendants from the
same stock. Our parents transmit to us not merely their natures, but their
idiosyncrasies, their diseases, their characteristic propensities.
(2) How close, too, is the tie of social interdependence. Every man is
dependent upon his brother. One has something to impart which the
other requires.
2. It is registered in the everyday experience of humanity.
(1) You see it written in a man s history as the lineal descendant from a
particular family. Some inherit a princely fortune, and some a crushing
penury, from their ancestors. Their social status, too, is often ruled by the
position and conduct of those of whom they were born.
(2) You see it written in his history as the offspring of past generations. The
human plant does not grow up in its wild luxuriance and unassisted
 strength, but is trained against the walls and espaliers of law and
government, and pruned by the hand of public customs and manners.

II. This hereditary principle of the Divine government is to man no just ground of
complaint.
1. No man is made to suffer more than he actually deserves on account of his
own personal sins. The method is for the Judge of all the earth to determine
and no one else. In sooth, since suffering must come to the sinner, I would
sooner have it through parents than in any other way; for that medium
seems to afford some alleviating considerations. Love modifies suffering,
cools its fires on the nerves, and lessens its pressure on the heart.
2. The evil which thus descends to us from our ancestors is not to be compared
with that which we produce ourselves. With evils that are transmitted to you
there can be no remorse. You bear them as calamities; and you have the
grace of heaven, the sympathy of the good, and the smiles of an approving
conscience to enable you to bear them with calm magnanimity, and even
with triumphant exultation.
3. Whilst this hereditary principle of the Divine government entails evil, it also
entails good. Whence came our political constitution, which,
notwithstanding its defects, affords a better guarantee of personal liberty,
social order, and human progress, than any other government under
heaven? Did we elaborate it ourselves? No. It is the production of days. It has
grown out of the enlightening instructions, the importunate prayers, the
patriotic sacrifices and struggles of the best men of the generations that are
gone.
4. This hereditary principle tends to restrain vice and stimulate virtue. What
sacrifices will not parents of the ordinary natural affection make to serve the
interest of their children! Now the hereditary principle of government brings
this mighty impulse in the worlds heart to act in the restraint of evil and in
the development of good.

III. THE TIME WILL COME WHEN MEN WILL CEASE ENTIRELY COMPLAINING OF THIS
PRINCIPLE. In those days of universal knowledge, virtue, and blessedness, not a
solitary man will be found to complain of this hereditary principle in the Divine
government. Every man shall have such an insight into the nature of Gods
administration that he shall see the wisdom and feel the beneficence of this
principle. In those days the successive generations of holy and happy men will
clearly see that the good, that will then have come out of this principle to humanity,
will far out-measure all the evil that has ever grown out of its operation, through all
the past history of man. In those days, parents, through many a circling age, down
to the solemn day of doom, will transmit nothing to their offspring, but halesness of
constitution, elasticity of intellect, purity of felling, nobleness of soul, and honour of
name, knowledge, and blessed example, on which it shall leave its successor to lay
another, and thus on for centuries; until humanity shall find itself on that rich and
lofty soil, where the choicest productions of paradise will bloom for ever.
1. This subject serves to show the right which every reformer has to protest
against the sins of individuals.
2. It serves to show the solemn responsibility of the parental character.
 3. It serves to show that the best way to elevate the race is to train the young.
4. It serves to throw some light upon what is called original sin. A
deterioration of our nature, and a disturbance of our moral relations, is a fact
palpable to every eye, incontrovertible to every intellect, conscious to every
soul
5. It serves to indicate the philosophy of Christs incarnation. (Homilist.)

JER 31:31-37
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of
Judah.

The new covenant

The old and new covenants are placed in opposition to each other. The latter is
represented as being--

I. More effective in its provisions.

1. Spiritual.
2. Loving.
3. Cheerful.
4. Diligent.
5. Persevering.

II. More comprehensive in its range.

1. An important truth implied. It is the duty of those who have tasted that the
Lord is gracious, to be zealous in instructing those around them.
2. A cheering assurance given. They shall all know Me, &c.
3. A striking reason adduced. For I will forgive their iniquity, &c. To know God
savingly, is to know Him as a sin-forgiving God, and that the enjoyment of
His pardoning mercy is an evidence of our interest in all the other blessings
of the Gospel covenant.

III. MORE SECURE AS REGARDS ITS STABILITY. Thus saith the Lord, which giveth
the sun, &c. The carnal and hypocritical He would indeed cast off; but for the
encouragement of the spiritual seed of Israel, the most stable things in the universe
are referred to as a pledge of the immutability of His gracious purposes. (Expository
Outlines.)

The new covenant

I. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IS DESCRIBED AS A NEW COVENANT. This covenant

would be new, for it had predecessors, and God is said to have made a covenant with
Noah when He promised that a judgment like the flood should not be repeated, and
with Abraham when He promised Canaan to his descendants for an everlasting
possession, and imposed the condition of circumcision. But by the phrase the old
covenant is meant especially the covenant which God made with Israel as a people
when Moses descended from Mount Sinai. At later periods in Israels history this
covenant was again and again renewed--as by Joshua, at Shechem; as by King Asa,
at Jerusalem; as by Jehoida, the priest, in the temple, and by the priesthood and
people together, under Hezekiah, and under the auspices of Ezra and Nehemiah in
later days still, after the great captivity. It was renewed and it was continually
broken. It was a Divine work, and yet, through mans perverseness, it was a
continuous failure. The new covenant: it is a phrase which sounds somewhat
strange to the ears of Christians, who have been accustomed all their life to talk of
the New Testament. A covenant is a compact or agreement, and it implies
something like equal fights between those who are parties to it. Monarchs make
covenants or treaties with monarchs, nations with nations. Even when, as
sometimes happens, the government of a great Power enters into contracts with a
house of business, or with an individual, this is because the firm or the person in
question is for the purposes of the contract on terms of equality with the negotiating
government, as having at disposal some means of rendering it a signal service,
which, for the moment, throws all other considerations into the background. And
this general equality between parties to a covenant may be further illustrated by the
case of the most sacred of all possible human contracts, the marriage tie--that
marriage tie which, by the law of God, once made, can be dissolved only by death,
and in which it is the glory of the Christian law--I do not speak of human legislation
in Christian times--to have secured to the contracting parties equal rights. It is,
then, a little startling to find this same word employed to describe a relation
between the infinite and eternal God and the creatures of His hand. He wants
nothing when He has everything to give. Man needs everything, and can do nothing
that will increase the blessedness that is already infinite, or enhance a power which,
as it is, knows no bounds. But here are covenants between God and man, covenants
in which there seems no place for reciprocity, covenants in which indulgence or
endowment is all on one side, and acknowledgment, or, rather, failure, on the other;
covenants in naming which language seems to forget its wonted meaning, and to
betray us into misconceptions, which bring, to say the least, bewilderment and
confusion; and yet, in reality, when God speaks of making a covenant with man, He
is only giving one more instance of that law of condescension of which the highest
results appeared when He, the Infinite, took on Him a human form, when He, the
Eternal, entered as a man into fellowship with the children of time. A covenant,
then, is a contract or compact, and the question cannot but occur to us, Might the
covenant which God makes with His people not come to be called, as it is called, a
testament? for the words covenant and testament represent in our English Bibles a
single word in each of the original languages. The Greek-speaking Jews of
Alexandria, who some 200 years or more before our Lord turned the Old Testament,
bit by bit, from Hebrew into Greek, as it was wanted for use in the service of their
synagogue, and then made of these fragments the great version which we to-day call
the Septuagint, used the Greek word for will to translate the Hebrew word for
covenant, because they observed that the old covenant of God with the patriarchs
and with Israel did involve actual bequests such as was the possession of Canaan,
which could only be inherited in a distant future. And thus the Hebrew word
meaning a contract was strained, if you please, by its actual use to mean a testament,
and the Greek word meaning primarily, although not exclusively, a will acquired by
its associations the sense of a covenant or contract. He who by His providence
controls the course of human events and the currents of human thought does also
most assuredly take human speech so that it may do His work, and it is His doing
and not any chance irregularity that the original word in the New Testament has
thus come to mean both covenant and testament, for that which it was intended to
describe answered to both meanings. Religion as such, and the religion of the
Gospels especially, is at once a compact with God and a bequest from God. The
Gospel, I say, is a compact or covenant, because its blessings are provisionally
bestowed. They must be met by faith, hope, love, repentance. And it is also a will or
testament more obviously than was the Mosaic covenant, for it was made by our
Divine Lord when His death was in full view, and when He, who alone could use
such words without folly or without blasphemy, took the cup into His blessed hands,
and when He had given thanks He gave it to His followers, saying, Drink ye all of
this; for this is My blood of the New Testament, which is being poured out for you
and for many for the remission of sins. And yet this very testament is so
conditioned as to be a covenant too, and the solemn words to which I have just
referred were but an echo in an after age of the saying in the prophets, Behold, I
make a new covenant.

II. OF THIS NEW COVENANT IN THE GOSPELS THERE WERE ACCORDING TO JEREMIAH
TO BE THREE CHARACTERISTICS. We cannot suppose that he is giving us an exhaustive
description. He selects these three points because they form a vivid and easily
understood contrast between the new covenant and the old, between Christianity
and Judaism.
1. In those who have a real part in the new covenant the law of God was not to be
simply or chiefly an outward rule, it was to be an inward principle. The law
was to be no longer an outward rule condemning the inward life or even
rousing the spirit of rebellion: it was to be an inward operation, not running
counter to the will, but shaping it and claiming obedience, not from fear but
from love, and from love heightened to enthusiasm. It was to present itself,
not as a summons from without the will, but as an impulse from within the
soul; not as declaring that which has to be done or foregone, but as
describing that which it was already a joy to forego or to do; in short, a new
power, the Spirit of Christ, giving Christians s new nature; the nature of
Christ would be within the soul and would effect a change.
2. The second token of a part in the new covenant is the growth of the soul in the
knowledge of Divine truth. In ancient Israel, as now, men learned what they
could learn about God from human teachers, but the truths which they
learned, though inculcated with great industry, were, in the majority of
cases, not really mastered, because there was no accompanying process of
interpretation and readjustment from within. It was to be otherwise in the
future. In the new covenant the Divine Teacher, without dispensing with
such human instruments as we are, would do the most important part of the
work Himself. He would make truth plain to the soul, and would enamour
the soul with the beauty of truth by such instruction as is beyond the reach of
human argument and human language, since it belongs altogether to the
world of spirits. Ye have an unction from the Holy One, said St. John to his
readers, and ye know all things. Listen not, cries St. Augustine, too
eagerly to the outward words: the true Master sits within.
3. A third characteristic of the new covenant was to be the forgiveness of sins.
 This, although stated last, is really a precedent condition of the other two.
This is a true saying., and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came
into the world to save stoners, and this salvation of His must begin with
pardon, and this pardon is the crowning triumph of the new covenant
between God and man. (Canon Liddon.)

The new covenant

This particular portion of the chapter is the only clear evangelical declaration in
the Book. It reads more like Isaiah than Jeremiah. It must have been a great
gladness to that sad-hearted and sorrowful prophet to have this glimpse of coming
restoration and grace for his sinful and sorely afflicted people. He was all the more
glad to pour in this balsam because he had hitherto been giving them salt for their
wounds and wormwood to drink.

I. THE NEW PLANTATION. Hitherto it had been his sad and sorrowful duty to
declare to the people Gods purpose to root out, to pull down, and to destroy and
throw down; but now the time has come to fulfil his task of declaring Gods purpose
to build and to plant (Jer 1:10). The devastation of the lend of Israel end Judah
had been complete, the slain of the people vast in numbers; the utter taking away
and dispersing of the ten tribes had left but a remnant even before the captivity of
Judah. The promise of a restoration of Judah to the land would be, even when
fulfilled, but the return of a mere handful of people and cattle. So small, indeed, that
the land would still seem to be desolate for want of inhabitants, and in poverty for
want of cattle. In view of this very discouraging outlook the prophet speaks this most
comforting promise.
1. The sowing--I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the
seed of man, and with the seed of beast. The same promise was made to
Israel and Judah by Eze 36:9-11, and by Hos 2:23. This promise seems to
include the gathering in of the Gentiles as well, just as the same covenant
promise is made to them as to the returned Jews. The figure is one of the
greatest encouragement. The remnant of the people and cattle are as the
handful of seed for the ground, but God will so bless them that they shall
increase like seed sown before s great harvest that shall fill the land. The
same thought is expressed in Psa 72:16. This prophecy was scarcely realised
in the return from Babylon, but it had the beginning of its fulfilment then.
There is a suggestion here of the method of multiplication of the people; as
seed sown in the ground multiplies into a great harvest, so shall living
Christians multiply themselves in those whom they are the means of
converting to God. How Andrew multiplied himself when he found Peter,
who after was the means of winning three thousand souls at one preaching!
Stephen multiplied himself through Saul of Tarsus. In this latter case seed
was literally sown in the ground, and out of the martyr blood sprung the
apostle of the Gentiles.
2. The watching--And it shall come to pass that like as I have watched over
them to pluck up, &c., so will I watch over them to build and to plant, saith
the Lord. The growth of Gods kingdom in the earth among men is not a
mere process of nature. It goes on in the power of Gods special and
supernatural gifts of grace, and is carried forward under His watchful eye
and fostering care. Not one least convert makes his appearance in the world
 but that God watches over him to protect and defend. His promise is that
their soul shall be as a watered garden (verse 12). It is comforting to know
that Gods promise of grace and favour is as true as His threats have proved.
If sin has abounded to our ruin, let us know that grace doth much more
abound to our salvation.
3. The new individual relation between God and the people. The saying which
the prophet alludes to: The fathers have eaten a sour grape and the
childrens teeth are set on edge, shall no longer be in vogue when that day of
grace of which the prophet speaks comes. He condemns the saying, as does
Eze 18:1-3. There was a certain truth in the saying, but it had been perverted,
and the entire proverb had been quoted in such a way as to cast a reproach of
injustice upon God. As a matter of fact, there is a law of heredity, both
physical and moral, to which every one must submit. It is impossible to shut
one s eyes to the fact; but then according to Gods law, and especially
according to His grace, moral responsibility does not attach to this
hereditary transmission of consequences unless the heir consents to the
fathers sin and walks in his way. Any individual descendant may break the
heredity at any point he pleases by turning to the Lord. It is also true that in
former times God dealt with the nation as such, rather than with individuals.
The nations sin brought their present calamities upon them, in which many
individually righteous men suffered; but in the days to come the national will
give place to the individual relation. This for two reasons. First, the nation as
a whole will have learned righteousness in that day, and so it will come to
pass that the individual transgressor will be so conspicuously by himself, that
it will be seen at a glance that his suffering or judgment will rest upon the
fact of his own sin. Hitherto the individually righteous man had been so rare
in the nation that he was overlooked and swept away in the tide of the
nations punishment, just as Caleb and Joshua were carried back into the
wilderness for forty years with the whole unbelieving nation. But, second,
there is s distinct advance in thought by the prophet in the direction of that
individuality of relation which characterises the new covenant in distinction
from that which was so apparent in the old. Under the law the oneness and
entirety of the nation was maintained; under the Gospel the individual soul
is brought before God. Every one of us shall give an account of himself to
God (Rom 14:12). Nothing could more mark the great advance in thought
than this prophetic declaration.

II. THE NEW COVENANT. As if to explain and justify his new doctrine, he
announces the fact of a new covenant. This is the first distinct announcement of the
new dispensation under this title. This covenant is to differ radically in terms and
contents from the old covenant which God made with the children of Israel when He
brought them out of Egypt. Reference is clear to the New Testament dispensation, as
may be seen from Heb 8:1-13. By a covenant is meant an appointment by God. We
are not to understand that God entered into a contract with man. He appointed
certain things, promised certain things, upon certain conditions which the people
were to perform. But the covenant or agreement was wholly of His own making. The
old covenant, so far as the blessings were concerned, had failed utterly because of
the utter failure of the people to do the things which God commanded. Therefore
He has taken it away and substituted another covenant, based upon better
promises--one in which He not only proposes blessings, but undertakes to fulfil the
conditions upon which they shall flow in to us.
1. Some contrasts. The old covenant was broken by the disobedience of the
people, though in the administration thereof God had acted throughout as a
forgiving husband who was constantly compounding the sins of an unfaithful
wife. But this new covenant is kept and secured by the performance of all its
conditions by God Himself, acting in and through Christ (Heb 8:6). The old
covenant was a faulty one, never intended indeed to be the means of their
salvation, but only to remind them of their sin and show them their
helplessness. Not faulty in the thing it was intended to accomplish, but in its
final ability to save; whereas the new covenant, made in and with Christ for
our sakes, is a perfect covenant in terms and in fulfilment, and so does
secure our salvation (Heb 8:6-13; Heb 10:1-22; Rom 8:3-4). The old
covenant had a complicated and elaborate ceremonial, which could not be
understood or administered except by priests and ministers, and then but
imperfectly; the new covenant is simply based on the one complete offering
which Jesus Christ has made for all time and for all people; He being at once
tabernacle, priest, altar, offering, and minister. We simply, as sinners, go to
God by Him, confess that we are stoners, acknowledge that we are helpless
either to get rid of sin or maintain righteousness, and call upon Him to save
us. This He does fully, freely, and eternally by His grace, without any merit of
our own. Under the old covenant the provisions for the cancelling of sins
were not only imperfect but utterly futile, every offering made by man
through the priests being in fact but a remembrance of sin, not a removal of
it; whereas in this new covenant there is perfect provision (Heb 10:1-39.).
Therefore on its basis the forgiveness of sins is freely proclaimed (verse 34;
Heb 10:17-18).
2. Chief characteristics. The prophet mentions three--
(1) Inwardness. I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts. The terms of the old covenant, indeed its whole contents, were
written first on tables of stone and then all its detail in external laws,
which the people were compelled to bind between their eyes, on their
wrists, and fix them on the door-plates of their houses and the posts of
their gates. The whole relation was as between an outward law and an
outward obedience. The law commanded and the subject had to obey.
The law of Moses did not take account of thoughts or motives, only of
actions. The action was not that of faith, but of works. But this new
covenant is not so proclaimed and written. Jesus shows in the Sermon on
the Mount that true righteousness extends to thoughts and motives, and
so the true life of God is not in externals, but in heart relation to God.
Therefore we are Gods children, not by national or family relation, but
by a new birth, by faith in Jesus Christ. We obey the law not because of
outward pressure, but from inward conviction, not by the fear of external
punishment, but by the constraint of an inward love. In the new creation
which comes to believers under the new covenant (2Co 5:17), they are not
bound by a multitude of statutes and minute rules, but constrained by a
personal love to and for Jesus Christ. It is now an affectionate loyalty to a
Divine Person; no longer a fearful obedience to an external, cold and
pitiless law. An old writer says, in answer to an anxious inquiry as to
 what a Christian may and may not do: Love God and do what you
please. That is, if the heart is controlled by the love of God, if the law is
written in the heart, then the Christian will know what is right and wrong
by the instinct of the law of righteousness in him, and will only desire to
do that thing which heart and conscience teach him. Christ in us the hope
of Glory is the best law a Christian can have. This is to walk with God,
and to walk with God is certainly to walk in paths of righteousness.
(2) Knowledge. And they shall teach no more every man his brother, saying,
Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me from the least of them unto
the greatest of them, saith the Lord. I think the sense of this passage is
that, under the new covenant with the law in the inward parts and
written in the heart, the system shall not be dependent on intellectual
training or culture. Philosophical or scientific knowledge must be
painfully taught and more painfully learned. The young child is often as
enlightened in the things of the Spirit as the aged scholar; the ignorant
negro as intelligent in spiritual things as his cultured master. This
knowledge is for the least as well as the greatest, and is dependent not so
much upon teaching and learning as upon spiritual apprehension (1Co
1:13 -end, 2:1-10). So also John declares that, with this law in our hearts
and the Spirit of God for a teacher, we are not dependent upon anyone to
teach us the essential truth of the Gospel (1Jn 2:27).
(3) Universality. From the least to the greatest is an expression which
carries with it the idea of universality as to the race. The old covenant
was confined to the Jewish people, the new covenant, or the Gospel, is
for all people. The terms of the covenant of grace are the same to all;
the masses of heathendom are to be dealt with just as the so-called
Christian nations. There is no difference now, for as all have sinned, all
have been brought under the provisions of grace. Let the covenant, then,
be published abroad.
3. The contents of the Covenant. These are three--
(1) I will be their God. This was a promise under the old covenant; it shall
be more than confirmed under the new. They had forfeited the right of
having Him for their God by their breach of His covenant, but now that
which could not be theirs by law comes to be theirs by Grace. After His
resurrection, Jesus sent this message to His disciples (Joh 20:17). This is
the relation now. He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and
in the same close and blessed way He is our God and Father.
(2) They shall be My people. Not an outward and earthly people, but an
heavenly and spiritual. Every one shall be born of the Spirit, and each
one is so an offspring of God. This promise is often emphasised in the
closing Book of Revelation (Rev 21:3-4).
(3) The forgiveness of sin. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will
remember their sin no more (Mat 26:28). This is the great promise
which the apostle held out to the people: Be it known unto you, men and
brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of
sins (Act 13:38). We might multiply passages innumerable to show this
great blessing, and how it glows in the forefront of all those of the new
covenant. Not only does He forgive our iniquities, but He utterly forgets
 them (Psa 32:1).

III. ASSURANCES. The wonderful covenant promises are now guaranteed by such
assurances as must satisfy any people or any soul. God appeals to the heavens,
where He has set the sun, moon, and stars for lights by day and night, whose
permanence is accepted; He appeals to the ocean, which obeys some mysterious
power, and never fails. As long as they endure, so shall the terms of this covenant
stand. When heaven and earth can be measured and searched out, and the
ordinances of heaven and earth fail, then shall the seed of Israel fail, but not till then
(verses 36, 37). (G. F. Pentecost, D. D.)

Jeremiahs prophecy of the new covenant

1. Of two things we may be sure beforehand.
(1) The prophets hope of permanent well-being in the future wilt not be
based on any expectation of the people doing better, but rather on the
faith that God in His grace will do more for them and in them. The action
of Divine love may, nay, doubtless will, transform human nature so as to
make the people of the new covenant veritable sons of God; but the
initiative will lie with God, not with men; and just on that account the
new covenant will be stable as the ordinances of the sun and moon and
stars.
(2) Since the new constitution is to be introduced on the express ground of
dissatisfaction with the old, its provisions will be found to have a pointed
reference to those of the latter, and to be of such a character as to supply
the needful remedy for their defects.
2. Looking now into the prophecy itself, we find that the description which it
gives of the peculiarities of the new covenant exactly answers to these
expectations.
(1) God appears most conspicuously throughout as the agent. He is the doer,
man is the passive subject of His gracious action. He is the giver, man is
but the receiver. The old covenant ran, Now therefore, if ye will obey,
&c. (Ex 19:5). In the new covenant there is no if, suspending Divine
blessing and favour on mans good behaviour. God promises absolutely
to be their God, and to regard them as His people, and to insure the
relation against all risk of rupture by Himself making the people what He
wishes them to be.
(2) There is an obvious reference to the defects of the old covenant in the
provisions of the new. Whereas, in the case of the old, the law of duty was
written on tables of stone; in the case of the new, the law is to be written
on the heart; whereas, under the old, owing to the ritual character of the
worship, the knowledge of God and His will was a complicated affair in
which men generally were helplessly dependent on a professional class,
under the new, the worship of God would be reduced to the simplest
spiritual elements, and it would be in every mans power to know God at
first hand, the sole requisite for such knowledge as would then be
required being a pure heart.
(3) Whereas, under the old, the provisions for the cancelling of sin were very
 unsatisfactory, and utterly unfit to perfect the worshipper as to
conscience, by dealing thoroughly with the problem of guilt--of which no
bettor evidence could be desired than the institution of the great day of
atonement, in which a remembrance of sin was made once a your, and by
which nothing more than an annual and putative forgiveness was
procured--under the new, on the contrary, God would grant to His
people a real, absolute, and perennial forgiveness, so that the abiding
relation between I-lira and them should be as if sin had never existed.
3. We must enter a little into detail by way of further explanation.
(1) That the contrast is rightly taken in the first of the three conditions will
be disputed by few, if any. One cannot read the words, I will put My law
in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, without thinking of the
tables of stone which occupy so prominent a place in the history of the
Sinaitic covenant. And the writing on the heart suggests very forcibly the
defects of the ancient covenant, in so far as it had the fundamental laws
of life. The slabs on which the ten words are inscribed may abide as a
lasting monument, proclaiming what God requires of man, saying to
successive generations, Remember to do this and to avoid doing that. But
while the stone slabs may avail to keep men in mind of their duty, they
are utterly impotent to dispose them to perform it; in witness whereof we
need only refer to Israels behaviour at the foot of the mount of lawgiving.
Manifestly the writing on the heart is sorely wanted in order that the law
may be kept, not merely in the ark, but in human conduct. And that,
accordingly, is what Jeremiah puts in the forefront in his account of the
new covenant, on which restored Israel is to be constituted. How the
mystic writing is to be achieved he does not say, perhaps he does not
know; but he believes that God can and will achieve it somehow; and he
understands full well its aim and its certain result in a holy life.
(2) Dispute is most likely to arise in connection with the second condition,
referred to in the words, They shall teach no more every man his
neighbour, &c. The primary lesson we take to be, that spiritual
knowledge in the new time will take the place occupied by ritual under
the old. Spiritual knowledge is a kind of knowledge which can be
communicated to each man at first hand, and which indeed can be
communicated in no other way. God, as a Spirit, reveals Himself to each
human spirit, to each individual man who has a pure heart and who
worships in spirit and in truth. On the other hand, the knowledge of
positive precepts, such as those contained in the ritual system, can be
only obtained at second hand. One man, who has himself been taught,
must teach others. The reason, the conscience, or the heart could never
reveal Gods will as embodied in such carnal ordinances. And only on
supposition that a tacit reference to the ritual system is intended can the
full force of the words They shall teach no more every man his
neighbour be perceived. For what was it in the Sinaitic covenant that
made men dependent on their neighbour for the knowledge of God?
Surely it was the ritual system. The priest s lips kept knowledge, and men
had to seek the Torah, the needful instruction in religious ritual, at his
mouth. And it was a grievous bondage, a sure index that the old covenant
could not be the final form of Gods relation with men, but was destined
 one day to be antiquated and replaced by a better covenant with better
promises. For these reasons, we find in this part of the oracle concerning
the new covenant the prediction that the ritual law would form no part of
the final covenant between God and His people, and that in the good
time coming men should not be kept dependent on priests and far from
God by an elaborate ceremonial; but, taught of the Spirit, should worship
God as Father, offering unto Him the spiritual rational service of devout
thoughts and gracious affections. So it was understood by the author of
the Epistle to the Hebrews, who gives prominence to the ritual of the old
covenant as one of the things most urgently demanding antiquation (Heb
9:1).
(3) The third blessing of the new covenant, the complete and perpetual
forgiveness of sin, is so clearly defined that no dispute can arise as to its
nature; the only point open to debate is the feature of the old covenant,
to which it contains a tacit reference. We assumed that the mental
reference is to the provision in the Levitical system for the cancelling of
sin, especially the great day of atonement. Jeremiah evidently speaks as
one who feels that the old Sinaitic covenant, at this point as at others,
was seriously defective. It made elaborate arrangements for cancelling
the sins of ignorance and precipitancy committed by the people, so that
these might not interrupt their fellowship with God; and yet there was no
real effective forgiveness. For many of the more grievous offences there
was not even an atonement of any kind provided. The Levitical
forgiveness was thus both partial and shadowy; the problem of human
sin was not thoroughly grappled with. All this Jeremiah felt; and
therefore, in his picture of the ideally perfect covenant, he assigns a place
to a forgiveness worthy of the name--a forgiveness covering the whole of
Israels sins: her iniquities as well as her errors; and not merely covering
them, but blotting them out of the very memory of heaven.
4. But on what does this free, full, and absolute forgiveness of the new covenant
rest? The Levitical forgiveness was founded on Levitical sacrifices. Is the
forgiveness of the new covenant to be founded on the sacrifice of nobler
name? That is a question which the student familiar with his New
Testament will very naturally answer in the affirmative; and we all know the
answer given in the Epistle to the Hebrews. But if it be asked, What is
Jeremiahs answer to the question? we must reply, None. The glorious
thought that the ideals of priesthood and of sacrifice can then only be
realised when priest and victim meet in one person, does not seem as yet to
have risen above the horizon. And yet one may well hesitate to make an
assertion when he reads Isa 53:1-12, or even those significant words of
Jeremiah himself, I was like a lamb that is brought to the slaughter. The
idea that a man, and not a beast, is the true sin-bearer is struggling into the
prophetic consciousness. If the sun of this great doctrine is not yet risen, its
dawn may be discerned on the eastern sky. (A. B. Bruce, D. D.)

A new covenant

I. The blessings of the new covenant.

 1. God undertakes to write His law in our hearts.
2. God undertakes to establish a relation between Himself and us.
3. God undertakes to give us the knowledge of Himself.
4. God undertakes to pardon all our iniquities.

II. The difference between the old and new covenants.

1. In the freeness of their grants.
2. In the extent of their provisions.
3. In the duration of their benefits. (G. Brooks.)

JER 31:33
I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.

The newness of the covenant

A covenant is a contract or agreement between two parties, binding each to the
other, and equally binding on both. The eligibility of any such covenant depends on
the fitness of the parties concerned to carry out the terms, the conditions of it,--
when on both sides equally, there is alike the will and the power to act upon it, to
adhere to it. The two parties to the covenant referred to in the preceding verse, were
the God of Israel, and the house of Israel. It was made with their fathers in the
day that He took them by the hand, to bring them out of the land of Egypt. That
was the date of it. It was a covenant of mutual friendship or goodwill, and of mutual
service. He was an husband unto them (Jer 31:32), and it was something
equivalent, in respect of sacredness, to the marriage vow by which, as His chosen
bride, their fidelity was pledged to Him. Which covenant, however, they brake. Their
idolatry was adultery. The only claim which Israel had thereafter was to get a bill
of divorcement, and to be put away. Her merited doom would have been final
rejection,--to have had a full end made of her, as there was to be, as there has
been, of the other nations, such as Babylon, whither the Lord scattered her. Instead
of this, however, a wondrous announcement, prefaced by the word Behold, is here
made (Jer 31:33). The former covenant having come to nought, through the failure
of one of the contracting parties, God Says, He will make another,--He will make
another with the same treacherous house of Israel He will bind Himself to them
anew. But He Will so make it this time, as to ensure its being kept. He will become
bound for both the parties, He will undertake for the fidelity of His partner, as well
as for His own. It is the covenant of grace, of which the text speaks, as the
presently existing regime, the basis of the constitution, under which,-as the subjects
of Gods moral government, we now live; the covenant, one and alone, without a
second, like the one bow in the cloud, in the day of ram, spanning the world in its
embrace. It is new in form, though not in substance. It was new to Adam, the first
covenant-transgressor, when, instead of doom, he found in it deliverance. It was
new to Abraham, when his faith in it was counted to him for (or unto) righteousness,
when he received the seal of his acceptance with God, not after, but before he was
circumcised. It was new to as many of Abrahams posterity, under the law, as had
faith enough to discern its newness through the haze, and amid the shadows of that
comparatively dark economy,--devout men like Simeon, and devout women like
Anna, who waited for the consolation of Israel. It was new--a new revelation to the
world--when that new thing was created in the earth of which the prophet speaks
(Jer 31:22), the sinless humanity of Christ, when God sent forth His Son, &c. It is
new still to every newly awakened sinner, when he first gets a sight of it, reads it
with his own eyes, and finds out that there is a place in it for him. It is new in this
respect, that it shall never be old, or become obsolete, or go out of date, or lose its
charm, or disclose all that is wonderful in it, never, even in eternity! There are four
clauses, or articles, in it, setting forth the fourfold provision which He has made for
carrying it into effect, i.e., for carrying out what has been His invariable purpose, in
all His transactions with men as His creatures, from the beginning, even to bless
them, by making and keeping them obedient to Himself--to make them happy, in
their being obedient and holy.
1. Clear understanding. I will put My law into their mind. God does this when
He lets us see ourselves as the breakers of it, and Christ as the keeper, the
fulfiller of it,--when He reveals to us the length, the breadth, the spirituality,
the beauty of the law,--in Christs living and dying, obedience to it,--how it
was magnified by Him!
2. Permanent Impression. I will put My law into their mind,--to dwell there. I
will write it in their hearts, so as to be indelible, and so as to be ever at
hand, available, as a rule of duty, a standard of appeal.
3. There is, however, something more engaged for on our behalf than mere
acquiescence or approval. There is pleasure and delight. What is written in
the heart is the object of thy hearts esteem, love, complacency. And this is
true of Gods law; when He writes it, then He makes its very strictness look
beautiful, its severity seem sweetly reasonable. Its perfection becomes its
charm.
4. Where there is clear intelligence, and constant remembrance, and cordial
choice of the law, there will also be--there cannot but be--an abiding,
practical influence,---a loyal subjection to it, such as the legal, carnal mind,
that is so fond of making a bargain with God, will not, cannot yield. (J. G.
Burns.)

Means of the worlds conversion

I. WHAT INSTRUMENT WILL BE EMPLOYED TO BRING ABOUT THE BLESSED CONDITION

OF THE HUMAN FAMILY PREDICTED IN THE TEXT. This instrument is Divine truth, most
expressively called in the text, knowledge of the Lord: that is, the exhibition of the
Divine character, more than any other truth, before all consciences, is to be the
mighty engine by which heaven will work out the moral revolution of the world.
What is the moral law itself, but Gods character--a catalogue of His perfection,
written out in the form of precepts? The soul that knows what God is, sees
intuitively what itself ought to be. To know Him, is to know His character, His
government, His rights, His claims on us, and our duties to Him. It is to know His
plan of mercy,--His Son, and His Spirit--His pardoning and sanctifying grace.

II. BY WHAT METHODS AND AGENCY IS THIS GRAND INSTRUMENT TO BE APPLIED TO

THE RENOVATION OF THE WORLD? How is this knowledge of the Lord to be spread all
over the earth, and to be brought in contact with every human heart? In this stage of
the Churchs history at least, it is evidently the Divine arrangement that men shall be
themselves the instruments of saving their own race. That this is the way to do a
great work, we learn from the analogies of the natural world. How are the coral isles
of the ocean made? Not by being upheaved, by some great convulsion, from the
bosom of the deep; but by the ceaseless labours of little insects, each of which works
in its own place, and adds its mite to the accumulated mass. It stops not to form
combinations and lay plans, but labours in its sphere. How is the huge globe
watered, and made productive? Not by great seas, but by little streams, or, rather, by
single drops of rain and dew, each refreshing a single leaf, or blade of grass. How is
bread produced for the millions of mankind? Each stalk of corn becomes
responsible for a limited number of grains. And, in the moral world, we see the same
results produced in the same way. How is it that vice is propagated? How are
drunkards, gamblers, and infidels made? Not by wholesale, but by individual
contact. One corrupt heart infects some other heart: one polluted soul taints some
other soul with the infection of its own depravity; and thus recruits are ever
multiplied for the host of Satan. Let it be so in the work of salvation. Let each
Christian labour to rescue his neighbour and his brother, and how soon will the
world be filled with the knowledge of the Lord! Nor will such benevolence be
restricted to its own immediate circle. A genuine concern for the salvation of one
soul is of the nature of the most enlarged philanthropy. From this subject we learn--
1. The true remedy for all our social and political evils. It is by spreading the
knowledge of the Lord.
2. The excellence of those methods of doing good, which exercise the conscience
on questions of personal duty. Hence the excellence of all those forms of
effort in which teaching is employed: the mother amid her children--the
teacher of a Sabbath School, or Bible class--the faithful distributor of tracts--
and, pre-eminently, the pastor and the missionary.
3. The mode in which revivals of religion may be promoted. A revival that shall
penetrate the mass of the community, must be carried into it by the living
agents, who are accustomed to mingle with the mass; and who will go hither
and thither, attaching themselves to individuals. (C. Hall.)

The law written on the heart

I. THIS TABLETS upon which God writes His law. I will put My law in their inward
parts.
1. Thus, you see, the Lord has selected for His tablets that which is the seat of
life. It is in the heart that life is to be found, a wound there is fatal: where the
seat of life is, there the seat of obedience shall be.
2. Observe next, that not only is the heart the seat of life, but it is the governing
power. It is from the heart, as from a royal metropolis, that the imperial
commands of the man are issued by which hand and foot, and eye and
tongue, and all the members are ordered. Ii the heart be right, then the other
powers must yield submission to its sway, and become right too.
3. But before God can write upon mans heart it must be prepared. It is most
unfit to be a writing-table for the Lord until it is renewed. The heart must
first of all undergo erasures. It must also experience a thorough cleansing,
 not of the surface only, but of its entire fabric. Truly, it was far easier for
Hercules to purge the Augean stables than for our hearts to be purged; for
the sin that lies within us is not an accumulation of external defilement, but
an inward, all-pervading corruption. In addition to this, the heart needs to be
softened, for the heart is naturally hard, and in some men it has become
harder than an adamant stone. Nor would the softening be enough, for there
are some who have a tenderness of the most deceiving kind. They receive the
Word with joy: they feel every expression of it, but they speedily go their way
and forget what manner of men they are. They are as impressible as the
water, hut the impression is as soon removed; so that another change is
needed, namely, to make them retentive of that which is good: else might
you engrave and re-engrave, but, like an inscription upon wax, it would be
gone in a moment if exposed to heat. In a word, the heart of man needs to be
totally changed, even as Jesus said to Nicodemus, Ye must be born again.

II. THE WRITING. I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts. What is this writing?
1. First, the matter of it is the law of God. God writes upon the hearts of His
people that which is already revealed; He inscribes there nothing novel and
unrevealed, but His own will which He has already given us in the book of
the law. Observe, however, that God says He will write His whole law on the
heart, this is included in the words, My law. Gods work is complete in all
its parts, and beautifully harmonious. He will not write one command and
leave out the rest as so many do in their reforms. Mark, again, that on the
heart there is written not the law toned down and altered, but My law,--
that very same law which was at first written on the heart of man unfallen.
2. But to come a tittle closer to the matter: what does the Scripture mean by
writing the law of God in the heart? The writing itself includes a great many
things. A man who has the law of God written on his heart, first of all, knows
it. Gods Spirit has taught him what is right and what is wrong: he knows this
by heart, and therefore can no longer put darkness for light, and light for
darkness. This law, next, abides upon his memory. God has given him a
touchstone by which he tries things. It is a grand thing to possess a universal
detector, so that, go where you may, you are not dependent upon the
judgment of others, and therefore are not deceived as multitudes are. This,
however, is only a part of the matter, and a very small part comparatively.
The law is written on a mans heart further than this: when he consents unto
the law that it is good; when his conscience, being restored, cries, Yes, that
is so, and ought to be so. That command by which God has forbidden a
certain course is a proper and prudent command: it ought to be enjoined.
But, furthermore, there is wrought in the heart by God a love to the law as
well as a consent to it, such a love that the man thanks God that He has given
him such a fair and lovely representation of what perfect holiness would be;
that He has given such measuring lines, by which he knows how a house is to
be builded in which God can dwell Thus thanking the Lord, his prayer,
desire, longing, hungering, and thirsting, are after righteousness, that he
may in all things be according to the mind of God.
3. If anybody should inquire how the Lord keeps the writing upon the heart
legible, I should like to spend a minute or two in showing the process. He
 enlightens by knowledge, convinces by argument, leads by persuasion,
strengthens by instruction, and so forth. So far also we know that one way by
which the law is kept written upon a Christians heart is this,--a sense of
Gods presence. The believer feels that he could not sin with God looking on.
Next, the Christian has a lively sense within him of the degradation which sin
once brought upon him. But a sense of love is a yet more powerful factor. Let
a man know that God loves him, let him feel sure that God always did love
him from before the foundations of the world, and he must try to please God.
Another very powerful pen with which the Lord writes is to be found in the
sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ. Besides that, God actually establishes
His holy law in the throne of the heart by giving to us a new and heavenly
life. Once more, the Holy Ghost Himself dwells in believers.

III. THE WRITER. Who is it that writes the law upon the heart? It is God Himself.
I will do it, saith He.
1. Note, first, that He has a right to indite His law on the heart. He made the
heart; it is His tablet: let Him write there whatever He wills.
2. Note, next, that He alone can write the law on the heart. This is noble work,
angels themselves cannot attain to it. This is the finger of God. As God
alone can write there and must write there, so He alone shall have the glory
of that writing when once it is perfected.
3. When God writes He writes perfectly. No holiness can excel the holiness
produced by the Holy Spirit when His inward work is fully completed.
4. Moreover, He writes indelibly. I defy the devil to get a single letter of the law
of God out of a mans heart when God has written it there. Written rocks
bear their inscriptions long, but written hearts bear them for ever and ever.

IV. THE RESULTS of the law being thus written in the heart.
1. Frequently the first result is great sorrow. If I have Gods law written on my
heart, then I say to myself, Ah me, that I should have lived a law-breaker so
long! This blessed law, this lovely law, why I have not even thought of it, or if
I have thought of it, it has provoked me to disobedience. Sin revived, and I
died when the commandment came.
2. The next effect of it is, there comes upon the man a strong and stern resolve
that he will not break that law again, hut will keep it with all his might.
3. That strong resolve soon leads to a fierce conflict; for another law lifts up its
head, a law in our members; and that other law cries, Not so quick there:
your new law which has come into your soul to rule you shall not be obeyed:
I will be master.
4. But does not something better than this come of the Divine heart-writing? Oh
yes. There comes actual obedience. The man not only consents to the law
that it is good, hut he obeys it; and if there be anything which Christ
commands, no matter what it is, the man seeks to do it,--not only wishes to
do it, but actually does it; and if there be aught that is wrong, he not only
wishes to abstain from it, but he does abstain from it.
5. As this proceeds, the man becomes more and more prepared to dwell in
heaven. He is changed into Gods image from glory to glory even as by the
 Spirit of the Lord. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

And will be their God-God in the covenant

I. HOW IS GOD ESPECIALLY THE GOD OF HIS OWN CHILDREN? We answer, that in
some things God is the God of all His creatures; but even there, there is a special
relationship existing between Himself and His chosen creatures, whom He has loved
with an everlasting love. And in the next place, there are certain relationships in
which God does not exist towards the rest of His creatures, but only towards His
own children.
1. First, then, God is the God of all His creatures, seeing that He has the right to
decree to do with them as He pleases. He is the Creator of us all; He is the
potter, and hath power over the clay, to make of the same lump, one vessel to
honour and another to dishonour. He is the God of all creatures, absolutely
so in the matter of predestination, seeing that He is their Creator, and has an
absolute right to do with them as He wills. But here again He has a special
regard to His children, and He is their God even in that sense; for to them,
while He exercises the same sovereignty, He exercises it in the way of grace
and grace only. Again, He is the God of all His creatures, in the sense that He
has a right to command obedience of all But even here there is something
special in regard to the child of God. Though God is the ruler of all men, yet
His rule is special towards His children; for He lays aside the sword of His
rulership, and in His hand He grasps the rod for His child, not the sword of
punitive vengeance. Again, God has an universal power over all His creatures
in the character of a Judge. He will judge the world in righteousness and
His people with equity. Our loving God is the Judge who shall acquit our
souls, and in that respect we can say He is our God. So then, whether as
Sovereign, or as Governor enforcing law, or as Judge punishing sin; although
God is in some sense the God of all men, yet in this matter there is something
special towards His people, so that they can say, He is our God, even in
those relationships.
2. But now there are points to which the rest of Gods creatures cannot come;
and here the great pith of the matter lies; here the very soul of this glorious
promise dwells. God is our God in a sense, with which the unregenerate, the
unconverted, the unholy, can have no acquaintance, in which they have no
share whatever. First, then, God is my God, seeing that He is the God of my
election. If I be His child, then has He loved me from before all worlds, and
His infinite mind has been exercised with plans for my salvation. If He be my
God, He has seen me when I have wandered far from Him; and when I have
rebelled, His mind has determined when I shall be arrested--when I shall be
turned from the errors of my ways. He has been providing for me the means
of grace, He has applied those means of grace in due time, but His
everlasting purpose has been the basis and the foundation of it all; and thus
He is my God as He is the God of none else beside His own children.
Furthermore, the Christian can call God his God, from the fact of his
justification. A sinner can call God--God, but he must always put in an
adjective, and speak of God as an angry God, an incensed God, or an
offended God. But the Christian can say my God without putting in any
adjective except it be a sweet one wherewithal to extol Him. Again, He is the
 believers God by adoption, and in that the sinner hath no part.

II. THE EXCEEDING PRECIOUSNESS OF THIS GREAT MERCY. I will be their God. I
conceive that God, Himself, could say no more than that.
1. Compare this portion with the lot of thy fellow-men! Some of them have their
portion in the field, they are rich and increased in goods, and their yellow
harvests are even now ripening in the sun; but what are harvests compared
with thy God, the God of harvests? Or, what are granaries compared with
Him who is thy husbandman, and feeds thee with the bread of heaven? Some
have their portion in the city; their wealth is superabundant, and in constant
streams it flows to them, until they become a very reservoir of gold; but what
is gold compared with thy God? Some have their portion in this world, in
that which most men love--applause and fame; but ask thyself, is not thy God
more to thee than that? What, if a thousand trumps should blow thy praise,
and if a myriad clarions should be loud with thine applause; what would it all
be to thee if thou hadst lost thy God?
2. Compare this with what thou requirest, Christian. To make thee happy thou
wantest something that shall satisfy thee; and come, I ask thee, is not this
enough? Will not this fill thy pitcher to its very brim, ay, till it runs over? But
thou wantest more than quiet satisfaction; thou desirest, sometimes,
rapturous delight. Come, soul, is there not enough here to delight thee? Put
this promise to thy lips; didst ever drink wine one-half so sweet u this, I will
be their God? Didst ever hear harp or viol sound half me sweetly as this, I
will be their God? But then thou wantest something more than present
delights, something concerning which thou mayest exercise hope; and what
more dost thou ever hope to get than the fulfilment of this great promise, I
will be their God? O hope! thou art a great-handed thing; thou layest hold of
mighty things, which even faith hath not power to grasp; hut though large
thine hand may be, this fills it, so that thou canst carry nothing else. I
protest, before God, I have not a hope beyond this promise. Oh, say you,
you have a hope of heaven. Ay, I have a hope of heaven, but this is heaven--
I will be their God.

III. THE CERTAINTY OF THIS PROMISE; it does not say, I may be their God; but I
will be their God. Nor does the text say, Perhaps I shall be their God; no, it says, I
will be their God. Oh! cries the sinner, I will not have Thee for a God. Wilt thou
not? says He, and He gives him over to the hand of Moses; Moses takes him a little
and applies the club of the law, drags him to Sinai, where the mountain totters over
his head, the lightnings flash, and thunders bellow, and then the sinner cries, O
God, save me! Ah! I thought thou wouldst not have Me for a God? O Lord, Thou
shalt be my God, says the poor trembling sinner, I have put away my ornaments
from me; O Lord, what wilt Thou do unto me? Save me! I will give myself to Thee.
Oh! take me! Ay, says the Lord, I knew it; I said that I will be their God; and I
have made thee willing in the day of My power. I will be their God, and they shall
be My people.

IV. MAKE USE OF GOD, if He be yours. It is strange that spiritual blessings are our
only possessions that we do not employ. There is the mercy-seat, for instance. Ah,
my friends, if you had the cash-box as full of riches as that mercy-seat is, you would
go often to it; as often as your necessities require. But, you do not go to the mercy-
seat half so often as you need to go. Most precious things God has given to us, but
we never over-use them. The truth is, they cannot be over-used; we cannot wear a
promise threadbare; we can never burn out the incense of grace; we can never use
up the infinite treasures of Gods loving-kindness. But if the blessings God gives us
are not used, perhaps God is the least used of all. Though He is our God, we apply
ourselves less to Him, than to any of His creatures, or any of His mercies which He
bestows upon us. Have thou not a God lying by thee to no purpose; let not thy God
be as other gods, serving only for a show: have not a name only that thou hast a God.
Since He allows thee, having such a friend use Him daily. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The Christians portion in God

Christian! here is all thou canst require.
1. To make thee happy thou wantest something that shall satisfy thee; and is not
this enough? Desire is insatiable as death, but He who filleth all in all can fill
it. The capacity of our wishes who can measure? but the immeasurable
wealth of God can more than overflow it.
2. But thou wantest more than quiet satisfaction; thou desirest rapturous
delight. Come, soul, here is music fit for heaven in this thy portion, for God is
the Maker of heaven. Not all the music blown from sweet instruments, or
drawn from living strings, can yield such melody as this sweet promise, I
will be their God. Here is a deep sea of bliss, a shoreless ocean of delight;
come, bathe thy spirit in it; swim an age, and thou shalt find no shore; dive
throughout eternity, and thou shalt find no bottom.
3. But thou wantest more than present delights, thou cravest something
concerning which thou mayest exercise hope; and what more canst thou
hope for than the fulfilment of this great promise, I will be their God? This
is the masterpiece of all the promises; its enjoyment makes a heaven below,
and will make a heaven above. Live up to thy privileges, and rejoice with
unspeakable joy. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 31:34
They shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them.

Good things to come

A blessed season is here spoken of, very unlike what the world has hitherto seen.
Such acquaintance with God is meant, as brings the power, the justice, the mercy,
the holiness of God before the mind, and applies them so closely to the heart, that it
may be ruled and actuated by that knowledge. And if it is this, and nothing less than
this, then may we justly say, The time is not come, of which the prophet speaks,
when all shall know Me, from the least to the greatest, saith the Lord. And it were
a vain speculation to inquire when it shall be. These are among the times and the
seasons, which God hath reserved in His own power. But it is not a vain
speculation, and by Gods blessing it may prove good to the use of edifying, if we
inquire how it might be--how this blessed consummation may be obtained, and the
promise brought to its fulfilment. Looking, then, at the fulfilment of the prophecy, I
first observe, that we have no ground for expecting that all will know the Lord,
because mankind will bring another nature into the world--a nature which of its own
accord shall turn towards God and righteousness. That which is born of the flesh is
flesh, and the time will never cease, when they who are taught of God to understand
themselves will be forced to confess, I know that in me (that is, in my flesh, my
original nature) dwelleth no good thing. Neither have we any right to expect that
they shall know Him by any fresh or more general revelation This was not needed
even by the Jews, to whom the promise was addressed. Our Lord declared that the
knowledge of God was sufficiently Within their reach, if their hearts had not been
closed against it. They had Moses and the prophets--let them hear them; they
would teach them to know the Lord. How much more, then, is it true of those on
whom the Sun of Righteousness has risen--the brightness of the Fathers glory, the
express image if His person, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead
bodily! The agency, therefore, to which we are to look for the accomplishment of
the prophecy, is no other than that from which whatever is good in man has been
derived from the beginning. Every good and perfect gift is from above, and cometh
down from the God and Father of lights. If the patriarchs served God in the midst
of a crooked and perverse generation--if Enoch and Abraham were governed by His
laws--it was because His Spirit wrote them in their hearts; if they possessed the
knowledge of God, it was because that knowledge was implanted in them by His
Spirit. And so, when all shall know the Lord, from the least to the greatest, it will
be the same Spirit which worketh all in all. But there are diversities of gifts, though
the same Spirit; and there are differences of administrations, though the same
Lord; and there are differences of results, even in the same administration. The
means producing the abundant harvest will be no new means; the Spirit will take of
the things of God, and write them in the heart by the instrumentality already in
operation; the difference will be, that the instrumentality will be, first, universal,
and secondly, more successful. It will be more universal. All shall know the Lord,
from the least to the greatest; from the youngest to the eldest, from the richest to
the poorest. All, therefore, shall know Him from their youth; all shall be brought up
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They shall not teach every man his
neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; this shall be no
longer needful. And why is it needful now? Partly, and for a first reason, because too
many grow up without that knowledge; and they who from their years and
experience in earthly things ought to be teachers in spiritual wisdom, are often
children in real understanding. How few are accustomed to hear the knowledge of
God treated as if it were the one thing needful to be acquired, and the one thing
needful to be retained! How few parents use this language to their children--Seek
knowledge, acquire learning; but first learn to know the Lord!--the fear of the
Lord, that is wisdom; and the knowledge of Him, that is understanding. No
wonder, then, that the impression made upon their tender minds, in regard to the
God in whom they have their being, is like the footprint in the sand, washed away by
the first wave of temptation, and quickly obliterated by the daily inroads of the
world. But there are other classes, of which the larger part of human society must
ever be composed. Shah we, then, leave the rich--reverse the prophets course, and
now betake ourselves to the poor? Do they know the way of the Lord, and the
judgment of their God! Alas! they have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the
bands. Multitudes spring up from youth to manhood, with no more knowledge of
the Lord than they might have possessed if the Lord had not revealed Himself to the
world. If they hear His name, it is to hear it blasphemed; if they learn that the Lord
has spoken to men, it is to learn that His message is despised. Whenever, then, the
destined time shall arrive, when all shall know the Lord, from the least to the
greatest, all from the least to the greatest will be nurtured in the faith and fear of
God. Christian instruction will be universal. Now it is rare--now it is partial--now it
is imperfect, and marred by inconsistency; then it Will be general and complete. But
further, Christian instruction, as it will be universal, so also it will be efficient and
successful. I say not that it is unsuccessful now; I believe that it is greatly honoured
of God, and that they bring a false report of the land of promise who reproach it as
vain and unprofitable; but its effect is now impeded by so many hindrances. Its
rarity is a hindrance. Those who have been taught to know the Lord, are
encompassed on every side by those who know Him not. Take the most favoured
case; the child who has hitherto sat beside the still waters, and drank of the pure
fountain of piety and holiness, must soon be launched on the wide ocean of the
world--must take his course among those who have gone with the stream of the
multitude, and are guided by no scriptural direction; the parent who has sown good
seed in his sons heart, and prays for its growth and fruitfulness, looks round after a
while, and sees (we trust he sees) the wheat appearing--but he cannot help seeing
that it is surrounded by tares, and how must he fear lest the tares should prevail and
overspread it! In proportion, therefore, as education in Divine knowledge will
become general, we may believe that it will become effective and permanently
influential, If each one in his own household, and each one in his own
neighbourhood, made this their chief and earnest care, that those in whom they are
interested and by whom they are surrounded should know the Lord from their
youth, the prophets words might be fulfilled, and the whole community become one
well-ordered family, walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy
Ghost; all, from the least to the greatest, might be taught of God, blessing the
pious endeavours of His people, and giving effect to the means which, in
dependence on His grace, they would employ; all might walk with God, as Enoch--
might trust in Him, as Abraham--might fear Him, as Joseph--might submit to Him,
as Eli--might set Him before their eyes, as David--so that, living and dying, they
might be the Lords. (Archbishop Summer.)

The duty of extending religious knowledge

I. THE EXISTING IGNORANCE SUPPOSED. The impression that there is a God is

seldom obliterated from the human mind. But this persuasion subsisting alone, or in
connection with the grossest error, comes far short of making wise unto salvation.
Oh! how lost is the immortal mind to all true apprehensions of Deity, when it can
stoop to the worship of stocks and stones, the works of mens hands. Yet the heathen
are not alone ignorant of God. It would be some relief if the eye, after surveying
pagan lands, and compassionating these dark places of the earth filled with the
habitations of horrid cruelty, could retreat securely to the nations of Christendom,
and there soothingly repose on pervading spiritual intelligence. But, alas! there are
multitudes in these favoured countries whose religious tuition has yet to be
commenced, who have all the ignorance of heathens, wanting only its palliations.
Nor does this remark apply only to the illiterate. A vast proportion of the learned
themselves have still to acquire the veriest rudiments of this heavenly science. The
list of the ignorant is not yet completed. To attain its completion, we must go to
Christian sanctuaries. Yes, even of those who attend in the house of God, numbers
seem as little instructed by their attendance as if they were frequenting heathen or
Mohammedan temples. Their ears are inured to the sound of the Gospel, and this
familiarity with its accents they are apt to mistake for acquaintance with its import.
Thus wide are the realms of ignorance, and I need not tell you that its sway is most
destructive. Without knowledge there can be no faith, for how can we believe what
we do not know? And without faith, we are Divinely assured, it is impossible to
please God.

II. As incumbent on us while ignorance lasts, the duty of teaching every man his
neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord. You will readily
admit the propriety of teaching every man his brother. You will own at once that
Andrew, finding his brother Simon, did right in bringing him to Jesus, and that all
Christian members of families would do well to imitate this commendable example.
But, alas! the interval is often wide between a verbal acknowledgment of duty and its
vigorous performance. And is it not so here? Are not Christians themselves too
sparing in expostulation with careless, unawakened relatives? You would stand
between them and temporal destruction, and the more they were bent on such ruin,
the more you would remonstrate. And will ye give place to them, then, and facilitate
their progress when they are madly encountering eternal destruction, and hastening
to the gates of the second death? You observe, however, that you are required,
moreover, to teach every man his neighbour. Here many will at once understand us
to speak of missionary agents, not deeming themselves at all qualified for personally
instructing a benighted neighbourhood. But this conclusion we cannot reach so
hastily. It is often adopted as self-evident when it has no evidence, when it is on the
contrary most erroneous and criminal. There are now Tract Societies and Christian
Instruction Societies, which employ many members of our Churches in diffusing
through the streets and lanes of our city the knowledge of the only true God. Why
may not others join their number? Change of labour is sometimes rest; and if the
maxim ever apply, it must surely hold good, when we pass from anxious wasting
tasks to those scenes and subjects which prove all affliction to be light and
momentary, and elevate the soul to a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.
One hour a week, where more cannot be conceded, may be space enough for great
usefulness. Yea, it were presumptuous to limit the happy effect of a single visit, for a
word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver. It must be allowed,
however, that all have not equal facilities for the personal prosecution of such works
and labours of love; and even though they had, it would still be their duty to engage
others in this service as well as themselves. Some are willing to devote their lives to
the extension of Christs kingdom, if you will devote a portion of substance to their
support. The proposal is most reasonable surely, and assigns you the easier
department of the treaty. By adopting it, and reducing it to energetic practice, you
may teach your neighbour and brother in the largest and noblest acceptation of the
terms.

III. THE ULTIMATE PREVALENCE OF KNOWLEDGE BY WHICH SUCH OBLIGATIONS

SHALL BE SUPERSEDED. The phrase, from the least of them unto the greatest of
them, may be differently understood, but in every view it is delightfully significant.
Does it refer to age? How beautiful on the one hand to see little children entering the
kingdom, to see God, out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, perfecting praise; and
to witness on the other hand maturity of years and grace identified, to see the grey
hairs a crown of glory being found in the way of righteousness How affecting to see
these extremes of life united in devotion, the infant and the ancient joining the
tender and the wrinkled hand to approach in fellowship the Father of mercies!
Again, does the language refer to station? How attractive to see the degraded rising
in character, and comfort, and piety, and the exalted humbly stooping from their
loftiness to acknowledge and embrace the lowliest followers of the Lamb! to see all
envy on the one hand, and all disdain on the other utterly lost and swallowed up in
fraternal endearment. And these shall not be verdant spots in the desert as
infrequent as lovely; the whole earth shall be such a paradise, for righteousness and
peace shall spring forth before all the nations. And how shall this consummation be
attained? Doubtless by God fulfilling His promise of putting His law in mens inward
parts, and writing it on their hearts. But will He do so directly and independently of
His revealed Word? No; we as the instruments in His hand must disseminate that
Word, and then He will open mens understanding to understand the Scriptures.
How honouring to be employed by such an Agent in such a work and for such ends!
(D. King.)

The Churchs duty to the world, and the promised result of its
performance

I. The churchs present duty.

1. The knowledge of God is essential to the well-being and happiness of man for
time and for eternity--in other words, that it is essential to his salvation. It
matters not in what region they may dwell, it matters not under what other
circumstances favourable to their advancement in civilisation or commerce
or the arts they may or may not be placed; such must be the lamentable
result in every case where men live and die without the knowledge of God,
while the guilt of such ignorance and the misery which it entails are only
heightened and aggravated by the circumstance, when the ease occurs in a
Christian land where the fight of the Gospel is wisely diffused.
2. A destitution of this knowledge is the natural condition of mankind.
3. The knowledge of God is that kind of knowledge which above all others we
should be anxious to diffuse.
4. The way in which this knowledge is to be communicated is suggested in the
text and adopted by this institution. We are to teach. We must exhort men
to the attainment of this knowledge, as to an imperative duty. We must
admonish them of the melancholy consequence of remaining in ignorance.
We must warn them of their danger, whilst they continue thus ignorant of
God and alienated from Him. We must reason with them, and remonstrate
with all possible earnestness and affection, if peradventure God may grant
them repentance to the belief of the truth.

II. The glorious prospect unfolded to the Church in connection with this duty, as
a reward for its performance--and which, when fully realised, will render the
performance of this duty no longer necessary; for then they shall teach no more
every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for
there shall be no more necessity, the work shall have been done, and they shall
know the Lord each and every one, from the least of them through all the grades
of society unto the greatest of them, from the meanest to the most exalted.
1. The nature of the blessing which is thus assured. It is the possession and
enjoyment of the knowledge of God.
2. The extent to which this blessing shall be diffused. It shall be universal. Riot
and disorder, debauchery and drunkenness, robbery and fraud,
assassination and murder, shall no more be known; for all those vile lusts
and furious passions in the human breast, whence these enormities proceed,
shall be eradicated and subdued, and men shall be bound together in one
common bond of brotherhood and love. Then uprightness and integrity shall
be the prevailing principles of commerce and of trade. Then the office of the
judge shall become a sinecure, and the prison a solitude, and the criminal
and the felon a name and a character belonging to a former state of things.
Then Holiness to the Lord shall be written upon the bells of the horses; and
men shall learn to combine diligence in business and honourable industry in
their lawful callings, with the fervour of an ardent piety and supreme
devotedness to God, while none shall undermine or overreach, none shall
tyrannise or oppress, none shall slander or traduce, none shall hurt or
destroy in all Gods holy mountain. (T. Raffles, D. D.)

Knowing the Lord through pardoned sin

If we regard this passage as instructive in its order, the knowledge of God follows
close upon the application of the law to the heart. The work of grace usually begins,
so far as we can perceive it, by the Holy Spirits bringing the law into contact with
the inner man. The law outside of a man is forgotten; he may profess a reverence for
it, but it does not affect his desires and thoughts. But when the Holy Spirit begins to
put the law into the inward parts, the immediate result is the discovery of our
shortcomings and transgressions, law-work is grace-work in its darker dress. It is
the axe which rough hews the timber which grace goes on to fashion and smooth. By
the operation of the law upon the conscience, convincing the man of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment, the Holy Spirit works towards the transforming of
the heart. He takes away the stone out of it, and makes it to be a fleshy, tender,
sensitive thing. Then with His own finger He writes the Divine law upon the mind
and the affections, so that the Divine commands become the centre of the mans life,
and the governing force of his action. The man now loves that law which before he,
at his very best, only feared: it becomes his will to do the will of God.

I. THE ONE ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE. This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent. To know God is to live in the
light. This knowledge brings with it trust, peace, love, holiness, and acceptance.
1. This knowledge is emphatically the knowledge of God. They shall all know
Me. They may not know everything about God. Who could? Only the infinite
can comprehend the infinite. The regenerate, however, know the Lord,
though they do not, and cannot, understand His incomprehensible glories.
They shall all know Me, saith Jehovah. Believers can say, Truly our
fellowship is with the Father; can you say that? Were you ever conscious of
the presence of God? Has He ever manifested Himself to you in any special
way! One said to a Christian lady that he did not believe in the Scriptures,
and she replied that she believed, in them, and delighted to read them. When
 asked her reason, she replied, Perhaps it is because I know the Author.
Personal acquaintance with God turns faith into assurance. The knowledge
of God is the basis of a faith of the surest and sweetest kind: we know and
have believed the love which God hath towards us. Knowing God, we believe
in the truth of His words, the justice of His sentences, the goodness of His
acts, the wisdom of His purposes, yea, and the love of His chastisements.
2. Note, next, that it is a personal knowledge. Each renewed person knows the
Lord for himself. You cannot see God with another mans eyes; you cannot
know God through another mans knowledge. Ye must yourselves be born
again! Ye must yourselves be made pure in heart, or you cannot see God.
3. Next, this knowledge is one which is wrought in us by the Spirit of the Lord. It
is the duty of every Christian man to say to his neighbour, and to his brother,
Know the Lord. God uses this effort as His instrumentality for saving men.
But the man who really knows the Lord, does not know Him solely by such
instruction. All Zions children are taught of the Lord. They know God by His
revealing Himself to them.
4. Note, carefully, that this knowledge of God becomes manifest knowledge. It is
so manifest that the most earnest workers who desire the conversion of their
fellow-men no longer say to such a man, Know the Lord, for they perceive
most clearly that he already possesses that knowledge, so as to be beyond the
need of instruction upon that point.
5. Next, this knowledge of God is universal among the regenerate. The
regenerate man with one talent knows the Lord; the man with ten talents
boasts not of them, but rejoices that he knows the Lord.
6. This is the distinguishing mark of the regenerate, that they know the Lord.
The knowledge of God lies at the bottom of every virtue and grace. The Lord
is no more to us a stranger of whom we have heard--of whom a report has
come to us through many hands. No; the Lord God is our friend.

II. THE ONE GRAND MEANS OF OBTAINING THIS KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. For I will
forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
1. Without the pardon of sin it is not possible for us to know the Lord. The
thought of God is distasteful to every guilty man. It would be good news to
him if he could be informed, on sure authority, that there was no God at all
Darkness covers the mind, because sin has blinded the soul to all that is best
and holiest. While sin lieth at the door, there is a difficulty on Gods part, too.
How can He admit into an intimate knowledge of Himself the guilty man, as
long as he is enamoured of evil? Beyond this, an awful dread comes over the
guilty mind, even when it begins to be awakened. Conscience testifies that
God must punish sin.
2. In the pardon of sin there is made to the pardoned man s clear and
unmistakable revelation of God to his own soul The knowledge of God
received by a distinct sense of pardoned sin is more certain than knowledge
derived by the use of the senses in things pertaining to this life.
3. This personal manifestation has about it a singular glory of overwhelming
self-evidence. How a man sees God when he comes to know in his own soul
the fulness of pardon intended by this matchless word, Their sins and their
iniquities will I remember no more! Can this be so? Does the Lord make a
 clean sweep of all my sins? Can it be that the Lord has cast them all behind
His back? Has He blotted out the record which accused me? Has He cast my
sin into the depths of the sea? Hallelujah! He is a God indeed. This is a
Godlike act. O Jehovah! who is like unto Thee? Mark, also, how freely, out of
His mere love, the Lord forgives, and herein displays His Godhead! No
payment on our part, of suffering or service, is required. The Lord pardons
for His own names sake.
4. When the soul comes to think of the method of mercy, it has a further
knowledge of God. In the extraordinary plan of salvation by grace through
Christ Jesus, all the Divine attributes are set in a glorious light, and God is
made known as never before. Oh, the splendour of redeeming love!
5. The immutability of Divine pardon is one of the most brilliant facets of the
diamond. Some think that God forgives, but afterwards punishes; that you
may be justified to-day, but condemned to-morrow. Such is not the teaching
of our text. Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. Our
debts are so fully paid by our Lord Jesus that there is not an account upon
the file of omniscience against any pardoned one. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Gods forgetfulness of sin

One of the appalling obstacles between sinful men now, and their eternal
blessedness hereafter, is the indestructible fact of the memory of sin. The poet
Dante, as he wandered through the forest of the terrestrial paradise, came to a
stream which on the one side was called Lethe, and on the other Eunoe, for it
possessed the double virtue to take away remembrance of offence, and to bring
remembrance back of every good deed done. Immersed in Lethes wave he forgets
his fault, and from Eunoes stream he returned
Regenerate,
Een as new plants renewd with foliage new,
Pure and made apt for mounting to the stars.
Where flows, then, the stream of happy forgetfulness? A poets dream may not
beguile us;--what are the facts, the stem, unchangeable facts of memory? Is memory
an unalterable record of life? Shall the shadow of this earth always lie before us
upon our path? The facts of memory are these. The mind of man is a chamber of
memories--a hall of echoes--a gallery of endless whispers--a house haunted by
shades of the past. The mind is one labyrinth of memories--like a catacomb of the
dead. Recollection is as the torch in the travellers hand through this endless
labyrinth of memory; but memory itself is the receptacle of all our past. There is a
place in it for all the deeds done in the body. All that the mind has been used for
remains a memory wrought into its own structure and form. No ingenuity of human
art has ever invented to watch the watchman a self-registering machine so accurate,
so constant, so unalterably true, as is the human brain--Gods register of the deeds
done in the body. Carry now this truth one step further. If in the present physical
basis of life there m provision made for memory; if matter so gross as the brain can
become the register of the mind; much more may memory be continuous and
comprehensive in the spiritual embodiment of the soul; much more shall it be made
perfect in the resurrection. The form shall be broken up, and they shall be
distributed, dust to dust, and earth to earth; but the soul shall have taken, before
this bodily form is broken up, the copy of this mortal life and its deeds, and hence
shall continue with the impression of it stamped upon it for ever. But this is not all.
Not only do we have in our own organisation a memory of ourselves which we
cannot tear from us, but also the universe has a memory of us. The memory of mens
lives is a part of the universe. The record of our life is a line written in the book of
things. It belongs to nature. We cannot blot it out. And if we carry this truth of
memory still further and higher, we rise to the conception of the unalterable
memory of the Eternal. Can God forget? Can God put our sin out of His eternal
remembrance? This is not simply a question of power over will. It is not simply a
question as to what an Almighty God can do; but what God as an infinitely perfect
moral Being will do. There are those who tell us that God out of His mere
benevolence van forgive sin, and open the heaven of His holy presence to the sinner
who would return. Yes, so might a kind human friend say to one who had done him
wrong, I do not care; you may come back at any time and sit at my table if you
please; I will not speak of the offence; I am willing to let it pass; but still, although
unmentioned, the wrong also would be there, sitting at the same table with the two
who sit down together again. The wrong once done shall be always as a shadow
between them, until something be done to put it away; until something be done to
enable both to forget it, something that shall cost some sacrifice, some suffering,
some reparation for the wrong, some humiliation, and some manifestation of the
evil really inflicted and the pain really felt on account of the sin which is to be
forgiven. Something must be said and done once for all of the nature of an
atonement for the sin which separates those two, in order that each may experience
the joy of a restored friendship, and that full reconciliation in which the wrong done
is to be henceforth morally forgotten as well as forgiven. Surely, then, it is not good
theology to imagine God to be reconciled to this world at a less effort and at a less
cost of sacrifice and suffering than is required for the perfect binding up of a broken
human friendship. Reconciliation does cost humiliation, suffering, self-vindication,
at least through sorrow and pain for the sin committed, on the part of the person
who would forgive, and then the recognition also of this effort and cost of
forgiveness on the part of him who is to be forgiven. Otherwise the forgiveness does
not reach to the bottom of the wrong, and the healing is only on the surface of life.
And shall the infinitely perfect One be less human in His forgiveness than we? How
can the Holy One forgive and forget our sin? Heavens answer is the Cross of Christ!
Through His work of atonement for sin is opened the Divine way of forgetfulness of
the sin of the world. God remembers man henceforth as he stands before Him in the
nature and grace of Christ. Hence He can forget man as he was without Christ.
Justification is Gods covering the knowledge of what we once were in our sins by
the blessed and all-transfiguring thought of what His own love in the suffering
Redeemer has done and always is for us. And this is no mere act of power or
violence over memory. It is no arbitrary act of forgetfulness. It contradicts no ethical
principle of memory, human or Divine. It is a moral hiding from the Divine
remembrance of the sin of the world, which has been already and once for all
condemned in the same suffering for it by which the Divine willingness to forgive
was made manifest. Our sin, which God always would forgive, can be sin forgiven
and forgotten, because it has been at last perfectly confessed before God, and Gods
necessary pain over it has been realised and revealed in the sufferings in it, and for
it, of the Son of His love, and its condemnation, once for all, has been visited upon it
in the death of Him who prays in Gods pure will that His enemies may be forgiven.
If, then, God has made such a morally sufficient atonement for sin that He can
forgive it, as He would forgive it, and can forget it without denying Himself, it
follows also that we ourselves shall be able to put hereafter our own sin of this life
out of mind, and all other pure beings shall be able to let it pass as a dream of the
night. (Newman Smyth, D. D.)

Gods non-remembrance of sin

(with Isa 43:25; Heb 8:12; Heb 10:17):--These texts are all alike in their
declaration that the Lord will not remember His peoples sins. In the mouth of two
or three witnesses every word shall be established. Here, then, you have Isaiah and
Jeremiah, two Old Testament saints affirming the same thing: is not this enough?
Added to these you have the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and these three
agree in one. Their united testimony is that Jehovah, the Lord God, will forgive the
sins of His people, and do it in so complete a way that He will remember their
iniquities no more. Does any unto generate person believe in the forgiveness of sin?
I trow not. No man in sincerity believes it until God the Holy Ghost has taught him
its truth, and has written it upon his heart. When a mans sins are set before him in
the light of Gods countenance, his first instinct is to fear that they are altogether
unpardonable. He looks to the law of God, and while he looks in that direction he
will certainly conclude that there is no pardon, for the law knows nothing of
forgiveness. It is, This do, and thou shalt live; disobey, and thou shalt die. What
the law asserts, the understanding also supports; for within the awakened man there
is the memory of his past offences, and on account of these his conscience passes
judgment upon his soul, and condemns it even as the law doth. Meanwhile, many
natural impressions and instincts assist and increase the clamours of conscience; for
the man knows within himself, as the result of observation and experience, that sin
must bring its own punishment; he perceives that it is a knife which cuts the hand of
him that handles it, a sword that kills the man who fights therewith. Meanwhile the
devil comes in with all the horrors of the infernal pit, and threatens speedy
destruction. Thus, for once, the devil craftily co-operates with the law of God and
with conscience; these would drive men to self-despair, but Satan would go further,
and compel them to despair as touching the Lord Himself, so as to believe that
pardon for transgression is quite impossible. With the desponding I shall try to deal
at this time, and may the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, help me to console them.

I. THERE IS FORGIVENESS. Our four texts all teach us that doctrine with great
distinctness.
1. This appears, first, in the treatment of sinners by God, inasmuch as He spares
their forfeited lives. Assuredly the Lord meant pardon when He tarried to
inquire, Adam, where art thou? In the morning of human history the
Lords long-suffering displayed itself and gave promise of larger grace. The
like is true of you and of me. If God had no pardons would He not long ago
have cut us down as cumberers of the ground?
2. Why did God institute the ceremonial law if there were no ways of pardoning
transgression? Why the bullocks and the lambs offered in sacrifice? Why the
burnt-offerings in which God accepted mans gift, if man could not be
accepted? Assuredly he could not be accepted if regarded as guilty. Why the
 peace-offering in which God feasted with the offerer, and the two united in
feeding upon the one sacrifice? How could this be unless God intended to
forgive and enter into fellowship with men?
3. Further than this, if there were no forgiveness of sin why has the Lord given
to sinful men exhortations to repent?
4. If you will think of it you will see that there must be pardons in the hand of
God, or why the institution of religious worship among us to this day? Why
are we allowed to pray in secret if we cannot be forgiven? What is the value
of prayer at all if that first and most vital favour of forgiven sin is utterly
beyond our reach? Why are we allowed to sing the praises of God? God
cannot accept the praises of unforgiven men; worshippers must be clean ere
they can draw near to His altar with their incense; if, then, I am taught to
sing and give thanks to God it must be because His mercy endureth for
ever.
5. What assurance of pardon lies in the ordaining, sealing, and ratifying of the
covenant of grace? The first covenant left us under condemnation, but one
main design of the new covenant is to bring us into justification. Why a new
covenant at all if our unrighteousness can never be removed?
6. Furthermore, why did Christ institute the Christian ministry, and send forth
His servants to proclaim His Gospel? For what is the Gospel but a
declaration that Christ is exalted on high to give repentance unto Israel and
remission of sins!
7. Why are we taught in that blessed model of prayer which our Saviour has left
us, to say, Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, or, Forgive us
our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us? A star of hope
shines upon the sinner in the Lords Prayer in that particular petition; for it
seems to say, There is a real, true, and hearty forgiveness of God toward
you, even as there is in your heart a real, true, and hearty forgiveness of
those who offend against you.
8. The best of all arguments is this: God has actually forgiven multitudes of
sinners.

II. This forgiveness is tantamount to forgetting sin.

1. You know what we do when we exercise memory. To speak popularly, a man
lays up a thing in his mind: but when sin is forgiven it is not laid up in Gods
mind. Of course the Lord remembers their evil doings, in the sense that He
cannot forget anything; but judicially as a judge, He forgets the
transgressions of the pardoned ones. They are not before Him in court, and
come not under His official ken.
2. In remembering, men also consider and meditate on things; but the Lord will
not think over the sins of His people. The great Fathers heart is not brooding
over the injuries we have done: His infinite mind is not revolving within
itself the tale of our iniquities.
3. Sometimes you have almost forgotten a thing, and it is quite gone out of your
mind: but an event happens which recalls it so vividly that it seems as if it
were perpetrated but yesterday. God will not recall the sin of the pardoned.
The transgressions of His people are dead and buried with Christ, and they
 shall never have a resurrection. I will not remember their sins.
4. Furthermore, this not remembering, means that God will never seek any
further atonement. The apostle saith, Now where remission of these is,
there is no more offering for sin. The one sacrifice of Jesus has made an end
of sin. The Lord will never demand another victim, nor seek another
expiatory offering.
5. Again, when it is said that God forgets our sins it signifies that He will never
punish us for them. How can He when He has forgotten them?
6. Next, that He will never upbraid us with them. He giveth liberally and
upbraideth not. How can He upbraid us with what He has forgotten?
7. Once more, when the Lord says, I will not remember their sins, what does it
mean but this--that He will not treat us any the less generously on account of
our having been great sinners!

III. Forgiveness is to be had.

1. Why does God forget our sin! Is it not on this wise? He looks upon His Son
Jesus bearing that sin.
2. Next remember that this forgetfulness of God is caused by overflowing mercy.
God is love: His mercy endureth for ever; and He desired vent for His love.
3. How does God forget sin? Well, it is through His everlasting love. He loved
His people before they fell; and He loved His people when they fell. I have
loved thee, saith He, with an everlasting love; and when that great love of
His had led Him to give His Son Jesus for His peoples ransom, it made Him
also forget His peoples sins.
4. Again, God forgets His peoples sins because of the complacency He has in
them as renewed and sanctified creatures. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 31:35
Thus saith the Lord, which giveth, the stars for a light by night.
Stars at midnight
(with Joh 16:32):--Two things, said Kant, fill the mind with ever new and
increasing admiration and awe the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them:
the starry heavens above, and the moral law within. Certainly there are few sights
more impressive than the starry heavens. But the stars, in addition to the influence
they produce upon the mind of the beholder by their number and magnitude and
beauty, serve a practical and a useful purpose in the system to which they belong.
They help to guide the mariner to steer his course, and the traveller to discern his
way. The darkness is never overwhelming so long as the stars are visible. The sailor
who has come within sight of the lights which skirt the coast knows that he is not far
from hospitable shores. So the stars convey to us the intimation and the assurance
that we are not far from home. Between the dark side of nature and the dark side of
human life is there not a striking analogy? Are not our lives a succession of days and
nights? Do we not spend our existence partly in the sunshine and partly in the
gloom? That He who has done so much for the dark side of nature, kindling those
soft fires which enlighten the prevalent gloom and shed their benign influences
upon the world beneath, should have done nothing to brighten the dark side of
human life so as to preclude despair is a suggestion against which all our spiritual
instincts rise in quick and emphatic revolt. But our Creator has not, we repeat, left
us in unrelieved darkness. So the dark side of human life is never utterly dark, for
there are stars shining somewhere in the darkness. It was into the deepening gloom
that Christ passed as He drew nearer Calvary. And yet, midnight as it then was with
Jesus, there were stars shining overhead. What were the sources of illumination and
strength of which Christ availed Himself?
1. The power of communion with God I am alone, and yet not alone, for the
Father is with Me. The Father was with the Son in approval of His work and
in an identity of purpose. A consciousness of a deep underlying agreement
with the Supreme will was a source of never-failing strength to Christ in the
sacred task which He had undertaken. And never was Christ more conscious
of the Fathers smile than when the world was most emphatically hostile.
And so, no matter how dark it is if only we can maintain our communion
with God--if only we have continued to us the Divine fellowship. Should the
world forsake us, we shall be able to stand alone if the Father is with us.
2. The power of persevering prayer was another source of light and strength to
Christ. The stars are always visible from the high vantage-ground of prayer.
The heavens are never wholly dark to him who can repeat the hallowed
name. And this was partly the secret of the strength which animated Christ
as He passed through the thick darkness, that He ofttimes resorted thither.
He had accustomed Himself to pray. I have meat to eat, He said, that ye
know not of. It is well to learn to pray if it is only that we may learn how to
stand alone. The time will come when the things upon which we have leaned
will no longer afford us any support; when our health will fail us; when the
ties which bind us to friends and loved ones will be severed. But he who has
learned to pray has found a companionship in solitude which shall avail him
in all the lonely crises of his life. It is not that, having found God, we can
afford to part with everything else. But it is that, having found Him, we have
found the true basis and guarantee of life. The darkness that overtakes us, be
it what it may, is only temporary and precedent to the dawn. We have found
the pathway of the stars.
3. The power of faiths great anticipation was another source of light and
strength to our Saviour. He anticipated the Cross? Yes. But He anticipated
the Crown also. To the eye of sight the Cross was a repulsive object; to the
eye of faith it was the tree of life in the midst of the garden. He said to
Himself, The Cross will not be the end, but the beginning of My influence
and power for good in this world, and through the sacrifice which I am about
to make I shall transform the very gates of death into the gates of life!
These, then, were the great hopes, the high anticipations, shining like stars in
the midnight sky, which sustained Christ in the darkness in which He found
Himself. Have faith in God, and that faith, like a great pilot-star, shall light
you over the roughest sea and in the darkest night. (T. Sanderson.)

JEREMIAH 32
 JER 32:1-15
Buy my field, I pray thee.

Jeremiahs faith

I. FAITH IS HERE ILLUSTRATED AS RESTING EXCLUSIVELY UPON THE WORD OF GOD.

All that Jeremiah did in this matter he did just because he had a command from the
Lord. Whilst he was in prison, God told him that his cousin should come and offer
him the redemption of a part at least of the family inheritance. The man came, and
he knew that this was the Word of the Lord; therefore he bought the field. It is not
to be supposed that he was rich. The probability is that he may have had to get the
money for the purchase from his friend Baruch. Neither had he any expectation of
himself obtaining any personal benefit from the purchase, for he believed that the
city would be given into the hands of the Chaldeans, that the people would be taken
for seventy years as exiles to Babylon. This is the very nature of true faith; it does the
thing, or it receives the thing, it fears or it hopes, as the case may be wholly because
God has spoken. If it embraces a promise, it rests its hope upon the Word of the
Lord. If it is moved by fear, it is because God has denounced an impending
punishment. If it acts in a particular way, it follows exactly the path which God has
marked out. Resting as it does entirely upon the Word of God, it is altogether
independent of reason, although it does not refuse to listen to its voice. Faith
receives testimony; our faith in men leads us to receive the testimony of men. We
often receive that testimony although we have no other evidence whatever of the
facts we believe. Nay, we receive it although we have found the very persons whose
testimony we are now relying upon to have been, in some instances, at least,
mistaken. Faith in men goes thus far; it must go thus far; we are compelled to act in
this way, or we should cut ourselves off from mankind and the activities of life. But if
this be so, if we find it necessary and reasonable to act in this way, receiving the
testimony of men, shall we not receive the testimony of God? When He speaks it is
for us simply to listen. How wondrously has God spoken! In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth. Going on from that primary revelation, He has
revealed more and more of His truth; and in proportion as our minds rise, in
proportion as our moral sense is cultivated, in proportion as we get free from the
degrading power of evil which perverts our moral judgment, we find the revelation
to be in accordance with everything we might expect. He speaks to us of things
which are far beyond the reach of human knowledge and experience, testimony or
deduction. He sets before us His own dear Son incarnate in our nature, and tells us
of the great purpose for which He came.

II. This passage teaches us also that FAITH TAKES ACCOUNT OF DIFFICULTIES AND
IMPROBABILITIES ONLY SO FAR AS TO REFER THEM TO HIM. We must pass on to a later
portion of the chapter to illustrate this. When Jeremiah had purchased the field, and
subscribed the deeds and sealed them, and they were deposited in the custody of
Baruch in an earthen jar to be kept for a considerable time, he seems to have
experienced what we all know, some kind of reaction Of feeling; and then, as if he
almost felt that he had done something that he was hardly warranted in doing, he
goes and lays the matter before God (verses 17-25). This must certainly have seemed
strange to any person who did not understand that it was Gods Word. That a man
who was in prison should buy an estate, believing as he did that before long the
country would be in the hands of the Chaldeans, who would recognise no title-deeds
whatever; that he should carefully go through the forms of Jewish law to acquire the
estate, really appeared a most foolish thing. It seems as if those thoughts, so natural
to us, came back upon Jeremiahs mind, and he began to think of the difficulties and
the probabilities of the case. You see that this is not a prayer for a blessing upon
what he had done; it is not a prayer that the matter in which he had been engaged
should be successful; but it is an utterance of wavering and distracted feeling; and
that wavering and distracted feeling is rightly uttered to God. We all know perfectly
well that faith as it exists in us is not complete in its power. Sometimes we can look
over, we might almost say, the boundaries of our earthly horizon and see the gates of
the heavenly Jerusalem and the hills of the celestial city, but at other times the
depths of the valley of the shadow of death seem to hide it all from our view.
Sometimes we can hold firmly to the truth which God has been pleased to set before
us with unequivocal assertion, and with demonstration of power to our believing
heart; but at other times our grasp upon it seems to relax, and it appears almost as if
it would slip through our hands. When there is anything of this, what will a person
who really has faith do, although that faith may not be in the most perfect state and
in the fullest exercise? He will take all his difficulty to God. Do we find any
difficulties about the way of salvation? Let us go and ask God to throw light, as far as
that light is necessary, upon the truths whereby we are to be saved. Is there any
question about my own connection with, or interest in, the work of Christ? Let me
go and spread it before God, and ask Him to make my salvation clear to me. God
never said that there should be no difficulty in the Christians path. God never told
us that there should be nothing hard to understand in the truth that the Christian
has to believe respecting Himself.

III. Again, we have this ILLUSTRATION OF THE NATURE AND THE POWER OF TRUE
FAITH:--it joins obedience prompt and full with reliance implicit and abiding. Why
does the inspired writer tell us the little particulars of the transaction? Would it not
have been enough to say, I bought the field? No, because the object was to show
that, in the full confidence that what God had said would come to pass, Jeremiah
had left nothing whatever undone. There was no flaw in the document; all legal
forms were complied with exactly; the two kinds of deeds that were always used, the
one sealed and the other open, were provided; the earthen jar was obtained; the
deeds were put in it and intrusted to a man of rank and standing; the money was
paid; and all was done in the presence of witnesses, just as if Jeremiah had hoped to
take possession of the little estates the very next day. This shows that the obedience
of faith will be prompt and full and will omit nothing. Jeremiah never expected to
get possession of that estate personally. He himself spoke of seventy years as the
period of the captivity, and he did not therefore expect that he should ever be put in
possession of the little piece of land, the reversion to which he had purchased. Faith
does not bind its expectations to the present; it does not limit them to a mans own
life here; it looks beyond. And the faith of a Christian looks farther still than
Jeremiahs. It does not look merely to a deliverance at the end of seventy years, and
a possession by some of our descendants or representatives at that time of a little
spot in the earthly Canaan. It looks to the close of this mortal life, to the day of
resurrection, and to glory with the risen Saviour throughout eternity. (W. A. Salter.)
Jeremiahs purchase

I. The reasons for this purchase.

1. We may perhaps suppose that kindness to a kinsman, as Matthew Henry
suggests, had something to do with it; for kindness is kinnedness, and it is
very hard if we cannot show kindness to our kith and kin when they are in
need. If Jeremiah has no need of the land, we may still infer, under the
circumstances of Jerusalem in a state of siege, that his cousin Hanameel has
great need of money. Some of us, perhaps, who maintain that business is
business, and should be conducted always on the strictest business
principles, may think that as to this matter of kindness to a kinsman, about
the most inexpedient way of showing it is by mixing it with matters of
business. As nearest kinsman his was the right of redemption, and it was
already his in reversion in case of the death of his cousin; this cousin being,
as we assume, in straits for want of money, and Jeremiah being a
considerate, reasonable, and kind-hearted man, concedes to his cousins
proposal, buying the land for what it is worth, and perhaps for something
more. And if the opportunity should occur to us of helping a needy relative in
some such way--if with anything like a reasonable prospect of success we can
give him another chance, a new start in life, helping him to help himself--
then, looking at the example of Jeremiah, I think we may all hear a voice
speaking to us, and saying, Go thou and do likewise.
2. We may suggest, as another reason for this purchase, Jeremiahs interest in
future generations. Anathoth was one of the cities of the priests, and this
field was ecclesiastical property. It might well be, therefore, that, unless
Jeremiah bought it, it might in those confused times pass into other hands,
by which it would become alienated from its sacred purposes, and so the law
of Moses suffer violation. He was a Jew, and we know how the Jews looked
on to the future and backward to the past, linking the past to the present and
the present to the future, finding in the present a focus in which both past
and future met, and so in the nations unity finding its immortality. We know
how that great national anthem, that prayer of Moses the man of God,
begins, Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations; and we
know how it closes, Let Thy work appear unto Thy servants, and Thy glory
unto their children, and establish Thou the work of our hands upon us, yea,
the work of our hands establish Thou it. We have a more sure word of
prophecy, we anticipate a more glorious future, and we also know that even
as to this life the best that we can do for those who are to come after us is not
by making purchases, not buying fields or houses, not saving fortunes for
our children, but by living godly, devout, Christ-like lives, shall we leave to
them the best inheritance.
3. Let us assume, again, that Jeremiah, magnifying his prophets office, would
have it made plain that he himself believed in his own predictions. The land
was indeed to be desolate for seventy years, to have its Sabbaths, and to lie
fallow; but after that time the people were to return from their captivity, take
joyful possession once more of houses, and fields, and lands: and this
particular piece of land, Jeremiah believed, would then revert to its rightful
 owners, the priests and Levites. For ourselves, making no pretension to the
prophets office--that is, in the sense of foretelling--yet let us take care that
our practice shall not conflict with our theory, that we practise what we
preach, and so adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things. Let your
conversation be as becometh the gospel of Christ.
4. Lastly, as summing up all, we may say that Jeremiah evidently believed it to
be the will of God. I marvel much how anyone calling himself a Christian,
can ever hesitate as to doing what he believes to be the will of God, especially
when the question is of something simple and easily done. I am asked
sometimes, Is baptism necessary to salvation? and I answer, No, a thousand
times, no. Salvation precedes baptism, and is in nowise a consequence of it;
but surely, if we once admit that it is the will of God, that we have for it at
once the example and precept of the Lord, that should be enough for us.

II. JEREMIAHS DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES AS TO THIS PURCHASE. No sooner was it

completed than he seems to have been oppressed as with a burden, his brain
clouded, and his nervous system rendered irritable by it.
1. Perhaps he is beginning to doubt whether after all he had rightly interpreted
the vision, and the subsequent visits of Hanameel, as making it quite certain
that he was to accept his kinsmans offer. He still thinks so, as it would seem,
upon the whole, but yet his mind is opening to a doubt, and he is in sore
perplexity of spirit.
2. It may be also that he is distressed at the thought that perhaps his very
confidence in the promises of God, and his wish to show that he believed in
his own predictions, may be turned against him. The sneering, who
understand so well the motives of others, may be saying, Dont tell me that
this man is so unselfish as to part with his money for a piece of land that
somebody else seventy years hence is to enjoy! He knows better than that,
and fully expects before very long to take possession of it himself; and
possibly, hearing such things, he might be in the confused condition of
Bunyans Christian in the valley of the shadow of death, when the foul fiend
whispered into his ear those terrible thoughts which he could hardly
distinguish from his own. There is nothing at all unusual, moreover, in such
an experience as this, that when a man, acting by such light as he has, has
done what seems to him a wise thing and a good thing, there comes for a
time a sort of morbid reaction, by which he sinks into despondency and
gloom. And herein lies the difference between those who fall away and those
who, enduring to the end, are saved: not that either is exempt from doubts,
conflicts, and temptations; but that in the one case these are yielded to, and
in the other, faith ultimately gains the victory over them.

III. HOW JEREMIAH OVERCAME AND SOLVED HIS DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES. I
prayed unto the Lord. Whether or not he prayed to the Lord about his purchase
before he made it we are not told. Perhaps he did not. There are some things that
seem so plain to us as matters of duty and of daily habit, that there is no need to
pray for Divine direction concerning them. As the Lord said to Moses when Israels
duty was so plain, Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of
Israel, that they go forward. But in any case we are sure that the spirit of prayer, the
continued lifting up of the heart to God, was in all that Jeremiah had done. But
when we find him bringing this matter of the purchase specially before the Lord,
seeking as he does for help and strength and grace, in weakness, perplexity, and
trouble, we are encouraged by his example to bring all our affairs to the throne of
the heavenly grace, however commonplace, mechanical, and routine they may be. (J.
W. Lance.)

A patriots faith in the future

This was bravely done, to make a purchase at such a time, when the enemy was
seizing upon all. That Roman is famous in history who adventured to purchase that
field near Rome wherein Hannibal had pitched his camp. But the Romans were
nothing near so low at that time as the Jews were at this. A striking parallel to this
confidence of Jeremiah, in the midst of near and present troubles, as to the ultimate
glory of his nation, is furnished in the recently published Memoir of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, whoso father, Gabriel Rossetti, an Italian patriot who sought asylum in this
country, yet never lost faith in the future of his native land. His biographer says:
When he died in 1854, the outlook seemed exceedingly dark; yet heart and hope did
not abate in him. The latest letter of his which I have seen published was written in
September or October 1853, and contains this passage, equally strong-spirited and
prophetic: The Arpa Evangelica . . . ought to find free circulation through all Italy. I
do not say the like of three other unpublished volumes, which all seethe with love of
country and hatred for tyrants. These await a better time--which will come, be very
sure of it. The present fatal period will pass, and serves to whet the universal desire
Let us look to the future. Our tribulations, dear Madam, will not finish very soon,
but finish they will at last. Reason has awakened in all Europe, although her enemies
are strong. We shall pass various years in this state of degradation; then we shall
rouse up. I assuredly shall not see it, for day by day--nay, hour by hour, I expect the
much-longed-for death; but you will see it.
Into the ground to die
Whilst shut up in the court of the prison, perhaps fastened by a chain that
restrained his liberty, Jeremiah received a Divine intimation that his uncle would
shortly come to him with a request for him to purchase the family property at
Anathoth. This greatly startled him; because he had so clear a conviction, which he
cherished as divinely given, of the approaching overthrow of the kingdom, and the
consequent desolation of the land. He gave, however, no outward sign of his
perplexities; but when his uncles son entered the courtyard with his request, the
prophet at once assented to the proposal, and purchased the property for seventeen
shekels (about 2). In addition to this, Jeremiah took care to have the purchase
recorded and witnessed with the same elaborate pains as if he were at once to be
entering on occupation. The two deeds of contract--the one sealed with the more
private details of price; the other open, and bearing the signatures of witnesses--
were deposited in the charge of Baruch, with the injunction to put them in an
earthen vessel and preserve them. They were probably not opened again until the
return from the captivity. But Jeremiah was not a sharer in that glad scene. He did
as God bade him, though the shadow of a great darkness lay upon his soul, for which
he could only find relief, as the Lord on the Cross, in recourse to the Father. He fell
into the ground to die, as the seed does, which holds at its heart a principle of life,
that can only express itself through death, and can only bless men when its sowing,
amid the depression and decay of autumn, has been complete.

I. HOURS OF MIDNIGHT DARKNESS. It is only in service that anything reaches its

fullest life. A bit of iron is condemned to solitude and uselessness till it becomes part
of a great machine. A man who lives a self-contained life, of which the gratification
of his own ambition and selfhood is the supreme aim, never drinks the sweets of
existence, nor attains his full development. It is only when we live for God, and, in
doing so, for man, that we are able to appropriate the rarest blessedness of which
our nature is capable, or to unfold into all the proportions of full growth in Christ. In
the deepest sense, therefore, Jeremiah could never regret that he had given the
strength and measure of his days to the service of others. But none can give
themselves to the service of others except at bitter cost of much that this world holds
dear. This will explain the privations and sorrows to which Jeremiah was subjected.
Death wrought in him, that life might work in Israel, and in all who should read the
Book of his prophecy.
1. He died to the dear ties of human love. Thou shalt not take thee a wife,
neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place, was early said to
him. What he held in his heart belonged to the race, and might not be poured
forth within the narrower circle of the home, of priestly temple-duty, or of
the little village of Anathoth.
2. He died to the goodwill of his fellows. None can be indifferent to this. It is
easy to do or suffer, when the bark of life is wafted on its way by favouring
breezes, or the air thrills with expressions of love and adulation. Then a man
is nerved to dare to do his best. It was his bitter lot to encounter from the
first an incessant stream of vituperation and dislike. Woe is me, my
mother, he cried sadly, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and
contention to the whole earth. I have not lent on usury, neither have men
lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me.
3. He died to the pride of national patriotism. No patriot allows himself to
despair of his country. However dark the louring storm clouds and strong the
adverse current, he believes that the ship of State will weather the storm. He
chokes back words of despondency and depression, lest they should breed
dismay. But Jeremiah was driven along an opposite course. A loftier
patriotism than his never hazarded itself in the last breach. His belief in
Israel was part of his belief in God. But he found himself compelled to speak
in such a fashion that the princes proposed, not without show of reason, to
put him to death, because he weakened the hands of the men of war.
4. He died to the sweets of personal liberty. A large portion of his ministry was
exerted from the precincts of a prison. Repeatedly we read of his being shut
up and not able to go forth.
5. He died, also, to the meaning he had been wont to place on his own
prophecies. Up to the moment when Jehovah bade him purchase the
property of Hanameel, he had never questioned the impending fate of
Jerusalem. It was certainly and inevitably to be destroyed by sword, famine,
pestilence, and fire. But now the Word of God, demanding an act of
obedience, seemed to indicate that the land was to remain under the
cultivation of the families that owned it.
 II. JEREMIAHS BEHAVIOUR. But amid it all he derived solace and support in three
main directions.
1. He prayed. Take this extract from his own diary: Now, after I had delivered
the deed of the purchase unto Baruch, the son of Neriah, I prayed unto the
Lord, saying, Ah, Lord God! There is no help to the troubled soul like that
which comes through prayer.
2. He rested on the word of God. The soul of the prophet was nourished and fed
by the Divine word. Thy words were found, he cries, and I did eat them:
and Thy words were unto me the joy and the rejoicing of my heart.
3. He faithfully kept to the path of duty. And I bought the field. It does not
always happen that our service to men will be met by rebuff, ill-will, and
hard treatment; but when it does there should be no swerving, or flinching,
or drawing back. The fierce snow-laden blast, driving straight in your teeth,
is not so pleasant as the breath of summer, laden with the scent of the
heather; but if you can see the track, you must follow it. To be anywhere off
it, either right or left, would be dangerous in the extreme. Such are the
resorts of the soul in its seasons of anguish.

III. COMPENSATIONS. To all valleys there are mountains, to all depths heights; for
all midnight hours there are hours of sunrise; for Gethsemane, an Olivet. We can
never give up aught for God or man, without discovering that at the moment of
surrender He begins to repay as He foretold to the prophet; For brass I will bring
gold, and for iron I will Bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron. Nor
does God keep these compensations for the new world, where light and darkness
fuse. It were long to wait, if that were so. But here and now we learn that there are
compensations. The first movement from the selfish life may strain and try us, the
indifference of our fellows be hard to bear; hut God has such things to reveal and
give, as pass the wildest imaginings of the self-centred soul. So Jeremiah found it.
His compensations came. God became his Comforter, and wiped, away his tears;
and opened to him the vista of the future, down whose long aisles he beheld his
people planted again in their own land. He saw men buying fields for money, and
subscribing deeds and sealing them, as he had done. There was compensation also
in the confidence with which Nebuchadnezzar treated him, and in the evident
reliance which his decimated people placed in his intercessions, as we shall see. So it
will be with all who fall into the ground to die. God will not forget or forsake them.
The grave may be dark and deep, the winter long, the frost keen and penetrating;
but spring will come, and the stone be rolled away; and the golden stalk shall wave
in the sunshine, bearing its crown of fruit; and men shall thrive on the bread of our
experience, the product of our tears, and sufferings, and prayers. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JER 32:8
Then I knew that this was the Word of the Lord.

Missed opportunities
No person who understands, and still less he who values, life as a sacred
opportunity of doing something for the world before he dies, but has often wished
that he could overleap the bounds of the present and understand what the result of
his action shall be, so that, with the larger experience of the future, he might go the
better armed against the perplexing problems and conditions of duty which beset
him in the present. If only we had the education which will come in the future, how
we should be protected against the mistakes of the present! And thus we feel a
certain impatience against time. Now, the incident recorded in this chapter suggests
to us exactly that thought of the way in which time may rebuke our rashness and
rebuke also our dulness. The incident which is recorded is a very simple one, but it is
suggestive and significant. A certain sort of dream, as we might call it, passed
through the mind of Jeremiah, then in close imprisonment because of the jealous
anger of the king. Whatever else he was, he was a Jew at heart, and he had that
capacity which was singularly, I suppose, possessed by the Jew--the tenacious love
of the soil which gave him birth. It was a joy for him to think that the land which was
given by God to his forefathers belonged in succession of family inheritance to his
own kinsman of that day; and the dream crossed his mind that perchance that
moment might come when he would have the opportunity of becoming the
possessor of his ancestral heritage. That was his thought. It came to him as a dream;
he describes it afterwards as the direction of the Word of the Lord coming to him.
But it was not, I imagine, realised as the Word of God at the first moment of its
approach: it was only a later circumstance an actual incident which occurred in his
life--which enabled him to see that the first suggested thought was, indeed, the
Word of the Lord. Now, the first thought which naturally arises from a thing like
that is this. We may act upon our first impressions, our impressions may be very
strong, and they may be ready to link themselves with our natural ambitions, but it
is not every impression that is the word of light, still less the Word of the Lord.
Religion divides itself very often, if we were to classify it, into two families or types.
It has often been made the subject of mere mental impressions. The presence of the
Spirit, the consciousness of a spirit working within, that has been emphasised to
such a degree that at last men, driven by their impulse or suggestion of some passing
impression, have committed deeds of violence and wrong which the common
conscience of humanity condemns. That is to say, early impressions, strong
impressions, even impressions which jump with the spirit of what we believe to be
right, impressions which wed themselves to our darling dreams, however much they
may justify themselves by the exercise of our imaginative conscience, are not in
themselves to be accepted as truly Divine suggestions. We must wait for the light of
other circumstances. Authority in religion is never on the one side or the other;
authority is never wholly within, nor yet wholly without. If it is wholly within, it is
open to the declaration of being a mere subjective impression; if it is wholly without,
it lays no weight upon the spiritual nature of man, and receives no response from his
conscience. But, when there comes to us this which, on the one hand, links itself
with our inner nature, and by its own commanding presence makes us feel that it is
true, and brings to it also the verifying evidence of providential opportunity--then
duty leaps up and can draw her sword, because she knows that she is not the victim
of a passing impression alone, but that two things, the law without and the law
within, have been combining within his life--then he may know that this also is the
Word of the Lord. But if, on the one side, an accident like this may be taken to
rebuke the rash impulsiveness of men who would act upon their own subjective
impressions, it also, and I think still more strikingly, witnesses against our dulness,
which fails to perceive the true significance of the incidents of life as they occur. It
was an impression on Jeremiahs mind, and it was only afterwards, when the light of
that later circumstance of Hanameels visit occurred, that he perceived its full
significance. Then I knew that this was the Word of the Lord. Now mark that this
experience is very true in our ordinary life. How often it happens that we have failed
to realise the full value of our opportunities till later circumstances flash new light
on their meaning! To take the simplest illustration which might come to our minds,
you are in the midst of a crowd; you are anxiously looking out because it is a crowd
where many of the celebrities of life are gathered; and after you have passed some
one suddenly says to you, Did you see him? and immediately there flashes upon
you the thought, you have been close to one whose name you have heard, whose
works perchance you have read, of whom you have had the greatest desire to have
some knowledge. Just then the after circumstance of the utterance of your friend
flashes upon you the true meaning of this; you have been close to that greatness
which you have worshipped, you have massed the opportunity. Or there are
incidents in your own life. Have you never had some friend who in early life was
your familiar companion? You played with him, studied the same tasks with him;
and now life has diverged, and he has risen to greatness, and we remain where we
were on the commonplace level of life. People meet us and say, You knew him; tell
me some incidents of his early life. But now the dimness of the past comes upon
your memory, and all the anecdotes have dropped away; the multitude of other
affairs has obscured your recollection. But then, by the light of this after greatness,
you know you have been by the side of one who was possessed of conspicuous
genius, one of whom you would say, Would that I had husbanded those stories of
the past; would that I had observed him, for his life would have a further meaning to
me had I been one who had noted carefully the characteristics, the features of his
talent, of his life. In other words, later circumstances are constantly forcing upon us
the dulness with which we have confronted the incidents of life as they have
occurred. And surely that is the common witness of history. What is the history of all
human progress? What is the history of literary life? Who killed John Keats? has
often been asked. To the men of his day he was but a raw youth, full of a kind of rude
desire for poetic fame; but now we recognise the genius which lay there; we go back
and say how true it is that the men of their day failed to recognise the glory of these
men, have persecuted them, and let them starve, and afterwards have built their
monuments. It is the same in the history of our Lord. You are not surprised that the
same thing should be fulfilled in His life who was in all points as we are--tempted,
yet without sin. We say, If we had lived in those days our hand would not have been
lifted up against that sacred life, we should have torn the crown of thorns from His
brow, we should have welcomed His mission, we should have adored Him. But the
men of that day did not see the beauty that they should desire Him. Thou art a
Samaritan and hast a devil, were the words with which He was greeted. John the
Baptist pointed out their dulness--There standeth One among you Whom ye know
not. But we forget that this may be true in us. Even in our midst Christ stands, and
we fail to recognise Him. Why is it we are perpetually visiting with our severe
criticism the dulness of the past, when we may be dull ourselves--dull to duty, dull to
opportunity, dull to the meaning of the age in which we are living, dull to the very
call of God, dull to the presence of Christ? Every duty, every opportunity of
kindness, every incident of our life, if we are alive to see it in its brighter light, in its
true significance, would never be deemed to be trivial and insignificant at all. When
we begin to see light, when the light shall flash upon it, when the grave is opening
upon us, this very flash of the circumstance which we call death may shine so back
upon the trivial incidents of our life, that we shall realise for the first time that those
commonplace things, those duties which I shirked, those things from which I turned
away, thinking them of no moment at all--those also were the Word of the Lord.
May I, then, ask you to observe the application of that truth, that time reveals to us
our dulness in relation to certain aspects of our life?
1. First, the circumstances of the presence of God. We are often disposed to say
that our lot in this century is cast in what we may call unfavourable
circumstances for faith. Splendid miracles no longer happen. May not the
presence of God be as real amongst the ordinary conventional aspects of our
daily life--in the sun that rises and sets, in the harvests that are sown and
reaped? And may it not be also that the hour might come upon us when the
light from some new combination of circumstances might so flash upon our
present or our past life as to reveal to us God was there indeed?
2. Or take it with regard to what we may call the providential circumstances of
life. Have you never felt that your burden in life is a larger one to bear than
your neighbours? We think that others who go cheerily through the world
have less affliction than we; we wish we could change with them. But
suppose the Lord Almighty did meet you, who understands exactly the
conditions of flesh and blood, who knows those special conditions which you
have inherited through the long succession of your ancestors, if He were to
come to you and say, I am about to bring upon you this sorrow you will lose
pecuniarily, or you shall have this illness, or that true one shall be swept
from your side; I ask you to bear for My sake, My child, this burden; and if
that measure your strength, I know exactly what you can bear; and I know
also the sweet and the glorious bounty of grace which shall come to you in
the bearing of it. Not one amongst us with the face of Gods strength looking
into ours, and the smile of God encouraging us to patience and fortitude,
would ever bear to shrink from the burden; we would gird up the loins of our
mature to bear whatever it was--sorrow, bereavement, loss. But that which
we would do if God so spake to us is surely that which we might lucre the
faith to do--seeing that later circumstances may just flash upon us this
revelation--It was God, indeed, who brought that burden upon me. That
loss, that bereavement, that sickness--were brought by the loving hand of
God, who sought to help you through the discipline of life into a better and
truer faith and spirit.
3. Lastly, I would ask you to see the light which that thought throws upon the
suggestions of duty--duty, stern daughter of the voice of God. If that has any
meaning, it has a claim upon your life and mine. But what I ask you to
observe is this. We never realise the splendour and the significance of the
duties which are laid upon us, when measured by our own small life; they
seem so trifling. Look for a moment at the prophet. That which he did might,
from one standpoint, be said to be merely the desire of a man to possess
some landed property, merely the wish of a man that he may be in the
possession of his ancestral heritage; but when the opportunity came he said,
This suggestion is the Word of the Lord. For his action was no longer a
commercial action done between himself and his kinsman; it became then a
great action, typical, representative, manifesting to Israel the real attitude of
strength with which Israel should confront its dangers. Like the old Roman,
it was the purchase of the land while the enemy was in possession which
gave dignity to his action. The Roman by his action said, Though the enemy
be at the gates, I do not despair of the welfare of the republic. Jeremiahs
action said more: I do not believe that one rood of the sacred soil shall ever
permanently be in the possession of the enemies of God; and it was the
splendour therefore, the significance, of the action which was flashed upon
him at the moment when the opportunity of the purchase came; and that
which was once a dream is become a reality. And he could therefore prove to
the people the reality of his faith in the hope and in the destiny of Israel. The
meaning and the significance of that action none of his countrymen could
gainsay, because he was ready to venture his money. That is the spirit of it.
Every duty costs something: it costs some trouble, some pains, some
thought, some money. Duty, whatever is in your life, is not always an easy
thing, unless your nature has been celestialised, and duty has become a
delight. But that, after all, belongs rather to the higher levels of life than that
commonly apportioned to humankind. Would duty be less noble if duty were
easy? Is it not precisely because the steep up which you climb is rocky;
because you must sometimes fall, and climb on hands and knees ere you can
get to the height where the light of God is shining; because it means the
expenditure of fame, money--whatever it is; because the duty is shirked--that
therefore the duty is noble? It does cost something; and the man who talks
glibly about duty, but is never ready to pay the price of his duty, to purchase
his duty by the laying down of some present price, either of money or of
time--that man, whatever else he may say, does not believe in the splendid
imperative of duty, he does not believe in the voice of God behind it. If I want
now to correct the dulness of my eyesight and be illumined by that light
which will enable me to perceive that the Divine light is there, which will
enable me to hear in every call the voice of the Lord, what shall be my best
means of achieving this? Let the past illumine the present; go back on your
life and observe it. You now can perceive exactly where it was you missed
your way, because you now know that, if you had done this or omitted to do
that, if you had not been the victim of that delusion, you would have been in
a different position- You see now that that voice at your side was indeed the
voice of the Lord. Let the past illumine the present. Do not treat duties as
trivial and commonplace, because as your present life illuminates your past
life, and shows you how Gods voice has been in it, so the future may illumine
the duties which appeal to you to-day. We often say that the dead are
canonised in our memory. When they pass away with their greatness, they
seem to move from the crowd of men and march with stately steps, and take
their place in the great banquet-halls of those whom memory holds
illustrious and dear; and from out those banquet-halls they look down with
eyes brimming with reproach, because we do not value them as we might. So
our duties, canonised by the light which the present throws upon them,
march stately before us; they take their place high above, and there are
reproaches in their eyes; and the future will have reproaches like this, if we
do not perceive the voice of the Lord at our side. The real thing which dims
our eyes is the limited light we bring, measuring all the incidents of life by
self. Bring in the larger light. Why, that old Roman brought in the larger
light, when he saw in the purchase of the land not his own private gain but
the welfare of the republic. He saw his duty in the larger light of the well-
being of the men and women about him. Let in the light of other mens
interests, let in the light of the welfare of those about you, and then you
 cannot say that the duties are insignificant, then their voice will be to you the
voice of humanitys need, and you will see a dignity in obeying it. Look upon
every action of your life, not in relation to self or to the men and women
about you, but in relation to God. Let in that larger light. Then every action
of yours has its transcendent significance; then His Divine voice appeals to
you; then you say, Every habit I contract, every word I speak, every
opportunity I miss, may be a Divine opportunity slighted, the Divine voice
turned back upon. (Bp. Boyd Carpenter.)

JER 32:14
Take these evidences,. . . and put them in an earthen vessel.

Sealed and open evidences

I am going to make a parable, not to bring out what the text teaches, but to use it
parable-wise. When Jeremiah bought this piece of land, it was transferred to him by
two documents. The first was a title-deed, drawn up and signed by witnesses and
then sealed up, not to be opened any more unless required to settle a dispute. That
was his real title-deed. Then there was a counterpart of this transfer made, and
signed by witnesses. This was not rolled up, and not sealed; but left open, so that
Jeremiah might refer to it, and that, when desired, the open deed might be read and
examined by others. Now, with regard to our redemption, our inheritance which
Christ has bought for us, at a price immense, we, too, have two sets of evidences.
The one is sealed up from all eyes but our own; in part, too, I might say that it is
sealed up from our own eyes. The other, the counterpart of that, equally valid, is
open to ourselves and open to others.

I. THE SEALED EVIDENCES OF OUR FAITH, the evidences which are sealed, at least
in a measure, from our fellow-men.
1. And, first, I would say, among the sealed evidences is this: the Word of the
Lord has come to us with power. If anyone asked himself, Have I a right to
the covenant of grace, and to the all things which are ours if we are in that
covenant? Have I a right to the purchased possession? Have I a right to the
Lord Jesus Christ, and all that comes to believers in Him?--in part, the
answer must be, Has the Word of the Lord come to you with power, not as
the word of man, but as it is in truth, the Word of God? There is a mystic
influence, a Divine unction, which really goes with the Word of God, in many
cases, so that it enters the heart, sheds a radiance upon the understanding,
pours a flood of delightful peace and joy upon the soul, and affects the whole
mental and spiritual being m a way which nothing else does. You cannot
explain this to others; do you know it yourself? If so, that will be to you the
sealed evidence that the eternal heritage is yours. The Lord has given you the
spiritual perception of these things.
2. The next one of these sealed evidences is this, if indeed this heavenly heritage
is ours, we have a living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. As many as received
Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that
believe on His name.
 3. Another sealed evidence of our interest in Christ is that we have life in Jesus.
You have risen from the lower sphere of mere soulish life into the higher
condition of spiritual life, and now you consort with God, you speak with
Christ, you have become familiar with heavenly things, and are raised up to
sit in the heavenlies with Christ Jesus.
4. This leads me to the fourth evidence, which is that now we have communion
with God in prayer. The prophet Micah said, My God will hear me, and if
you can truly, from your soul, say the same, you have a blessed evidence that
you are an heir of heaven.
5. I rank very highly among the sealed evidences of our inheritance the fact that
we have the fear of God before our eyes. That holy awe of God, that
consciousness of His majestic presence, that dread of doing anything
contrary to His will, that tender, loving, filial fear, which love does not cast
out, but rather nourishes and cherishes, he that has this holy fear is a child of
God.
6. Another evidence is this: we have secret supports in the time of trouble.
Underneath are the everlasting arms; you are sustained when enduring
awful pain, comforted under deep depression of spirit, strengthened for the
work for which in yourself alone you are quite unequal, borne upward with
holy joy in the midst of cruel slander; surely that is enough evidence for you.
7. Another sealed evidence is the secret love which the child of God has to all
others of the children of God We know that we have passed from death unto
life, because we love the brethren. As to the love we have to Jesus, We love
Him because He first loved us, and our love to Him is one of the evidences
of His love to us. We also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
8. Those inward conflicts which you now have, that struggling in your soul
between right and wrong, the new man seeking to get the victory over the old
corrupt nature, all these are your sealed evidences. So, also, are the victories
which God gives you, when He treads evil passions beneath the feet of the
new-born Man-child, who is the image of Christ within you, when you
conquer yourself, when you subdue anger, when you go forth to do, by the
strength of God, what else your nature would shrink from; all these are
blessed evidences, signed, and sealed, to be rolled up, and put away, to be
seen by no eye but your own, and the eye of the Most High.

II. The open evidences of our faith.

1. The first of such evidences that we are the children of God must be the open
Word of God itself. I read the Bible, and I say, Well, if this Book be true, I
am a saved man: if this is really a Divine revelation, then I am saved.
Beloved, have you that open evidence of your salvation? That is the best
evidence in the whole world.
2. Next to that, the open evidence of our right to the inheritance is a thorough
change of life such as other people can see. Is it so with you? Has there been
a distinct crisis in your being? Have you been turned from darkness unto
light? Have you been brought from the power of Satan unto God?
3. Another open evidence is separation from the world. A man who is really a
child of God cannot, after his conversion, consort with his old companions.
 4. The next open evidence is found in union with the people of God, making
them your companions, taking a delight in them.
5. One very clear open evidence is strict honesty, uprightness, and integrity in
business. Your word must be your bond, and you must sooner fail in
business than do the smallest thing that would be contrary to the strictest
integrity.
6. One very open evidence of a change of heart, and of our possession of the
inheritance, is a readiness to forgive.
7. Another open evidence is one which we often get, and do not like, that is, the
opposition of the world. Thank God, Isaac, when Ishmael mocks you; for it is
a mark that you are of the true seed, and that Ishmael is not.
8. Another open evidence, and one that is very sweet, is a holy patience in time
of trouble, and especially in the hour of death.

III. The uses to which we put these evidences.

1. One of them is that they often yield us comfort. It takes the sting out of every
trouble when we know that the heavenly inheritance is surely ours.
2. Then again, these evidences answer the unjust charges of Satan when he
comes and says, You are not a child of God.
3. And above all things, I think that we ought to value these evidences because
they will be produced in court at the last day. That is the most solemn thing
of all. I was an hungered and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me
drink: and so on. He produces this evidence of a work of grace in their
hearts, and says to them, Come, ye blessed of My Father, &c. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

JER 32:17
Thou hast made the heaven and the earth.

Creation-an argument for faith

I would to God we had in the religion of these modern times a more potent
infusion of this heroic faith in God. When Edward Irving preached that memorable
sermon concerning the missionary, who he thought was bound to go forth without
purse or scrip, and trusting in his God alone, to preach the Word, a howl went up to
heaven against the man as a fanatic. They said he was visionary, unpractical, mad,
and all because he dared to preach a sermon full of faith in God. If once again we
could, like the world, be hanged upon nothing but the simple power and providence
of God, I am sure we should find it a blessed and a safe way of living, glorious to
God, and honourable to ourselves.

I. TO STIMULATE THE EVANGELIST. And who is the evangelist? Every man and
woman who has tasted that the Lord is gracious. Here is your encouragement: the
work is Gods, and your success is in the hand of Him who made the heaven and the
earth.
1. Remember that the world was created from nothing. He spake and it was
done; He commanded, and it stood fast. The case of the sinner is a parallel
one. You say there is nothing in the sinner. Ay, then, there is room here for a
re-creating work; for the Eternal God to come, and with His outstretched
arm to create a new heart and a right spirit, and put His grace where there
was none before.
2. But you have none to help you or go forth in your work with you. When God
made the world--and the same God is with thee--He worked alone.
3. But you reply, My sorrow lieth not so much in that I am alone, as in the
melancholy fact that I am very conscious of my own weakness, and of my
want of adaptation for my peculiar work. I am not sufficient for these things;
but rather I feel like Jonah, that I would flee into Tarshish, that I might
escape from the burden of the Lord against this Nineveh. Ay, but cast thy
thoughts back again upon creation. The Eternal needed no instruments in
creation. He sayeth not by mans strength, nor by human learning, and
eloquence, and talent. It is His strength, and not the strength or weakness of
the instruments to which we must look.
4. Dost thou still complain, and say--Alas! it is little I can say! When I speak, I
can but utter a few plain words--true and earnest, but not mighty. I have no
power to plead with souls with the tears and the seraphic zeal of a Whitfield.
I can only tell the tale of mercy simply, and leave it there. Well, and did not
God create all things by His naked word? At this day, is not the Gospel in
itself the rod of Jehovahs strength? Is it not the power of God unto salvation
to every one that believeth?
5. Another pleads, You are not aware of the darkness of the district in which I
labour. I toil among a benighted, unintelligent, ignorant people. I cannot
expect to see fruit there, toil as I may. Ah! brother, and while you talk so you
never will see any fruit, for God giveth not great things to unbelieving men.
But for the encouragement of thy faith, let me remind thee that it is the God
that made the heavens and the earth on whom thou hast to lean.
6. Ay, saith one, but the men among whom I labour are so confused in their
notions, they put darkness for light and light for darkness; their moral sense
is blunted; if I try to teach them, their ears are dull of hearing and their
hearts are given to slumber. Besides, they are full of vain janglings and
oppose themselves to the truth; I endure much contradiction of sinners, and
they will not receive the truth in the love of it. Did not the Holy Spirit brood
with shadowing wings over the earth when it was chaos? Did He not bring
out order from confusion?
7. Ah, say you, they are all so dead, so dead! Ay, and remember how the
waters brought forth life abundantly; and how the earth brought forth the
creeping thing, and the cattle after its kind; and how, at last, man was made
out of the very dust of the earth.
8. See how fair and glorious this earth is now! Well might the morning stars sing
together, and the sons of God shout for joy! And dost thou think that God
cannot make as fair a heart in man, and make it bud and blossom, and teem
with hallowed life?
 II. TO ENCOURAGE THE INQUIRER. Many really desirous to be saved are full of
doubts, and difficulties, and questionings.
1. Your mind is so dark. I cannot see Christ, says one; I feel benighted; it is all
darkness, thick as night with me. Yes, but then there is the question, Can
God roll this night away? And the answer comes, He who said, Let there be
light, and there was light, can certainly repeat the miracle.
2. Another of your doubts will arise from the fact that you feel so weak. You
cannot do what you would. You would leave sin, but still fall into it; would
lay hold on Christ, but cannot. Then comes the question, Can God do it? And
we answer, He who made the heavens and the earth without a helper, can
certainly Bare thee when thou canst not help thyself.
3. Ay, sayest thou again, but I am in such an awful state of mind; there is such
a confusion within me; I cannot tell what is the matter with me; I know not
what I am; I cannot understand myself. Was not the world just so of old,
and did not all the beauty of all lands rise out of this dire confusion?
4. There is more hope in thy case than there was in the creation of the world, for
in the creation there was nothing done beforehand. The plan was drawn, no
doubt, but no material was provided; no stores laid in to effect the purpose.
But in thy case the work is done already, beforehand. On the bloody tree
Christ has carried sin; in the grave He has vanquished death; in resurrection
He has rent for ever the bends of the grave; in ascension He has opened
heaven to all believers; and in His intercession He is pleading still for them
that trust Him.
5. Yet again, God has done something more in thee than there was done before
He made the world. Emptiness did not cry, O God! create me. Darkness
could not pray, O Lord give me light. Confusion could not cry, O God!
ordain me into order. But see what He has done for you. He has taught you
to cry, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within
me.
6. It was in Gods power to make the world or not, just as He pleased. No
promise bound Him; no covenant made it imperative upon Him that His arm
should be outstretched. Sinner, the Lord is not bound to save thee except
from His own promise, and that promise is, He that calleth upon the name
of the Lord shall be saved. He cannot withhold saving thee if thou callest
upon Him.
7. It is certain that there is more room in your case for God to glorify Himself
than there was in the making of the world. In making the world He glorified
His wisdom and He magnified His power, but He could not show His mercy.

III. TO COMFORT BELIEVERS. You are greatly troubled, are you? It is a common lot
with us all And you have nothing on earth to trust to now, and are going to be cast
on your God alone? Happy trouble that drives thee to thy Father! Blessed storm that
wrecks thee on the Rock of Ages! Glorious billow that washes thee upon this
heavenly shore! And now thou hast nothing but thy God to trust to, what art thou
going to do? To fret? Oh, do not thus dishonour thy Lord! Show the world that thy
God is worth ton thousand worlds to thee. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The power of God

I. LOOK AT THE POWER OF GOD IN WHAT HE HAS MADE. A little child can take a
grain of wheat, and drop it into the earth; by the aid of the earth, the air, the sun, the
rain, and the dew, it grows and fills the carol wheat. By a lithe grinding at the mill,
the coarse and fine parts are separated, and you have flour. By a little adding of
water, and by baking, you have bread. You eat the bread, and it becomes flesh, and
blood, and bone. But suppose you had to do all this. Could you make the grain of
wheat? Could you make it grow when made? Could you make it turn into blood, and
bone, and flesh? What power of God is seen in every grain of wheat! You can bring
two drops of water together, and you might, by great digging, and much hard work,
turn the channel of the small brook, and make the brook run in a different place; but
could you make a basin of waters, ton thousand miles across its top, and so deep,
that no man can measure it even with the longest rope? Could you make such basins
again and again, till all the oceans on the earth were made? Could you dig great
channels, some of them many miles wide, and fill them all with waters, and thus
make all those great rivers which pour their waters on towards the great ocean, and
which will thus run as long as the world lasts? No, you cannot. No man can. But God
can do all this! Men can shoot a bird on the wing; they can subdue the horse and the
elephant; they can spear the fish, and crush the insect with the foot. But who has
power to make the smallest insect that creeps or flies, or the most tiny fish that
swims? God can do all this. Suppose you could see a chain held in the hand of God,
which holds every weed and flower, every insect and creature that lives, every mind
that thinks, whether in this or in any other world, would you not feel that the hand
of God was strong, to hold all up, every moment, from the morning of creation to the
end of all things? He fainteth not, neither is He weary. There is nothing too hard
for the Lord. Men are born and die; trees grow up and fall away; nations grow and
perish; but all the works of God continue as they were from the beginning, because
from age to age God remains the same, almighty in power, unaltered, undiminished,
untired, unceasing! What a being God is!

II. LOOK AT THE POWER OF GOD AS HE GOVERNS THE WORLD. God made the body,
and the spirit in the body, and knows just how to reach and guide the spirit. Herod
and Pilate may lay their plans just as will please themselves; and the wicked in hell
may curse and swear day and night for ever, if they wish; but God knows how to
make all this wickedness turn, so as to bring honour to His own name.
1. He can make great joy to come from great sorrows.
2. The power of God can keep His people when in danger.
3. The power of God is seen in turning the plans of Satan, the greatest sinner,
against himself.

III. Having proved that god has almighty power i infer some things.
1. I infer that He can aid us to carry the, Bible to all people.
2. That the power of God gives us faith in His government.
3. That the power of God is terrible to wicked people. What an eye God has! No
darkness can hide from it: no cave shut it out!
4. That the power of God should make His people feel happy. (John Todd, D. D.)
The Creators regard and provision for man
I see a mother that, as the twilight falls and the baby sleeps, and because it sleeps
out of her arms, goes about gathering from the floor its playthings, and carries them
to the closet, and carries away the vestments that have been cast down, and stirring
the fire, sweeping up the hearth, winding the clock, and gathering up dispersed
books, she hums to herself low melodies as she moves about the room, until the
whole place is once again neat and clean, and in order. Why is it that the room is so
precious to her? Is it because there is such beautiful paper on the walls? because
there is so goodly a carpet on the floor? because the furniture in the room is so
pleasing to the eye? All these are nothing in her estimation except as servants of that
little creature of hers--the baby in the cradle. She says, All these things serve my
heart while I rock my child. The whole round globe is but a cradle, and our God
rocks it, and regards all things, even the world itself, as so many instruments for the
promotion of our welfare. When He makes the tempest, the pestilence, or the storm,
when He causes ages in their revolutions to change the world, it is all to serve His
own heart through His children--men when we are walking through this world, we
are not walking through long files of laws that have no design; we are walking
through a world that has natural laws, which we must both know and observe; yet
these must have their master, and Christ is He. And all of these are made to be our
servants because we are Gods children. (Christian Age.)

JER 32:19
Great in counsel, and mighty in work.

The greatness of Gods wisdom, and the abundance of His power

I. Consider the subject speculatively.

1. My first proofs shall be taken from the nature of God. The nature of God
proves that He is great in counsel. Consider the perfect knowledge that He
hath of all possible beings, as well as of all the beings which do actually exist.
The knowledge of all possible beings, diversified without end by the same
intelligence that imagines them: What designs, or, as our prophet expresseth
himself, What greatness of counsel doth it afford the Supreme Being? But let
us not lose ourselves in the world of possible beings; let us confine our
attention to real existences. I am willing even to reduce them to two classes.
Let each of you imagine, as far as his ability can reach, how great the counsel
of an intelligence must be, who perfectly knows all that can result from the
various arrangements of matter, and from the different modifications of
mind. The Supreme Being perfectly knows what must result from every
different arrangement of the parts of bodies infinitely small; and He perfectly
knows what must result from every different arrangement of the parts of
bodies infinitely great. What treasures of plans! What myriads of designs! or,
to use the language of my text, What greatness of counsel must this
knowledge supply! But God knows spirits also as perfectly as He knows
bodies. If He knows all that must result from the various arrangements of
 matter, He also knows all that must result from the different modifications of
mind. Human spirits, of which we have but an imperfect knowledge, are
thoroughly known to Him. He knows the conceptions of our minds, the
passions of our hearts, all our purposes, and all our powers. But what is this
object of the Divine knowledge? What is this handful of mankind, in
comparison of all the other spirits that compose the whole intelligent world,
of which we are only an inconsiderable part? God knows them as He knows
us; and He diversifies the counsels of His own wisdom according to the
different thoughts, deliberations, and wishes of these different spirits. We
have proved then, by considering the Divine perfections, that God is great in
counsel, and we shall endeavour to prove by the same method that He is
mighty in work. These two, wisdom and power, are not always united; yet it
is on their union that the happiness of intelligent beings depends. In God,
the Supreme Being, there is a perfect harmony of wisdom and power: The
efficiency of His will, and the extent of His knowledge are equal Carry your
thoughts back into those periods in which the Perfect Being existed alone.
Sound reason must allow that He hath so existed. What could then have been
the rule or model of beings which should in future exist? The ideas of God
were those models. And what could cause those beings, that had only an
ideal existence in the intelligence of God, actually to exist out of it? The
efficiency of His will was the cause. The will of the same Being then, whose
ideas had been the exemplars, or models, of the attributes of creatures,
caused their existence. The Supreme Being therefore, who is great in counsel,
is mighty in work. This being granted, consider now the ocean of Gods
power, as ye have already considered the greatness of His counsel. God not
only knows what motion of your brain will excite such or such an idea in
your mind, but He excites or prevents that idea as He pleaseth, because He
produceth or preventeth that motion of your brain as He pleaseth. God not
only knows what objects will excite certain passions within you, but He
excites or diverts those passions as He pleaseth. God not only knows what
projects your passions will produce, when they have gained an ascendency
over you, but He inclines you to form, or not to form, such projects, because,
as it seems best to Him, He excites those passions, or He curbs them.
2. Let us take another method (and here I allege the second proof of the truth of
my text, that is, the history of the world, or of the Church): Let us take, I say,
another method of proving that God, who is great in counsel, is also mighty
in work. What counsel can ye imagine too great for God to execute, or which
He hath not really executed? Let the most fruitful imagination exert its
fertility to the utmost; let it make every possible effort to form plans worthy
of an infinite intelligence, it can invent nothing so difficult that God hath not
realised.
(1) God hath the power of making the deepest of His childrens afflictions
produce their highest happiness.
(2) God establisheth His Church by the very means that tyrants use to
destroy it.
(3) God turneth the victories of Satan to the ruin of his empire. Here fix your
attention upon the work of redemption, for the perfections of God, which
we celebrate to-day, are more illustriously displayed in it than in any
other of the Creators wonders.
 II. CONSIDER THE GREATNESS OF GODS COUNSEL, AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF HIS
WORKING, IN A PRACTICAL LIGHT. When we have proved that God is great in counsel,
and mighty in work, in my opinion, we have sufficiently shown, on the one hand, the
extravagance of those madmen who pretend to exercise wisdom and understanding,
and counsel against the Lord: and, on the other, the wisdom of those who, taking
His laws for the only rules of their conversation, commit their peace, their lives, and
their salvation, to the disposal of His providence. Only let us take care that we do not
flatter ourselves into an opinion that we possess this wisdom while we are destitute
of it: and let us take care, while we exclaim against the extravagance of those
madmen, that we do not imitate their dangerous examples. But what! Is it possible
to find, among beings who have the least spark of reason, an individual mad enough
to suppose himself wiser than that God who is great in counsel, or, is there one who
dare resist a God mighty in working? But who then, ye will ask me, who are those
men, who presumptuously think of overcoming God by their superior knowledge
and power? Who? It is that soldier, who, with a brutal courage, defies danger,
affronts death, resolutely marches amidst fires and flames, even though he hath
taken no care to have an interest in the Lord of hosts, or to commit his soul to His
trust. Who? It is that statesman, who, despising the suggestions of evangelical
prudence, pursues stratagems altogether worldly; who makes no scruple of
committing what are called State crimes; who, with a disdainful air, affects to pity
us, when we affirm that the most advantageous service that a wise legislator can
perform for society is to render the Deity propitious to it; that the happiest nations
are those whose God is the Lord. Who? It is that philosopher, who makes a parade of
I know not what stoical firmness; who conceits himself superior to all the
vicissitudes of life; who boasts of his tranquil expectation of death, yea, who affects
to desire its approach, for the sake of enjoying the pleasure of insulting his casuist,
who hath ventured to foretell that he will be terrified at it. Who? It is that
voluptuary, who opposeth to all our exhortations and threatenings, to the most
affecting denunciations of calamities from God in this life, and to the most awful
descriptions of judgment to come in the next, to all our representations of hell, of an
eternity spent in the most execrable company, and in the most excruciating pain;
who opposeth to all these the buzz of amusements, the hurry of company, gaming at
home or diversions abroad. Let us abhor this disposition of mind; let us entertain
right notions of sin; let us consider him who commits it as a madman, who hath
taken it into his head that he hath more knowledge than God, the fountain of
intelligence, more strength than He beneath whose power all the creatures of the
universe are compelled to bow. When we are tempted to sin, let us remember what
sin is. Let each of us ask himself, What can I, a miserable man, mean? Do I mean to
provoke the Lord to jealousy? Do I pretend to be stronger than He? Can I resist His
will? (J. Saurin.)

For Thine eyes are upon the sons of men.--

Perfect observation and estimation of character
In the course of a discussion in a society of artists, a singular fact was mentioned
about a well-known painter. It is that he paints beyond the skin-deep beauty and
expression of his sitters, and where the character has warranted it, he has brought
out all of the latent beauty and portrayed almost the very soul of the person. He
sometimes has made enemies of his sitters because of his conscientious efforts to
portray character. There is the story of a society beauty, who, when she received her
portrait from this artist, took it to her room, studied it for a while, recognised the
fact that the artist had laid bare her true character on the canvas, and in a moment
of fury cut out the face and destroyed it. She did not want that peculiar nature of
hers staring her in the face from the walls of her room. Yet an unerring portrait of
character is really being painted of every one, and will at last be exposed.

JER 32:23
They have done nothing of all that Thou commandedst them to do.

Sins of omission
Omissions cannot be trivial, if we only reflect what an influence they would have
upon an ordinary commonwealth, if they were perpetrated as they are in Gods
commonwealth. If one person has a right to omit his duty, another has and all have.
Then the watchman would omit to guard the house, the policeman would omit to
arrest the thief, the judge would omit to sentence the offender, the sheriff would
omit to punish the culprit, the government would omit to carry out its laws; then
every occupation would cease, and the world die of stagnation; the merchant would
omit to attend to his calling, the husband-man would omit to plough his land: where
would the commonwealth be? The kingdom would be out of joint; the machine
would break down, for no cog of the wheel would act upon its fellow. How would
societies exist at all? And surely if this is not to be tolerated in a society of men,
much less in that great commonwealth of which God is king. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 32:26-27
Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for Me?

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

This method of questioning the person to be instructed is known to teachers as
the Socratic method. Socrates was wont, not so much to state a fact, as to ask a
question and draw out thoughts from those whom he taught. His method had long
before been used by a far greater teacher. Putting questions is Jehovahs frequent
method of instruction. Questions from the Lord are very often the strongest
affirmations. He would have us perceive their absolute certainty. They are put in this
particular form because He would have us think over His great thought, and confirm
it by our own reflections. The Lord shines upon us in the question, and our answer
to it is the reflection of His light.

I. Consider the wonderful question of our text which the Lord put to the prophet,
VIEWING IT AS NECESSARY.
1. It was needful to tell the prophet this, though he knew it. He never doubted
that the Lord is almighty, and yet it was needful for Jehovah Himself to
speak home this truth to his mind and heart. It is often necessary for the
 Lord Himself to drive home a truth into the mind of His most faithful
servant. We learn much in many ways, but we learn nothing vitally and
practically till the Spirit of God becomes our schoolmaster. The God of truth
must teach us the truth of God or we shall never learn it.
2. It is necessary for us to be thus specially instructed, even though we know a
truth well enough to plead it in prayer, as Jeremiah did when he cried,
There is nothing too hard for Thee. That man is no mean scholar in the
classes of Christ who has learned to handle scriptural truths when pleading
with the Lord. Oh, that we used more argument in prayer! Prayers are weak
when they lack pleadings.
3. It is necessary for God thus to reveal truth individually to each of our hearts
even though we may have acted on it. Jeremiah had acted on the fact that
nothing was too hard for God. After his obedience, he began to look back on
what he had done, and to be considerably bewildered, while trying to make
out how God would justify what he had done. The best of men are men at the
best. If the Lord lifts you up into the purity and dignity of a childlike faith,
yet you will have your moments when you will cry, Lord, speak to me Thyself
again, even though it be out of the whirlwind; and let me know that I have
done all these things according to Thy Word, and not after my own fancy.
Even the practice of truth does not raise us above the need of having it again
and again laid home to the soul.
4. Another necessity for this arises out of further manifestations with which we
are to be favoured. God had caused Jeremiah to know His omnipotence so
far, but he was to see still more of it. Faith has led you into marvellous
places; but there are greater things before you, and the Lord presses truth
upon you that you may receive more of it.

II. Look at the text regarding it as decisive.

1. For the argument is fetched from the Lord Himself. When we look to God
alone, and think, by the help of His Spirit, of who He is and what He must
be, then we realise that nothing can be too hard for Him. Meditate much
upon the Divine Father, Creator and Preserver; upon the Divine Son, the
risen Redeemer, who hath all power in heaven and in earth; upon the sacred
Spirit, of whom the rushing mighty mind in the tornado is but a faint
symbol, and you will feel that here is the source of all might.
2. But He means us also to see the argument as founded on His name, I am
Jehovah. The name brings out the personality of God. It also signifies self-
existence. God does not exist because of His surroundings: He draws nothing
from without, His life is in Himself. All things were made by Him, and He
sustaineth all things by the Word of His power. The name of Jehovah
reminds us that He has within Himself sufficiency for all His will; He hath
adequate power of performance for all His purposes and decrees; Jehovah
wills, and it is done. Moreover, the name sets forth the truth that He is
immutable: He is I am that I am. Time does not affect Him, nor change
come near Him. He is never less than Jehovah; He cannot be more.
3. The argument is also founded on the Lords relation to man. I am the Lord,
the God of all flesh. How is the worm linked to the immortal! Happy men
who have such a God! Not that flesh and blood, as they are, can inherit the
 kingdom of God, nor that corruption can dwell with incorruption; but for
believers in the Lord Jesus there is a resurrection which shall lift us into a
body of a nobler sort. The argument is that, since Jehovah is the God of all
flesh, He can effect His purposes by men, and work among them things
which seem impossible.
4. The argument is so great that it puts all other arguments out of court. Is
anything too hard for Jehovah? Come, Jeremiah, rake up your difficulties;
set in order the discouraging circumstances; call in your friends, who all
shako their heads at you, and point their fingers to their brows, as much as to
insinuate that you are a little gone from your senses; and then, answer them
all with this, Nothing is too hard for Jehovah. This clears the deck of every
doubt that would board your vessel. Blessed argument which answers every
difficulty, and sets faith upon a rock from which it cannot be removed! My
soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from Him.

III. Applying it in detail.

1. Apply this question to the justification of your obedience. If you do what God
bids you, the responsibility of your conduct lies with Him, and He will bear
you through. He will bring forth our judgment as the light, and our
righteousness as the noonday.
2. Apply this glorious truth to the sure fulfilment of all the Divine promises.
Consider a great one to begin with. This chapter evidently shows that the
Jews are one day to be converted and restored. They that crucified the Lord
of Glory shall look on Him whom they pierced, and shall mourn for Him. Is
anything too hard for the Lord?
3. Apply this to any case of great sin. Select any one whom you know to be
especially hard-hearted, and pray for him earnestly and hopefully.
4. Apply this to difficult truths. I will put before you a problem. If man acts
freely in his sinful actions how can predestination be a fact? If every man
acts after his own will, how, then, does God foreordain all things? I answer,
Is anything too hard for Jehovah? The solving of this great problem
constrains me to worship the Lord; for He does solve it in actual history.
Consider another hard case--the hardest of all: human salvation. How can it
be possible for God to exercise the fulness of His mercy, and yet discharge
the necessities of His justice? All men and all angels put together would have
made but one fool in trying to solve that difficulty. The Lord has answered it.
He gave His Son to bear our sin. Is anything too hard for the Lord?
5. Bring hither your own little problems. You are always getting into tangles and
snarls. Prudent friends try to help you, but the tangle grows worse. Bring
your hard cases to one who is wiser than Solomon, and He will draw out a
clear thread for you.

IV. Treat the text as USING IT WITH DELIGHT.

1. Use the text as a preventive of unbelieving sin. Do Gods work thoroughly,
heartily, intensely, and God will reward you in His grace.
2. Use it next for consolation in the time of trouble. Jehovah hath delivered
those who trust in Him, and He will yet deliver us.
 3. Next, use the text as a window through which you look with expectation. The
Lards blessing is coming upon the Churches: look for it!
4. Let this text be a stimulus to you to engage in great enterprises. Launch out
into the deep. Fall back upon omnipotence, and then go forward in the
strength of it.
5. Let the text be a reason for adoration. O Thou to whom nothing is hard, we
adore Thee! We worship Thee with all our hearts, and this day we believingly
link our weakness with Thine omnipotence. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

God above us all

In one of his letters to John Sterling from Scotsbrig, Thomas Carlyle says, One
night, late, I rode through the village where I was born. The old kirkyard tree, a huge
old gnarled ash, was nestling itself softly against the great twilight in the north. A
star or two looked out, and the old graves were all there, and my father and my
sister; and God was above us all. What comfort in this for the soul bewildered by
lifes sudden changes! He is watching: He knows: He will not fail us. Above the
graves where His saints are sleeping, above the homesteads where His children are
weeping, God is above us all. (Quiver.)

Faiths work
There are three particulars connected with the wording of the text, to which it is
desirable to direct attention. You observe the notice of time, Then came the Word
of the Lord unto Jeremiah. The context shows you that this was in answer to
Jeremiahs prayer. In the next place, we notice that Jehovah claims to be the God of
all flesh; an expression which evidently answers the question, whether the
Scriptures of the Old Testament, such as this with which we have to do, are confined
to the Jewish people? Then, thirdly, we observe the question, Is there anything too
hard for Me? We have before us, then, Jeremiah as an example of faith--as one who
possessed and exercised that faith for which Abraham was so remarkable. Let us
consider how faith deals with mysteries. Jeremiahs faith was tried by what was a
great mystery to him upon this occasion, in connection with Gods providential
dealings. What use was there in purchasing land which was in possession of the
enemy? And yet God told him to do it. Then, if God told him to do it, why give the
whole of the land into the possession of the enemy? Here was a mystery. Jeremiahs
faith had to grapple with that mystery, and to persevere, as he did, in that holy
consistency by which he had an opportunity of testifying both to Israel and to Israel
s foes concerning the honour and the truth of the God of Israel. Now, we too have, in
the course of our lives, to meet with mysterious dispensations in Gods providence.
There are difficulties before us. There are two clear convictions in our minds; first of
all, we can have no doubt, as believers, that God directed us to pray, and heard our
prayers; but then, on the other hand, we can have no doubt that God is permitting,
in His providence, these difficulties that now perplex us. And these two plain facts
coming together at the same point of time do not harmonise with each other; but
they come, as it were, into collision, and they clash; and we say, How can this be?
How mysterious this is, that it should be Gods will that I should seek Him in prayer,
and yet Gods will that, notwithstanding my prayer, there should be this difficulty
connected with this matter, or these circumstances should arise! It is a blessing
when, under such circumstances, you are enabled still to hold fast to the confidence
of faith. Some persons may say, Why does God permit mystery? An answer may be
easily given. Bring common sense to bear upon this question. How is it that a father
deals with the children of the family of which he is the head? There are many things
which the father must necessarily say and do, that must occasion perplexity to the
children who listen to what he says and observe what he does. Those children will
have recourse to their father again and again, to ask for an explanation of what they
cannot understand. Sometimes the parent will give the explanation, but at other
times the parent declines to explain; he knows that the subject is beyond the present
capacity and intelligence which his children possess; and, therefore, he points them
into the way of duty, but tells them to wait until they can more fully understand
before they ask anxiously for reasons to account for things that now are difficult and
perplexing to them; and their confidence in their father, their faith in their father s
word, promotes the proper discipline of such a well-regulated family. Now, we are
all of us children with reference to our Heavenly Fathers dealings with us. Why do
you say so much of faith? some people ask. The simple answer is, that the creature
that is happy must be dependent upon the Creator, and that dependence can only be
felt or maintained by the exercise of faith. God in Christ has manifested Himself in
such a way that we, His poor sinful creatures, may approach Him; and if we are
enabled to rest upon that Saviour who is almighty, whatever mysteries there be
around us, or connected with our own experience, faith in the Lord Jesus--that
feeling of the soul which leads us to rest upon Him as our Saviour and Friend,
though it cannot solve the mysteries, will be contented to wait until time shall so
bring things to light, and eternity shall so manifest the purposes and counsels of
God, that the Saviours assurance shall be fulfilled. What I do thou knowest not
now, but thou shalt know hereafter. But now take the ease of impossibilities, and
see how faith deals with them. Jeremiah might have argued, Why should I go and
purchase this piece of land? it can never be mine; it is impossible. Now, how did
Jeremiahs faith deal with this? He simply did what God told him; and he left the
solution of the difficulty with God. Now, this obedience of faith is that to which we
need give attention. There can be no difficulty about duty, though there may be
difficulty about the reasons why God calls us to that particular duty. We may have
this plainly before us by an illustration. I may say to my child, Go and fetch me that
book; the child may not know my reasons for asking him to fetch that book; it
might be possible that I could not explain my reasons to the child, or if I did explain
them, that the child would only be puzzled, and his difficulty increased. It might be
utterly impossible for the child to understand why I asked him to do this particular
act of obedience; but there is no difficulty at all in the child going and fetching the
book. The path of duty is quite plain, but the reasons in the parents mind for
commanding the duty at a particular time might be unintelligible and inexplicable.
And so with reference to our position with God; the path of duty which He calls us to
tread is always plain to him that seeks understanding and wisdom from Him. It is
only when we begin to ask the why and wherefore that difficulties spring up; when
we ask, Lord, why art Thou doing this? then we come into the presence of
impossibilities. But when we ask, Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? then the
path of duty lies before us, and with our hearts set at liberty we run in the way of
Gods commandments. But now we have to consider the promise of faith in
connection with the difficulties of our daily experience; and here, too, the example of
Jeremiah is instructive. We have seen that he maintained the exercise of faith and
resisted temptations, notwithstanding mysteries; that he went forward in the path of
simple obedience, notwithstanding seeming impossibilities; but was he not severely
exercised and tried with all this mystery, and difficulty, and seeming impossibility?
Certainly he was. But faith led him to prayer. And this is the way in which faith deals
with difficulty--it takes men to God. (W. Cadman, M. A.)

The infinite capability of God

It is the glory of God, that there is nothing too hard for Him but wrong. The fact
of Gods infinite capability should lead us--

I. TO RENDER HIM SUPREME HOMAGE. Surely, before Him who worketh all things
after the counsel of His will, all should bow with profoundest reverence and awe.

II. To place in Him unbounded confidence. Confide in Him--

1. To supply all wants. He can do exceeding abundantly, &c.
2. To fulfil all promises. There are wonderful promises--the conversion of the
whole world, the resurrection of the mighty dead. He is able to fulfil them all;
and He is faithful that hath promised.

III. TO EXPECT FROM HIM WONDERFUL MANIFESTATIONS. He is always at work. He

has done wonders, is doing wonders, and will continue to do wonders through all
ages. He fainteth not, neither is weary. With such a God, what wonderful things
await us! (Homilist.)

JER 32:33
They have turned unto Me the back, and not the face
Human wickedness

I. AS CONDEMNING DIVINE AUTHORITY. To turn the back upon any one, not only
indicates an utter lack of interest in him, but a dislike. To turn the back upon God
means--
1. An ignorement of His existence. The language of wickedness is, Depart from
me, I desire not a knowledge of Thy ways. The wicked are without God in
the world. They shut their eyes to the greatest fact of facts. God is not in all
their thoughts.
2. A repugnance to His presence. What a monstrous sight is this, man turning
his back on God.

II. AS REGARDLESS OF DIVINE INSTRUCTION. God is constantly teaching men early

and late--teaching them--
1. In the operations of nature.
2. In the events of their history.
3. In the monitions of their consciences.
4. In the declarations of His Word. (Homilist.)
 Though I taught them, rising up early and teaching them, yet they have
not hearkened to receive instruction.

Disregard of Gods teaching

I. GODS MERCIFUL INSTRUCTION is given to man according to mans capacity and

present situation; and is of that special and particular nature that no one need
mistake it; and is so simple and yet so full and impressive in itself that a child even
may comprehend it.
1. We have no cloudy pillar resting over our churches, no fire from heaven
blazing forth upon an altar of sacrifice, no voice of prophecy attended with
signs and wonders, no mysterious Urim and Thummim sparkling on the
breastplate of a high priest, nor do we hear the voice of God speaking to us
audibly from the summit of a mountain encircled with fire and with loud
peals of thunder: but the Deity nevertheless teaches us by means equally
potent. We have gathered into one source of Divine instruction the
accumulated experience of many centuries--the Bible, and this carries with it
the evidence of its own Divinity. We have the Church with her solemn
sacraments, her public forms of worship, her large assemblies of believers,
and her glorious history of martyrs and confessors of the faith. We have the
Divine Spirit entering the hearts of the humble, and by the glory of His light
piercing the darkest abodes of ignorance, and leading the teachable disciple
of Christ into all truth. We have the providence of God showing us in many
ways how quickly the sands of life drop away, how uncertain and how frail it
is, how like the flower of the field we look for an instant bright and joyous,
but the next, droop from the blight of disease, and crumble away into the
ashes of the grave God teaches us also through our own everyday feelings,
and the very common concerns of our daily existence
2. The words of Jeremiah express an earnestness in the Divine teaching. God is
spoken of as rising up early and teaching them. He is the first among
teachers. He is so desirous that His people should be guided by His counsels
that He will be with them in the earliest dawn of their existence, both
nationally as well as personally.

II. MANS DISREGARD OF THE DIVINE INSTRUCTION. They have turned unto Me,
saith the Lord, the back and not the face: and again, they have not hearkened to
receive instruction. The Jews stand not alone in this matter. We may see some such
strange manifestations in our own day. The same spirit of practical infidelity is
abroad now, and the same infatuation which makes the most sublime subjects of
religion matters for scorn and mockery, may be witnessed in our own land of
freedom and enlightenment. We are happy to say the good sense of society and the
spread of intelligence keeps this spirit down within narrow boundaries; but
nevertheless it may be observed publishing itself with the godless jest, with the boast
of independence, and with the mocking contempt of all which bears the stamp of
religious profession. (W. D. Horwood.)

JER 32:39
 I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear Me for ever.

Whole-hearted religion
In reference to the heart, one of the earliest works of Divine grace is to unite it in
one. Strange to say, I should be equally truthful if I said that one of the first works of
grace is to break the heart; but so paradoxical is man that when his heart is
unbroken it is divided, and when his heart is broken, then, for the first time, it is
united; for a broken heart in every fragment of it mourns over sin, and cries out for
mercy. Every shattered particle of a contrite spirit is united in one desire to be
reconciled to God. There is no union of the heart with itself till it is broken for sin
and from sin.

I. Unitedness of the heart.

1. It is naturally divided. Sin is confusion, and at its entrance it created a Babel,
or a confusion, within the heart of mare The lusts crave for that which the
intellect condemns; the passions demand that which the reason would deny;
the will persists in that which the judgment would forego. To many a man it
is given to admire things that are excellent, and still to delight in things
which are abominable. His conscience bids him rise to a pure and noble life,
but his baser passions hold him down to that which is earthly and sensual.
Frequently, too, there is a very great division between a mans inward
knowledge and his outward conduct. Men are often wise in the head and
foolish in the hand: ,they know the right and do the wrong Man is a puzzle,
and none can put him together but He that made him at the first. He is a self-
contradiction, a house divided against itself, a mystery of iniquity, a maze of
folly, a mass of perversity, obstinacy, and contention.
2. If our heart be not whole and entire in following after God we cannot meet
with acceptance. God never did and never will receive the homage of a
divided heart. Alexander, when Darius proposed that the two great
monarchs should divide the world, replied that there was only room for one
sun in the heavens. What his ambition affirmed that God declareth from the
necessity of the case. Since one God fills all things there is no room for
another. It is idle to attempt to serve two such masters as holiness and
iniquity. It was once proposed to the Roman senate to set up the image of
Christ in the Pantheon among the gods, but when they were informed that
He would not agree that any worship should be mingled with His own, the
senate straightway refused Him a shrine. In this they acted in a manner
consistent with itself; but those are altogether inexcusable who swear by the
Lord and swear by Malcham.
3. It must be united for sincerity: a divided heart is a false heart. Declare that
thou wilt serve Belial ever so little, and I know that thy service of Christ is
but Judas service--mercenary, temporary, traitorous.
4. Our heart must be united, next, for intensity of life. True religion needs the
soul to be ever at a fervent heat. None climb the hill whereon the New
Jerusalem is built except such as go on hands and knees, and laying aside
every weight give themselves wholly to the Divine ascent.
5. The heart must be united to be consecrated. Will God be served with broken
cups and cracked flagons, and shall His altars be polluted with torn and
 mangled sacrifices?
6. We must have our heart united, or else none of the blessings which, are to
follow in covenant order can possibly reach us. For, look, I will give them
one heart, and then it follows, one way; no man will have a consistent,
uniform way while he has a divided heart, Read next, That they shall fear
Me for ever; but no man will fear God for ever unless fear has taken
possession of his whole heart. The convert may profess to follow the Lord for
awhile, but he will soon turn aside; he who does not begin with his whole
heart will soon tire of the race.
7. God will give His chosen this unified heart. I will give them one heart. This
the Lord does in part by enlightenment through the light of His Holy Spirit.
He shows us the worthlessness and deceptiveness of everything that would
attract our hearts away from Jesus and from our God; and when we see the
evil of the rival, we give our heart entirely to Him whom we worship. The
Lord works this also by a process more thorough still; for He weans us from
all idolatrous loves.

II. If we have this we may now advance to the second blessing of the covenant
here mentioned, which is CONSISTENCY OF WALK. I will give them one way.
1. Without this unity there can be no truth in a mans life. If he spins by day, and
unravels at night, he is acting out a falsehood.
2. We must have one walk, or else our life will make no progress. He who travels
in two opposite directions will find himself no forwarder.
3. We must choose and keep to one way, or we cannot attain to usefulness. If a
man speak for God to-day, and so lives to-morrow that he virtually speaks
for the devil, what power has he over those around him? How can he lead
who has no way of his own?
4. No person can come to any true personal assurance while his life is of a
double character. But if I know that I have one heart, and that my heart
belongs to my Lord, and that I have one way, a way of obedience to Him,
then may I be assured that I am His. A plain way will make our condition
plain. This unity of way is a covenant blessing: it comes not of man, neither
by man, but God gives it to His own elect as one of the choice favours of His
grace. I will give them one heart and one way.

III. Notice the next covenant blessing, STEADFASTNESS OF PRINCIPLE. That they
may fear Me for ever. Get the heart and the way right, and then the spiritual force
of the fear of God will abide in us in all days to come. Notice the basis of true
religion,--it is the fear of God: it is not said that they shall join a church and make a
profession, and speak holy words for ever; but that They may fear Me for ever.
When God has given us a true spiritual fear of Him it will abide all tests. Outward
religion depends upon the excitement which created it; but the fear of the Lord lives
on when all around it is frost-bitten. Persecution comes, Christians are ridiculed in
the workshop, they are pointed out in the street, and an opprobrious name is hooted
at them; now we shall know who are Gods elect and who are not. Then, perhaps,
comes a more serious test, the trial of prosperity. A man grows rich, he rises into
another class of society. If he is not a real Christian he will forsake the Lord, but if he
be a true-born heir of the kingdom he will fear the Lord for ever, and consecrate his
substance to Him. A heart wholly given to God will stand the wear and tear of life in
all conditions, whether in honour or in contempt. With some of you old age is
creeping on; but I rejoice to know that your grace is not decaying. Oh, what a mercy
it is to have within us a fear of God, which is not to last for a period of years, but for
ever!

IV. PERSONAL BLESSEDNESS. For the good of them. Where God gives us one
heart and one way, and steadfast principle, it must be for our good in the highest
sense. Tell me who are the happiest Christians. They will be found to be whole-
hearted Christians. Plunge into the river of life; let body, soul, and spirit be
immersed into its floods, and you shall swim in joy unspeakable. Lose sight of the
shores of worldliness and you shall see Gods wonders in the deeps. In intense
devotion to the Lord, you will find the rare jewel, satisfaction.

V. The last is a RELATIVE BLESSING. And for their children after them.
Wholehearted Christians are usually blessed with a posterity of a like kind. Be
thorough and true, and your family will respect your faith. The almost inevitable
consequence of respect in a child towards his parent is a desire to imitate him. It is
not always so, but as a rule it is so: if the parents live unto God in a thorough,
hearted way, their sons and daughters aspire to the same thing. They see the beauty
of religion at home around the fireside, and their conscience being quickened they
are led to pray to God that they may have the like piety, so that when they
themselves commence a household they may enjoy the like happiness. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

JER 32:40
I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I win not turn away from
them, to do them good.

The application of the covenant of grace

I. IT IS ALL OF GRACE. Its grand end seems to be, to glorify all Gods attributes,
indeed, but especially to manifest the exceeding riches of His grace.
1. God was under no necessity of making such a covenant. Man, as fallen, guilty,
and depraved, might most justly have been left in the destruction into which
his sins had brought him. He could have no claim upon God for a second
covenant, merely because he had ruined himself by his breach of the first.
God is indeed merciful and gracious, but He is not thereby laid under any
necessity to show His goodness in the way of saving sinners of the human
race, any more than He was obliged to save the angels who fell. Grace and
mercy are, and must be, absolutely free, and spontaneous, and self-moved.
God, too, is infinitely independent of all His creatures--self-sufficient, yea,
self-satisfied. Though all sinners had been left to perish, His happiness and
glory would not have been thereby diminished.
2. God is the party contracting in the covenant for both sides. God the Father
engages for the Godhead; and God the Son, as the God-man Mediator,
 engages for sinners. Moreover, it is an absolute covenant of the richest and
the freest promises; for, so far as we sinners are personally concerned, there
are no meritorious conditions or prerequisite qualifications.
3. If you consider the character of those persons to whom the covenant is
fulfilled, that they are not only all heinous sinners, but that, very often, they
are the oldest and the vilest sinners that burden and pollute Gods earth, who
are brought to enjoy it; you will see another proof, that it must be a covenant
of the freest grace, since it embraces such hell-deserving sinners. It begins
at Jerusalem. The publicans and harlots are brought into the kingdom,
while, generally, the scribes and Pharisees, the decent, moral, respectable
men and women, are left out. Even so, Father, for so it seemeth good in Thy
sight.

II. IT IS VERY KIND AND BENEFICENT. It is all about doing us good, especially by
making us good, holy, and happy. Coming from God, the infinitely good one, the
author of every good and perfect gift, it is just one great promise of ceaseless and
unmixed love to us. It is just a constellation of blessings. Observe, too, their
certainty. Nothing will provoke God to turn away from thus doing His people
constant good; and even with regard to afflictions and temptations, they shall be
enabled to say, It was good for us that we were afflicted. You will observe that
there is no limitation upon the good here promised, and why should we restrict? We
must view it in its universal comprehensiveness. It includes all good--good
temporal, spiritual, and eternal--good for the body, the mind, and the soul--all true
happiness in time, at death, and through eternity--grace and glory--all the good that
God can bestow, or that we can receive. It includes good in three distinct periods of
time. Good before our conversion--to bring us into being--to preserve us alive
notwithstanding all dangers--to prevent our committing the unpardonable sin, or in
any other way putting a tombstone upon our souls, and sealing them over under the
curse--and to bring about an effectual calling at the appointed time. Good after
conversion and union to Christ, comprehending all the blessings of grace. And glory
in eternity. In the first period, eternal life is only coming certainly towards them,
and as yet they have no personal title to or enjoyment of it; during the second
period, they have the title, and a begun but still an imperfect enjoyment; and during
the last period they have both the perfect title and the perfect enjoyment, and that
for ever, too!

III. IT IS VERY FULL AND COMPREHENSIVE. The three following ideas will illustrate
its amplitude and completeness.
1. First, you will observe that it not only provides for all on the part of God, but
that it also secures everything on the part of the sinner with relation to his
enjoyment of it, which, strictly speaking, is all that he has to do with it.
Hence, it is so suitable to our helpless spiritual condition, who, of ourselves,
could do nothing but just sin on, and so deserve fresh wrath, and the
upbreaking of the covenant, if that were possible.
2. Again, you will notice that God here provides for the making of this covenant
with each and all of His people in the way of their being brought to close with
it. The application of it is as much Gods work and promise as is the
decreeing of it or the fulfilling of its conditions. I will make, and who will or
can prevent Him? Neither the devil, nor guilt, nor their own wicked and
 unbelieving hearts shall.
3. Once more, you will observe that the line of this covenant runs through all
time. It is from everlasting to everlasting, like its parties--as endless as the
soul of the sinner on which its blessings are to be bestowed. How ample
then--how all-comprehensive is Gods covenant! There is no redundancy, but
there is no deficiency.

IV. IT IS PERSONAL AND PARTICULAR. It is made or fulfilled with each and all of
Gods people individually and separately, and not merely with the whole Church as s
corporate body. The persons with whom it is actually made, are not all men without
exception. The countless heathen never so much as hear of its existence or offer. It
includes, then, only all Gods elect people--all those given to Christ as Mediator by
the Father, and accepted by Him as such--all Christs mystical members--His
spiritual seed--Gods true spiritual Israel. Their names are all enrolled in the book of
life, and engraven on Jesus breastplate. They are constantly in His eye, and in His
breast, and so they are in His prayers, and in His working, and in His dying. The
Lord knoweth them that are His, directly and unerringly. We again can ascertain
them only in so far as we can see this covenant fulfilled to them, enjoyed by them,
and exemplified (extracted as it were) in their lives. But when we see the Lord thus
doing good to any soul, and putting His fear into any heart, then and there we see
Gods seal and mark, and behold His election realised in their sanctification.

V. IT IS VERY HOLY. God, the maker of it, is holy in all His works, and peculiarly so
here in this, the glory of them all. Hence, we find Zecharias calling it (Luk 1:72),
Gods holy covenant. Two observations will show its sanctity. First, it preserves
unsullied, yea it peculiarly displays the righteousness and holiness of Gods
character and government in at all saving sinners, only through the infinite and
vicarious sufferings, death, and obedience of the God-man Mediator, in their room,
and on their behalf. Secondly, it secures the personal holiness of all who are brought
into the covenant. God here engages to do them good, and especially in the way of
making them really and spiritually good. It gives to each a twofold righteousness,
corresponding to the twofold unrighteousness he inherited from Adam--the imputed
righteousness of Christ for justification, and the inwrought righteousness of the
Spirit for sanctification of heart and life; and it never gives the one without the
other.

VI. IT IS EVERLASTING. It would be comparatively valueless, if it could ever end.

Oh, how tantalising it would be to be stripped of the enjoyment of its blessings after
we had enjoyed them for a period, and so had just come to know their incalculable
value l Deprivation of such blessedness would be torture, exquisite just in
proportion as we had tasted its sweetness. The reminiscence and the contrast would
then make the loss all the more agonising. But it is everlasting --a covenant of
salt--which can never fail, or change or intermit, or end. It must be so; for you will
remember that the condition of the covenant has been already performed by Christ,
and accepted by the Father. Now, God will not--indeed, He cannot,--alter or reverse
what has been already done, for that is an impossibility. Moreover, the condition
being the infinitely perfect, unchangeable, and everlasting righteousness of Jesus,
the covenant founded thereon must be absolutely unalterable and eternal The very
holiness, justice, and truth of God are all pledged to Christ to secure its permanency
and everlasting continuance.

VII. FAITH IN CHRIST IS THE ONLY WAY OF OUR BEING BROUGHT INTO THE
ENJOYMENT OF IT. Faith is just a receiving and resting upon Christ fist and upon all
the promises as in Him yea and amen to the glory of God. Nothing more is requisite
in us. The fidelity and omnipotence of the promises ensures their fulfilment to, the
soul that believes and rests on them. There is nothing left for us to do but thus just
to receive and rely upon these promises, and Christ in them, by the empty hand of
faith. And even this faith, and its act of closing with the covenant, is here previously
secured. It is included in the good to be done to us. Faith is Gods gift--one of His
promises and one of the operations of His Spirit. Faith and repentance, and new
obedience, are all blessings in the covenant, and not conditions of it. At the very
most, they are only conditions of connection and of order in the enjoyment of its
various and well-regulated blessings. (F. Gillies.)

I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me.

Perseverance in holiness

I. THE EVERLASTING COVENANT. I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

In the previous chapter, in the thirty-first verse, this covenant is called a new
covenant; and it is new in contrast with the former one which the Lord made with
Israel when He brought them out of Egypt. It is new as to the principle upon which
it is based. Brethren, take care to distinguish between the old and the new
covenants; for they must never be mingled. If salvation be of grace, it is not of
works, otherwise grace is no more grace; and if it be of works, it is not of grace,
otherwise work is no more work. The new covenant is all of grace, from its first letter
to its closing word; and we shall have to show you this as we go on. It is an
everlasting covenant, however: that is the point upon which the text insists. The
other covenant was of very short duration; but this is an everlasting covenant.
1. The first reason why it is an everlasting covenant is, that it was made with us
in Christ Jesus. He is, both in His nature, and in His work, eternally qualified
to stand before the living God. He stands in absolute perfectness under every
strain, and, therefore, the covenant stands in Him.
2. Next, the covenant cannot fail because the human side of it has been fulfilled.
The human side might be regarded as the weak side of it; but when Jesus
became the representative of man that side was sure. He has at this hour
fulfilled to the letter every stipulation upon that side of which He was the
surety. Since, then, that side of the covenant has been fulfilled which
appertains to man, there remaineth only Gods side of it to be fulfilled, which
consists of promises--unconditional promises, full of grace and truth. Will
not God be true to HIS engagements? Yes, verily. Even to the jots and tittles,
all shall be carried out.
3. Furthermore, the covenant must be everlasting, for it is founded upon the free
grace of God. Sovereign grace declares that He will have mercy upon whom
He will have mercy, and will have compassion on whom He will have
compassion. This basis of sovereignty cannot be shaken.
4. Again, in the covenant, everything that can be supposed to be a condition is
 provided. If there be, anywhere in the Word of God, any act or grace
mentioned as though it were a condition of salvation, it is in another
Scripture described as a covenant gift, which will be bestowed upon the heirs
of salvation by Christ Jesus.
5. Moreover, the covenant must be everlasting, because it cannot be superseded
by anything more glorious. The moon gives way to the sun, and the sun gives
way to a lustre which shall exceed the light of seven days; but what is to
supersede the light of free grace and dying love, the glory of the love which
gave the Only-begotten that we might live through Him!

II. THE UNCHANGING GOD OF THE COVENANT. I will not turn away from them, to
do them good.
1. He will not turn away from doing them good, first, because He has said so.
That is enough. Jehovah speaks, and in His voice lies the end of all
controversy.
2. Still, let us remember that there is no valid reason why He should turn away
from them to do them good. You remind me of their unworthiness. Yes, but
observe that when He began to do them good they were as unworthy as they
could possibly be. Moreover, there can be no reason in the faultiness of the
believer why the Lord should cease to do him good, seeing that He foresaw
all the evil that would be in us. He entered into a covenant that He would not
turn away from us, to do us good; and no circumstance has arisen, or can
arise, which was unknown to Him when He thus pledged His Word of grace.
Moreover, I would have you remember that we are by God at this day viewed
in the same light as ever. We were undeserving objects upon whom He
bestowed His mercy, out of no motive but that which He drew from His own
nature; and if we are undeserving still, His grace is still the same. If it be so,
that He still deals with us in the way of grace, it is evident that He still views
us as undeserving; and why should He not do good towards us now as He did
at the first? Moreover, remember that He sees us now in Christ. Behold, He
has put His people into the hands of His dear Son. He sees us in Christ to
have died, in Him to have been buried, and in Him to have risen again. As
the Lord Jesus Christ is well pleasing to the Father, so in Him are we well
pleasing to the Father also; for our being in Him identifies us with Him.
3. The Lord will not turn away from His people, from doing them good, because
He has shown them so much kindness already; and all that He has done
would be lest if He did not go through with it. When He gave His Son, He
gave us a sure pledge that He meant to finish His work of love.
4. We feel sure that He will not cease to bless us, because we have proved that
even when He has hidden His face He has not turned away from doing us
good. When the Lord has turned away His face from His people, it has been
to do them good, by making them sick of self and eager for His love.
5. I close with this argument, that He has involved His honour in the salvation of
His people. H the Lords chosen and redeemed are cast away, where is the
glory of His redemption?

III. THE PERSEVERING PEOPLE IN THE COVENANT. I will put My fear in their hearts,
that they shall not depart from Me. The salvation of those who are in covenant with
God is herein provided for by an absolute promise of the omnipotent God, which
must be carried out. It is plain, clear, unconditional, positive. They shall not depart
from Me.
1. It is not carried out by altering the effect of apostasy. If they did depart from
God, it would be fatal If the Holy Ghost has indeed regenerated a soul, and
yet that regeneration does not save it from total apostasy, what can be done?
2. Neither does this perseverance of the saints come in by the removal of
temptation. No, the Lord does not take His people out of the world; but He
allows them to fight the battle of life in the same field as others. He does not
remove us from the conflict, but He giveth us the victory.
3. This is affected by putting a Divine principle within their hearts. The Lord
saith, I will put My fear in their hearts. It would never be found there if He
did not put it there. What is this fear of God? It is, first, a holy awe and
reverence of the great God. Taught of God, we come to see His infinite
greatness, and the fact that He is everywhere present with us; and then, filled
with a devout sense of His Godhead, we dare not sin. The words, My fear,
also intend filial fear. God is our Father, and we feel the spirit of adoption,
whereby we cry, Abba, Father. There moves also in our hearts a deep sense
of grateful obligation. God is so good to me, how can I sin? He loves me so,
how can I vex Him? But if you ask, By what instrumentality does God
maintain this fear in the hearts of His people? I answer, It is the work of the
Spirit of God: but the Holy Spirit usually works by means. The fear of God is
kept alive in our hearts by the hearing of the Word; for faith cometh by
hearing, and holy fear cometh through faith. Be diligent, then, in hearing the
Word. That fear is kept alive in our hearts by reading the Scriptures; for as
we feed on the Word, it breathes within us that fear of God which is the
beginning of wisdom. This fear of God is maintained in us by the belief of
revealed truth, and meditation thereon. Study the doctrines of grace, and be
instructed in the analogy of the faith. Know the Gospel well and thoroughly,
and this will bring fuel to the fire of the fear of God in your hearts. Be much
in private prayer; for that stirs up the fire, and makes it burn more
brilliantly. In fine, seek to live near to God, to abide in Him; for as you abide
in Him, and His Words abide in you, you shall bring forth much fruit, and so
shall you be His disciples. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Bible religion
The world abounds with religions. There is but one true religion, that of the Bible.
It is sometimes spoken of as trust in God, sometimes as love for God, sometimes
obedience to God; here it is spoken of as the fear of God. It is the fear of not
pleasing in all things the object of the affections. The fear of not coming up to the
Divine idea of goodness.

I. As having its SEAT IN THE HEART. Fear in their hearts There is something in
mans spiritual nature analogous to the heart in his physical organisation. The heart
of the body is the most vital of all its organs; it sends the life-blood through all the
parts. What in mans spiritual nature is like his heart, and which the Bible calls his
heart? It is the chief liking of the soul. The chief liking is the spring of human
activity; it works and controls all the faculties of man. Bible religion takes possession
of this, inspires this, makes goodness and God the chief objects of liking, so that the
soul feels that God is its all in all.
1. Bible religion is in the heart, not merely in the intellect.
2. Not merely in the sentiments.
3. Not merely in occasional service.

II. AS IMPARTED BY GOD. How does He put this priceless principle into the heart?
Not miraculously, not irrespective of mans activities.
1. By the revelation of Himself to man.
2. By the ministry of His servants.

III. AS A SAFEGUARD AGAINST APOSTASY. IS it possible for man to depart from his
Maker? In a sense, no. No more than from the atmosphere he breathes, no more
than from himself. But there is a solemn sense in which men can and do depart from
Him. It is in sympathy of aim. All unregenerate souls are far off from God, vagrants,
ever wandering, settling nowhere. To depart from Him is to depart from light,
health, harmony, friendship, all in fact that makes life worth having. What can
prevent this, the chief of calamities? God s fear in the heart. This is that law of moral
attraction that will bind the soul for ever to God as its centre. (Homilist.)

JER 32:41
I will plant them in this land assuredly with My whole heart and with My whole
soul
The whole-heartedness of God in blessing His people

I. consider our text for instruction.

1. God blesses His people heartily. With My whole heart. Notice, in passing,
that word assuredly; for it confirms the word as full of truth and certainty.
He is slow to wrath, but He is swift to mercy, for He delighteth in it. When
He deals out His grace to His people, then you see the loving God, for God is
love; and you see the living God, for He blesses you with His whole soul.
2. He does this work of blessing His people thoughtfully, for it is added, and
with My whole soul. Not only the affections of God, speaking after the
manner of man, but the great mind and life of God is thrown into the work of
saving and blessing His people. His essence, His soul, is here at home. The
design argument, when brought to bear upon nature, proves the existence of
God. Much more when that argument is brought to bear upon the works of
grace do we see the Lord; for in the transactions of grace them is design in
everything.
3. We notice, next, that if that be so, then He employs all His resources to bless
His elect. The Lord our God--I speak as a man, and with deep reverence--is
absorbed in doing good to His people: there is nothing that He is, there is
nothing that He has, but what He will bring it to bear upon the design upon
which He has set His whole heart and His whole soul. Behold ye, what God
 hath done for His people! He has given them His all: all the wisdom of His
providence shall be theirs while here, and all the glory of His heaven
hereafter. God has His abode in heaven; behold, He makes it the abode of
His chosen for ever. Angels are His courtiers--they shall be ministering
spirits to His elect. The throne of His Son they shall sit upon with Him. The
victories of God shall furnish them with palms, and the delight of God shall
find them harps. But stop, there is something more than all! It was little for
God to give earth and heaven, but He must needs give His Son, the express
image of His glory, His other self.
4. The Lord subordinates all other works to that of His love. Everything,
whether of creation or destruction, mercy or judgment, shall work, like the
wheels of some vast machinery, to produce good to those who are the people
of the living God.
5. The Lord gives to His people and for His people without stint. When He feeds
His children, though once they would have been thankful to eat the crumbs
from His table, He sets them among princes, and gives them to eat of the
kings meat. He lays eternity under contribution to provide for the needs,
nay, for the desires, for the joys of His people.
6. Another point sets forth most plainly that the Lord blesses His people with
His whole heart and with His whole soul, for He perseveres in it. Are you not
surprised with the variety of His favours towards you? An old writer says that
Gods flowers bloom double, for He sends two blessings where there seems
but one; but I would say they are like the light: they are sevenfold, even as in
every ray from the sun we have seven colours blended in harmony. What
sevens and sevens of infinite love are contained in every beam of mercy that
comes to the redeemed!
7. As the Lord Perseveres in His work, so He succeeds in it. God is determined to
make something of His People, and He will.
8. God delights in all that He does for His own. We are happy when God blesses
us, but not so happy as God is. Our God has all the instincts of motherhood
and fatherhood blended in one; and when He looks upon His Church He
calls her Hephzibah--My delight is in her. He does not rejoice in the
works of His hands so much as in the works of His heart.

II. CONSIDER THE TEXT WITH THE EVIDENCE. In order to prove that God doth thus
bless us with His whole heart and with His whole soul, I would remind you that the
whole Trinity is engaged in the blessing of the chosen.
1. First comes the Father. It was He that chose us--chose us, not because He
must choose us or none, but freely with His whole heart. Wisdom from her
throne determined the way in which God would lead His People, and bless
His people, and sanctify His people, and perfect His people.
2. In reference to the ever-blessed Son of God, whom we worship as most truly
God, we have the same truth to state. He loved us ages before He came to
earth am man.
3. I must not omit the Holy Spirit, to whom be all honour and glory. When we
were mad with sin, and ravenous after the pleasures of it, He followed us, to
check us in our headlong career, to beckon us to better things, to draw us
thither, and to help us when we began to incline to the right. He gave us life,
 and light, and liberty.

III. Consider the inferences which flow from the text.

1. The first inference is one of consolation. Does God bless us with His whole
heart and with His whole soul? Oh, then, how happy we ought to be!
2. Another inference, and I have done: it is one of exhortation. Let us love our
God with our whole heart and with our whole soul. Trust Him for the past,
the present, and the future; trust Him completely, implicitly, unhesitatingly.
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

The enthusiasm of God

Who can but admire a man who speaks thus? Enthusiasm quickens life. It is salt
and light for common days. It makes earth flash with heaven. But was it a man who
said this? No. This voice came from heaven. Then of Cod. Well may Calvin annotate
my text, saying, The words are indeed did some strong and radiant angel thus avow
himself? No. This is the voice singular. God is telling His people the great things He
purposes to do for them, and He declares He will accomplish all with His whole
heart and with His whole soul. Here we are brought face to face with the kindling
fact that God is a God of enthusiasm. In one sense, Calvins remark on the
singularity of these words is very pertinent. But surveying them from another view-
point, the Divine declaration is not singular. Enthusiasm is an impressive element
of Bible theology. Scripture gives us peeps into Gods nature. Only peeps. The open
vision would blind us. And assuredly we frequently behold in the Holy Book the
outflashing of the Divine enthusiasm. Isaiah uses the wonderful phrase, The zeal of
the God of hosts. It is Gods quenchless enthusiasm which is to establish in triumph
the ever-increasing kingdom and peace of Emmanuel. This quality of God is one
Isaiah delights in. Isaiah on the enthusiasm of God is a stimulating study. He says of
a wonderful and apparently impossible deliverance of Gods people from their iron
oppressor, The zeal of the Lord of hosts shall do this. Courage, sad-hearted and
foe-encircled brother! The enthusiasm of God is pledged to thy deliverance! In
another place the poet-theologian describes God as a warrior, and cries, He . . . was
clad with zeal as a cloak. Grand is the vision of God as He appears in ruby-red robe
of zeal. Ezekiel, his feet on earth, his soul floating amid the cherubim, represents
Gods enthusiasm in its vengeful form when he declares how the wrath Divine shall
bruise impenitent transgressors, and they shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken
it in My zeal, when I have accomplished My fury in them If enthusiasm be a quality
which Old Testament theology ascribes to God, it is also emphatically accredited to
Him by the theology of the new covenant. It is revealed as an outstanding feature of
Him to have seen whom is to have seen the Father. With My whole heart and with
My whole soul, was the motto of His incarnate life. Holy enthusiasm was the
temper of His words and deeds. The zeal of Thy house will eat me up. Thus our
Lord fulfilled the scriptural ideal of enthusiasm as He fulfilled all scriptural ideals.
God in Christ is always a God of enthusiasm. How intense He is! How He prays! The
fervour of His prayers is never chilled. How He meditates! His inexplorable
thoughts breathe themselves through eternity. The Christ of the New Testament is
the Jehovah of the Old Testament, in white-hot enthusiasm, as in everything,
august, and gentle, and lovely. Enthusiasm must surely be an essential of a true
theology. One cannot conceive of an impassionate God. An apathetic God would
depress the universe. An ancient Greek finely described enthusiasm as a God
within. And such all grand enthusiasm is, and must be evermore. How attractive is
our God by reason of His enthusiasm. Who would not love Him with his might who
is ready to bless with His whole heart and with His whole soul? Such a God allures
us. Who are they for whom God promises to labour so enthusiastically? Notice the
repetitions them in this verse. Equally recurrent is the them in the previous
verse. In verse 38 the them is indicated. It refers to My people. God will do
wonderfully for His people. He prizes His people beyond compare. Nothing is too
great for Him to do for those who are in His sight so lovely. And no enthusiasm is
too lavish to expend upon their interests. Is there caprice in this wealthy enthusiasm
over His people? By no means. Gods people represent character. And Gods
enthusiasm for character is shown in His enthusiasm for His people. Gods
enthusiasm is evoked by character. Our poor unworthy enthusiasms are often
pitifully raise directed. The zeal of God never misses the true mark. God is
enthusiastic to help men of character. See how in the neighbourhood of this text He
rains golden showers of promises upon such. I will not turn away from them, to do
them good (verse 40). I will rejoice over them to do them good (verse 41). I will
plant them in this land (verse 41). I will bring upon them all the good that I have
promised them (verse 42). And fields shall be bought in this land (verse 43). The
enthusiasm of God runs forth in temporal helpfulness to men whose ways please
Him. He cares even for fields which belong to His people. Lay tide to heart,
burdened business man, if thou art one of Gods people! Consider this, depressed
agriculturist, who art a man of God! God makes your interests His own interests.
God is enthusiastic in respect of the creation and development of character. How
abundantly that can be demonstrated from the context! I will give them one heart,
and one way, that they may fear Me for ever, for the good of them, and of their
children after them (verse 39). I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not
depart from Me. What do these golden words portend? That with all His heart and
with all His soul God will perfect the character of His people. The fact is, nothing in
man creates such enthusiasm on Gods part as the instituting and enhancing of
character. Your soul is that in you in which God is most interested, and He is
interested in everything about you. He is enthusiastic in incomparable degree for
your salvation. The supernatural rectification of the will and of the being which we
commonly call conversion draws forth Gods intense enthusiasm. With His whole
heart and with His whole soul He proposes to develop the good He has already
created. He pines to perfect His servants. He has splendid ideals for them. He
strongly yearns to make their to-morrows better than their yesterdays. There are
those whose so-called enthusiasm is self-centred. Certain intense people are
intensely selfish. Some have ineffectual enthusiasms. No altruism irradiates them.
Nobody is anything bettered for them. They are fruitless fires. Not so the
enthusiasm of God. Gods zeal is to help, to bless, to enrich men. To illumine what is
dark in men. To raise what is low. To glorify what is sordid. Temporally and
spiritually beneficent is the enthusiasm of God. He delights to help us. Nor can the
strong years conquer His enthusiasm. In this, as in respect of all the qualities of the
Divine character, we are to be imitators of God, as beloved children. An
enthusiasm is contagious. Throbs thrill. The awful peril is that we imitate evil
enthusiasms. Souls of men, be admonished against such devil-born enthusiasm.
Gods enthusiasm is the true ideal for man. Be ye imitators of God. Be ours
enthusiasm for holy living. What a rebuke to our tepidity is the enthusiasm of God!
What is more remote from God than moral and spiritual coldness? Oh, this Divine
enthusiasm is the crying need of modern religion! It is very instructive to study the
Bible teaching concerning the enthusiasm of God. It is even more impressive on the
negative than on the positive side. God has no spark of enthusiasm for much that
man burns about. What discordance there often is between God and man! This is
apparent in the objects of their respective enthusiasms. God has no enthusiasm for
self-centredness. God has no enthusiasm for worldliness. No matter what form it
assumes, He cares not for it. It is all vanity to Him. God has no enthusiasm for
indifferency. Some are zealous for nothing but apathy. They have dead hearts, and
there is no death so deadly as the death of the heart. Stoicism is not sanctity. God is
quick with sympathy. The omissions from the revealed enthusiasms of God are
intensely significant. Take heed lest thou art enthusiastic where thy God is not. A
God who, with His whole heart and with His whole soul, seeks mans highest good,
is a God who constrains our devotion. He attracts us. He captivates us. Were He a
cold, unresponsive God, I should shrink from Him. But being an enthusiastic God,
my heart is His. Here is a ground of trustfulness--the enthusiasm of God. Can I fear
for the morrow when this God is mine? Here is a ground of hope--the enthusiasm of
God. All shall always be well, seeing such a God is mine. Here is a ground of service-
-the enthusiasm of God. Too much one cannot do for such a God. When He declares,
With My whole heart, and with My whole soul, He prefixes another delectable
word, assuredly. The margin renders it in truth, or in stability. So the good
Lord assures us of the perpetuity of His kindly enthusiasm. It will never fail His
people. Whoever cools toward us, the enthusiastic God of grace will be faithful and
fervent still (D. T. Young.)

JER 32:42
All the good that I have promised.

The religion, of the promise

(with Num 10:29):--Obeying a true instinct, the Church of Christ has from the
beginning understood the whole story of the transfer of the chosen people from the
land of bondage to the land of promise as possessing, over and above its historical
value, the preciousness of a divinely-planned allegory. For us, to-day, just as really
as for them in days of old, the stimulus continues to be simply this--a promise.
Heaven cannot be demonstrated. We merely take Gods Word for it. Not enough, in
our times, is said--soberly and intelligently said, I mean--about heaven. Very many
people have the feeling that the old-fashioned heaven of their childhoods thoughts
and hopes has been explained away by the progress ex discovery. It seems to them
as if heaven were pushed farther and farther off, just in proportion as the telescope
penetrates farther and farther into space. The gates of pearl recede with the
enlargement of the object-glass, and the search for tee Paradise of God, like that for
the earthly Eden, seems to become more hopeless, the more accurate our knowledge
of the map. The primitive Christians found it comparatively easy to think of heaven
as a place just above the stars. To us, who have learned to think of the sun itself as
but a star seen near at hand, and of the stars as suns, such localisation of the
dwelling-place of the Most Highest is far from easy. Another, and a very different
reason for keeping heaven, as it were, in the background, holding the mention of it
in reserve, comes from those who believe that there is such a danger as that of
cheapening and vulgarising sacred things by too much fluency in talking about
them. It cannot be denied that there is a certain amount of reason for this
fastidiousness, some strength in this protest. An indulgent rhetoric may throw open
the gates with a freedom so careless as to make us wonder why there should be any
gates at all; and lips to which the common prose speech of the real heaven would
perhaps come hard, were they compelled to try it, can sing of Jerusalem the
Golden, and of the Paradise for which tis weary waiting here with a glibness at
which possibly the angels stand aghast. This is a second reason, a very different
reason from the first, but still a reason, for observing reticence about heaven. And
yet, m the face of both of these reasons, I think it is a sad pity, our hearing so little as
we do about the hope of heaven as a motive power in human life. For after all that
has been said, or can be said, these two facts remain indisputable; they stare us in
the face: first, that this life of ours, however we may account for it, does bear a
certain resemblance to a journey, in that the one is a movement through time, as the
other is a movement through space; secondly, that any journey which lacks a
destination is, and must of necessity be a dismal thing. Human nature being what it
is, we need the attractive power of something to look forward to, as we say, to keep
our strength and courage up to the living standard. Christians are men with a hope,
men who have been called to inherit a blessing. Nor is the Old Testament lacking in
this element of promise. It runs through the whole Bible. What book anywhere can
you point to so forward-looking as that Book? As we watch the worthies of many
generations pass in long procession onwards, from the day when the promise was
first given of the One who should come and bruise the serpents head, down to the
day when the aged Simeon in the Temple took the Child Jesus into his arms and
blessed Him, we seem to see upon every forehead a glow of light. These men have a
hope. They are looking for something, and they look as those look who expect in due
time to find. If this be true of the general tone of the Old Testament Scriptures,
doubly, trebly is it true of the New Testament. The coming of Christ has only
quickened and made more intense in us that instinct of hope which the old
prophecies of His coming first inspired. For when He came, He brought in larger
hopes, and opened to us far-reaching vistas of promise, such as had never been
dreamed of before. A solemn joy pervades the atmosphere in which apostle and
evangelist move before our eyes. They are as men who, in the face of the wreck of
earthly hopes, have yet no inclination to tears, because there has been opened to
them a vision of things unseen, and granted to them a foretaste of the peace eternal.
The glory that shall be revealed; the things eye hath not seen, prepared for those
who love God; the house not made with hands, waiting for occupancy; the crown
of righteousness, laid up--you remember how prominent a place these hold in the
persuasive oratory of St. Paul. The complaint that the progress of human knowledge
has made it difficult to think and speak of heaven as believing men used to think and
speak of it, is a complaint to which we ought to return for a few moments; for, from
our leaving it as we did, the impression may have been conveyed to some minds that
the difficulty is insuperable. Let me observe, then, that while there is a certain grain
of reasonableness in this argument for silence with respect to heaven and the things
of heaven, there is by no means so much weight to be attached to it as many people
seem to suppose. For after all, when we come to think of it, this changed conception
of what heaven may be like is not traceable so much to any marvellous revolution
that has come over the whole character of human thought since you and I were
children, as it is to the changes which have taken place in our own several minds,
and which necessarily take place in every mind in its progress from infancy to
maturity. The really serious blow at old-time notions upon the subject was dealt long
before any of us were born, when the truth was established beyond serious doubts
that this planet is not the centre about which all else in the universe revolves. But
the explanation of our personal sense of grievance at being robbed of the heaven we
were used to believe in is to be sought in the familiar saying, When I was a child, I
spake as a child, &c. We instinctively, and without knowing it, project this childish
way of looking at things upon the whole thinking world that was contemporary with
our childhood, and infer from the change that has come over our own mind that
corresponding change has been going on in the mind of the world at large. This
fallacy is the more easily fallen into, because it is a fact that, if we go back far enough
in the history of thought, we do find even the mature minds seeing things much as
we ourselves saw them in our early childhood. But let me try to strike closer home
and meet the difficulty in a more direct and helpful way. I do it by asking whether
we ought not to feel ashamed of ourselves, thus to talk about having been robbed of
the promise simply because the Father of heaven has been showing us, lust as fast as
our poor minds could bear the strain, to how immeasurable an area the Fatherhood
extends. Instead of repining because we cannot dwarf Gods universe so as to make
it fit perfectly the smallness of our notions, let us turn all our energies to seeking to
enlarge the capacity of our faith so that it shall be able to hold more. What all this
means is, that we are to believe better things of God, not worse things. It may turn
out,--who can tell?--that heaven lies nearer to us than even in our childhood we ever
ventured to suppose; that it is not only nearer than the sky, but nearer than the
clouds. The reality of heaven, happily, is not dependent on the ability of our five
senses to discover its whereabouts. Doubtless a sixth or seventh sense might
speedily reveal much, very much of which the five we now have take no notice. Be
this as it may, the reasonableness of our believing in Christs promise, that in the
world whither He went He would prepare a place for us, is in nowise impugned by
anything that the busy wit of man has yet found out, or is likely to find out. There is
no period of life from which we can afford to spare the presence of this heavenly
hope. We need it in youth, to give point and purpose and direction to the newly
launched life. We need it in middle life to help us cover patiently that long stretch
which parts youth from old age--the time of the fading out of illusions in the dry
light of experience; the time when we discover the extent of our personal range, and
the narrow limit of our possible achievement. Above all shall we find such a hope the
staff of old age, should the pilgrimage last so long. But let us not imagine that we can
postpone believing until then. Faith is a habit of the soul, and old men would be the
first to warn us against the notion that it is a habit that may be acquired in a day.
Those of us who are wise will take up the matter now, at whatever point of age the
word may happen to have found us. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 33

JER 33:1-9
The Word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah the second time, while he was yet shut
up in the court of the prison.
A Divine message sent into a prison

I. A TRUE CHILD OF GOD AND AN HONOURED PROPHET IN DISGRACE AND AFFLICTION

(verse 1). Let not the child of God think that his sorrows are always because of his
Sins.

II. Though despised of man, the prophet was honoured of God (verses 1, 2).
1. To receive communications from the Divine mind is the highest honour.
2. He whom God honours and owns as His child need not fear what man can do.

III. Divine consolation to an afflicted servant (verse 3).

1. The most precious of all privileges, that of prayer: Call unto Me.
2. The most marvellous of all assurances: And I will answer thee.
3. The most encouraging of all promises: I will show thee great and mighty
things.

IV. The adversity and prosperity of nations are under the control of God (verses
4-7).
1. It is impossible properly to construe the history of a nation without reference
to the moral government of God.
2. National prosperity or adversity has always been in the line of national virtue
or vice.

V. The essential conditions of national as well as individual healing (verses 8, 9).

1. It is essential that God come to do the work. I will cleanse, &c.
2. It is essential that God work upon our moral natures. I will cleanse them
from all their iniquity.
3. It is essential that God work upon our moral natures by the assurance of the
forgiveness of sin. I will pardon all, &c.
4. This moral and spiritual cleansing and pardon are essential for the
appreciation of the Divine goodness: And they shall fear, &c.
5. This spiritual healing shall manifest forth the glory of God: It shall be to Me a
name, &c. (D. C. Hughes, M. A.)

The method of Divine procedure

The prophet, when the Word of the Lord came unto him, was in a good hearing
place, shut up in the court of the prison. Shut up unjustly, it was no prison to him,
but a sanctuary, with Gods altar visibly in it, and God Himself irradiating the altar
with a light above the brightness of the sun. How hardly shall they that have riches
hear the Gospel. Their ears are already filled; their attention is already occupied.
What keen ears poverty has I What eyes the blind man has!--inner eyes, eyes of
expectation. We should have had no world worth living in but for the prison, the
darkness, the trouble, the blindness, the sorrow, which have constituted such
precious elements in our lot. There would have been no poetry written if there had
been no sorrow. Jeremiah heard more in the prison than he ever heard in the palace.
God knows where His children are. There are a thousand prisons in life. We must
not narrow words into their lowest meanings, but enlarge them into their broadest
significance, He is in prison who is in trouble, who is in fear, who is in conscious
penitence, without having received the complete assurance of pardon; he is in prison
who has sold his liberty, is lying under condemnation, secret or open; and he is in
prison who has lost his first love, his early enthusiasm that was loaded with dew like
a flower in the morning. Whatever our prison is, God knows it, can find us, can send
a word of His own directly to us, and can make us forget outward circumstances in
inward content and peace and joy. (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 33:3
Call unto Me, and I win answer thee.

An invitation a promise-a revelation

I. A GRACIOUS INVITATION--Call unto Me implies all the constituents of

successful prayer.
1. Penitence.
2. Contrition.
3. Humility.
4. Importunity.
5. Restitution.
6. Faith.

II. A PRECIOUS PROMISE--And I will answer thee. The invitation accepted, its
conditions complied with, always brings the answer.
1. Gods word pledged.
2. Gods nature pledged.
3. Confirmed by the experience of His saints.

III. A GLORIOUS REVELATION--And will shew thee, &c.

1. The greatness of Gods love.
2. The power of Jesus to forgive sin.
3. The worth of the soul.
4. The joys and comforts of religion.
5. The victory of faith in death. (J. T. Davies.)

Prayer

I. The invitation to prayer.

1. Whose is it?
 2. To whom is the invitation addressed?
3. What is the tenor of the invitation?

II. The promise.

1. It is general.
2. It is special. Apply
(1) Reprove the prayerless.
(2) Encourage the prayerful. (G. Brooks.)

The golden key of prayer

God s people have always in their worst conditions found out the best of their
God. Those who dive into the sea of affliction bring up rare pearls.

I. Prayer commanded.
1. This is great condescension. So great is the infatuation of man on the one
hand, which makes him need a command to be merciful to his own soul, and
so marvellous the condescension of God on the other that He issues a
command of love.
2. Our hearts so despond over our unfitness and guilt that but for the command
we might fear to approach.
3. It is remarkable how much more frequently God calls us to Him in Scripture
than we find there our sinfulness denounced!
4. Nor by the commands of the Bible alone are we summoned to prayer, but by
the motions of His Holy Spirit.

II. An answer promised.

1. Gods very nature, as revealed in Jesus Christ, assures us that He will accept
us in prayer.
2. Our own experience leads us to believe that God will answer prayer; e.g., the
conversion of many a child has been an answer to parents pleadings with
God.
3. Yet God does not always give the thing we ask. Lord Bolingbroke said to the
Countess of Huntingdon, I cannot understand, your ladyship, how you can
make out earnest prayer to be consistent with submission to the Divine will.
My lord, she said, that is a matter of no difficulty. If I were a courtier of
some generous king, and he gave me permission to ask any favour I pleased
of him, I should be sure to put it thus: Will your majesty be graciously
pleased to grant me such and such a favour; but at the same time, though I
much desire it, if it would in any way detract from your majestys honour, or
if in your majestys judgment it should seem better that I did not have this
favour, I shall be quite as content to go without it as to receive it. So you see
I might earnestly offer a petition, and yet might submissively leave it with the
king.

III. Encouragement to faith.

1. Promised to Gods prophet, this specially applies to every teacher. The best
 way for a teacher or learner in Divine truth to reach the deeper things of
God is to be much in prayer. Luther says, Bene orare est bene studuisse--
To have prayed well is to have studied well
2. The saint may expect to discover deeper experience and to know more of the
higher spiritual life, by being much in prayer.
3. It is certainly true of the sufferer under trial; if he waits on God he shall have
greater deliverance than he ever dreamed of (Lam 3:57).
4. Here is encouragement for the worker. We know not how much capacity for
usefulness there is in us. More prayer will show us more power.
5. This should cheer us in intercession for others.
6. Some are seekers for your own conversion. Pray, and see if God will not show
you great and mighty things. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Prayer encouraged
The text belongs to every afflicted servant of God. It encourages him in a threefold
manner.

I. To continue in prayer. Call unto Me!

1. Pray, though you have prayed (see Jer 32:16, &c.).
2. Pray concerning your present trouble. In Jer 32:24, the prophet mentions
the mounts which were raised against Jerusalem, and in Jer 32:4 of this
chapter the Lord answers on that very point.
3. Pray though you are still in prison after prayer. If deliverance tarries, make
your prayers the more importunate.
4. Pray; for the Word of the Lord comes to you with this command.
5. Pray; for the Holy Spirit prompts you, and helps you.

II. To EXPECT ANSWERS TO PRAYER. I will answer thee, and shew thee.
1. He has appointed prayer, and made arrangements for its presentation and
acceptance. He could not have meant it to be a mere farce: that were to treat
us as fools.
2. He prompts, encourages, and quickens prayer; and surely He would never
mock us by exciting desires which He never meant to gratify.
3. His nature is such that He must hear His children.
4. He has given His promise in the text; and it is often repeated elsewhere: He
cannot lie, or deny Himself.
5. He has already answered many of His people, and ourselves also.

III. TO EXPECT GREAT THINGS AS ANSWERS TO PRAYER, I will shew thee great and
mighty things We are to look for things--
1. Great in counsel; full of wisdom and significance
2. Mighty in work; revealing might, and mightily effectual.
3. New things to ourselves, fresh in our experience and therefore surprising. We
may expect the unexpected.
 4. Divine things: I will shew thee.
(1) Health and cure (Jer 32:6).
(2) Liberation from captivity (Jer 32:7).
(3) Forgiveness of iniquity (Jer 32:8). (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Prayer and its answer

A young engineer was being examined, and this question was put to him:
Suppose you have a steam-pump constructed for a ship, under your own
supervision, and know that everything is in perfect order, yet, when you throw out
the hose, it will not draw; what should you think? I should think, sir, there must be a
defect somewhere. But such a conclusion is not admissible; for the supposition is
that everything is perfect, and yet that the pump will not work. Then, sir, replied
the student, I should look over the side of the ship to see if the river had run dry.
Even so it would appear that if true prayer is not answered the nature of God must
have changed.
Instant in prayer
Sir Walter Raleigh one day asking a favour from Queen Elizabeth, the latter said
to him, Raleigh, when will you leave off begging? To which he answered, When
your Majesty leaves off giving. Ask-great things of God. Expect great things from
God. Let His past goodness make us instant in prayer.
Prayer the souls wings
Thomas Brooks, alluding to the old classical myth of Daedalus, who, being
imprisoned in the island of Crete, made wings for himself, by which he escaped to
Italy, says, Christians must do as Daedalus, who, when he could not escape by a
way upon earth, went by a way of heaven. Holy prayers are the wings of the souls
deliverance. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Calling unto God

What is this calling unto God? Is it a verbal exercise? Is it a mere act of
exclamation! Nothing can be further from the meaning. It is a call that issues from
the heart; it is the call of need, it is the cry of pain, it is the agony of desire, it is
enclosure with God in profound and loving communion. If we have received no
answers, it is because we have offered no prayers. Ye have not because ye ask not or
because ye ask amiss, you have been praying obliquely instead of directly; you have
been vexing yourselves with circumlocution when your words ought to have been
direct appeals, sharp, short, urgent appeals to Heaven: to such appeals God sends
down richness of dew, wealth of blessing, morning brighter than noonday. God will
shew His people great and mighty things. There is nothing little. The bird in the
heavens upon its trembling wing is only little to us, it is not little to God. He counts
the drops of dew, He puts our tears into His bottle, He numbers our sighs, and as for
our groans, He distinguishes one from the other; these are not little things to Him,
they are only little to our ignorance, and folly, and superficiality. God looks at souls,
faces, lives, destinies, and the least child in the world He rocks to sleep and wakes in
the morning, as if He had nought else to do; it is the stoop of Fatherhood, it is the
mystery of the Cross. As to these continual revelations, they ought to be possible.
God is infinite and eternal, man is infinite and transient in all his earthly
relationships; it would he strange if God had told man everything He has to tell him,
it would be the miracle of miracles that God had exhausted Himself in one effort, it
would be incredible that the eternal God had crushed into the moment which we call
time every thought that makes Him God. Greater things than these shall ye do;
when He, the Paraclete, is come, He will guide you into all truth; grow in grace, and
in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; add to your faith, until you scaffold
yourselves up into brotherly love and charity, for from that pinnacle the next step is
right into heaven. The question is, Are we in need of further revelation? Do we call
for it? We may call for it speculatively, and no answer will he given; we may ask for
it for the sake of mere intellectual delectation, and the heavens will be dumb and
frowning: but if we try to outgrow God, then we shall know what God is in reality;
He challenges the sacred rivalry, He appeals to our emulation to follow Him and
study Him, and try to comprehend Him, and then how like a horizon He is, for we
think we can touch Him in yonder top, but having climbed the steep the horizon is
still beyond. To cleverness God has nothing to say; to vanity He is scornfully
inhospitable; but to the broken heart, to the contrite spirit and the willing mind, to
filial, tender, devout, obedience, He will give Himself in infinite and continual
donation: To this man will I look, for I see My own image in him, My own purpose is
vitalised in his experience--the man who is of a humble and contrite heart, and who
trembleth at My word, not in servility, but in rapture and wonder at its grandeur and
tenderness. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Gods gracious answers to our prayers

When poor men make requests to us we usually answer them as the echo does the
voice; the answer cuts off half the petition. We shall seldom find among men Jaels
courtesy, giving milk to those that ask water, except it be, as this was, an entangling
benefit, the better to introduce a mischief. There are not many Naamans among us,
that, when you beg of them one talent, will force you to take two; but Gods answer
to our prayers is like a multiplying glass, which renders the request much greater in
the answer than it was in the prayer. (J. Reynolds.)

Answers to prayer should be eagerly expected

One of the heathen poets speaks of Jupiter throwing certain prayers to the winds,-
-dispersing them in empty air. It is sad to think that we often do that for ourselves.
What would you think of a man who had written and folded and sealed and
addressed a letter, flinging it out into the street and thinking no more about it?
Sailors in foundering ships sometimes commit notes in sealed bottles to the waves
for the chance of them being some day washed on some shore. Sir John Franklins
companions among the snows, and Captain Allen Gardiner dying of hunger in his
cove, wrote words they could not be sure anyone would ever read. But we do not
need to think of our prayers as random messages. We should therefore look for a
reply to them and watch to get it. (J. Edmond.)

And shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.--
Prevailing prayer
There are different translations of these words. One version renders it, I will
shew thee great and fortified things. Another, Great and reserved things. Now,
there are reserved and special things in Christian experience: all the developments
of spiritual life are not alike easy of attainment. There are the common frames and
feelings of repentance, and faith, and joy, and hope, which are enjoyed by the entire
family; but there is an upper realm of rapture, of communion, and conscious union
with Christ, which is far from being the common dwelling-place of believers. We
have not all the higher privilege of John, to lean upon Jesus bosom; nor of Paul, to
be caught up into the third heaven. There are heights in experimental knowledge of
the things of God which the eagles eye of acumen and philosophic thought hath
never seen: God alone can bear us there; but the chariot in which He takes us up,
and the fiery steeds with which that chariot is dragged, are prevailing prayers.
Prevailing prayer is victorious over the God of mercy. By his strength he had power
with God: yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed: he wept, and made
supplication unto Him: he found Him in Bethel, and there He spake with us.
Prevailing prayer takes the Christian to Carmel, and enables him to cover heaven
with clouds of blessing, and earth with floods of mercy. Prevailing prayer bears the
Christian aloft to Pisgah, and shows him the inheritance reserved; it elevates us to
Tabor and transfigures us, till in the likeness of our Lord, as He is, so are we also in
this world. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 33:6
Behold I will bring it health and cure.

This passage, in its more immediate application, relates to the city and people of
Jerusalem, and conveys a promise to the unhappy nation of the Jews of blessings
which are yet in store for them.
The Great Physician

I. THE VISIT WHICH THIS GOOD PHYSICIAN PAYS TO THE POOR PATIENT WHO HAS
NEED OF HIM. The patient is a wretched being, who, in a spiritual point of view, is
diseased from head to foot, and hath no soundness in him. He has the disease of
human nature, the disease which you and I have--sin. He has become painfully alive
to the humiliating fact that there is no good thing in him--that all his doings have
been evil--and that the sentence of death eternal hangs over his soul. He cannot heal
himself. His fellow-sinners cannot heal him. Is not then his case desperate? It would
be so indeed were it not for a voice from heaven which saith of this poor sinner, I
will bring him health and cure. Every word is a word of comfort to that sinners
soul. There is comfort in the first word I--I will do it. For who is it that speaks? It is
Jesus, the great, the mighty Saviour of the soul--that famous, that renowned
Physician who hath healed already such a multitude of sinners, and hath never lost a
single patient. There is comfort in the next word, I will bring--for, alas! this sinner
cannot fetch his cure. But look at the last words of the sentence, and behold still
more abundant comfort for this perishing transgressor. I will bring, saith the
Lord--What? A medicine? A healing application that will be likely to avail--that may
conduce towards recovery? No, but--Oh, bold words! words only fit for an Almighty
Saviour!--I will bring him health and cure--something so sovereign in its virtue, so
sure, so swift in its effects, that, the moment it is tried upon the patient, he is well;
not only in part restored; not only altogether freed from his disease; but well--in full,
in perfect health. The balm which the Physician brings to cure the sinner with is the
blood which He hath shed for them, the life which He hath given for them, the full,
the perfect and sufficient sacrifice which He hath offered up for them. And this
balm, is not medicine only--for that may heal or not heal; that is a mere experiment
upon a broken constitution, and may be ineffectual; but the balm which Jesus brings
the sinner may well be styled health and cure; for it is everything at once which the
sinners case requires. This precious blood cleanseth from all sin. But we have not
yet attended this Good Physician to His patient. We have not yet ascertained, I
mean, how He may be said to bring this health and cure to the poor sinners
soul. It is when He opens that sinners eyes to view Him as a Saviour--when, by His
word or by His ministers, He sets His love before that sinners soul, and by His Holy
Spirit makes him see it.

II. OBSERVE THE GOOD PHYSICIAL ACTUALLY CURING THE POOR PATIENT HE
ATTENDS. There is a difference between a remedy brought near, and a remedy
applied; and there is a difference again between Christs bringing health and cure
to the sinner, and that sinners being cured. The grace of God that bringeth
salvation is said to appear unto all men; but we know that all men to whom it
appeareth are not saved by it. Many men perceive that Christ is their Physician, yet
will not take His remedy; and many men believe that they have used the remedy
when they have only done so in appearance. The patient we have endeavoured to
describe is a really humbled and awakened soul, and the Lord, who brings him
health, gives him faith also, to be healed. He believes in Jesus as a Saviour. He casts
his soul on Him for pardon and righteousness.

III. Now proceed to the blessings my text describes Him as bestowing on the poor
patients He has healed. I will reveal to them, says He, the abundance of peace and
truth.
1. We may regard this peace and truth as the privileges of the redeemed sinner.
When our poor sick bodies are recovered unexpectedly from a painful and a
dangerous disease, how do we rejoice in our newly acquired health! How are
our fears calmed and our anxieties removed! but these natural emotions are
not to be compared for a moment with the spiritual feelings and experiences
of the pardoned sinner; no sooner hath the Good Physician healed the soul
than what doth He reveal to it? The abundance of peace and truth. Peace--
for being justified by faith, he hath peace with God through Jesus Christ our
Lord. Christ revealeth also to him the abundance of truth. He enjoys,
through the Spirit which Christ sends him, a glorious and most comfortable
apprehension of the truth of God--of the truth of His grace, of the truth of
His covenant, of the truth of His promises.
2. Consider this abundance of peace and truth as referring also to the
character acquired by the believer in consequence of his faith. Christ may be
said to have revealed to His people the abundance of peace in that He hath
given them a peaceful spirit--in that He hath sent that Dove-like Messenger
to rest upon their souls who is first pure, then peaceable, and who makes
the hearts He enters like Himself. And Christ may be said also to have
revealed to him the abundance of truth, by enabling him to walk in truth.
He is an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile, no crooked policy, no artful
management. His aim is, on all occasions, to be a child of the light and of
the day--sincere and without offence unto the day of Christ--having no
 fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reproving them.
(A. Roberts, M. A.)

Health for the soul

I. THE PATIENT AND HIS DISEASE. The patient is man; the disease is sin. We see the
disease equally in the most refined as in the most ignorant. It stares us in the face
when we read of an African negress sacrificing a fowl to her little image; and it
shows itself equally when we read of a Grecian philosopher proposing before his
death the sacrifice of a cock to Esculapius. We see the ignorance of the true God; we
see at the same time such a consciousness of sin that something must be done to
appease the apprehension which they have of the reality of a God. But we need a
closer application of the subject. You may all of you say perhaps, I have never been
guilty of idolatry; I am neither Mohammetan, nor Socialist, nor Communist, nor an
infidel. Let us look, then, at some of the peculiar features of the disease of sin, and
see whether it is not preying upon you as it is upon other men in the world. Now, it
is well illustrated by the effect which sickness produces upon our body. For instance,
sickness produces languor through the whole body; and this is exactly Gods account
of the effect of sin (Isa 1:5-6). Take the faculties of man. Take his understanding.
The understanding, we are told, is darkened, so that man is no longer wise to do
good; he is only wise to do evil. Again, look at his will. The will of man has a wrong
bias. Once, I cannot doubt, it was true of Adam, as spoken of our Lord in the fortieth
Psalm, I delight to do Thy will, O God; yea, it is within my heart. I cannot doubt
there was a time when that was the natural expression of Adams heart; but now it is
not the expression of any mans heart until he is renewed by the Holy Ghost. But
again: sickness takes away our desire for what is wholesome. So it is with sinners.
They put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter; they call darkness light, and light
darkness, and evil good, and good evil: whereas the spiritual man delights in the law
of God after the inward man renewed by the Holy Ghost. Another effect produced by
sickness upon the frame is, that it takes away the comfort of life. There is no
enjoyment in anything put before the sick man enfeebled by disease, anything in
which he was once able to take delight. Yea, life itself often becomes a burden. Now,
what is the burden? Why, sin is the burden; it is this, only you do not know it; it is
this which at times poisons the joy even of the most thoughtless--the consciousness
of sin, the consciousness of your opposition to a holy God.

II. THE PHYSICIAN AND THE CURE. Behold I will bring it health and cure--I--
Jesus. And it has been Jesus always. The remedy may have been stated more
distinctly under the Gospel than under the law, but not more really. It was Jesus
always, it was the precious blood of Jesus always, pointed at in the very first premise
that was made by God, that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpents
head. And salvation has always been shut up in that seed. It may have been
expressed sometimes as being Abrahams seed, sometimes the seed of Isaac, and
sometimes the seed of Jacob, but it had only one meaning; as the apostle said in the
third chapter of Galatians, Not unto seeds, as of many; but as of one, and to thy
seed, which is Christ. There is the Physician that God has always revealed. And
what is His character? I cannot give you a better picture of Him than He has given of
Himself in the parable of the good Samaritan. The wounded man had no charges; he
had nothing to pay; the good Samaritan paid for all It is so with Jesus. The only fee,
if I may so speak with reverence of Jesus, is--all He asks of us is, that we should trust
Him, that we should believe in Him. He holds out to us in the Gospel perfect cure of
all our disease, whatever it may be, and however aggravated; and He only says, Let
Me cure you. And when I point you to this Good Samaritan as a Physician, I would
have you remember that He is the only One. I call this another inexpressible mercy,
that the poor sinners mind, anxious for relief, is not distracted in the Gospel by
choosing between physicians. As the sun is clear in the firmament of heaven at
noonday, so does Jesus shine forth as the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His
wings to every poor sinner. And observe how He brings this before you. He says,
Direct your attention, behold, take notice, I will bring you health and cure. Here
is purpose, here is determination, here is sovereign will. I will cure, I will heal, I will
reveal abundance of peace and truth. We may ask, then, if the way be so simple,
why is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered! Is there no balm in
Gilead? Is there no physician there? Yes, there is balm, there is the blood of Jesus;
there is a Physician, there is Jesus Himself. Then why is not the health of the
daughter of my people recovered! I will put before you some reasons. Some are not
healed because they do not know they are sick. There is often very great mischief
going on in our frames without our knowing it. That is the way in which mortal
diseases get hold of a man. Then some are not healed because they love their
disease. Yea, they love sin. We read of a very celebrated man, St. Augustine, that
there was a time when his conscience was so harassed by the oppression of sin, at
the same time that his affections were set upon the enjoyment and indulgence of it,
that he declared he was afraid his prayers should be heard when he prayed for
deliverance from sin. Now I would ask whether that is not the ease with many.
Some, again, are not healed because they are not willing to be healed. Our Lord says,
Ye will not come to Me that ye might have life. Again, some hearts are not healed
because they will not take the Gospel remedies. What are the two great remedies
that Jesus proposes? Repentance towards God, and faith towards Himself. But these
are bitter and nauseous draughts to the natural man. There is one other reason
which I would give why some are not healed--because they put no confidence in the
Physician. Here is the root of all the evil--a want of faith. If they trusted Him, they
would trust His word; and if they trusted His Word, they would take His remedies.
(J. W. Reeve, M. A.)

JER 33:8
I will cleanse them from all their iniquity.

Our Cleanser
(with Psa 19:12):--Many think that Jesus came into the world to forgive our sins;
which is true, but it is only a part of the truth; for the New Testament reveals that He
came to save us from our sins. Forgiveness is a great thing; but cleansing from sin is
greater. Any kindly hearted man can forgive an injury; but only an omnipotent God
can wash the love of sin from our nature. The Bible reveals that God has both the
will and the power to give a clean heart.

I. IT IS A NEEDFUL PRAYER. Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.

 1. Do not our secret thoughts need cleansing?
2. Our secret imaginations need to be cleansed. Children build fairy castles in
the air, and tenant them with the pure, the brave, and the true; but as we
grow older, our airy castles begin to be peopled with those whose actions are
tainted with sin; and when we arrive at manhood, the unconverted soul
builds castles in its imagination in which iniquity abounds without any
obstacle to hinder it.
3. Our secret desires need cleansing. If there were no desire for sin, there would
be no transgression; and we, therefore, need to pray continually, Lord,
cleanse my sinful desires! Let my longings be washed from their bias to
transgression!
4. Our secret habits need cleansing. When a man yields to a sinful habit it is
difficult to break it off. You need superhuman power; and that power shall be
granted to all who sincerely ask of God. The sculptor who forms a figure in
marble does it gradually by thousands of chisel strokes; and in the same way,
when you are forming your soul either for goodness or badness, it is a
gradual work. As no man is made an angel in a moment, so no man is made a
devil in a moment. It is a work of time. It is first a thought, then a picture in
the mind, then a desire, then a hesitating step, and afterwards the boldness
of habit. It is hard work battling against a world inclined to sin; it is more
difficult to resist a loved one who tempts us; but the hardest battle ever man
can fight in this world is when he struggles against his souls inclination to
think or do evil. And I feel persuaded that no man can cleanse his secret
faults without the help of God. But however bad your secret sins may be, you
can be purified. Is there anything too hard for the Lord? Christ has unfurled
the flag of liberty, and His Spirit now calls on every man who is bound by sin
to cry to Him for life!

II. UNBELIEF HINDERS US FROM BEING CLEANSED. Some men say, Nobody can be
saved from all their secret faults! But if the Lord say He will cleanse us from all our
iniquity, is it not a wicked thing to doubt it? Perhaps, somebody remarks, Well, I
used to think I might be cleansed from sin, and I tried, but failed every time. Now
let me ask you a question. Were you not a great deal happier when you were seeking
to ,conquer your secret faults than you are now? You reply, Yes, I was happier; but
why did I not succeed? A man who is trying to crush down the sin of his heart is
happier than he who is content with the slavery of sin. If he do not succeed, the
reason is that he is trying to do for himself what cannot be done without God. Ask
the Lord to cleanse. It is your work to bring your soul in faith and prayer to Him,
and it is His work to cleanse it.

III. HOW DOES THE LORD CLEANSE US? The Jews in times of old were cleansed by
being sprinkled with the blood of a beast. But this is not the way in which we are
cleansed from secret faults. The Spirit of Christ can enter our souls and can cleanse
us from sin. (W. Birch.)

A threefold disease and a twofold cure

Jeremiah was a prisoner in the palace of the last King of Judah. The long, national
tragedy had reached almost the last scene and the last act. The besiegers were
drawing their net closer round the doomed city. The prophet never faltered in
predicting its fall, but he as uniformly pointed to a period behind the impending
ruin, when all should be peace and joy. His song was modulated from a saddened
minor to triumphant jubilation. The exiles shall return, the city shall be rebuilt, its
desolate streets shall ring with hymns of praise, and the voices of the bridegroom
and the bride. The land shall be peopled with peaceful husbandmen, and white with
flocks. There shall be again a King upon the throne; sacrifices shall again be offered.
That fair vision of the future begins with the offer of healing and cure, and with the
exuberant promise of my text. The first thing to be dealt with was Judahs sin; and
that being taken away, all good and blessing would start into being, as flowerets will
spring when the baleful shadow of some poisonous tree is removed.

I. A THREEFOLD VIEW OF THE SAD CONDITION OF HUMANITY. Observe the recurrence

of the same idea in our text in different words. Their iniquity whereby they have
sinned against Me.. . . Their iniquity whereby they have sinned, and whereby they
have transgressed against Me. You see there are three expressions which roughly
may be taken as referring to the same ugly fact, but yet not meaning quite the same-
-iniquity, or iniquities, sin, transgression. Suppose three men are set to describe a
snake. One of them fixes his attention on its slimy coils, and describes its sinuous
gliding movements. Another of them is fascinated by its wicked beauty, and talks
about its livid markings, and its glittering eye. The third thinks only of the swift-
darting fangs, and of the poison-glands. They all three describe the snake, but they
describe it from different points of view. And so it is here. Iniquity, sin,
transgression are synonyms to some extent, but they do not cover the same
ground. They look at the serpent from different points of view. First, a sinful life is a
twisted or warped life. The word rendered iniquity, in the Old Testament, in all
probability, literally means something that is not straight; that is bent, or, as I said,
twisted or warped. That is a metaphor that runs through a great many languages. I
suppose right means the very same thing--that which is straight and direct; and I
suppose that wrong has something to do with wrung--that which has been
forcibly diverted from a right line. We all know the conventional colloquialism about
a man being straight, and such-and-such a thing being on the straight. All sin is
a twisting of the man from his proper course. Now there underlies that metaphor the
notion that there is a certain line to which we are to conform. The schoolmaster
draws a firm, straight line in the childs copybook; and then the little unaccustomed
hand takes up on the second line its attempt, and makes tremulous, wavering pot-
hooks and hangers. There is a copyhead for us, and our writing is, alas! all uneven
and irregular, as well as blurred and blotted. There is a law, and you know it; and
you carry in yourself--I was going to say, the standard measure, and you know
whether, when you put your life by the side of that, the two coincide. This very
prophet has a wonderful illustration, in which he compares the lives of men who
have departed from God to the racing about in the wilderness of a wild dromedary
entangling her ways, as he says, crossing and recrossing, and getting into a maze
of perplexity. Ah! is that not something like your life? All sin is deflection from the
straight road, and we all are guilty of that. Let me ask you to consult the standard
that you carry within yourselves. It is easy to imagine that a line is straight. But did
you ever see the point of a needle under a microscope? However finely it is polished,
and apparently regularly tapering, the scrutinising investigation of the microscope
shows that it is all rough and irregular. The smallest departure from the line of right
will end, unless it is checked, away out in the regions of darkness beyond. The
second of them, rendered in our version sin, if I may recur to my former
illustration, looks at the snake from a different point of view, and it declares that all
sin misses the aim. The meaning of the word in the original is simply that which
misses its mark. Now, there are two ways in which that thought may be looked at.
Every wrong thing that we do misses the aim, if you consider what a mans aim
ought to be. Mans chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever. That is
the only aim which corresponds to our constitution, to our circumstances. And so,
whatever you win, unless you win God, you have missed the aim. Anything short of
knowing Him and loving Him, serving Him, being filled and inspired by Him, is
contrary to the destiny stamped upon us all. Then there is another side to this. The
solemn teaching of this word is not confined to that thought, but also opens out into
this other, that all godlessness, all the low, sinful lives that so many of us live, miss
the shabby aim which they set before themselves. I do not believe that any man or
woman ever got as much good, even of the lowest kind, out of a wrong thing as they
expected to get when they ventured on it. If they did they got something else along
with it that took all the gilt off the gingerbread. The drunkard gets his pleasurable
oblivion, his pleasurable excitement. What about the corrugated liver, the palsied
hand, the watery eye, the wrecked life, the broken hearts at home, and all the other
accompaniments? There is an old story that speaks of a knight and his company who
were travelling through a desert, and suddenly beheld a castle into which they were
invited, and hospitably welcomed. A feast was spread before them, and they each ate
and drank his fill. But as soon as they left the enchanted halls they were as hungry as
before they sat at the magic table. That is the kind of food that all our wrong-doing
provides for us. He feedeth on ashes, and hungers after he has fed. And now,
further, there is yet another word here, carrying with it important lessons. The
expression which is translated in our text transgressed, literally means rebelled.
And the lesson of it is, that all sin is, however little we think it, a rebellion against
God. That introduces a yet graver thought than either of the former has brought us
face to face with. Behind the law is the Lawgiver. When we do wrong, we not only
blunder, we not only go aside from the right line, we lift up ourselves against our
Sovereign King. Sins are against God; and, dear friends, though you do not realise it,
this is plain truth, that the essence, the common characteristic, of all the acts which,
as we have seen, are twisted and foolish, is that in them we are setting up another
than the Lord our God to be our ruler. We are enthroning ourselves in His place.
Does not that thought make all these apparently trivial and insignificant things
terribly important? Treason is treason, no matter what the act by which it is
expressed. It may be a little thing to haul down a union-jack from a flagstaff, or to
tear off a barn-door a proclamation with the royal arms at the top of it, but it may be
rebellion. And if it is, it is as bad as to turn out a hundred thousand men in the field,
with arms in their hands.

II. THE TWOFOLD BRIGHT HOPE WHICH COMES THROUGH THIS DARKNESS. I will
cleanse . . . I will pardon. If sin combines in itself all these characteristics that I
have touched upon, then clearly there is guilt, and clearly there are stains; and the
gracious promise of this text deals with both the one and the other. I will pardon.
What is pardon? Do not limit it to the analogy of a criminal court. When the law of
the land pardons, or rather when the administrator of the law pardons, that simply
means that the penalty is suspended. But is that forgiveness? Certainly it is only a
part of it, even if it is a part. What do you fathers and mothers do when you forgive
your child? You may use the rod or you may not; that is a question of what is best for
the child. Forgiveness does not lie in letting him off the punishment; but forgiveness
lies in the flowing to the child, uninterrupted, of the love of the parents heart. And
that is Gods forgiveness. Do you need pardon? Do you not? What does conscience
say? What does the sense of remorse that sometimes blesses you, though it tortures,
say? I know not any gospel that goes deep enough to touch the real sore place in
human nature, except the Gospel that says to you and me and all of us, Behold the
Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world! But forgiveness is not enough,
for the worst results of past sin are the habits of sin which it leaves within us; so that
we all need cleansing. Can we cleanse ourselves? Let experience answer. Did you
ever try to cure yourself of some little trick of gesture, or manner, or speech? And
did you not find out then how strong the trivial habit was? You never know the force
of a current till you try to row against it. You may have the stained robe washed and
made lustrous white in the blood of the Lamb. Pardon and cleansing are our two
deepest needs. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

Our sins swallowed up

You see the Thames as it goes sluggishly down through the arches, carrying with it
endless impurity and corruption You watch the inky stream as it pours along day
and night, and you think it will pollute the world. But you have just been down to
the seashore, and you have looked on the great deep, and it has not left a stain on
the Atlantic. No, it has been running down a good many years and carried a world of
impurity with it, but when you go to the Atlantic there is not a speck on it. As to the
ocean, it knows nothing about it. It is full of majestic music. So the smoke of London
goes up, and has been going up for a thousand years. One would have thought that it
would have spoiled the scenery by now; but you get a look at it sometimes. There is
the great blue sky which has swallowed up the smoke and gloom of a thousand
years, and its azure splendour is unspoiled. It is wonderful how the ocean has kept
its purity, and how the sky has taken the breath of the millions and the smoke of the
furnaces, and yet it is as pure as the day God made it. It is beautiful to think that
these are only images of Gods great pity for the race. Our sins, they are like the
Thames, but, mind you, they shall be swallowed up--lost in the depths of the sea, to
be remembered against us no more. Though our sins have been going up to heaven
through the generations, yet, though thy sins are as crimson, they shall be as wool,
as white as snow. (W. L. Watkinson.)

I will pardon all their iniquities.

The pardon of sin

I. The pardon of sin which Almighty God, in infinite mercy and grace, is now
offering to sinners in the Gospel, is A FULL PARDON--that is, it comprehends and
extends to every sin, however sinful, and includes all sins, however numerous. It was
foretold in ancient prophecy that when the Messiah should come to make His soul
an offering for sin, He should, by His atoning death, finish transgressions, make
an end of sins, make reconciliation for iniquity, and bring in everlasting
righteousness. Our blessed Saviour having come, as it wee thus written of Him, and
having suffered the just for us the unjust, the Gospel testimony of His vicarious
sufferings declares that His expiatory death has made a full and perfect atonement
for all the sins of His people--that He has thereby fully reconciled them to God--that
His blood cleanseth them from all sin--that He is able to save to the uttermost all
who come unto God through Him.

II. The pardon proclaimed in the Gospel is FREE--it is vouchsafed by an infinitely

gracious God, suspended on no condition whatever to be performed by the sinner as
the meritorious ground of its bestowal. It is this absolute freeness of the forgiveness
of sin proclaimed in the Gospel that makes it worthy of an infinitely gracious Gods
bestowal, and good news to poor, miserable, and wretched sinners. Were it
otherwise, it could be no rest to an awakened and alarmed conscience--to a weary
and heavy sin-laden soul.

III. The pardon proclaimed to sinners in the Gospel is EVERLASTING. This makes
it a complete pardon. (A. MWatt.)

JER 33:9
They shall fear and tremble for all the goodness and for all the prosperity that I
procure unto it.

Chastened happiness
Our text suggests at the outset the remark that all the good things which make up
prosperity are to be traced unto the Lord. These benefits are not from beneath, but
from above; let them not be passed by in ungrateful silence, but let us send upward
humble and warm acknowledgments. He who forgets mercy deserves that mercy
should forget him. Remark next, that temporal mercies are always best when they
come in their proper order. Blessed be God if He has given to us first the fruits of the
sun of grace, and then the fruits put forth by the moon of providence. The main
thing is to be able to sing, Bless the Lord, who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who
healeth all thy diseases, and after that it is most pleasant to add, Who satisfieth thy
mouth with good things. What shall I say of the happiness of those persons who
have spiritual and temporal blessings united, to whom God has given both the upper
and the nether springs, so that they possess all things needful for this life in fair
proportion, and then, far above all, enjoy the blessings of the life to come? Such are
first blessed in their spirits and then blessed in their basket and in their store. In
their case double favour calls for double praise, double service, double delight in
God. And yet, and yet, and yet, if we are very happy to-day, and though that
happiness be lawful and proper, because it arises both out of spiritual and temporal
things in due order, yet in all human happiness there lurks a danger. There is a
wealth which hath a sorrow necessarily connected with it, and I ween that even
when God maketh rich and addeth no sorrow therewith, yet He makes provision
against an ill which else would surely come. The text speaks of goodness and
prosperity procured for us, and then tells us that all danger which might arise out of
it is averted by a gracious work upon the heart. The Lord sends a chastened joy.
They shall fear and tremble. I Let us think a little about THE TONING DOWN OF OUR
GREAT JOYS.
1. In the cup of salvation there are drops of bitterness, and so must it be, for
unmixed delight in this world would be dangerous. When the sea is smooth
the ship makes poor sailing. Men are bird-limed by their rest and ease, and
have small care to fly heavenward. We are apt to lose our God among our
goods, Is it not so? If the worlds roses had no thorns should we not think it
paradise, and forego all desire for the gardens above?
2. Unmixed joy would be fallacious, because there is no such thing here below. If
a man should become perfectly contented with the things of this world, it
would be the result of a false view of things. This is an error against which we
should pray; for this world cannot fill the soul, and if a man thinks he has
filled his soul with it, he must be under a gross delusion. As to spiritual joy, I
say that in no mans experience can it be long without admixture and yet be
true. Never at any moment can a Christian be in such a position that he has
not some cause either for dissatisfaction with himself, or fear of the tempter,
or anxiety to he faithful in service.
3. Unmixed delight on earth would be unnatural. When the Dutch had the trade
of the East in their hands they were accustomed to sell birds of paradise to
the untravelled people of these realms. These specimen birds had no feet, for
they had craftily removed them, and the merchants declared that the species
lived on the wing and never alighted. There was so much of truth in the fable
that had they been really and veritably birds of paradise they would not
have found a place for their feet upon this globe. Truly, birds of paradise do
come and go, and flit from heaven to earth, but we see them not, neither can
we build tabernacles to detain them. While you are here expect reminders of
the fact that this is not your rest.

II. THE FEELINGS BY WHICH THIS SOBERING EFFECT IS PRODUCED. They fear and
tremble for all the goodness and for all the prosperity that I procure unto it. Why
fear and tremble?
1. Is not this in part a holy awe of Gods presence? Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will and
to do of His good pleasure. The argument for fear and trembling is the work
of God in the soul. Because God is working m you there must be no trifling. If
the eternal Deity deigns to make a workshop of my nature, I too must work,
but it must be with fear and trembling.
2. But next to that there arises up in the mind of every favoured Christian a deep
repentance for past sin. Have you not felt as if you could never open Four
mouth any more because of all your unkindness to your heavenly Friend?
Such penitent, reflections keep the Lords people right, by creating a fear and
trembling m the presence of His overflowing goodness.
3. Has not your deepest sense of unworthiness come upon you when you have
been conscious of superlative mercy? We tremble and are afraid, because of
the unutterable grace which has met our utter unworthiness, and rivalled it,
until grace has gotten unto itself the victory.
4. Have you never noticed how the Lord brings His people to their bearings, and
keeps them steady, under a sense of great love, by suggesting to their hearts
the question, How can I live as becometh one who has been favoured like
 this? Did you ever feel that the glory of the palace of love made you afraid to
dwell in it?
5. And have you never felt a fear lest Gods goodness should be abused by you?
He who has never questioned his own condition had better make an
immediate inquiry. He who has never felt great searchings of heart needs to
be searched with candles. No mans hell shall be more terrible than that of
the self-confident one who made so sure of heaven that he would not take the
ordinary precaution to ask whether his title-deeds were genuine or no.
6. One more thought may also occur to the most joyous believer. He will say,
What if after rejoicing in all this blessedness I should lose it? What, cries
one, do you not believe in the final perseverance of the saints? Assuredly I
do, but are we saints! Theres the question. Moreover, many a believer who
has not lost his soul has, nevertheless, lost his present joy and prosperity,
and why may not we?

III. THE MEASURE IN WHICH YOU AND I CAN ENTER INTO THIS EXPERIENCE. We have
hundreds of us perceived the benefits of the dark lines and shadings of lifes picture,
and we see how fit and proper it is that trembling should mingle with transport. As
the fruit of experience I have learned to look for a hurricane soon after an unusually
delightful calm. When the wind blows hard, and the tempest lowers, I hope that
before long there will be s lull; but when the sea-birds sit on the wave, and the sail
hangs idly, I wonder when a gale will come. To my mind there is no temptation so
bad as not being tempted at all. The worst devil in the world is when you cannot see
the devil at all, because the villain has hidden himself away within the heart, and is
preparing to give you a fatal stab. Since there is an everlasting arm that never can he
palsied, since there is a brow that knows no wrinkle, and a Divine mind that is never
perplexed, we go forward in hope, and cast ourselves upon our eternal Helper once
again. You have heard of the ancient giant Antaeus, who could not be overcome,
because as often as Hercules threw him to the ground, he touched his mother earth,
and rose renewed. Such be your lot and mine, often to be cast down, and as often to
rise by that downcasting. When I am weak then am I strong. Let us glory in
infirmity, because the power of Christ doth rest upon us. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 33:10-13
The voice of Joy, and the voice of gladness.

Joy after desolation

We are called upon to realise the fullest meaning of desolation. Think of a
forsaken city, think of being afraid of the sound of your own footfall! Even in that
desolation there comes an overpowering sense of society, as if the air were full of
sprites, ghostly presences. What s singular sense there is too of trespass,
encroachment, of being where you have no right to be--as if you were intruding
upon the sanctuary of the dead--as if you were cutting to the life some spiritual
ministry, conducting itself mysteriously but not without some beneficent purpose.
You have broken in upon those invisible ones who are watching their dead; you want
to escape from the solitude--in one sense it is too sacred for you, wholly too solemn;
you would seek the society of your kind, for other society is uncongenial, unknown,
and is felt to be a criticism intolerable, a judgment overwhelming. Yet if you do not
fasten your attention upon the possibilities of desolation, darkness, forsakenness,
loneliness, how can you appreciate what is to follow? May we not then hasten to
inquire what is to follow? Can God work miracles here? It is just here that He works
His grandest miracles; it is when all light dies out that He comes forth in His glory;
it is when we say, There is no more road, the rock shuts us out, our progress is
stayed,--it is then that a path suddenly opens in rocky places, and footprints disclose
themselves for the comfort and inspiration of the lone traveller. Notice how exactly
Gods miracles fit human circumstances. They overflow them, but they first fill all
their cavities and all the opportunities which they create and present. Thus God
displaces darkness by light; thus God does not drive away the silence with noise but
with music: it is no battering of rude violence that brings back human intercourse
into plains that have been swept with human desolation; it is a festival, a banquet, a
wedding scene, and already the forsaken valley vibrates as if under the clash of
wedding bells. What was the quality of the joy that was wrought? It was profoundly
religious. The voices that were uplifted were to say, Praise the Lord of hosts: for the
Lord is good; for His mercy endureth for ever. There are times when men must
praise the Lord. The heart leads the judgment; the uppermost feeling, elevated and
sanctified, tells the whole man what to do, uses the understanding as one might use
some inferior creature to help him in carrying out the purposes of life. What is this
highest faculty, what is this mysterious power, that takes to itself understanding,
imagination, conscience, will, and all elements of energy? It is religious emotion; not
sentimentalised and frittered away into mere vapour, but high, intelligent, noble
feeling, glowing, passionate enthusiasm, a consecration without break or flaw or
self-questioning, a wholeness of consent and devotion to the supreme purpose of
life. When this desolation is banished, when this wedding feast is held, by what
picture is the safety of the people represented? By a very tender one. We had in
England shepherds who long ago spoke of taking care of their flocks under the idiom
of telling their tale counting the flock one by one. There shall be no hurrying,
crowding into the fold, but one shall follow another, and each shall be looked at in
its singularity; there shall be nothing tumultuous, indiscriminate, promiscuous;
every process of providence is conducted critically, individually, minutely: so there
is no hope for a man getting into the fold without the Shepherd seeing him; every
sheep of the flock has to pass under the hand of him that telleth his tale. Until we
realise the personality of the Divine supervision we shall flounder in darkness and
our prayers will be mere evaporations, bringing back no answer, no blessing, no
pledge from heaven. This is the picture presented by the prophet. Not one tittle of
this providential order has been changed; the whole mystery of human life is to be
found within its few lines. Consider what desolation good men have been called
upon to realise. Never let us shut our eyes to the suffering aspect of human life. On
the contrary, let us dwell upon it with attentive solicitude, that we may wonder, and
learn to pray and trust. Say nought to the mocker, for he is not worth heeding, but
say to the poor suffering heart itself, Wait: joy cometh in the morning: it is very sore
now; the wind is very high, the darkness is very dense; our best plant poor heart! is
to sit down and simply wait for God: He will come we cannot tell when, in the early
part of the night, or not until the crowing of the cock, but come He will; it hath
pleased Him to keep the times and seasons wholly to Himself, without revelation to
narrow human intellects; let us then wait, and there is a way of waiting that amounts
to prayer: poor heart! we have no words, we could not pray in terms, because we
should be mocked by the echo of our own voice, but there is a way of sitting still that
by its heroic patience wins the battle. Consider what changes have been wrought in
human experience. You thought you could never sing again when that last
tremendous blow was dealt upon your life, yet you are singing more cheerfully now
than you ever sung in any day of your history; you thought when you lost
commercial position that you never really could look up again, for your heart was
overpowered, and behold, whilst you were talking such folly, a light struck upon
your path, and a voice called you to still more strenuous endeavour, and to-day you
who saw nothing before you but the asylum of poverty are adding field to field and
house to house. You have been raised again from the very dead, you have forgotten
your desolation, and you are now sitting like guests invited by heavens own King at
heavens great banqueting table. Hold on; the end will judge all things. Hope stead
lastly in God; prayer is sweetest in the darkness; when there seems to be no road
over which to travel up to heaven, then it works its miracles, it finds a pathway in
the night-cloud. What is the joy that is depicted in this text? It is religious joy. The
joy created by religion is intelligent. It is not a bubble on the stream, it has reason
behind it; it is strengthened and uplifted, supported and dignified, by logic, fact,
reality. Religious joy is healthy. It is not spurious gladness, it is the natural
expression of the highest emotions. Religious joy is permanent. It does not come for
a moment, and vanish away as if it were afraid of life and afraid of living in this cold
earth-clime; it abides with men. Let us know by way of application that there is only
one real deliverance from desolateness. That is a Divine deliverance. Let us flee then
to the living God; let us be forced to prayer. (J. Parker, D. D.)

And of them that shall bring the sacrifice Of praise.

In what sense praise is a sacrifice
If I wanted to use, which I do not, mere theological technicalities, I should talk
about the difference between sacrifices of propitiation and sacrifices of thanksgiving.
But let us put these well-worn phrases on one side, as far as we can, for a moment.
Here, then, is the fact that all the world over, and in the Mosaic ritual, there was
expressed a double consciousness--one, that there was, somehow or other, a black
dam between the worshipper and his Deity, which needed to be swept sway; and the
other, that when that barrier was removed there could be an uninterrupted flow of
thanksgiving and of service. So on one altar was laid a bleeding victim, and on
another were spread the flowers of the field, the fruits of the earth, all things
gracious, lovely, fair, and sweet, as expressions of the thankfulness of the reconciled
worshippers. One set of sacrifices expressed the consciousness of sin; the other
expressed the joyful recognition of its removal. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

Thanksgiving unstinted
The sacrifice is thanksgiving. Then there will be no reluctance because duty is
heavy. There will be no grudging because requirements are great. There will be no
avoiding of the obligations of the Christian life, and rendering as small a percentage
by way of dividend as the Creditor up in the heavens will accept. If the offering is a
thank-offering, then it will be given gladly. The grateful heart does not hold the
scales like the scrupulous retail dealer, afraid of putting the thousandth part of an
ounce more in than will be accepted.
Give all thou canst--high heaven rejects the love
 Of nicely calculated less or more.
(A. Maclaren, D. D.)

Praise to Christ should be spontaneous and unrestrained

If there is in us any deep, real, abiding, life-shaping thankfulness for the gift of
Jesus Christ, it is impossible that our tongues should cleave to the roof of our
mouths, and that we should be contented to live in silence. Loving hearts must
speak. What would you think of a husband that never felt any impulse to tell his wife
that she was dear to him; a mother that never found it needful to unpack her heart
of its tenderness, even in perhaps inarticulate croonings over the little child that she
pressed to her heart? It seems to me that a dumb Christian, a man that is thankful
for Christs sacrifice, and never feels the need to say so, is as great an anomaly as
either of these I have described. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

JER 33:15-16
This is the name wherewith she shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.

The justified Church

It is no slip of the pen--She shall be called: it is no mistranslation, or unguarded
statement, as might be imagined. It is a deliberate name, based on a great and an
everlasting principle; and it is just as true, she shall be called the Lord our
Righteousness, as it is true that He, that is, Christ, shall be called the Lord our
Righteousness. Why? Because there is a spiritual and yet real identity between
Christ and this redeemed and believing throng. He and they are one in time, and will
continue one in eternity. Nay, so completely is the Church knit to its Head, that it is
said she is the fulness of Christ; as if Christ were not complete in heaven, complete
in His mediatorial glory, complete in His happiness, until there be added to Him
those He has ransomed by His blood, prepared by His Spirit, and at last brought, as
the fruits of His grace, to the triumphs of His throne. You will also recollect, that in
Scripture, the relationship that subsists between Christ and His Church, is
represented as being the relationship which subsists between the husband and the
wife. Her responsibilities He has assumed Himself, that they may be absorbed, and
disappear before His Cross. It is thus, that a transfer, an exchange, takes place
between Christ and His Church--by concentrating all her responsibility on Him; He
being answerable for her sins, answerable for her defects, answerable to a perfect
law and to a holy God; and she receiving from Him that glorious and everlasting
name, which is the Open Sesame at the gates of heaven, and which shall he heard
loudest in the songs and hallelujahs of the ransomed around the throne. Whatever
name, I would observe next, is given in Scripture to anything, is a reality. Therefore,
when it is said, This is the name by which she, the Church, shall be called, it does
not imply that it is the investiture of that Church with a mere empty and evanescent
honour, but the stamp, the imprimatur of an everlasting and indelible reality; so
that the Church, in herself all rags, is made in Christ the Righteousness of God. In
discussing the subject matter of this name, I would lay before you the following
facts, in order to show you the absolute necessity of our being called, or being
made, the Lord our Righteousness, before we can ever expect to see God in
happiness. Let me observe, then, there has been, is now, and ever will be, what is
called a law. The law of God is just to God Himself what the sunbeam is to the sun--
what the rivulet is to the fountain--what the effect is to the cause--what the blossom
or the leaf is to the stem or the root. Gods law is indestructible,--the everlasting
stereotype, which can no more be destroyed than the Eternal Himself can be
dethroned from the supremacy of the universe. Setting out, then, with the postulate,
that there is, and must be, such a thing as Gods moral law,--the language of which
is, Do, and live,--Do not, and die,--we proceed, in the second place, to notice, that
every member of this justified Church, with every child of Adam, has broken and
violated that law. The next inquiry is, How can man be saved, and this law retain its
unbending and awful strictness? Shall the whole race perish? for the whole race
have broken Gods law. Blessed be God, His love and mercy would not suffer this. If
not, shall Gods holy law be abrogated and annulled in whole or in part! His justice,
His truth, His holiness cannot suffer that. Here, then, is the question, which no
earthly OEdipus can solve; the labyrinth, which no human wisdom can unthread.
Ancient philosophers, who saw dim and shadowy the attributes of the Eternal, even
they were perplexed with difficulty here; and Socrates himself admitted, that it was
extremely difficult to see how God could possibly receive to heaven them that His
holiness must see to be sinful. Having thus noticed the impossibility of finding
anything that could meet our case, let me ask again, Shall God be unjust, in order
that sinners may be saved; or shall God be unmerciful, and this, in order that His
law may remain just? God so loved us, that He would not let us perish; and yet God
is so just, that He would not let His law be violated; how then can it be, how shall it
be, that God shall remain infinitely just, infinitely holy, infinitely true, and yet that
His love shall rush forth, and fill mens souls with its fulness, and the wide world
with the multiplication of its trophies? The answer is given, This is the name by
which He (Christ) shall be called, the Lord our Righteousness; and this is the
name by which she (the Church) shall be called, through an interest in Him, the
Lord our Righteousness. By that atonement which Christ consummated on the
Cross, and in virtue of that righteousness which Christ achieved by His life, it now
comes to pass, that God may be just whilst He justifies the ungodly that believe. This
righteousness of Christ, which constitutes the only title of the believer, is called in
Scripture by various names. It is called the righteousness of Christ, because He
perfected and consummated it. It is called the righteousness of God, because He
devised it, and it is His mode of justifying the sinner. It is called the righteousness of
faith, because faith receives it; and it is also called our righteousness, because it is
made ours by the free and sovereign gift of God.
1. Let me now observe of this righteousness that it is a perfect righteousness.
When Christ exclaimed on the Cross, in the language partly of agony, and
partly of triumph, It is finished, He announced in these accents that that
moment there was provided a perfect robe, of perfect and of spotless beauty,
for every sinner under heaven, who would put forth the hand of faith, and
appropriate it without money and without price.
2. This righteousness is an everlasting righteousness. Death shall not tarnish it,
the grave shall not corrupt it, the wear and tear of life shall not destroy it.
3. This righteousness is ours, to the exclusion of all other whatever. Christ says
to the queen on the throne, and to the meanest beggar by the wayside, Ye
must both be saved by putting on the same perfect righteousness, or ye must
 be lost for ever.
4. This righteousness is ours by imputation. Our sins were transferred to Him,
and He endured the consequences of them; His righteousness is transferred
to us, and we realise the fruits of it.
5. This righteousness is received by faith, and by faith alone. There are three
things to be noticed; first, the spring; secondly, the water; and thirdly, the
pipe that conveys the water. The spring, in this instance, is the love of God;
the element, that justifies us, is the righteousness of Jesus; and faith is the
channel, or the conduit, by which that righteousness is conveyed to us and
made ours. It is the mere medium, not the merit; it is the mere hand that
receives; and in no sense has it any part or share of the merit or glory.
6. I would observe of this righteousness that it insures, wherever it is,
everlasting glory. Whom He justifies, He glorifies. Where He begins, He
finishes; what He commences by grace, that He consummates and creams in
glory. The Churchs glory, derived from her Lord, is the righteousness of
Christ; her beauty is that moral and spiritual beauty, which derived from
heaven, defies the assaults of earth and hell, making its heirs the meet
companions of Christ at heavens high festival.
7. This Church, thus justified in the righteousness of Christ, is, in the next place,
free from all condemnation. All things minister peace and blessedness to her
who is at friendship with God, and identified with Jesus. For this is the
name by which she shall be called, the Lord our Righteousness.
8. This way of salvation excludes all boasting. Just because man is saved wholly
through grace--wholly through the righteousness of another, and his very
name is the name of another, therefore, this redeemed, elect, ransomed
Church will east her crown before the throne of God and of the Lamb, and
say, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, &c.
9. I observe that this mode of justification does not make void the law of God.
Nay, says the apostle, we rather establish the law. You have in this fact
clear and decisive evidence that it is the elevation of the Cross that makes all
the moralities rise and cling and coil around it, and bloom and blossom. The
Gospel alone in fact can give true and high-toned morality.
10. This righteousness is that alone in which we may glory. There is nothing but
the Gospel that is worth glorying in. There is a moth in the fairest robe--
there is a worm in the goodliest cedar--there is disease in the healthiest
frame and rust on the purest gold. None of these things can satisfy mens
souls with happiness. There is no glorying but in the righteousness of Christ,
that is bright, pure, enduring, the prolific source of all that is good. (J.
Gumming, D. D.)

Christ, the perfection of righteousness

Matthew Arnold, one of the prominent leaders of modern Agnosticism, thus
speaks of Christ in his Literature and Dogma: Christ came to reveal what
righteousness really is . . . Nothing will do except righteousness; and no other
conception of righteousness will do except Christs conception of it; His method and
secret. And in another part of the same book he writes: For our race, as we see it
now, and as ourselves we form a part of it, the true God is and must be perfect.
(Great Thoughts.)

JER 33:20-26
If ye can break My covenant of the day, and My covenant of the night . . . Then
may also My covenant be broken with David My servant.

Gods great day-and-night engine, as a witness against skepticism

Day and night in their season are Gods perpetual challenge to unbelief, His
sublime witnesses to the perpetuity of His Church. The doubters in Jeremiahs time
saw, or thought they saw in the captivity of Israel already accomplished, and that of
Judah foretold as nigh at hand, the complete breakdown of all Gods plans and
promises as to His people and His Church. They said: The two families (Judah and
Israel) which the Lord did choose, Tie hath even cast them off. Theres an end of
all our fine expectations! Prophecy breaks down! God cant keep His contract!
Religion is a failure! We told you so! But what does God say to them in reply? Thus
saith the Lord If My covenant of day and night stand not, if I have not appointed the
ordinances of heaven and earth; then will I also cast away the seed of Jacob, and of
David My servant, &c. Thus God reminds the sceptic and the doubter that His
covenant with His Church is as firm as that with day and night. We of to-day are in
the midst of a sceptical age, and some good people are alarmed at the growth of
doubt, and at coldness and troubles in the churches. They firmly believe in the truth
of Christianity, but they seem to have lost something of their faith in its conquering
power. What does God mean by His covenant of day and night? It was equal to
saying: If you can stop the daily rotation I have given to this earth, then you may
stay the onward rolling wheels of My Messiahs chariot from the conquest of the
world! Thats what God meant, and He has thus far made good His word. Judah,
like Israel, for her sins, went into captivity. But unlike Israel, Judah was brought
back to do Gods work for ages longer; and perhaps for more work in the future than
we now understand. The Church lives and grows. Tier ministers are thousands of
thousands. As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea
measured, no more can her people. The earth rolls onward, bringing day and night
in their season, and the sun hears the missionary Angelus chiming around the
globe. Let us study this sublime illustration. Look at the daily rotation of this globe,
and imagine the power necessary to produce and maintain this rotation. Suppose we
see what Gods oath of day and night means when represented by steam mechanics.
Let us build our engine and run this revolving globe a while by steam power. The
earth is not a fiat fly-wheel set upon its edge, but a massive sphere, 8000 miles in
diameter. So, by the ratio of size of shaft to size of paddle-wheel on a large
steamboat, the earth must be slung on a steel shaft about 250 miles in diameter and
10,000 miles long. It must be driven by an engine whose cylinder should measure
1200 miles bore and 2000 miles stroke, having a piston-rod 100 miles thick and
2500 miles long, working by a connection-rod 3000 miles long on a crank of 1000
miles arm, with a wrist 200 miles long and 50 miles thick. The piston of this engine
will make but one revolution daily; but to do that it will travel 4000 miles, at an
average velocity of nearly three miles a minute. The working capacity of this engine
will be about fourteen thousand million (14,000,000,000) horse-power. It must be
controlled by an automatic governor of infallible accuracy, and supplied with
inexhaustible fuel and oil; and so run on, day and night, never starting a bolt, nor
heating a journal, nor wearing out a box, age after age. The iron bed-frame for this
machine must be 10,000 miles square and 4000 miles high, and not tremble a hair
under the stroke that drives the equatorial rim of this fly-wheel globe up to a steady
velocity of seventeen and one-half miles a minute, twenty times the velocity of a
lightning express train! Wholl take the contract to build and run this engine? The
vast mass must fly through space in the earths orbit around the sun, with a velocity
of more than 1100 miles a minute. The Armstrong 100-ton steel rifle sends its 2000-
pound steel projectile at the rate of 1600 feet per second clean through a solid
wrought-iron plate 22 inches thick. But God fires this globe, 8000 miles in diameter,
through space with 60 1/2 times the velocity of the monster projectile, and 2000
times that of an express train at 34 miles per hour. And our engine that gives it its
day-and-night rotation must fly with it at that speed, and never lose a stroke! And
these are very slow among the velocities of the starry worlds. And yet these velocities
only represent what God does every moment by the abiding force of that first
impulse He gave to this silent spinning globe when He shot it from His creating
hand like a top from a boys finger! Now, imagine the infidel trying to seize, in its
mighty sweep, the flying crank that runs this globe, to stop its revolution! What
then? Did you ever see a man caught and whirled and mangled on a little factory
shaft, reduced to a shapeless pulp in a moment? Even so it has ever been with those
who have tried to stop the engine of Christianity. (G. L. Taylor, D. D.)

Divine plans of action unalterable

I. The Almighty both in the material and spiritual departments of His universe
acts from plan.
1. The text speaks of a covenant with material nature as well as with David.
2. The Infinite One acts evermore from plan.
(1) A priori reasoning would suggest this.
(2) The constitution of the creation shews this. The laws of nature about
which philosophers talk are only parts of His plan which they have
discovered.
(3) The Bible teaches this. It speaks of Him appointing everything in nature
(Gen 1:1-31; Gen 8:21-22; Isa 4:10-11; Psa 104:1-35. &c.).

II. The plan on which God conducts the material universe is manifestly beyond
the power of His creatures to alter.
1. This is a blessing to all. If men could alter the order of nature what would
become of us!
2. This is an argument for the Divinity of miracles, if miracles are changes in the
order of nature.

III. The unalterableness of His plan in material nature illustrates the

unalterableness of His plan in the spiritual department of action. It is not impossible
for God to reverse the order of nature, but it is impossible for God to act contrary to
those principles of absolute truth and justice which He has revealed (Homilist.)
 JEREMIAH 34

JER 34:17
Ye have not hearkened unto Me, in proclaiming liberty.

The liberty of sin

The Word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah that all bondservants in Israel should
be forthwith emancipated. At first the princes obeyed, and the enslaved were
allowed to go free. But eventually the princes played falsely, and once more brought
their old servants into bondage. Then comes the text with its terrible irony.

I. THE MUTINY AGAINST THE LAW. In the first instance the governors felt the
reasonableness of the commandment, they agreed to it, but at length they resisted it,
violated it. And this spirit of revolt against the higher law is ever working in us and
displaying itself in some form of disobedience.
1. There is a theoretical repudiation of the law. Literary men are ever urging
upon us that the moral law as given in revelation is unphilosophical, and the
sooner it is renounced by all educated people the better. One by one they
ingeniously find us a way out of all the ten great precepts. In our simplicity
we thought the Saviour taught us that heaven and earth might pass away, but
that the moral commandments should persist in absolute authority and
force, but eloquent writers affect to show that the commandments are mere
bye-laws, ripe for repeal.
2. And if there is a theoretical repudiation of the law on the part of the literary
few, is there not a personal, practical mutiny against it on the part of us all?
In manifold ways we criticise the law, fret at it, evade it, violate it. We spurn
the circumscriptions which deny us so much, and in blind passion break into
forbidden ground. And yet how gracious and beautiful is the law! How
generous is the law referred to in the text enjoining upon the rich and great
mercy and brotherliness! And the whole of the moral law as expressed in
revelation is equally rational and benign. The commandments are not
grievous. No, indeed, they are gracious. Every commandment is an
illumination, a light shining in a dark place to guide our feet in a dim and
perilous way. Every commandment is a salvation. The commandment
enjoining love is to save us from the damnation of selfishness; enjoining
meekness to save us from the devil of pride; enjoining purity to save us from
the hell of lust. Every commandment is a benediction. Scientists are always
descanting on the grandeur of natural law, the law which builds the sky,
which transfigures the flower, which rules the stars. The scientist, the
mathematician, the musician will tell you that law is good, that the secret of
the worlds beauty is to be found in the wonderful laws which God wrote in
tables of stone long before Moses came. And ii natural law, which rules
things, is so sublime, how much does that moral law, which rules spirits,
excel in glory! And yet how blindly do we mutiny against the great words of
 light and love! Some time ago it was told in the paper that a herd of cows was
being driven through a long, dark, wooden tubular bridge. Here and there in
the woodwork were knotholes, which let in the sun in bars of light. The
animals were afraid of these sun-bars; they shied at them, were terrified at
them, and then, leaping over them, made a painful hurdle-race of it, coming
out at the other end palpitating and exhausted. We are just like them. The
laws of God are golden rays in a dark path, they are for our guidance and
infinite perfecting and consolation. But they irritate us, they enrage us, we
count them despotic barriers to our liberty and happiness, and too often we
put them under our feet. So foolish was I, and ignorant, I was as a beast
before Thee.

II. THE LIBERTY OF LICENCE. Behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord.
These nobles wished to be free themselves in enslaving their brethren, but in doing
this they gave themselves away into servitude; they wished to enrich themselves,
and they lost everything; they sought personal indulgence at the expense of their
neighbours, and they suffered sword and famine and pestilence. Disobedience
always means bondage, disgrace, suffering, death. A liberty to the sword, the famine,
and the pestilence! Most awful is the liberty of unrighteousness; who can express the
fulness of its woe! Some of you have visited the Castle of Chillon on the Lake of
Geneva. In that castle is a dungeon which contains a shaft, at the bottom of which
you see the waters of the lake; that shaft is called the way of liberty. Tradition says
that in the old days the jailor in the darkness of the dungeon would whisper to the
prisoner, Three steps and liberty, and the poor dupe, hastily stepping forward, fell
down this shaft, which was planted full of knives and spikes, the mutilated, bloody
corpse finally dropping into the depths. That is precisely the liberty of sin. The dupe
of sin takes a leap in the dark, he is forthwith pierced through with many sorrows,
and mangled and bleeding falls into the gulf. There is a way that seemeth right unto
a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
1. I want you to feel the madness of contending with God, for that is exactly what
sin means.
2. I want you to believe that only through self-limitation can you find the highest
liberty and blessedness. All civilisation is the giving up of liberty to find a
nobler liberty.
3. If you are to keep the law, you must seek the strength of God in Christ. Born
of God, living in fellowship with Him, full of faith, of love, of hope, we shall
find the yoke of the law easy, and its burden light. The inner force is equal to
the outward duty. (W. L. Watkinson.)

JEREMIAH 35

JER 35:1-19
Go unto the house of the Rechabites, and speak unto them, and bring them into
the house of the Lord, into one of the chambers, and give them wine to drink.
The Rechabites
Did the Lord make a proposal to total abstainers to drink wine? Did he send for
them to a kind of wine festival? Is this the meaning of the Lords Prayer, Load us
not into temptation? Is not the Lord always thus leading men into temptation?--not
in the patent and vulgar sense in which that term is generally understood, but in a
sense which signifies drill, the application of discipline, the testing of principles and
purposes and character? Is not all life a temptation? The Lord tries every man.
There need be no hesitation in offering the prayer, Lead us not into temptation.
People have tried to soften the words. They have said instead of lead leave us not
in temptation; but these are the annotations of inexperience and folly, or
superficiality. We are not men until we have been thus moulded, tried, qualified. We
can do little for one another in that pit of temptation. We must be left with God.
There is one Refiner; He sits over the furnace, and when the fire has done enough
He quenches the cruel, flame. Think it no strange thin that temptation hath befallen
you; yea, think it not strange that God Himself has given you opportunities by which
you may be burned. He never gives such an opportunity without giving something
else. Alas, how often we see the opportunity and not the sustaining grace! The
drinking of wine in this case was to be done in the house of the Lord. Now light
begins to dawn. Mark the limitations of our temptation. The Lord is never absent
from His house. Let God tempt me, and He will also save me; let Him invite me into
His own house, that there, under a roof beautiful as heaven, He may work His will
upon me, and afterwards I shall stand up, higher in nature, broader in manhood,
truer in the metal of the Spirit. Observe the details of this mysterious operation. The
men who were taken were proved men (verse 3). When the Lord calls for giants to
fight His battle and show the strength of His grace, they are chosen men. All these
men were conspicuous witnesses for the truth: they were identified with the faith of
Israel; they were the trustees of the morality of society. It is so in all ages. There are
certain men whom we may denominate our stewards, trustees, representatives; as
for ourselves, we say, it is not safe to trust us; we are weaker than a bruised reed; we
cannot stand great public ordeals; we were not meant to be illustrations of moral
fortitude: spare us from the agony of such trial! There are other men in society
whom God Himself can trust. What did the sons of Rechab say? Herein is a strange
thing, that children should obey the voice of a dead father. Yet this is a most pleasing
contention; this is an argument softened by pathos. The men stood up, and did not
speak in their own name; they said, We be the sons of a certain man, who gave a
certain law, and by that law we will live, and ever will live. The trial took place in the
chamber of the sons of Hanan, the son of Igdaliah, a man of God, which was above
the chamber of Maaseiah. The father of Maaseiah was Shallum, who was the
husband of Huldah the prophetess, who had taken an active part in the reformation
wrought in the reign of Josiah. So all these were so many guarantees of probity, and
strength, and success. There will be no evil wrought in that chamber I Not only are
the Rechabites there, but their fathers are with them in spirit. Though our fathers,
physical and spiritual, be dead, yet they may live with us in the spirit, and may go
with us and sustain us in all the trials and difficulties of life. We will drink no wine.
Note the definiteness of the answer. No inquiry is made about the kind of wine. Men
are saved by their definiteness. A strong, proud, decisive answer is the true reply to
all temptation. An oath that strikes as with a fist of iron, a denial that is like a long,
sharp two-edged sword,--these must be our policies and watchwords in the time of
danger. The reason is given (verse 6). It is a filial argument. Good advice is not
always thrown away; and men should remember that though exhortation may be
rejected for a long time, yet there are periods when it may recur to the memory and
come upon the whole life like a blessing sent from God. The argument is a fortiori.
The Lord has shown how the sons of Jonadab can refuse wine: now He will take this
example and apply it to the whole host of Judah, and He will say, See what one
section of your country can do; if they can do this, why cannot you be equally loyal
and true? why cannot you be equally obedient to the spirit of righteousness? for
three hundred years this bond has been kept in this family; never once has it been
violated: if one family can do this, why not a thousand families? if one section of the
country, why not the whole nation? This was Gods method of applying truth to
those who needed it. Thus we teach one another. One boy can be obedient; why not
all boys? One soul can be faithful; why not all souls? God in His providence says: See
what others can do, and as they toil and climb and succeed in reaching the highest
point, so do ye follow them: the grace that made them succeed will not fail you in the
hour of your trial and difficulty. (J. Parker, D. D.)

We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father,
commanded us.

The Rechabites
St. Austin says of the Syrophenician woman, who was both hardly spoken of by
our Saviour at first, and anon commended highly before her face; she that took not
her reproach in scorn, would not wax arrogant upon her commendation; so these
Rechabites who lived with good content in a life full of neglect, may the better
endure to have their good deeds scanned, without fear of begetting ostentation. And
therefore I will branch out my text into four parts, in every of which they will justly
deserve our praise, and in some our imitation. First, when the prophet Jeremiah did
try them with this temptation, whether they would feast it and-drink wine, they
make him a resolute denial, a prophet could., draw them to no inconvenient act.
Some are good men of themselves, but easily drawn aside by allurements; such are
not the Rechabites. He that will sin to please another, makes his friend either to be a
God that shall rule him, or a devil that shall tempt him. Three things, says Aristotle,
do preserve the life of friendship.
1. To answer love with like affection.
2. Some similitude and likeness of condition.
3. But above either, neither to sin ourselves, nor for our sakes to lay the charge
of sin upon our familiars.
No, he is too prodigal of his kindness, that giveth his friend both his heart and his
conscience. I may not forget how Agesilaus son behaved himself in this point
toward his own father: the cause was corrupt wherein his father did solicit; the son
answers him with this modesty: Your education taught me from a child to keep the
laws, and my youth is so inured to your former discipline, that I cannot skill the
latter. Here let rhetoricians declaim Whether this were duty or disobedience. But let
us examine the case by philosophy. I am sure that no man s reason is so nearly
conjoined to my soul as my own appetite, although my appetite be merely sensitive.
And must I oftentimes resist my own appetite, and enthral it as a civil rebel: and
have I not power much more to oppose any mans reason that Persuades me unto
evil, his reason being but a stranger unto me, and not of the secret council of my
soul! Yes, out of question. How it pities me to hear some men say, that they could
live as soberly, as chastely, as saintlike as the best, if it were not for company! Fie
upon such weakness: says St. Austin, If thy mother speak thee fair, if the wife of thy
bosom tempt thy heart, beware of Eve, and think of Adam. The serpent was a wise
creature (Gen 3:1-24), and Eve could not but take his word in good manners. Fond
mother of mankind, so ready to believe the devil, that her posterity ever since nave
Dean slow to believe God. Never can there be a better season for nolumus, for every
Christian to be a Rechabite, than when any man reacheth out a cup of intemperance
unto us, to say boldly, We will not drink it. Now I proceed to the second part of my
text, which hath a strong connection with the former; for why did they resist these
enticements, and disavow the prophet (verse 8)? Their obedience is the second part
of their encomium, they will obey the voice of Jonadab their father. The name of
father was that wherewith God was pleased to mollify our stony hearts, and bring
them into the subjection of the fifth commandment. Surely as a parricide, that killed
his father, was to have no burial upon the earth, but sewed in an ox hide and east
headlong into the sea; so he that despiseth his father deserves not to hold any place
of dignity above others, but to be a slave to all men. For what are we but coin that
hath our fathers image stamped upon it? and we receive our current value from
them to be called sons of men. And yet the more commendable was the obedience of
the Rechabites, that their father Jonadab being dead, his law was in as good force as
if he had been living. Concerning this virtue of obedience, let us extend our
discourse a little further, and yet tread upon our own ground. Obedience is used in a
large sense, for a condition, or modus, annexed unto all virtues. As the magistrate
may execute justice dutifully under his prince, the soldier may perform a valiant
exploit dutifully under his captain; but strictly, and according to the pattern of the
Rechabites, says Aquinas. It is one peculiar and entire virtue, whereby we oblige
ourselves, for authoritys sake, to do things indifferent to be done, or omitted; for
sometimes that which is evil may be hurtful prohibito to the party forbidden: as the
laws forbid a man to murder himself: sometimes a thing is evil prohibenti, so
treasons, adulteries, and thefts are interdicted: but sometimes the thing is no way in
itself pernicious to any, but only propounded to make trial of our duty and
allegiance, as when Adam was forbid to eat the apple; and this is true obedience, not
to obey for the necessity of the thing commanded, but out of conscience and
subjection to just authority. Such obedience, and nothing else, is that which hath
made the little commonwealth of bees so famous: for are they not at appointment
who should dispose the work at home, and who should gather honey in the fields?
they flinch not from their task, and no creature under the sun hath so brave an
instinct of sagacity. Let us gather up this second part of my text into one closure: we
commend the Rechabites for their obedience, and by their example we owe duty to
our parents, natural and civil, those that begot us, those that govern us. We owe duty
to the dead, after our rulers have left us in the way of a good life, and changed their
own for a better. We owe duty to our rulers in all things honest and lawful; in
obeying rites and ceremonies indifferent, in laws civil and ecclesiastical. But where
God controls, or wherein our liberty cannot be enthralled, we are bound ad
patiendum, and happy if we suffer for righteousness sake. Now that the obedience
of the Rechabites was lawful and religious, and a thing wherein they might
profitably dispense with freedom and liberty, the third part of my text, that is their
temperance, will make it manifest, for in this they obeyed Jonadab. To spare
somewhat which God hath given us for our sustenance, is to restore a part of the
plenty back again; if we lay hands upon all that is set before us, it is suspicious that
we expected more, and accused nature of frugality. And though the vine did boast in
Jothams parable, that it cheered up the heart of God and man, though it be so
useful a creature for our preservation, that no Carthusian or Caelestine monk of the
strictest order did put this into their vow to drink no wine, yet the Rechabites are
contented to be more sober than any, and lap the water of the brook, like Gideons
soldiers. Which moderation of diet did enable them to avoid luxury and swinish
drunkenness, into which sin whosoever falls makes himself subject to a fourfold
punishment. First, The heat of too liberal a proportion kindles the lust of the flesh.
Lot, who was not consumed in Sodom with the fire of brimstone, drunkenness set
him on fire with incestuous lust in Zoar. What St. Paul hath coupled (2Co 6:1-18.),
let us not divide; lastings go first, then follows pureness and chastity. Secondly, How
many brawls and unmanly combats have we seen? Thirdly, Superfluity of drink is
the draught of foolishness. Such a misery, in my opinion, that I would think men
had rather lose their right arm than the government of their reason, if they knew the
royalty thereof. Lastly, Whereas sobriety is the sustentation of that which decays in
man, drunkenness is the utter decay of the body. The Rechabites had
encouragement to take this vow upon them for three reasons:
1. As being but strangers to the true commonwealth of Israel.
2. To make the better preparation for the captivity of Babylon.
3. To draw their affections to the content of a little, and the contempt of the
world.
Now I follow my own method to handle the second consideration of this vow, that
these circumstances were not only well foreseen, but that the conditions of the thing
vowed are just and lawful. Not to tumble over all the distinctions of the schoolmen,
which are as multiplicious in this cause as in any; of vows, some are singular, which
concern one man and no more, as when David vowed to build an house unto the
Lord, this was not a vow of many associated in that pious work, but of David only.
Some are public when there is a unity of consent in divers persons to obtest the
same thing before the presence of God. And such was this vow in my text, it
concerned the whole family of the Rechabites. That this vow was of some moment in
the practice of piety, appears by Gods benediction upon them. For as it was said of
Socrates goodness, that it stood the common wealth of Athens in more stead than
all their warlike prowess by sea and land, so that religious life of the Rechabites was
the best wall and fortress to keep Judah in peace and safety. And almost who doth
not follow Christ rather to be a gainer by Him than a loser. Behold, we have left all
and followed Thee; that was the perfection of the apostles, that was the state of the
Rechabites; not simply all, everything that belonged to the maintenance of a man,
and so to live upon beggary, they have learned to ask nothing but a gourd to cover
their head, a few flocks of sheep to employ their hands, the spring water to quench
their thirst. They that must have no more, have cut off superfluous desires, that they
can never ask more. And so piety and a godly life were chiefly aimed at in the vow of
the Rechabites. The end and last part of all is this: That forasmuch as God was well
pleased with these abstemious people that would drink no wine, therefore promise
unto the Lord, and do the deed; for that is my final conclusion, that a vow justly
conceived is to be solemnly performed. When we have breathed out a resolved
protestation before God, it is like the hour we spake it in, past and gone, and can
never be recalled. Says David, I have poured out my soul in prayer, as if upon his
supplication it were no longer his, but God s for ever. Surely if our soul be gone from
us in our prayers, then much more in our vows they are flown up to Heaven, like
Lazarus to the bosom of Abraham, they cannot, they should not return to earth
again. He that changed his sex in the fable is not so great a wonder, as he that
changeth any covenant which is drawn between God and his conscience. He that
hath consecrated himself to God, doth, as it were, carry heaven upon his shoulders.
Support your burdens in Gods name, lest if you shrink the wrath of God press you
down to the nethermost pit. I will give a brief answer to one question. Is Christ so
austere that He doth reclaim against all dispensation? no, says Aquinas, you are
loose again, if the thing in vow be sinful, nay if it be unuseful, nay if it cross the
accomplishment of a greater good. This is good allowance, and well spoken. The
careful pilot sets his adventure to a certain haven, and would turn neither to the
right hand nor to the left, if the winds were as constant as the loadstone, but they
blow contrary to his expectation. Suppose a Rechabite protesting to drink no wine,
had lived after the institution of our Saviours Supper, when He consecrated the fruit
of the grape, and said, Drink ye all of this, would it pass for an answer at the Holy
Communion to say, We will drink no wine? No more than if he had sworn before not
to eat a paschal lamb, or any sour herbs, quite against the institution of the
passover. There is enough in this chapter to stride over this doubt if you mark it.
Jonadab indented with God, that he and his seed should live in tabernacles for ever;
and in tabernacles they did live for three hundred years. Then comes the king of
Babylon with an army into the country to invade the land. It was dangerous now to
live in tabernacles; there was no high priest, I assure you, to absolve them; no
money given to the publicans of the Church for a dispensation: but they said, Come
and let us go to Jerusalem for fear of the army of the Chaldeans and Syrians, and let
us dwell at Jerusalem. The vow was unprofitable, tabernacles dangerous, and so the
bond is cancelled. Yet, do not take all the liberty due unto you, if I may advise you:
there are two things which you may choose to untie the knot of a vow. The
peremptory rejecting of a bad vow, and that is lawful, and the changing thereof into
some other vow, and that is more expedient, that God may have some service done
unto Him, by way of a vow. (Bishop Hacket.)

Obedience to parental authority

The first and principal commandment of the moral law, Honour thy father and
thy mother, begins with obedience to parents; but must of course be interpreted in a
wider sense so as to apply to all who have a right to obedience--the persons to be
honoured in that famous and excellent summary of the Catechism are the King, and
all in authority under him, my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters,
and last of all my betters; the falling into disuse of such an instructive word is a
fact of very great significance and needs no comment. But duty to parents comes
clearly first, which an old writer has called the band and firmament of
Commonwealths; for society is near its dissolution when this obligation is loosened
or weakened in any way. The stability of an empire like that of China is an
illustration in point, and I was struck some time ago by hearing a missionary of long
experience select this one virtue of reverence for parents as that which has for so
many centuries preserved the cohesion of that people. Affection may indeed be
missing, but obedience and respect for authority are, I believe, universal. So it has
come to pass that a nation that we despise outdoes us in the discharge of one of the
most elementary moral duties; not that Confucius is a better teacher than Moses, or
made any advance upon him, but that we are somehow drifting from a
commandment of God, and seem powerless to enforce it. To arrest the widespread
mischief we must go back to first principles, and seek to re-establish authority in the
family, in the elementary schools, in places of higher education, and perhaps in the
university itself. Authority must be taught to be a trust delegated by God to some for
the good of the whole body, and the applications of the Christian precept: All of you
be subject one to another, in its several relations, must be laid down fearlessly and
with distinctness by teachers and preachers as the safeguard of society. To revert to
filial reverence. It was once, I believe, a characteristic of Englishmen, for even as late
as the last century sons would address their fathers by the reverential title of sir.
The virtue is not exotic, it can stand our rude climate, and it must not be thought for
a moment to be a poor sickly plant, that has no root in strong and masculine
natures. On the contrary, take a specimen of it from the most robust of our own
countrymen. To most of us is known the compunction of Dr. Johnson which has
formed the subject of an historical picture. He has related of himself, how when a
young man he refused to stand at his fathers stall to sell books; it was, he says,
through pride he disobeyed, a trivial circumstance to a less sensitive man, but it was
a burden to him for fifty years, until on the very day he went to the very spot where
his fathers stall used formerly to be, and on a day of business stood in Uttoxeter
market, bareheaded, for an hour exposed to the gibes of the passers-by, and the
inclemency of the weather. This was a penance by which I trust I have propitiated
heaven for the only instance I believe of contumacy to my father. Upon which Mr.
Leslie Stephen, by no means a sentimental writer, remarks: The anecdote cannot be
read without emotion, and if it illustrates a touch of superstition in Johnsons mind,
it reveals too that sacred depth of tenderness which ennobled his character. To both
parents we are debtors. Mothers are to be esteemed as highly as fathers, and dutiful
obedience rendered to them. Take care you despise them not in their old age or in
lonely widowhood. Value them all the more if they are alone. Do not think that you
have outgrown their wisdom, for in his mature years Solomon could stamp his own
maxims with the authority of his mothers mint, and give them currency as the
words which his mother had taught him. The wishes of parents are also to be
attended to, for wise fathers dealing with grown-up children will not burden them
with commands, but will leave them to act upon what their sons know they would
wish done. In a book that furnished my vacation reading I lighted upon a passage in
the undergraduate life of Dr. Corrie that will interest some of us. When he first
came up, his father, knowing his sons great love for horses, and fearing the scenes
of temptation into which this taste might lead him, expressed a strong desire that he
would not go to Newmarket. This injunction was faithfully respected. Though he was
fully aware that his father would never ask him whether his wish had been observed,
his loyalty would not permit him to trifle with the confidence thus placed in him. A
characteristic anecdote of a man who was known as the soul of honour, who if he
lacked sons of his own, was looked up to and reverenced by hundreds of pupils and
others, who felt their own principles of duty strengthened by his unswerving fidelity
to old traditions. Obedience to a fathers law is the whole idea of the incarnation.
Not to please Himself at all, but to surrender Himself wholly to the Divine will, runs
through all Christs life. When He cometh into the world He saith, I am come to do
Thy will, O God, and when He is about to leave the world in that great fight of
conflicting emotions the thought of submission alone rules His prayer, Not My will,
but Thine be done. Not only as a son, but as a citizen, as a member of the Jewish
synagogue and nation, He is obedient to the law, to every ordinance of man, for His
Fathers sake. Conscious of His Divinity, of His real relation to God at twelve years
old, He goes meekly home to be subject to earthly parents and to learn His trade.
When the time of His manifestation has come, He allows John to baptize Him, to
fulfil an ordinance of God, and by His obedience He approves Johns commission in
the eyes of the people. Though, as Son of God, He is free from the temple tax, yet He
works a miracle to pay the due, that He might give no offence to the rulers who sat
in Moses seat. He even acknowledges that the civil power of the Roman Governor is
of God. Under the terms of the new covenant we are no mere slaves but sons, and
can claim the spirit of adoption, the will to wish all things in conformity with Gods
will, and the power to perform the same. I have heard myself from the lips of those
whose whole life has been most wilful and contrary such a confession as this, I love
now as much to do things for God as at one time I did everything against God, for
the love of Christ converts and subdues a stubborn temper, which to its harm would
kick against the pricks into a service where there is no heavy burden, no galling
yoke, but all is perfect freedom. (C. E. Searle, D. D.)

The obedient Rechabites

I. THE AUTHORITY OF THE FAMILY. The power of human descent and family
tradition in moulding a career is well illustrated in the case of the Rechabites.
1. It controlled the natural tastes. Its members must renounce pleasure, comfort,
and fixed habitation; their inheritance was the loss of those very things
which sons expect, and parents delight to bequeath. But with the loss came a
better gain,--health of body, purity of morals, loyalty of conscience. They had
that best possession,--noble character.
2. The authority of the family also controlled their external alliances; those
entering it by marriage must accept its obligations. A man may leave father
and mother to cleave unto his wife, but may not leave truth and virtue.
3. In the same way the family tradition proved superior to surrounding
influences. They were as faithful in the city as in the country, as loyal among
strangers as where well known. So from lonely farmhouses among the hills,
young men and young women have gone to seek an easier fortune in the
great city, or in the lawless West, and been delivered from evil by the abiding
influence of their sanctified homes.
4. The faithfulness of the Rechabites displays the normal influence of the family
in transmitting a tendency to virtue, and confirming that inherited
disposition by congenial surroundings and careful training. This is what God
means the family to be,--His surest and mightiest agency for spreading
righteousness on the earth.

II. THIS HIGHER AUTHORITY OF GOD. If human descent and family tradition exert
authority over the individual, the Divine Creator and Governor holds a far higher
claim upon him. Whatever depravity sin may breed into the race, virtue is always its
normal life, holiness its ideal. The Scriptures describe man as directly connected
with God in his origin. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness. When the clay was shaped, He breathed into his nostrils thy breath of
life, and man became a living soul. The characteristics of our Divine origin are as
discernible as the marks of our human descent. Our intellect is made after the
likeness of the Divine mind, else the universe would be to us an insoluble mystery.
In our tastes we can trace kinship with Him who has adorned the earth with beauty.
Pure human affection gives us our worthiest conception of the Divine love.
Misfortune cannot turn it, ingratitude cannot chill it, death itself cannot overcome
it, The Heavenly Father uses this earthly tie to symbolise His own regard; the
Saviour describes His fostering care and close union with the Church by naming it
His bride. Our moral nature is plainly Divine in origin. Conscience is the voice of
God in man. He who obeys it is lifted to the plane of Divine action, is made a co-
worker with God. Over this lordly realm, crowned its regent by the Creator Himself,
is the Personal Soul, the Self, the I. Self-consciousness is its throne, self-
determination its sceptre. By this solemn conviction I am, I will, man separates
himself from all the universe around him; through this he balances his soul against
the whole world and weighs it down; with it he faces eternity. He is his own,
something for which the Infinite asks, and he may give. It is here that mans Divine
origin finds its explanation; for the glad choice of God, all the dignity of human
nature was given; to this end converge the constant teachings of the revealing
universe, the open instructions of the inspired Word, the solemn persuasions of the
Holy Spirit. Lessons--
1. The responsibility of parents. One writer on heredity declares that the
dispositions of Bacon and Goethe were formed by the simple addition of the
dispositions of their ancestors. We know that passionate temper, fretfulness,
and despondency may be inherited. Let a parent beware how he sins.
2. The responsibility resting upon the child of godly parents. When one who has
had a virtuous ancestry seeks out vice and courts godlessness, he has not
long to wait before every red drop in his veins will turn against him and
curse him traitor. There is something back of his own will,--an authority he
knows not how to resist and cannot defy.
3. The ultimate responsibility of each soul to God. When Samuel J. Mills was
struggling against the convictions of the Spirit, he exclaimed, I wish I had
never been born! His mother replied, But you are born, my son, and can
never escape your accountability to God. The glad choice of the holy God is
the highest exercise of the created will. (C. M. Southgate.)

The obedience of the Rechabites

I. Wherein it resembles christian obedience.

1. It was total. They did not consult their preferences or their affinities. They
did not proceed upon any law of natural selection. They did not show
punctilious fidelity with reference to one commandment, and great laxity
concerning another. This is one essential characteristic of Christian
obedience. It is total. If we can make choice of such commands as we feel like
obeying and disregard the rest, what are we but masters instead of subjects,
dictating terms instead of receiving orders?
2. It was constant. It kept an unbroken path. It bore the stress of storms and
tests. And herein it was marked by another essential characteristic of
Christian obedience--a beautiful constancy. Enlistment in the Lords army is
for life, and there is no discharge in that war.

II. Wherein this Rechabite obedience was unlike Christian obedience.

1. The Rechabites obeyed Jonadab: Christians obey God. This is a substantive
 difference. And we must not confound things that radically differ. The source
of a command has a great deal to do with the value of obedience to it. The
lower relation must give way to the higher when the two conflict.
2. Jonadabs commands, so far as we know, were for temporal and material
ends, in the interests of a rugged manhood and a sturdy independence. Gods
commands are for spiritual ends, for good of soul, and they stand vitally
connected with those higher interests that relate not only to the life that now
is, but to that which is to come. Rechabite obedience, therefore, conserves
temporal good; Christian obedience conserves eternal good.
3. Rechabite obedience was not necessary to salvation; Christian obedience is
indispensable.

III. Wherein it shames Christian disobedience.

1. These Rechabites are obedient to their father Jonadab, a mere man who had
been dead nearly three hundred years, while Judah is in open and flagrant
disobedience to the Most High God.
2. Jonadab commanded but once, and he had instant and constant heed,
generation upon generation, for centuries. But I, saith the Lord of hosts,
the God of Israel--I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking. I have
also sent unto you, &c.
3. Obedience to Jonadab was at a cost, and it brought at the best only power to
endure and the spirit of independence. It left the Rechabites poor and
homeless. Obedience to God was also at a cost, but it gave His people assured
possessions, peace of conscience, protection from their enemies, and all the
exceeding riches of an eternal inheritance in Gods kingdom of grace and
glory. Yet the Rechabites obeyed Jonadab with a beautiful constancy, while
Judah hearkened not to the voice of the Lord.
Practical suggestions--
1. The very essence of Christian fidelity is obedience.
2. A true obedience has two infallible signs. It will have no reservations, and it
will never cry Halt!
3. See the shame and guilt of disobedience under the Gospel.
4. In respect to one particular in this Rechabite obedience, namely, abstinence
from wine--three things are clear.
(1) Abstinence from wine is not here made obligatory.
(2) Abstinence from wine is not wrong.
(3) Abstinence from wine for the sake of the stumblers is lifted by the New
Testament to the sublime height of a duty, and made imperative (Rom
14:21).
Wine-drinking is a sin for that man who drinks with offence (Rom 14:20). Wine-
drinking is a sin for that man who by it puts a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall
in a brother s way (Rom 14:15). When wine-drinking wounds a weak conscience it
is as in against Christ (1Co 8:12). (H. Johnson, D. D.)

The obedience of the Rechabites

Jonadab saw that his people were but a handful among a more powerful people,
and likely soon to be swallowed up by their neighbours, and he hit upon a happy
method of preserving their independent existence. He enjoined them not to drink
wine; this was to save them from luxury and intemperance, which would prey upon
them from within, and make them ripe for destruction; and he also commanded
them not to till the ground, nor to have any houses, nor to dwell in cities; this was
in order that they might have no riches to tempt others to make war upon them; and
thus, to use his own words, they might live many days in the land wherein they
were strangers. Luxury and wealth are the bane of nations, and by keeping his tribe
a simple, pastoral people, pure in their habits, and destitute of property, he
accomplished his wishes for them.

I. THE OBEDIENCE OF THE RECHABITES CONTRASTED WITH THE DISOBEDIENCE OF

ISRAEL TO GOD. An ancestor of that family, who had been dead nearly three hundred
years, had issued his commands, and they were still obeyed; but the living God had
spoken repeatedly to Israel, by His prophets, yet they would not hear. The
commands of Jonadab, too, were very arbitrary. There could be no sin in cultivating
the fields, or in living in houses, whatever moral worth there may have been in the
precept to drink no wine: but still, because Jonadab commanded it they obeyed. The
complaint of God has still an application. It is a fact, that among sinners, any and
every law, precept, or tradition, of mere human authority, is better obeyed than the
laws of God Himself. See, in a few instances, how this has been verified. Mahomet
arose, a sensualist, an adulterer, a breaker of treaties, and a robber, and issued his
commands, which for centuries have been religiously obeyed. At the cry of the
muezzin, and the hour of prayer, every follower of his, whether in the desert, on
board the ship, in the city, or the field, suspends his labour, his pleasures, and even
his griefs, and casts himself upon his knees in prayer. But the blessed Jesus, pure,
peaceful, and glorious, speaks, and even those who acknowledge Him as Lord over
all, and own the goodness of His commands, can listen to such words as, This do in
remembrance of Me, and obey them not. The founder of some monkish order,
again, has enjoined upon all his fraternity certain rules and austerities, and he is
obeyed. Day after day, and year after year, the same tedious round of ceremonies is
gone through with, as though salvation depended upon it, and the deluded ones will
rise at the midnight hour to inflict stripes upon themselves or to offer prayer. But
Christ may enjoin the reasonable duty of praying to our Father in spirit and in truth,
and multitudes can suffer days and years to pass, and pray not. The commander of
the order of Jesuits can place his inferior priests in any country of the world, and
whether the mandate be to act as father confessor in some palace, or to Penetrate to
China or Paraguay, there is no more resistance for apparent regard for the sacrifices
to be made than in the machinery which is moved by mechanic power. Christ
commands His disciples to go preach the Gospel to every creature, but only here
and there one goes forth. The heathen priest bids the worshippers of idols to cast
their children rote the fire or the water, and it is done. Jesus says, Suffer little
children to come to Me, and has appointed a sacrament in which they may be
received, but men will admit the duty, and yet neglect the baptism of their children.
The Rechabites of modern times, and Sons of Temperance, may institute a vow of
temperance, and it is kept; or command one of their number to minister to the sick,
and it is done; or provide well for their poor; but Christ says, that no drunkard shall
enter heaven, and enjoins charity to the sick and the destitute, while many heed
Him not.
 II. THE REWARDS OF OBEDIENCE. Modern travellers, moreover, state that the
Rechabites are still in existence. Mr. Wolf, the famous Jewish missionary, asserts
this as his belief. And another traveller who visited a tract to the south of Judea,
which has been unexplored for centuries, met there a native who claimed to be a
Rechabite, and when an Arabic Bible was shown to him, turned to this chapter and
read from it the description of his People, and said that it was still true of them, and
that they still kept the precepts of Jonadab, their father. Over three thousand years
have passed away since that family of the Kenites came with Israel into Canaan, and
for two thousand years no traces of them were preserved; but now, after so long a
lapse of time, recent discoveries have brought them to light, retaining their name,
and glorying in their independence. Though surrounded by Mohammedan Arabs,
they conform to the law of Moses yet maintaining that they are not Israelites; and
are much hated by the Mussulman. This account was given by a traveller so late as
1832, and is confirmed by English residents at Mocha, and from other sources. No
doubt every promise of Gods Word is as abundantly fulfilled. We may not always be
able to trace out the literal accomplishment of every one as strikingly as in this case,
but we never could prove one promise in all the Bible false; and the more light we
have the more abundantly do we see that all have been yea and amen. Let us rest
upon Gods Word. Exceeding great and precious promises are given to us in the
sacred book. They are like good notes from a prompt paymaster, falling due at
different times. We may sometimes question their worth, or may even forget in the
multitude of cares that we have such securities treasured up, but the time of their
payment will come, and we shall find all redeemed. (W. H. Lewis, D. D.)

The Rechabites
Their record was an honourable one, and reached far back into the early days of
Hebrew history. When Israel was passing through the wilderness of Sinai, the tribe
of the Kenites showed them kindness; and this laid the foundation of perpetual
friendliness between the two peoples. They seem to have adopted the religious
convictions of Israel, and to have accompanied them into the Land of Promise.
Retaining their integrity as s pastoral people, the Kenites maintained these friendly
relations with Israel during the intervening centuries; and it was of this tribe that
the Rechabites, for such was the name of this strange tent-loving people, had sprung
(Jdg 4:17-24; 1Sa 15:6; 1Ch 2:55). About the time of Elijah, and perhaps largely
influenced by him, the sheikh or leader of one branch of the Kenites was Jonadab
the son of Rechab. He was dismayed at the abounding corruption of the time, and
especially of the northern kingdom, then under the fatal spell of Jezebels and
Ahabs influence; and resembled some rank jungle in whose steamy air, heavy with
fever and poison, noisome creatures swarm, and foul pestilences breed. In his
endeavour to save his people from such a fate, this noble man, who afterwards
become Jehus confederate in extirpating idolatry, bound his people under a solemn
pledge to drink no wine for ever; neither to build houses, nor sow seed, nor plant
vineyards, but to dwell in tents.

I. JEREMIAHS TEST OF THE RECHABITES. So soon as their arrival was noised

abroad, and had come to the ears of Jeremiah, he was seized by a Divine impulse to
derive from them a striking object-lesson for his own people. With an inventiveness
which only passionate love could have suggested, the prophet caught at every
incident, and used every method to awaken his people to realise their true position
in the sight of God. Probably a little group of Jews, arrested by the prophet s
association with these strange-looking men, followed them in to watch the
proceedings. They were curious witnesses of the prophets action, as he caused
bowls of wine to be set before the tribesmen, and cups to be offered them, that they
might dip them in and drink. They also heard the blunt unqualified refusal of these
quaint old-fashioned Puritans, We will drink no wine, followed by an explanation
of the solemn obligation laid on them centuries before. The moral was obvious, Hero
were men loyal to the wish of their ancestor, though he was little more than a name
to them, and refusing the offered sweets in which so many freely indulged. How
great a contrast to the people of Jerusalem, who persistently disregarded the words
of the living God perpetually remonstrating against their sins! The prohibitions of
Jonadab were largely arbitrary and external; whilst those of Jehovah were
corroborated by the convictions of conscience, and consonant with the deepest
foundations of religion and morality. The voice of Jonadab was a cry coming faintly
from far down the ages; whilst Jehovah was ever speaking with each new dawn, and
in the voice of each fresh messenger whom He rose early to send. Such devotion to
principle; such persistent culture of simplicity, frugality, and abstinence; such literal
adherence to the will of the father of their house--not only carried within them the
assurance of perpetuity to the people who practised them, but must receive the
signature and countersign of the Almighty. Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts,
the God of Israel Jonadab, the son of Rechab, shall not want a man to stand before
Me for ever. This phrase had a very profound significance. It suggested, of course,
obviously, that the tribe should not cease to exist. The phrase is often used in
Scripture of priestly service. And may we not infer that where we meet that devotion
to principle, and that detachment from the world, which characterised these men,
there will always be a strong religious tone, a knowledge of God, a power in prayer
and intercession, which are the essential characteristics of the priests?

II. THIS ELEMENTS OF A STRONGLY RELIGIOUS LIFE. Oh, to stand always before
Him, on whose face the glory of God shines as the sun in his strength! But if this is
to be something more than a vague wish, an idle dream, three things should be
remembered, suggested by the words of the Rechabites.
1. There must be close adhesion to great principles. Many superficial reasons
might have suggested to the Rechabites compliance with the prophet s
tempting suggestion. The wine was before them; there was no sin against
God in taking it; the people around had no scruples about it; and the prophet
himself invited them. In contrast to this, it is the general tendency amongst
men to ask what is the practice of the majority; what is done by those in their
rank and station; and what will be expected of them. We drift with the
current. We allow our lives to be settled by our companions or our whims,
our fancies or our tastes. We make a grave mistake in supposing that the
main purpose of our life is something different from that which reveals itself
in details. What we are in the details of our life, that we are really and
essentially. The truest photographs are taken when we are unprepared for
the operation. And, indeed, when we consider the characters of the early
disciples of Jesus, or those of saints, martyrs, and confessors, must we not
admit that they were as scrupulous in seeking the will of God about the trifles
of their life, as the Rechabites were in consulting the will and pleasure of the
 dead Jonadab? The thought of God was as present with the one as of
Jonadab with the other. And was not this the secret of their strong and noble
lives? What a revolution would come to us all if it became the one fixed aim
and ambition of our lives to do always those things that are pleasing in His
sight!
2. Abstinence from the spirit of the age. It was an immense gain in every way for
the Rechabites to abstain from wine. Wine was closely associated with the
luxury, corruption, and abominable revelries of the time (Isa 28:1-8). Their
abstinence was not only a protest against the evils which wore honeycombing
their age, but was a sure safeguard against participation in them. In these
days the same principles apply. Surely, then, we shall do well to say with the
Rechabites, whoever may ask us to drink, We will drink no wine. But wine
may stand for the spirit of the age, its restlessness, its constant thirst for
novelty, for amusement, for fascination; its feverish demand for the fresh
play, the exciting novel, the rush of the season, the magnificent pageant. It is
easier to abstain from alcohol than from this insidious spirit of our time,
which is poured so freely into the air, as from the vial of some demon
sorceress.
3. We must hold lightly to the things around. The Rechabites dwelt in tents.
They drove their vast flocks from place to place, and were content with the
simple life of the wandering shepherd. It was thus that the great patriarchs
had lived before them (Heb 11:9; Heb 11:13). It is difficult to say what
worldliness consists in. What would be worldly to some people is an ordinary
part of lifes circumstances to others. But all of us are sensible of ties that
hold us to the earth. We may discover what they are by considering what we
cling to; what we find it hard to let go; what we are always striving to
augment; what we pride ourselves in. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

The Rechabites

I. THEIR PRINCIPLES ARE TRIED. Three features mark this trial.

1. They were offered wine. After s family record of three hundred years
abstinence, the evil thing is set before them, free of cost. As they fortunately
had no experience of its power by reason of former habits of intemperance,
they could look upon the enemy without fear or danger.
2. Wine was offered them by a good man. Jeremiah was the generous host.
Surely Gods prophet would not offer them an evil thing, or tempt them to do
wrong! A great many well-meaning people place the tempting cup before
their guests, and their guests are not the sturdy sons of Jonadab, and much
evil is wrought.
3. Wine was offered in the Lords house. They were in the chamber of good men,
on holy ground, and in strict privacy. Under such circumstances, might
they not suspend their stringent rules of life? They had broken one vow in
coming into Jerusalem, might they not yield another point, and adopt one of
the ways of city people? Life is full of opportunities for testing principles and
character.

II. Their principles are triumphant.

 1. It was prompt and definite. They reasoned not with flesh and blood, nor did
they offer any compromise.
2. It was complete. Their pledge was a comprehensive one, involving dwelling in
tents, and living a very unworldly life (verses 6-10). Total abstinence, was not
enough. Their fathers commandment, was broad. Sobriety is not salvation.
3. It was general. We, our wives, our sons, our daughters (verse 8). The
domestic peace had not been broken by faithlessness and sin. A blessed unity
in principle and in practice.
4. It was constant. Three hundred years had passed since they received these
injunctions, and they still regarded them as binding and sacred.

III. Their actuating motive.

1. It was filial love. For Jonadab our father commanded us (verse 6) was the
only defence they cared to offer for their singular conduct. A pious ancestry
is an invaluable blessing; but the filial spirit must turn that boon to practical
account.
2. Men live after death. He being dead, yet speaketh. Time cannot impair the
power of a good life.

IV. THE EXEMPLARY MEANING OF THEIR CONDUCT. They were not tried for their
own sake, but for the good of others.
1. Conduct makes personal influence. No man liveth unto himself. The end of
our trials may concern others more than ourselves. The Jews were to be
instructed by the behaviour of the Rechabites.
2. The sobriety of one condemns the drunkenness of the other. If one life can be
good, other lives can too.
3. It was a contrast of privilege. In obedience to an earthly father, who had been
dead three centuries, the sons of Jonadab had kept their pledges. The Jews
had received Divine commands, all the prophets had spoken to them, and yet
they disobeyed (verses 14, 16).
4. It justified Divine judgment. Therefore . . . I will bring upon Judah, &c.
(verse 17). The abstinence of Rechab condemns inebriate Judah.
5. National intemperance is a swift destroyer.
6. Personal drunkenness makes up the national sin. The units make the million.

V. The rechabites reward.

1. Divine approval Jeremiah assured them of Gods benediction.
2. Divine preservation. Jonadab promised his sons long life, many days in the
land where ye be strangers (verse 7), and that promise God ratified. Medical
and statistical science have come to Jonadabs view.
3. Divine honour. Jonadab, the son of Rechab, shall not want a man to stand
before Me for ever (verse 19). Standing before God has reference to a
priestly relationship and service. (R. W. Keighley.)

A reason for total abstinence

 The late Frances E. Willard once asked the greatest of inventors, Thomas A.
Edison, if he were a total abstainer; and when he told her that he was, she said, May
I inquire if it was home influence that made you so? and he replied, No; I think it
was because I always felt that I had a better use for my head. Who can measure the
loss to the world if that wonderful instrument of thought that has given us so much
of light and leading in the practical mechanism of life had become sodden with
drink, instead of electric with original ideas!
Obedience to human authority
1. Premise that complications are apt to arise, unless we remember--
(1) That the authority of any particular superior is limited to its own sphere.
(2) That all human authority is subordinate to Gods, so that in submitting
to human authority we are submitting to Gods, in resisting we are
resisting Gods (Rom 13:1-2; Eph 6:5-7; Col 3:20; 1Pe 2:13).
(3) That authority, even within its own limits, is to be used with discretion,
not pressed beyond reason, or vexatiously.
2. What right had Jonadab to enjoin upon his descendants the observances
specified? His injunctions were those of a founder and legislator.
3. To proceed, then, we have--
(1) Obedience to the laws of our country, a branch of which is obedience to
magistrates. This to be rendered for conscience sake, and therefore
even in cases in which (as the payment of taxes) evasion might be
possible (Rom 13:1-7; Tit 3:1; 1Pe 2:13-15).
(2) Obedience to the rules of the Church, a branch of which is obedience to
ecclesiastical superiors (Heb 13:17; 1Th 5:12-13; 1Ti 5:17). And by the
rules of the Church are to be understood the rules of that branch of the
Church in which God has cast our lot.
(3) Obedience to authority in the family. To masters. To husbands. To
parents. (C. A. Heurtley, D. D.)

I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking; but ye hearkened
not unto Me.--
The aggravated nature of disobedience

I. LOOK AT THE AUTHORITY OF GOD--the right He has to be obeyed and hearkened

to. I have spoken unto you, saith God. We must lay a stress upon that I. We must
contrast it with the name of Jonadab. It is as much as to say, What is Jonadab
compared with Me? What is his authority compared with Mine?

II. WE MUST LAY A STRESS ALSO UPON THE MANNER IN WHICH THE LORD HATH GIVEN
HIS DIRECTIONS TO US. I have spoken unto you, saith He--how? rising early and
speaking. Oh! wonderful expression! spoken, indeed, in accommodation to mans
language; but how affecting! how significant! Jonadab, perhaps, laid down his rules
but once, and was readily obeyed. But again and again hath the Great Jehovah sent
abroad His invitations, and renewed His offers, and repeated His commands.

III. THE NATURE OF THE LORDS DIRECTIONS. Look over Jonadabs injunctions,
and assuredly you will pronounce them harsh and strict in the extreme. He laid an
embargo on the very gifts of providence, and bade his family abstain from them.
Now contrast with this the gentle, gracious precepts of the Gospel of Christ Jesus--
surely His yoke is easy and His burthen is light! But before He gives His precepts He
sends His invitations (Mat 11:28). Pardon and grace are first proposed before duties
are required. (A. Roberts, M. A.)

The reasonableness of hearkening to Gods voice and submitting

ourselves to Him
1. As we are His creatures (Mal 1:6; Heb 12:9).
2. As He is our benefactor (Isa 1:2-3; Rom 12:1).
3. As He has engaged Himself to support and deliver such (Rom 8:28, &c.).
4. As He forbids only what is hurtful, and commands only what is good (Rom
7:12; De 10:12-13).
5. The wisest and best of men have acted thus (Heb 12:1).
6. It is its own reward (Psa 19:11).
7. The reward He sets before us is infinitely great (2Co 4:17-18).
8. Disobedience exposes to His wrath (Rom 1:18; Rom 2:8-9). (H. Foster.)

Disobedience to God condemned

I. Let us consider this complaint. There is at this day--

1. The same regard for the commands of men.
2. The same disregard for the commands of God. But let us consider the
complaint more minutely--

II. With its attendant aggravations.

1. The authority from which the different commands proceeded.
2. The commands themselves.
3. The manner in which they were enforced. Address--
(1) Those who regard man, and not God.
(2) Those who regard God, and not man.
(3) Those who feel a united regard for both. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

Return ye now every man from his evil way.--

Sinners admonished to return to God

I. What the exhortation presupposes.

1. That there has been a departure from God.
2. This departure is universal (Rom 3:10; Rom 3:19-23).
3. This departure is flagrantly wicked. Evil way. Evil in its nature, in its
influence, in its consequences.
 II. To what reforms the exhortation points.
1. Deep conviction of the evil and dangerous nature of a wicked career.
2. Contrition of heart, and confession of sin to God.
3. The renunciation of every evil way.
4. Supreme love and loyalty to God.

III. Compliance with this request is urgent.

1. Life is short and uncertain.
2. Sin is hardening and deceitful.
3. You will escape the greatest evils and realise the most exalted pleasures.
4. The longer you delay the less probability there is that you will ever return.
5. The present is the only time in which we are authorised to tell you you can be
saved.

IV. The happy result of returning to God.

1. The Israelites entered Canaan--a faint type of heaven to which believers are
called.
2. Ye shall dwell there in fulness of joy, and at Gods right hand. Your sun
shall no more go down. (Helps for the Pulpit.)

Amending ones ways a great work

Sir Thomas Burnet, the third son of Bishop Burner, led at one time a dissipated
life. At last he took a serious turn, and one evening his father observing him to be
very thoughtful, asked what he was meditating. A greater work, replied he, than
your lordships History of the Reformation. Ay, said the bishop, what is that?
The reformation of myself, said the young man. He fulfilled his promise, and he
afterwards became one of the best lawyers of his time; and in 1741 one of the judges
in the Court of Common Pleas.

JEREMIAH 36

JER 35:16-17
I will bring upon Judah and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem all the evil
that I have pronounced against them: because I have spoken unto them, but they
have not heard; and I have called unto them, but they have not answered.

Condemned by our virtues

How did the obedience of the Rechabites prove inexcusable, and therefore worthy
of the severest punishment, the disobedience of the Jews? Their obedience was the
obedience of children to their father, and sufficiently showed that even in a matter
which crossed their natural inclinations men were capable of acting on a parental
command and practising self-denial. The Jews then could not plead that they had no
power of hearkening unto God. The Rechabites were witnesses against them. If
Jonadab were obeyed because he was a father, had not Jehovah a right to expect to
be obeyed, seeing that He was a father unto Israel? If the Rechabites could obey,
obey as children, the Israelites might have obeyed, obeyed as children. Thus the
instance or example of the Rechabites rose up in the sternest condemnation of the
Jews, and in the clearest vindication of the judgments with which God was about to
visit their transgressions. Now let us extend the argument, and exhibit it in such
shape as may make it applicable to ourselves. It is a very hard doctrine which we
have to enforce, when we press on your attention the utter worthlessness, so far as
our procuring favour with God is concerned, of those virtues and excellences which
are so much admired in society. There is something so graceful, and beautiful, and
beneficial around a man of unblemished morals, of high rectitude, of large
generosity--the dutiful son, the affectionate husband and parent, the loyal subject,
the staunch friend--that you seem to shrink instinctively from statements which go
to the bringing him to a level with those whom you abhor as the hardened and the
injurious, and to the declaring him possibly as far off from the kingdom of heaven as
though he lived a dissolute life, or were dishonourable in his dealings. But the
statements are not the less true because they may jar with your feelings; and the
minister cannot,, without the worst dishonesty, soften down facts on which
Scripture is most explicit, and which even experience sufficiently establishes--the
facts that there may be as thorough enmity to God beneath the aspect which is most
attractive, as beneath that which is most repulsive, and that the virtues which shed a
blandness over domestic life, and a dignity over commercial transactions, and a
strength over political relations, may as well coexist with complete want of the
religion of the heart, as those vices which break up the peace of families, and outrage
all the decencies of a neighbourhood. But the principle involved in the text requires
us to go even further than this, and to maintain, not only that there is no justifying
power in these virtues, hut that there is even a condemning power--that they may be
brought up as witnesses against their possessors, and used as proofs of their being
without excuse in their neglect of God and disobedience to His Gospel. The man of
great native kindliness of heart has evidently even less excuse than one of worse
nature for withholding from God the offerings of thankfulness. Where there is a fine
generosity, a gushing sensibility, a quick appreciation of what is noble and
disinterested, what shall extenuate indifference to the Gospel, with all its holy story
of love and condescension and conquest? We have thus engaged you with the
general argument, rather than with the particular case presented by our text. You
will, probably, however, understand the argument better, if we now confine
ourselves to the relation which subsists between parent and child; for it is on this
that God grounds His complaint against the Jews. Now there is no more beautiful
and graceful affection of our nature than that which subsists between parents and
children. We cannot but admire this affection, even as exhibited amongst inferior
animals; and no passage in natural history is so attractive as that which tells how
tenderly the wild beast of the forest will watch over her young, or with what
assiduousness the fowls of the air will tend their helpless brood. But with the
inferior animals the affection is but an instinct which lasts for a time, just long
enough to ensure attention to the offspring whilst yet unable to provide for
themselves; when this time is past, the tie is for the most part altogether broken;
there is no keeping up of the relationship; however exquisitely the beast of the field
and the fowl of the air may have nourished their young during their weeks of
helplessness, they become afterwards as strangers to them, and seem not to
distinguish them from others of their tribe. There is for a time a great exhibition of
parental affection, but comparatively little of filial; there is apparently no
reciprocity, for when the offspring has reached an age at which the kindness might
be returned, the connection seems at an end, and the offspring goes away from the
parent, though, becoming a parent itself, it displays the very instinct of which it has
been the object. But in the human race the connection goes beyond this; if not so
very intense at the first, it is abiding and reciprocal; the love of a parent for a child
does not terminate when the child has grown into strength and asks no further help-
-it continues through life, increasing, for the most part, rather than diminishing, so
that though the child may have been long absent from his home, wandering in
foreign lands, or domesticated among strangers, yet can he always reckon that the
hearts of his father and mother are beating kindly towards him, and that he has only
again to present himself at their door, to unlock a tide of rich sensibilities, and be
folded in an ardent embrace, and welcomed with deep gratulations. But whilst
parents are thus abidingly and profitably actuated by affection for their children,
children entertain an affection towards their parents which is scarcely less graceful
and scarcely less advantageous. Of course there are exceptions, but they provoke
unmingled reprobation, as though all the feelings of a community rose up against
that unnatural being, a thankless child, and prompted the fitness of ejecting him
from its circles. It is comparatively but seldom that children show themselves void of
affection towards a father and a mother, when that father and that mother have
done their part as parents; on the contrary, whether it be in the highest or the lowest
families of the land, there is generally a frank yielding to its heads of that respect
and that gratitude which they have a right to look for from their offspring. And from
this fact, illustrated in the particular case of the Rechabites, God proceeds in our text
to justify His complaint against the Jews. We stay not to demonstrate to you the
paternal character of God; it is the character which pervades the whole of revelation,
and is outlined by the whole of providence. The question is not as to whether God
acts towards us as a father--it is only whether we act towards God as children; and
here comes the melancholy contrast between men as members of particular families,
and men as members of the universal family. The very beings who can recognise
most cordially the claims of earthly parents, who can manifest themselves a
reverence and a homage which give to the domestic picture an exquisite moral
beauty, and who would show themselves monstrously indignant at any tale of filial
disobedience or unthankfulness, have only to be viewed as children of God, and
presently they would be convicted of all that unnaturalness, all that ingratitude, and
all that baseness, on which they are so ready to pour unmingled reprobation. You
cannot for a moment profess to deny, that in the heart which is all alive to filial
emotions, and which beats with so true an affection towards a father and a mother,
that the whole strength is gathered in the showing them respect and ministering to
their comfort, there may be an utter indifference towards the heavenly Parent--ay,
no more practical remembrance of Him in whom we live, and move, and have our
being, than if it were the heart of one of those blots upon our race, in which all the
family charities appear to have been extinguished, or never to have grown. Then do
ye not further perceive how thoroughly self-condemned must all of us stand, if we
act faithfully the part of a child toward an earthly parent, but utterly fail to act that
part towards a heavenly? It will be demonstrable from our own actions that we were
quite without excuse, as members of the universal family; we shall be put to shame
by our very excellence as members of individual families. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
A wilful rejection of salvation
Mr. Spurgeon has said, To me it is especially appalling that a man should perish
through wilfully rejecting the Divine salvation. A drowning man throwing away the
life-belt, a poisoned man pouring the antidote upon the floor, a wounded man
tearing open his wounds--any of these is a sad sight. But what shall we say of a soul
refusing its Saviour and choosing its own destruction? (R. Venting.)

JER 36:3
It may be.

It may be

I. THIS WORD SHOWS US THE HEART OF GOD. Displeased because of sin, but longing
to show mercy to the sinner. All His counsels and warnings, promises and
threatenings, are for good (De 5:29-33; De 32:44-47; Isa 1:18-20; Jer 8:7-11; Eze
12:3; Eze 18:31; Hos 11:1-8; Joh 3:16-17; Luk 19:10; Luk 19:41-42).

II. This word reveals the grand possibilities of human life.

1. Earnest attention (Jer 36:3).
2. Penitential prayer (Jer 36:7).
3. Moral reconciliation. The hindrances to peace are not with God, but with us.

III. This word holds out encouragement to all true workers for Christ.
1. Prayer.
2. Holy endeavour.
3. Missionary enterprise. (W. Forsyth, M. A.)

JER 36:4-7
I am shut up.

Jeremiah in prison
1. Jeremiahs age was one of great political troubles.
2. It was also an age of signal religious privileges.
3. It was an age of great moral corruption.

I. HIS IMPRISONMENT SUGGESTS THE SAD MORAL CHARACTER OF HIS AGE. The
prisons of an age are often criteria by which to determine its character. When
prisons are filled with men of signal excellence of character, force of conscience, and
self-denying philanthropy, you have sad moral proofs of the deep moral corruption
of the age that could tolerate such enormity.
 II. HIS IMPRISONMENT SUGGESTS GODS METHOD OF RAISING HUMANITY. Heavens
plan embraces the agency of good men. The agency is twofold, primary and
secondary. There are spiritual seers and spiritual mechanics.
1. Jeremiah may be regarded as a type of the primary human agents whom God
employs. They are frequently in the lowest secular condition; yet in that
condition God communes with them, and gives them a message for the
world.
2. Baruch may be regarded as a type of the secondary agents. In this age the
Baruchs are numerous. Men abound who will take down the thoughts of
great thinkers; but the Jeremiahs are rare. Thought power, rather than
tongue power, is wanted now.

III. His imprisonment suggests the inability of the external to crush a holy soul.
1. He is free in his communion with heaven. From the dungeon he cried, and
God heard him (Lam 3:56-57).
2. He was free in his sympathies with the race. He could not go out in body to
the house of the Lord, but he went out in soul. Walls of granite, massive iron
bars, chains of adamant, cannot confine the soul; nor can the densest
darkness throw on it a single shadow. (Homilist.)

Gods servant imprisoned

When Henry Burton, two centuries ago, was persecuted for the name of Christ
and put in prison, I found, he said, the comforts of my God in the Fleet Prison
exceedingly, it being the first time of my being a prisoner. Go thou, and read in the
roll.
The prophet and the roll:--

I. The solicitude of Jeremiah--(verses 4, 5).

II. The command of Jeremiah (verse 6).

III. The hope of Jeremiah (verse 7).

If Divine mercy could not woo them back to righteousness, he hoped that Divine
justice might drive them. Alas! he was disappointed. The national heart, with a few
rare exceptions, hardened into granite. And then they were overwhelmed with
calamities. (E. Davies, D. D.)

The utility of Holy Scripture

See here the utility of the Holy Scriptures and the excellent use that may be made
of reading them. A man maybe thereby doubtless converted, where preaching is
wanting, as divers were in Queen Marys days, when the Word of God was precious;
as Augustine was, by reading Rom 13:1-14.; Fulgentius, by the prophet Jonah;
Franciscus Junius, by Joh 1:1-51., &c. (John Trapp.)
 JER 36:6
The fasting-day.

Symbolism of a fast

I. It exhibits the duty of a wise self-restraint or self-denial, in receiving the good

gifts of heaven. What could more exactly typify this than the temporary withdrawing
from innocent pleasure, and even from the proper nourishment of the frame? It is
temporary, and not absolute; an occasion, and not a permanency; a suspension, and
not a renunciation. It admonishes us by an example, and does not crush us by a law.
It reminds us of the obligation of sobriety in the use of the world s offerings. It bids
us reflect that it is good for us to break away at times from what is plentiful,
contenting ourselves with what is scanty; and to interrupt the course of the
enjoyments that only do not reproach us, in order to make room for higher
satisfactions. It exhorts us to be frugal, to be watchful, to be provident. It enjoins to
be temperate in all things, and to let our moderation be known to all men; to learn
how to lack as well as how to abound; and to show to others and prove to ourselves
how well we can resign what we would fain keep, and refrain from what we desire to
do, controlling tongue and hand, wish and passion, at the call of any holy
commandment.
2. It typifies our weak and subject condition. When we pause in the midst of our
blessings, and put them at a distance for a while that we may see them the
better, we remember how precarious is our hold upon them, and how easily
what we dispense with for a day may be withdrawn from us for ever. Fulness
may shrink. Strength and activity may be crippled. Resources heaped up ever
so high may be scattered to the winds. Opportunity and desire may perish
together. It is good to be impressed with this at intervals, though it would not
be good to dwell upon it perpetually; for you make a man none the better by
making him habitually sad.
3. It presents an image of the sorrows of the world. These are a part of our
subjection, and a peculiar part. While it is foolish and ungrateful to
anticipate trouble, every day having enough to do with its own; and it is one
of the worst occupations we can engage in, to torment ourselves with
unarrived calamities, and paint the white blank of the future with woe; yet it
becomes thoughtful persons, and has no tendency to make them less
thankful, to consider She evils of humanity. They may be thus preserved
from presumption, thus guarded against surprises, thus furnished with a
fellow-feeling for the sufferings of others, and thus better prepared for their
own trial when God shall send it.
4. Fasting represents penitence. It does so on the principle already mentioned,
since penitence is one kind of grief. It does so on another ground. When a
man is thoroughly stricken with the sense of sin, and seeks to express that
consciousness, he describes his unworthiness to receive the bounties of
heaven by declining to partake of them. (N. L. Frothingham.)
 JER 36:20-26
He cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth until
an the ton was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth
The burnt roll

I. The incidents connected with the text.

II. A few observations upon them.

1. The piety of the parent is no assured guarantee for the religion of the son. The
life of the Spirit can alone come from God, and it is given and withheld in a
way to us past finding out. There are many instances in which we should not
be justified in attributing any neglect to the parent, though the child may not
by any means have walked in his steps; and, where this does occur, men not
unfrequently become monsters of iniquity; for it has been well remarked that
none are more abandoned than those who become wicked after a religions
education: they cannot have quietness in vice till they have stupefied their
consciences; and the greater the obstacles before men can fully indulge their
lusts, the more depraved they are afterwards. The testimony of the Spirit,
respecting Josiah, the father of Jehoiakim, is this, that he did that which
was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the ways of his father
David.
2. However men may slight and pour contempt upon the threatenings of God,
they can in no way prevent their fulfilment. Jehoiakim and his princes
mocked at the message of God, despised His gracious warnings, and
purposed the infliction of punishment upon the prophet and scribe
concerned in their delivery; but by so doing they did but provoke the wrath
of the Lord till there was no remedy: God at length brought upon them the
King of Babylon. And all this, we are told, took place, that the Word of the
Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled. The destruction of the
world in the time of Noah was long delayed; but it came at length, and that
when men were little expecting it. And, if men will not be prevailed upon to
flee to the refuge which God hath in infinite mercy provided, this warning
must be fulfilled in their destruction.
3. Those who slight Gods warnings increase their condemnation. It was
declared by the Lord through Huldah, the prophetess, to Josiah, the father of
Jehoiakim, Because thine heart was tender, and thou didst humble thyself
before God when thou heardest His words against this place and against the
inhabitants thereof, and humbledst thyself before Me, and didst rend thy
clothes and weep before Me, I have even heard thee also, saith the Lord:
behold I will gather thee to thy fathers; and thou shalt be gathered to thy
grave in peace (2Ch 34:27).

III. THE APPLICABILITY OF THIS SUBJECT TO PRESENT TIMES. Are there not those in
this our land who endeavour, by the keen knife of wit and sarcasm, to cut the Bible
in pieces, and thus bring it into contempt, and cause it to be neglected? And why do
they act thus? They hate the Bible because they perceive that its threatenings are
pointed at them and their sins; they are against the Bible because they see that the
Bible is against them; they Know very well that, if the Bible be true, if it be indeed
the Word of the living God, they are in a very awful case--in danger of feeling the
wrath of God for ever in another world: this they cannot bear to think of, and
therefore they first begin to wish that it may not be true; next, indulge a faint hope
that it is not; and, lastly, are led on by. Satan to believe that it is nothing else but a
cunningly-devised fable, fitted to frighten and alarm the minds of the weak;
forgetting that the very circumstance which makes it so distasteful to themselves,
namely, that it forbids the indulgence of every sinful desire and the practice of every
wicked act, is of itself one of the very strongest proofs that it is not the Word of man,
but of God.

IV. Some lessons of instruction.

1. The duty of reverencing Gods Word.
2. The duty of making it known according to our ability among others.
3. The duty of dealing ,faithfully with those who live in disobedience to Gods
commands. (T. Grantham.)

The burnt roll and the Scriptures

I. The words in the roll were inspired by God; so are the Scriptures.
1. Christ appealed to and taught out of them (Mat 4:4; Mar 12:10; Joh 7:42; Act
1:16; Heb 3:7; 2Pe 1:19; 2Pe 1:21; 2Ti 3:16).
2. Further proof--
(1) Their harmony and agreement.
(2) The perfect moral scheme they unfold.
(3) Their power over mens hearts.
(4) Their wonderful preservation.

II. The words in the roll contained Divine threatenings against sin. So throughout
the Scriptures.

III. The words in the roll were intended to produce penitence and result in
forgiveness (verse 3). To the Lord our God belong--mercies, &c.

IV. THE WORDS IN THE ROLL ARE DESPISED BY THE HARDENED AND REBELLIOUS
(verses 22-24). Burning was merely the outward and visible sign of contempt,
neglect, and disdain.

V. The words in the roll are, nevertheless, reverenced by some (verse 25).
(Homiletic Magazine.)

Rejection of Gods message

I. Deep and varied interest of the Book of Jeremiah.

 1. Divine truth of doctrine and promise (Jer 17:1-27; Jer 30:1-24; Jer 31:1-40,
&c.).
2. Views of a prophets inner life of anguish and faith (chaps. 1, 9, 10, 12).
3. Passages of vivid narrative (this chapter).

II. A strange scene.

III. A SEARCHING LESSON FOR THE SOUL. The possibility of complete indifference
to the most urgent warnings from God, even without open rejection of religion. Let
us take the case of Zedekiah thus in some few respects.
1. His act as a specimen of the souls acts now.
2. His excuses.
3. His doom.

IV. ZEDEKIAH HEARS A MESSAGE FROM ONE WHOM, ON THE WHOLE, HE OWNS AS
GODS MESSENGER, AND, BY WAY OF REPLY, HE BURNS IT. Countless souls own the
Bible, as, on the whole, Gods Word. Perhaps in a time of distress, like Zedekiah
(chap. 38.), they will anxiously turn to it. But in their hour of security, when grief or
conscience is silent, the Bible may warn mere, but in vain. Church lessons, sermon
texts, family portions, private reading, all bring them Gods warnings. The soul,
while it dares not say it is false, can yet cast the unfelt truth aside.

V. ZEDEKIAH, PERHAPS, EXPLAINED HIS ACT IN SOME VAGUE WAY TO HIMSELF.

Jeremiah is a prophet; but cannot a prophet be prejudiced and exaggerate? So
Bible readers will let sceptical depreciation off the Bible so far warp them as just to
take the edge off the reality of its warnings. Ye shall not surely die.

VI. BUT MUCH MORE THAN THIS: ZEDEKIAH POSITIVELY REJECTED THE MESSAGE
FROM WOUNDED PRIDE. He did not want it: he was well enough as he was. This
blinded him in great measure to the question whether it were from God or not. So
self will rise against the very words of Jesus, till it has seen its need and misery as it
is (Rev 3:17).

VII. ZEDEKIAH, FOR ALL THIS SECURITY AND INDIFFERENCE, WAS ON THE VERGE OF A
REAL AND DREADFUL DOOM. Ruin, captivity, blindness, bereavement (chap. 39.). So
now, indifference to Divine warnings is no disproof of their truth. The Judge of all
the earth will act, not on our view of things, but on His own.

VIII. HE WHO THREATENS IS HE WHO ATONES, SAVES, AND LOVES. He sends His
real threatenings to drive us to His real mercy (Rev 3:19). (H. C. G. Moule, D. D.)

Jeremiahs roll burnt

The history with which our text is connected is soon told. It appears that Jeremiah
the prophet, at the command of the Lord, had instructed Baruch the scribe to write,
in a roll of a book, an abstract or an abridgment of all the sermons which during the
last three-and-twenty years he had preached, as well as an account of the various
judgments which the Lord had denounced against Judah by reason of their sins.
This was done that the king and his people might be put in remembrance of what
they had heard, and that they might the better understand it, when they had it all
before them at one view.

I. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WRITTEN WORD. Our Lord and His apostles speak to us
by their written words in the New Testament; and they attest the inspiration of the
written Old Testament by the numberless quotations from its various hooks. These
Scriptures we are commanded to talk of, when we walk by the way, and when we sit
in the house. We are also especially to heed them when they are read or explained
to us in the sanctuary of public worship.

II. THE VALUE OF DIVINE ORDINANCES. We should come up to the house of God,
my brethren, to ask those things that be necessary as well for the body as the soul.
We should come up to set forth Gods most worthy praise. We should also come up
to hear His most holy Word.

III. THE LORDS OBJECT IN THE SCRIPTURES. The object which God has in view in
giving us His Word, is to save our souls. He therein tells us, first, of our danger, and
then of our refuge. The Scriptures, therefore, when rightly received, issue in our
salvation. This was the Lords object in reference to Judah. Judah had sinned; and
the Lord had threatened, by Jeremiah, to punish those sins. Mean-while, however,
he tried once more to bring them to repentance. He therefore commanded Jeremiah
to commit to writing all the evils he had pronounced against that nation, in the hope
that, when they read what was written, they might be alarmed at their danger, and
seek pardon from their God before their destruction came.

IV. THE REBELLION OF THE CARNAL MIND. The carnal mind, we are told, is
enmity against God. It on this account opposes Gods Word, and hates and
persecutes Gods faithful servants.

V. THE FOLLY OF DESTROYING GODS WORD. Those men destroy Gods Word who
will not receive its sayings. It matters not, however, my brethren, whether you
receive the whole Word of God, or not. By it you must be one day judged. The
judgment will be set, and the books will be opened. If you could get together and
burn all the Bibles in the universe, that flame would never destroy Gods truth. Hell
would be the same: eternity would be the same: death and judgment would be
unaltered. Reject not, then, the inspired Word. Receive it most thankfully. Pray, over
it most earnestly. (C. Clayton, M. A.)

The rash penknife

Jehoiakim s last opportunity was now to come. The Spirit of God comes upon the
prophet Jeremiah, and inspires him with a message from Heaven. Baruch, the
scribe, is summoned to take it down in writing from his lips. I see him coming to the
prophets chamber with ink and pen and sheets of parchment. The people are awed
and amazed. One of them, named Michaiah, instantly hastens off to the palace, and,
finding a number of the princes gathered together, acquaints them with what has
taken place, and gives them the substance of the prophecy. Presently one of these is
commissioned to go into the monarchs presence and inform him. Jehoiakim,
professing great indifference, has yet his curiosity aroused, and wishes the
document itself to be brought to him. So Jehudi runs and fetches the roll, telling of
the awful judgments that are about to descend upon the throne and upon the land,
and proceeds to read it aloud to the king. The tragic sequel you already know, So
Jehoiakims day of grace closed. In that moment the door of mercy was shut against
him for ever! His doom was sealed. The Spirit of God was quenched. The man was
given up. Not, observe, that his life was ended; he lived at least four years after this;
but he had sinned away his day of grace, and never more was God to ply him with
the offers of mercy. His souls ruin was now complete.

I. THOSE WHO, IN THEIR EARLY DAYS, HAVE RESISTED HOLY INFLUENCES, GENERALLY
TURN OUT THE MOST WICKED OF MEN. I hardly know an exception to this rule. Nor can
you much wonder that it is so. It is just what we might expect. When a man
deliberately tramples on conviction, and resists the dealings of Gods Spirit, he uses
the most effectual means to sear his conscience and harden his heart. If, in early
days, you have been hedged round with Christian influences, and loving counsels,
and bright examples, and fervent prayers: and you have withstood all these things,
you are just the person most likely to make a rebound to the other extreme, and
plunge headlong into gross iniquity.

II. If a mans religion is not genuine and heart-deep, it often happens that
troubles and calamities only drive him farther away from God. Do you remember
what is written of King Ahaz? It might be written of many a one besides him. In the
time of stress did he trespass yet more against the Lord. Yes, with some men the
more they suffer the more they sin. Adversity angers them against God. It is well
known that times of pestilence, whilst they have brought out an unwonted religious
earnestness on the one side, have brought out an unusual amount of wickedness on
the other. The plague of London developed the vices of the metropolis to a frightful
extent. Men patrolled the streets singing ribald songs beside the dead cart. When a
ship is wrecked, and about to go to the bottom, if some fall on their knees and pray,
others fly to drink and cursing. Nothing is a truer touchstone of character than the
way in which a man treats the chastenings of God.

III. AS THE HEART GETS HARDENED IN SIN, THERE IS A GROWING UNWILLINGNESS TO

LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF GOD. As soon as a young man begins an evil course, and
resolves to take his fill of sinful pleasure, he acquires a hatred of his Bible, and a
disinclination to attend the house of God. If he cannot silence Gods ministers, he
will keep as far as possible from them, and shut his ears against all good counsel I
know a man to whom the sound of the church bells is so hateful, that in the warmest
day in summer he will close all his windows, if possible, to keep it out. He was once
a very different man, but now the devil has got such possession of him, that he
abhors every vestige of religion; and I verily believe that were you to put a Bible into
his hand, he would cut it in pieces with his penknife, and pitch it into the fire. If I
want to know something of your state of heart, I ask, what value do you put on, and
what use do you make of the law of God? (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)

The Bible disposed of, what then?

Were the Bible proved to be quite unworthy of confidence, were it shown to be
dotted everywhere with error as thick as a leper with his loathsome scales, what
advantage would it be to godless men?

I. GOD WOULD STILL REMAIN. The Bible does not make God; it does not even
demonstrate the being of God. It assumes Him. Its opening words are, In the
beginning God created. The simplest argument in all the world is that which
phrases itself thus: Design supposes a designer. Were I to say that John Milton
made Paradise Lost by jumbling letters in a bag and tossing them forth, all
reasonable men would laugh at me; but this would be no more preposterous than is
the allegation that our universe is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. All men know
that back of law is the Lawgiver, back of order the Arranger, back of design an
Infinite Contriver. But while the world would retain its belief in God, it would, in the
absence of the Scriptures, know nothing of His Providence or of His Fatherhood.

II. THE SENSE OF SIN WOULD REMAIN. The Bible is not responsible for the sense of
sin. If there were no Bible, our consciences would still speak to us. When Prof.
Webster was lying in prison awaiting his doom he made formal complaint that he
was affronted by his keepers, who shouted at him, Oh, you bloody man! and by his
fellow-prisoners, who pounded on the walls of his cell, shouting, Oh, you bloody
man! A watch was set, but no voice was heard; it was his guilty conscience that was
crying out against him. It is not the Bible that gives us Ixion on the wheel, or
Sisyphus vainly rolling the stone up the mountain-side, or Tantalus up to his lips in
the ever-receding waters. No, in any case conscience would remain; but in the
absence of revelation we should know no remedy for its sting.

III. WERE THE BIBLE DESTROYED, OUR SENSE OF DUTY WOULD STILL REMAIN. The
moral law is set forth in the Scriptures in the Decalogue and the Sermon on the
Mount. The Decalogue, however, was written in the human constitution long before
it found expression in Scripture. It is interwoven with the nerves and sinews of the
race. The Sermon on the Mount is simply a broad and glorious exposition of the
Decalogue. There is nothing new or original here. We are reminded that the Golden
Rule itself did not originate with Christ. The ethical system of the Bible is merely an
authoritative statement of certain laws which are written in the soul of man. God
here places His imprimatur on those otherwise anonymous precepts which the
whole world recognises as right. So, were the Bible to vanish, the moral distinctions
would remain, and a man would know his duty while, alas! ever sensible of not
doing it.

IV. THE BIBLE GONE, DEATH WOULD STILL REMAIN; DEATH-AND JUDGMENT
FOLLOWING AFTER. It needs no revelation from on high to tell us that, as Abd-el-
Kader says, the black camel kneels at our gate. That admonition is written on the
grave-stones that line the journey of our life.
The air is full of farewells to the dying
And mournings for the dead.
But without the Scriptures we should have no hope of triumph over death.

V. THE DREAM OF IMMORTALITY WOULD STILL REMAIN. This is quite independent of

Scripture. The Greeks put an obolus upon the tongue of the dead to pay their
ferriage across the Styx because there might be a happy land beyond. The Indian
chic was buried with his bows and arrows at his side, because, if there should by
chance be a happy hunting-ground, he would need them there. Thus immortality
has always been a fond dream--a dream only. When Cicero lighted the lamp in the
grave of his daughter it was with the thought that possibly her life, though
extinguished for a time, might be rekindled. When Socrates put the cup of hemlock
to his lips, he said, I go; whether to perish or to live again I know not. The old fable
of the Phoenix expressed the fondest of pagan hopes. No, no, we should not lose the
dream but we should lose the certainty, for in the Gospel life and immortality are
brought to light. The twilight vanishes, the dream becomes a splendid reality. The
Bible is our noonday sun. Its glories are far away from the multitude who will not
receive it. There are mysteries, vast and incomprehensible here; but burn the Book,
or what is the same, let the world lose its confidence in it, and all that makes life
worth living goes from us. But the Bible is in no danger; it has come to stay; it will
glorify life and illuminate the valley of death until the last penitent sinner has gone
through heavens gate. Voltaire said that he would pass through the forest of the
Scriptures and girdle all its trees so that in a hundred years Christianity would be
only a vanishing memory. The hundred years have expired; Voltaire is gone, and
none so poor to do him reverence, but Christianity is still here, and the trees of the
Lord are full of sap. The brazier of Jehoiakim is a golden altar, the fumes of which,
like frankincense, have gone through all the earth. (D. J. Burrell, D. D.)

The mutilated Bible

1. Consider the object which God has in view in writing His Word and sending
His written messages to mankind. This object is most pathetically set forth
(verse 3). That is why God has given us the Bible! Not to bewilder us, not to
start us on courses of intellectual speculation, not to tempt our curiosity, not
to found rival sects, but to bring us to Himself to obtain forgiveness of
iniquity and sin.
2. Man is so unwilling to hear anything unpleasant or disagreeable about
himself that lie gets into a wrong temper before he actually knows what God
s object is. Jehoiakim did not hear the whole roll. Did any man ever destroy
the Bible who knew it wholly? The difficulty is in the three or four leaves.
There are men to-day who having heard three or four leaves of Genesis have
cut it with the penknife. They cannot get over the six days and the talking
serpent, so they cut the roll with the penknife. Or if they begin another book,
they are offended by the extraordinary numbers of people killed in war, and
the romantic ages of the patriarchs; so they cut the roll with the penknife. Or
if they begin elsewhere, they are offended by the descriptions of human
nature, its depravity, its helplessness, its horrible sin; and having heard three
or four leaves, they cut the roll with the penknife. Now the Bible must be
read in its entirety, that all its parts may assume their just proportions and
their appropriate colour.
3. Though Jehoiakim cut the roll and cast it into the fire, the words were all
rewritten, and the impious king fell under the severe and fatal judgment of
God (verse 30). Men have not destroyed revelation when they have destroyed
the Bible. The Word of the Lord abideth for ever. The penknife, cannot
reach its spirit, the fire cannot touch its life. The history of the Bible is one of
 the proofs of its inspiration.
4. The desire to cut the Bible with the penknife and to cast it into the fire, is
quite intelligible because in a sense profoundly natural. The Bible never lures
human attention by flattering compliments. What wonder if the leper should
break the mirror which shows him his loathsomeness?
5. This desire to mutilate the holy Word shows itself in various ways, some of
them apparently innocent, others of them dignified with fine names and
claiming attention as the last developments of human progress.
(1) Look, for example, at the use made of the sectarian penknife.
(2) Look at the use of the philosophical penknife. The letter is cut down to
nothing, and revelation becomes a question of consciousness, so that the
inquiry is not so much, What is written? as, What do you feel? From
these reflections we may well learn to hold the roll as inviolable, holy,
sufficient, final. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The indestructible Book

There are thousands of Jehoiakims yet alive who cut the Word of God with their
penknives; and my object is to designate a few of them. The first man I shall
mention as thus treating the Word of God is the one who receives a part of the Bible,
but cuts out portions of it with his penknife, and rejects them. Jehoiakim showed as
much indignity toward the scroll when he cut one way as when he cut the other. You
might as well behead Moses as to behead Jonah. Yes, I shall take all the Bible or
none. No; you shall not rob me of a single word of a single verse of a single chapter
of a single book of my Bible. When life, like an ocean, billows up with Rouble, and
death comes, and our barque is sea-smitten, with halyards cracked, and white sails
flying in shreds, like a maniacs grey locks in the wind--then we will want Gods
Word to steer us off the rocks, and shine like lighthouses through the dark channels
of death, and with hands of light beckon our storm-tossed souls into the harbour. In
that last hour take from me my pillow, take away all soothing draughts, take away
the faces of family and kindred, take away every helping hand and every consoling
voice--alone let me die, on the mountain, on a bed of rock, covered only by a sheet of
embroidered frost, under the slap of the night-wind, and breathing out my life on
the bosom of the wild, wintry blast, rather than in that last hour take from me my
Bible. Stand off, then, ye carping, clipping, meddling critics, with your penknives! I
can think of only one right way in which the Bible may be divided. A minister went
into a house, and saw a Bible on the stand and said, What a pity that this Bible
should be so torn! You do not seem to take much care of it. Half the leaves are gone.
Said the man: This was my mothers Bible; and my brother John wanted it, and I
wanted it; and we could not agree about the matter, and so each took a half. My half
has been blessed to my soul, and his half has been blessed to his soul. That is the
only way that I can think of in which the Word of God may be rightfully cut with a
penknife. The next man that I shall mention as following Jehoiakims example is the
infidel who runs his knife through the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and rejects
everything. Men strike their knife through this Book, because they say that the light
of nature is sufficient. Indeed! Have the fire-worshippers of India, cutting
themselves with lancets, until the blood spurts at every pore, found the light of
nature sufficient? Has the Bornesian cannibal, gnawing the roasted flesh from
human bones, found the light of nature sufficient? No! I call upon the pagodas of
superstition, the Brahminic tortures, the infanticide of the Ganges, the bloody
wheels of the Juggernaut, to prove the light of nature is not sufficient. A star is
beautiful, but it pours no light into the midnight of a sinful soul. The flower is sweet,
but it exudes no balm for the hearts wound. All the odours that ever floated from
royal conservatory, or princely hanging gardens, give not so much sweetness as is
found in one waft from this scriptural mountain of myrrh and frankincense. All the
waters that ever leaped in torrent, or foamed in cascade, or fell in summer shower,
or hung in morning dew, gave no such coolness to the fevered soul as the smallest
drop that ever flashed out from the showering fountains of this Divine Book. The
light of nature is not sufficient. Infidels strike their penknife through this Book
because they say that it is cruel and indecent. There are things in Ezekiel and
Solomons Song that they dont want read in the families. Ah! if the Bible is so
pernicious just show me somebody that has been spoiled by it. Again, they strike
their penknife through the Bible because it is full of unexplained mysteries. What,
will you not believe anything you cannot explain? Have you finger-nails? You say,
Yes. Explain why, on the tip of your finger, there comes a nail. You cannot tell me.
You believe in the law of gravitation; explain it, if you can. I can ask you a hundred
questions about your eyes, about your ears, about your face, about your feet, that
you cannot answer. And yet you find fault that I cannot answer all the questions you
may ask about this Bible. I would not give a farthing for the Bible if I could
understand everything in it. I would know that the heights and depths of Gods truth
were not very great if, with my poor, finite mind, I could reach everything. Again,
the infidel strikes his penknife through this Book because he says, if it were Gods
Book, the whole world would have it. He says that it is not to be supposed that if God
had anything to say to the world He would say it only to the small part of the human
race who actually possess the Bible. To this I reply that the fact that only a part of
the race receives anything is no ground for believing that God did not bestow it.
Who made oranges and bananas? You say, God. I ask, How can that be, when
thousands of our race never saw an orange or a banana? If God were going to give
such things why did He not give them to all? If all the human race had the same
climate, tile same harvests, the same health, the same advantages, then you might by
analogy argue that if He had a Bible at all He would give it to the whole race at the
same time. Again, the infidel strikes his penknife through the Book by saying: You
have no right to make the Bible so prominent, because there are other books that
have in them great beauty and value. There are grand things in books professing no
more than human intelligence. The heathen Bible of the Persians says: The heavens
are a point from the pen of Gods perfection. The world is a bud from the bower of
His beauty. The sun is a spark from the light of His wisdom. The sky is a bubble
on the sea of His power. Beautiful! Beautiful! Confucius taught kindness to
enemies; the Shaster has great affluence of imagery; the Veda of the Brahmins has
ennobling sentiment; but what have you proved by all this? Simply that the Author
of the Bible was as wise as all the great men that have ever lived put together;
because, after you have gone through all lands, and all ages, and all literatures, and
after you have heaped everything excellent together and boiled it down, you have
found in all that realm of all the ages but a portion of the wisdom that you find in
this one Book. Take it into your heart! Take it into your house! Take it into your
shop! Take it into your store! Though you may seem to get along quite well without
this Book in your days of prosperity, there will come a time to us all when our only
consolation will be this blessed Gospel. (T. De Witt Talmage.)
The written Word
Jeremiah continued to prophesy close up to the time of the first captivity. The
days were evil, the cup of the nations iniquity was filling rapidly, as rapidly, indeed,
as the cup of its predicted desolation and sorrow, yet the people discerned not the
signs of the times.

I. THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH LED TO THE PREPARATION OF THIS ROLL. Jeremiah

had now been a preacher to the people for three-and-twenty years, serving the Lord
with all humility of mind, and warning the nation every one night and day with
tears. The effect of these spoken addresses, however, had been utterly
disappointing; under Divine guidance he must now have recourse to another
expedient. He must prepare a summary of all his sermons, revive upon the minds of
the people the warnings which seemed to have passed away; must enable them to
read, each in the solitude of his secret chamber, words which, as heard with the
outward ears, had neither moved them to repentance nor kindled in them any sense
of alarm. And the word came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Take thee a roll
of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel,
and against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spake unto thee, from
the days of Josiah, even unto this day. It is worthy your noting how frequently in
the Old Testament the Almighty gives instructions to have His words committed to
writing; to Habakkuk it is said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables.
The commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai must be preserved on two
tables of testimony,--tables of stone, written with the finger of God; and the
commission given to Ezekiel shall be contained in the roll of a book, written within
and without. Of all this, no doubt the design is to make us appreciate the value of a
written revelation, of a written rule of faith, of a written charter of salvation, of a
written and inspired record of the mind and will of God. In a matter so vital to mans
happiness, God would not leave us at the mercy of mans memories--to the fidelity
with which oral traditions might be handed down. But let us see what this history
teaches us is the avowed purpose of the Most High in giving us this written
revelation. Write all these words, for it may be that the house of Judah will hear all
the evil which I purpose to do unto them; and the same thought is repeated in the
seventh verse, where Baruch is instructed to go and read the writing to the
assembled people. It may be, they will present their supplication before the Lord,
and will return every one from his evil way. But how striking is this language on the
part of Almighty God. It may be that such and such effects will follow on the use of
certain means. In the infinite prescience of the everlasting mind we know there can
be no such thing as a may be; gathering into its sweep as that mind does the issues
of all being, chance, time, space, every circumstance with regard to every soul, is an
inevitable must be. While still further, with regard to this very people of whom it is
said, It may be that they will turn, we know it was a settled fact, in the order of the
Divine omniscience, that they would not turn, but would deal very treacherously.
Too humble we cannot be in dealing with those apparently conflicting difficulties of
moral state, nor too thankful either. They teach us that in relation to the acts and
purposes of an infinite mind there are things which are too high for us; that however
much two statements may seem to cross each other, if they are clearly revealed we
must accept both. An intellect to which nothing would be paradoxical, says Bishop
Horsley, would be an infinite intellect. It is a bad way of reconciling two Scripture
doctrines to ignore or overlook or hide under a bushel one of them. The denial of the
doctrine of the Divine predestination, of a knowledge on the part of God of how you
or I shall act at any given moment of our future history, is simple atheism; the
dethronement of God from the rule of the universe, and a passing of the sceptre to
the hands of a thousand wild contingencies, that each may contend for it as it will.
And yet with all this must be in the Divine purposes, room should be left for the
may be in the human volition and acts. I bid you take a practical example. Look at
the apostle Paul and his companions in the storm. All the men in that ship were to
be saved; he knew that, as an absolute purpose of God, which nothing could prevent.
It was a must be; but the sailors did not believe in this assurance. Hope was gone,
the ship must be abandoned. Down with, the boats instantly, and let each for
himself take his chance of deliverance. Now, how did Paul act, with his
foreknowledge that all the passengers should be saved? Did he sit quietly? Just the
reverse; with all the earnestness and solemnity of one who felt that on the assistance
of these sailors he and all that sailed with him were dependent for their life, he cried
out, Except these abide in the ship ye cannot be saved. I have told you that there
shall be no loss of any mans life among us and I believe that It shall be even as it
was told. He seems to add, God s predestinations are accomplished not by the
superseding of human efforts, but by the employment of them; not by forcing our
moral liberty, but in harmony therewith. The end is fixed; but for the fulfilment of it
my earnestness is necessary, your submission to my directions is necessary; the
labour and skill of these seamen to lighten the ship, to take up the anchor, to loose
the rudder-bands, to hoist up the mainsail to the wind are necessary. There is a
sense in which it must be that you shall be saved, and there is a sense in which it
may be that you shall perish. You have, to do, not with the certainty, but with the
contingency, and it hangs upon this, Except these abide in the ship. And it is under
like limitations that God uses the expression, it may be, in regard to the effect
which the writings of Jeremiah might have upon the minds of those who should read
them,--whether the Jews or ourselves. But, in our case, the putting of the Bible into
our hands is, so to speak, a moral experiment. To us, His ministering servants, God
says, Here is a book fitted by the nature of its discoveries to commend itself to every
mans conscience; calculated by its discoveries of a Saviours love, and power, and
tenderness, to win the most hardened heart to repentance, and accompanied,
moreover, with such piercing and persuasive energy, through the influences of the
Spirit, that only on the supposition of the most resolved obduracy and pride can any
conscience remain unconvinced of its guilt, or any sinner continue in the error of his
ways. I, in My infinite foresight, may know that in the case of this man, or of that,
the message will fail, but I will have the experiment tried with all. Thou shalt speak
My word unto them, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear. You must
preach upon contingencies; Take thee a roll of a book, it may be that the house of
Judah will hear all the evil that I purpose to do unto them. But let us look at this
may be--this merciful contingency that God, in condescension to our forms of
thought, is pleased to speak of. These possible results, which it is in the heart of God
to do, should be produced by our taking the Book of Scripture into our hands. First,
God hopes thereby to excite in us a holy fear of His just displeasure--It may be that
they will hear all the evil that I purpose to do unto them. Yes, will hear it and
believe in it--will not suppose that I speak parables, will not think that I have just
menaced merely to humble, or have drawn pictures of calamity only to terrify, but
will be persuaded of a truth that if My message be not accepted these results will
follow. I will leave men to themselves, I will withdraw from them the influences of
My Holy Spirit, I will bid the great High Priest offer up no more prayers for them, I
will even suffer them to delude themselves into a false peace. Oh! ye who despise the
Word, will ye hear all the evil which God purposes to do unto you? But see, God has
better hope of His work. He trusts it may produce amendment of life, accompanied
with earnest desires for forgiveness--It may be that they may return every man
from his evil way, that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin. Do not fail to note
here the import of that expression. That I may forgive. It touches upon another of
God s deep things, namely, upon what God is able to do, what are the limits imposed
upon Him by the nature of His own attributes, upon some things which cannot be
done by Him, to whom, nevertheless, we are accustomed to say that all things are
possible. Sins of longest life I can forgive, and sins of the blackest dye; I can forgive
infirmity, forgive years of despised grace and despised opportunity, but it is beyond
the power of My holy nature, beyond the reach of the great propitiation, to forgive
where there is no returning, where the heart is still in love with evil, enslaved under
the uncast-off yoke of sin. It may be that they may return, that I may forgive their
iniquity and their sin. I must note one other of these contingent results which God
hopes for through His written Word, put by the Spirit into the mouth of Jeremiah;
namely, that it will set the people upon much earnest prayer. It may be, he says to
Baruch, in the seventh verse, that they will present their supplications before the
Lord, and will return every one from his evil way. Very beautifully does this come
in, for none of the other results were to be expected without this the sense of
spiritual danger, the heart to turn from sin, the desire for experimental assurance of
the Divine forgiveness, are, it is true, not things that we could ever obtain by
ourselves, but are the gifts of God, promised to earnest and persevering prayer. You
are told to pray, told that it is the will of God that you should pray. There you have
something; use that, and then God will give more. You pray that you may know how
to pray; if the heart so turned to God be not yours, yet you desire that you may have
that heart, and all hinges upon your honest use of Gods kind contingencies. This
merciful experiment He is making with you as to the use of His written Word, it
may be they wall present their supplications before the Lord. If they do, the next
step will follow, they will return every one from his evil way. Such is the design of a
gracious God, in ordering Jeremiah to prepare the roll; such were His ends in
restoring it after it was destroyed, and presenting it, with all its subsequent
enrichments, for the use of us and of our children unto this day.

II. THE ROLL DESTROYED. Jeremiah, as we learn from the narrative, was at this
time under restraint; not in prison, where he was not placed until afterwards, but
only forbidden by Jehoiakim to exercise his prophetic functions, or even to be
present at the services of the temple. Accordingly he gives it in charge to Baruch, a
man who had taken all the Lords words in his mouth, to go up and recite all the
words of the Lord in the ears of the people who would assemble in the Lords house
on the fast day. Whether there was no congregation assembled, or in obedience to
some unrecorded instruction, the first reading of the roll seems to have taken place
in the hearing of a single person only, in one of the side courts in the entrance of the
gates of the Lords house. This noble hearer was Michaiah, the son of Gemariah, the
son of Shaphan, the scribe, who was so arrested by the words he had heard that he
lost no time in going to tell them, as well as he could remember, to the princes at the
time resident in the court of Jehoiakim. Interested in this second-hand recital, the
princes thought they should like to hear for themselves, and they accordingly sent
for Baruch to the palace, that they might have a private hearing of the words of this
roll. And here it concerns us nearly, to watch what effect the reading of this roll had
upon the princes. Well, in the first instance, it produced in the minds of these
princes sentiments of deep emotion. It came to pass, when they had heard all the
words, they were afraid, both one and the other, and said unto Baruch, We will
surely tell the king all these words. Easily can we conceive how encouraged Baruch
would be by this first fruit of a faithful message; he had stirred up the dormant
activities of conscience; the arrows of conviction were rankling sharply in the soul, a
sudden fear had evidently taken hold of the men,--they trembled. For this, as we
know, is the sequel: the princes tell the matter to the king, the king sends for the
book, commands one of his servants to read out of it, and is so irritated at its
disclosures, that at the end of the third or fourth leaf he takes the roll from the hand
of Jehudi, and having cut it up to pieces that no part of it might be recovered, waits
with awful deliberation until all the roll is consumed in the fire on the hearth. The
marvel of the sacred writer seems to be less at the burning than at what followed the
burning, or rather at what did not follow the blasphemous hardihood that could go
so far and not tremble at the mischief itself had wrought, yet they were not afraid,
nor rent their garments, neither the king nor any of his servants that heard all these
words. It is just here that an important practical lesson comes in for us, for it tells
us what despised religious conviction may lead to; what a soul-hardening tendency
there is in warnings which we have felt once, and felt keenly too, but which we
resolved afterwards we would put aside and try to forget all about; and the danger is
the same to this day. Show me a man who has never been the subject of one serious
or solemn thought, whom the Word, whether read or preached, has never
penetrated with a sense of sin or danger, and of that man, I say, I have hope. The
arrow is yet on the wing, it may pierce him yet. But when we come to the case of a
man who, like Judahs princes, has trembled under the power of the Word, or who,
like Jehoiakim himself, has felt it to be so pointedly addressed to his own heart that
he could bear its presence no longer, then I say there is room for nothing but the
most distressing apprehension, and fearful standings in doubt. Ay! better had it
been for Elnathan, and Delaiah, and Gemariah never to have seen that roll at which
their consciences trembled, than having seen it and having trembled at it, to have
relapsed into their former indifference, and even to stand by whilst its dishonoured
pages were blazing on the hearth.

III. THE ROLL RESTORED AND REPLENISHED WITH MORE AWFUL JUDGMENTS. Who
ever hardened his heart against God and prospered? Who ever kicked against the
pricks of an accusing conscience and did not live to mourn in bitterness his folly?
The anger of Jehoiakim against the roll was great, because it told him that the king
of Babylon should certainly come and destroy the land. And so, like the foolish
Brahmin who crushed the microscope with a stone because it showed him insects in
his food, he thought to be revenged on the roll by burning it in the fire. Well, what
are the consequences? Why, the new roll Jeremiah was to write contained not only
the former things, but some worse, even the utter ruin of the royal house, the
condemnation of Jehoiakims posterity to captivity and shame, and the exposure of
his own body to the burial of an ass, as an eternal monument of Gods displeasure
against all who despised the warnings of His written Word. Not only was Jeremiah
to rewrite all the words of the Book which had been burned in the fire, but, says the
sacred historian, There were added besides unto them many like words. And what
is the great practical lesson I wish you to derive from this part of the history? That
the Word of God is imperishable. A singular and wonderful Providence, as we all
know, has watched over that Word. Every jot and tittle shall have its complete
fulfilment, for indeed there is something beyond the mere writing. Oh, suffer me to
remind you of its double aspect, its double lesson, its double tendency, either to
strengthen the mind and hopes of the righteous, or to cover with overwhelming
hopelessness the prospects of the ungodly and the sinner. Let me say a word first to
those who feel that they do not belong to Christ, have no part in the covenant, know
well enough they are not washed, not sanctified, not justified by the Lord Jesus
Christ, and by the Spirit of our God. Must I not in all faithfulness say to them, even
as Baruch would have said to Jehoiakim when he threw the strips and shreds of
heavenly truth into the flame, Be thou well assured that all the words written in this
roll shall come to pass, yes, and there shall be added unto them many like words?
The neglect of the preached Word can but aggravate the condemnation. Heaven
and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away. More grateful,
however, is it to the minister of the Gospel of love and peace to approach this
imperishableness of the written Word from its other side, and see what are the
promises to them that fear God. And to them I say, even to all that are in Christ
Jesus, to all that have found peace, this unfailing certainty of all that God hath
written in His Word is like a footing on the everlasting rock. Yes, it is yours to live in
a world of change, changes in nature, changes in Providence, changes in the Church
of God, changes in the rolling seasons, changes in your own frames and feelings, and
desires and spiritual experiences; and what protection and refuge against your own
inconstancy, your own fluctuations of purpose, and will, and power, is it to be able to
fall back on the unchanging, eternal, indefeasible Word of promise of the Most High
God, of Jesus the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. (D. Moore, M. A.)

Bible-burning
We read in the first lesson this morning the earliest instance of Bible-burning on
record, and also the uselessness of the experiment. On this page of the Bible we have
two extremes brought into juxtaposition--there is the extreme of utter obedience, as
illustrated by the Rechabites, in the preceding chapter, and the extreme of
disobedience, recorded here. Between these two cases lies the life conduct of the
men and women of our generation. Few are so obedient as to follow out to the very
letter the duties enjoined on us by Gods holy Word. We like to shirk the more
disagreeable, and to modify others so as to justify a partial obedience; and yet,
though we may try to find loopholes through which to escape distasteful duties, I
question much whether any would go to the extreme of defiance, represented by
Jehoiakims conduct in burning the Book itself. Whether the teachings of the Book
are followed out as they should be, or disregarded, people generally admit their duty
to obey and yield honour and respect to the Book itself, if not from proper motives,
then from a superstitious, unreasoning veneration. The holy Bible ought to be
treated by us with respect at least; the Book ought not to be treated as any other
book, but should occupy a place peculiarly its own, and that because it is the gift of
God to man, the gift which shows us the way of salvation, which tells us of Gods
relationship to us as our Father, which tells the story of a Saviours love and
compassion. Jehoiakim is a beacon to us to warn us of the danger of hardening our
hearts and resisting holy influences. Sins persisted in bring sorrow and reverses, and
the effect of reverses is either to bring us to God or to drive us far away from Him
into the outer darkness of misery and ruin. Unless the heart is illuminated by the
light of true religion, man will rebel when God chastens; misfortunes will but drive
him into evil excesses, and, instead of quickening within his breast the sense of sin
and inciting to repentance, he will go from bad to worse, he will be unwilling to hear
the voice of God, will shut his eyes to his danger, and will, in effect, dismiss those
whose duty it is to recall him to his better self, with the old answer of Felix to Paul.
(M. P. Maturin, M.A.)

Rejected blessings
Time is the material of our lives, but do not those people out it with a penknife,
and cast it into the fire, who talk of killing time, and put their words into practice?
But if it perishes it is recorded, and an hour will come when they would give all that
they possess for a moment of it. Youth is one of the precious opportunities of life--
rich in blessings if we choose to make it so, but having in it the materials of undying
remorse if we out it with a penknife, and cast it into the fire. Health is another of
Gods most precious gifts which is too often cut with a penknife and thrown into the
fire of passionate sin. Never treat money affairs with levity--money is character.
This is a wise precept, for money is a power lent to us by God, not for our own use
only, but for the good of others. There is then such a thing as conscientious money-
spending, and it is very sinful to cut money, so to speak, with a penknife and cast it
into the fire. If we are to be saved, we must use the means of salvation which God
gives to us as He gave this roll of a book to Jehoiakim. Above all, we must not treat
with contempt the gracious invitations of our Saviour to come unto Him. If we
despise or neglect so great salvation, we shall kill our souls. No doubt Jehoiakim
fancied when he burned the roll upon which Gods threatenings against his sins
were written, that these would somehow be prevented from taking effect. But the
truth of God is not so easily destroyed. Jeremiah caused another and a longer roll to
be written. From this we may learn the often-forgotten fact that the truth of God
does not depend upon men. They may believe or they may not believe, but though
this matters to themselves it cannot destroy truth. It is well to remember this fact,
which, when stated, seems so obvious, for many men have a contemptuous
patronising way of talking about religion as if it would perish if they ceased to
believe it. And as it is with truth, so is it with our responsibilities. We do not get rid
of them by simply ignoring them and treating them with contempt. (E. J. Hardy, M.
A.)

Jehoiakims penknife
A homely writer says, Jehoiakims patent has expired, and a whole army of
followers of his are fond of cutting at Gods Word. God gives very sharp, earnest,
forcible warnings. He gives them in Scripture; He gives them in our daily lives. Do
not let us handle Jehoiakims penknife to pare down the long dark columns of
warning against sin and heedlessness and godlessness, which are written in His
book. Shall I tell you how this absurd childish folly comes about? It comes of small
pieces of heedlessness, gentle warnings not heeded, then stronger ones are sent, and
they too are soon tossed aside. I cannot believe that Jehoiakim became such a
downright fighter against God by any sudden visitation; he probably went on from
smaller neglects to greater; from neglects to rejections; from rejections to defiance,
till at last he thought as little of cutting Gods Word into fragments, as he once
would have thought of putting off a serious thought to a more convenient season. (J.
Kempthorne, M. A.)

Burning the roll

I remember, when on a mission, coming down from a pulpit where I had been
pleading with souls, and going up to a respectably dressed man, one on whom my
eye had rested more than once while preaching. I saw the tear was in his eye; I knew
that the Word had gone home to his heart. I entreated him then and there to give
himself up to the Lord. I daresay I talked with him for a quarter of an hour, till at
last I found he too seemed to burn the roll. He began by listening to me politely and
civilly, but as I went on earnestly pleading with him, pressing him to surrender
himself to God, I saw he was resisting and hardening his heart, till at last he said
something to the effect that he wished I would not talk to him any more. So after
offering a short prayer I had to withdraw. A few weeks after, that man was struck on
the head in a drunken broil, and never had time to say, God save my soul. His day
of grace ended in that church, he too had burned the roll. (W. Hay Aitken, M. A.)

Unbelief does not alter facts

Jehoiakim made the other mistake of thinking that he had removed the danger
when he had destroyed the roll that told of it. He could burn the parchment, but did
that arrest the tramp of Nebuchadnezzars army? Putting out the lighthouse lamps
does not blow up the reef. Its merciless fangs are as sharp as ever, and all the more
surely fatal because they are hid in the darkness. We do not alter facts by refusing to
believe them, or to attend to the statement of them. As Bishop Butler says, Things
are as they are, and burning Jeremiahs roll changed nothing. Only it was the
throwing away of one more possibility of escape, and made the king a more hopeless
victim of the fierce conqueror. (A. Maclaren.)

Jehoiakims wickedness
We have before us one of the most tragic acts of wickedness recorded in the
history of the kings of Judah. It is in striking contrast with the act of the good King
Josiah (2Ch 34:15-33), who, when the lost book of the law was found, humbled
himself and gave instant heed to its warnings and precepts; all the more so because
the good king was father of this wicked and defiant one. Truly grace does not run in
the blood. The chapter before us relates how Jeremiah had written out a summary of
the prophecies concerning the impending captivity, and caused it to be read to the
people assembled at a great and special fast in the Temple, and afterward to the
princes in private, and finally to the king (verses 1-19). The object of the special
message was one of compassion and pity on the part of Jehovah (verses 3, 7). It is
wonderful how, in the midst of His wrath, God always remembers mercy. The
reading of the prophecy to the people evidently made a deep impression, for the
news of it was carried to the princes, who sent for Baruch and had him read it to
them. They in turn were deeply affected, and said it must be brought before the king.
They, however, knew his tyrannical temper, and took two precautions. First, after
hearing from Baruch s lips how he came to write this prophecy of woe, they warned
him to go with Jeremiah, and both to secrete themselves from the wrath of the king;
then they laid the writing up in the house of the scribe (verses 15-19), and lastly went
in to report the matter to the king. These princes seemed favourable to the prophet
and to the Word of God, but they feared the king. An evil king can suppress the good
that is in his people and prevent a whole nation from repentance or reformation.
Men in authority have great privilege, but also great responsibility.

I. THE WORD OF GOD DESTROYED. The burden of the word of Jeremiah, which was
a summary of all his prophecies on this point, was that Judah should be carried
away captive by the King of Babylon (verse 29). This was not the first warning, but
the gathering up of all past threats; it was Gods final word to the king and the
people. As it was read, he ordered it bit by bit to be cut away and thrown into the fire
until all was consumed. In this action the following points may be noted--
1. The contempt of the king. The princes had put the writing away in the house
of the scribe (verse 20) before they went in to the king. This was a testimony
of their respect for a message sent by a prophet of the Lord, and of their fear
for its safety. The king, however, had no such feelings of reverence for Gods
Word. He did not even dignify the document by sending a proper official to
bring it; but showed his contempt by telling a page or under-secretary to
fetch it. This act was a suggestive prelude to what followed afterward. The
Bible, of all books, is entitled to the place of highest honour, and it is a bad
sign when this due respect ceases to be manifest.
2. The rage of the king. As the book was being read, the king overlooked the
message, which undoubtedly was incorporated, that God hoped that the
reading of it might induce them to turn from their sins and claim His
promised mercy. Many people, who declaim against what they call the hard
and bitter denunciation of sin and of the judgments of God, seem
persistently to forget that the Book which condemns sinners to death and
hell is mostly taken up with earnest and loving entreaties to repentance, with
promises of life and salvation. God was beyond his reach, but His Word
being within his grasp, he poured out his wrath against that. He ordered it to
be cut to pieces and burned with fire. This was not a hasty and impulsive
action on the part of the king, but deliberate and premeditated. He
perseveres in his evil work, notwithstanding the remonstrances of his
princes. He was a proud and haughty scorner, who dealt in proud wrath
(Pro 21:24). There are times when remonstrance ceases to be wise, and a
wilful sinner must be given up to his chosen way. The reason for his wrath
was the evil tidings which the prophets words brought him. Yet how foolish
was his wrath--how impotent his rage! For what did he destroy? Only the
parchment on which the Word of God was written; not the Word of God
itself. It is related of a heathen princess of hideous countenance, that on
looking into a mirror which a missionary had, and seeing her ugliness, she
destroyed the glass in rage, and ordered that no more mirrors should be
brought into her kingdom. I once saw a man in a railway carriage to whom a
leaf of the New Testament had been given, crumple it up in his hand, fling it
on the floor, spit on it, and grind it under his heel. This action was as
ridiculous as it was impotent. The rage of the hater of Gods Word was
evoked, but the Word of God was not destroyed.
3. The attitude of the witnesses. There were two classes of witnesses present.
(1) The kings servants; his pages and immediate attendants. Yet they were
not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the king nor any of his
servants that heard all these words. This implies that the message not
only failed to bring about any repentance or desire that the evils
 threatened might be averted (compare 2Ch 34:19), but that the servants
were not even horrified at the action of the king in ordering the writing to
be destroyed. They became parties to the act of the king in his wilful
unbelief, in his contempt and deliberate defiance of Jehovah. When we
join ourselves either in service or companionship with unbelieving men,
we must be prepared either to go with them or break from them, when a
crisis comes by reason of Gods Word. We may serve an ungodly king,
like Daniel, if we have the courage to take Gods part when occasion
comes, or we may have social and business relations with unbelievers, if
we are prepared to act in a like loyal manner. But how often a timid
Christian finds himself overborne by his wicked companions when they
warm themselves at their fire, as with Peter in the High Priests palace.
(2) On the other hand, there were three princes present who made
intercession to the king, that he would not burn the roll; but he would not
hear them. They had, however, cleared their skirts and washed their
souls from the iniquity. Are we as faithful in all such like emergencies?
4. The baffled king. Having destroyed the writing, the king began to reflect that
he had not avoided Gods Word or put himself beyond the further reach of it,
so long as the scribe and the prophet were at large. He therefore sent to have
them arrested. Probably he contemplated their murder, thinking thus he
would get rid of the Word. This is an old method with the haters of God. But
the Lord hid them. Let us suppose he had succeeded in getting hold of the
prophet and had killed him; would he next seek to destroy God too? This
would be the logical course. How men forget that when they have destroyed
the outward revelation they have not destroyed the Word of God; and when
they have killed the prophets they have not baffled the Spirit by whom the
prophets speak. God hid His prophet and His scribe. Man is immortal till
God has no further need of him. Let all God s witnesses know of a truth that
God can deliver His servants from any manifestation of the wrath of man, if
it is best for them and for His cause; and let them know when He does not
deliver, it is neither for want of love, faithfulness, nor power, but because all
round it is best that they should seal their testimony with suffering or death.

II. THE INDESTRUCTIBLE WORD. The facts in this incident bring out clearly the
truth, that mans hatred and rage against Gods Word are as impotent as is the
broken wave that falls back in spray from the rock against which it has spent itself.
In this conflict of man against Gods message, we see that it is neither a book nor a
man against which the enemies of Christ fight. God can reproduce His Word, either
by the same prophet, as He did in this case, or by another. Before the world can get
rid of the Gospel it must kill all the believers in the world, and then they must not be
too sure that God has not hidden His Word as He hid His prophet, to come forth
unexpectedly, as the law came forth in the time of Josiah. Millions of Bibles may be
destroyed, and the preachers and witnesses of the Word burned and put to the
sword, but it only serves to both increase the Word of God and multiply the
witnesses. When will the world learn that they cannot fight against God? Look only
at the impotence of men in this conflict in the past. One Herod destroyed the little
children, but God hid His Christ; another Herod beheaded John the Baptist, but
failed utterly to destroy his testimony. The world crucified Christ; but God raised
Him from the dead. The world imprisoned the apostles, stoned Stephen, put James
to the sword, persecuted the young Church, but this only served to increase the
number of believers and multiply the revelation. Paul wrote more Epistles while in
prison than he would have if he had been free. John wrote the Revelation while he
was exiled for the Word of God. The Word of God cannot be broken, or defeated,--
as this foolish and wicked king found out. Several points more may be noted in
connection with this latter half of our study.
1. God takes note of our treatment of His Word. It is evident that the eyes of the
Lord were upon the king while he was burning the roll, from the fact that,
immediately afterward, He commissioned Jeremiah to rewrite it.
2. The Word rewritten. Not one jot or tittle of Gods Word shall pass away till
all be fulfilled. What was the king advantaged by his work? What are any of
us advantaged by our unbelief? Suppose we say, I do not believe Gods
Word, will that alter the fact that it will be carried out to the letter? Suppose
instead of destroying Gods Word, we keep it closed, never look into it and
never go where it is preached, or, reading and hearing, do not heed it; will
that prevent it from being fulfilled? Shall our unbelief make Gods Word to
be a lie? Did the unbelief of the antediluvians prevent the flood?
3. More words added. In the first message God had simply told the king that he
and the people would be carried away captive, but now He adds more, saying
that for this act of wickedness he himself should be deprived of a direct heir,
and his body should be cast out and exposed to the heat of the day and the
frost of the night. He would not only bring upon the men of Judah all that He
had first declared, but would add an especial punishment to the king.
Cumulative unbelief brings cumulative punishment. With the burial of an ass
shall he be buried; dragged and east out far from the gates of Jerusalem, and
none shall mourn for him, either as brother, or kindred, or king (Jer 22:19).
To mutilate the Word of God, either by adding to it or destroying it, is to
bring special additional plagues and sufferings upon the transgressor (Rev
22:18-19). Let us learn this solemn lesson in connection with the Word of
God. His Word is eternal; it can neither be bound nor broken; that it will not
cease in the world until all that is written therein be fulfilled. All the unbelief,
neglect, and rage against it are utterly futile (Isa 40:6-8). (G. F. Pentecost.)

The story of a penknife

I. JEHOIAKIMS USE OR MISUSE OF THE PENKNIFE. Let us talk a little about this
famous penknife. In itself it was a very insignificant article. Very unlike was it to its
namesakes of to-day, which contain so many other things beside the knife blades
that one feels as if one were carrying about an engineers tool bag and a portable
carpenters shop. The knife Jehoiakim used was a rough specimen of workmanship,
doubtless, even though, as it belonged to me king s confidential secretary, it is likely
to have been the very best of its kind. Probably it was a straight bit of metal
thickened at one end for a handle, flattened and sharpened for a blade at the other
end. A pocket-knife it was not, being carried in the oblong writing-case or box along
with the ink horn and reed pen. That rough bit of bladed iron was the instrument of
the kings spiritual suicide.

II. The meaning of Jehoiakims conduct.

 1. He had formed a resolution against God. The message of the roll asserts the
Divine authority over Jehoiakim and his kingdom. He would not permit such
interference. He would manage his own affairs. How bright a day was it for
some of us when we resolved that we would serve God! But what a black day
it must be when the decision is taken that God shall not be served. That was
what Jehoiakim meant. He doomed himself henceforward to follow his own
will.
2. This resolution was avowed by a public act. Among our red-letter days, if the
day of decision for Christ comes first, the day of professing Christ comes next
in importance. As days are reckoned in heaven, that would be the exact
order. But what a terrible thing to express the opposite decision! It may be
quickly and easily done-by the tone of a laugh. Jehoiakims courtiers would
all know, as well as if he had said the words, punctuating each word with a
slash of the penknife at the manuscript, I will not serve God.
3. The decision and profession were impatient and hasty. The entire roll was
Gods message to the king. Only three or four columns--a very small portion
comparatively, was read before the whole was destroyed. To decide against
God without hearing Him out, is a madmans act. Let our minds be open a
while longer. Jehoiakim had committed himself, and all the greater part of
his people.
4. This hasty action was an insult to God. To tear up a letter unread or in public-
-and Jehoiakim did both--can have but one meaning. This letter ought
never to have been written. But fancy acting like this towards God, and
saying to your Maker, You have no business to interfere with me!

III. THE USE OF THE PENKNIFE BY IMITATORS OF JEHOIAKIM IN OTHER TIMES. In

many ways it is possible to insult Almighty God by professing a hasty, half-conscious
decision that we will let Him manage our life. The penknife is still at work in various
ways.
1. One favourite kind of penknife is an insult or injury to Gods messenger. Gods
message is often represented by the man who brings it, and pulling the
servant to pieces, in one way or another, is a common expression of revolt
against God. Herods penknife was the sharp sword of his executioner,
putting an end to the life of the prophet who had become an incarnate
rebuke. Cruelty is not always necessary. A passing slight is quite enough.
2. Similar results may be effected by staying away from a meeting, or severing
oneself from a society or class, breaking off an acquaintance with an earnest
Christian, and so on. The Bible class is getting rather warm, as you call it.
Conversions are frequent, and it will be your turn soon. So you absent
yourself.
3. A more or less sincere profession of scepticism will serve the purpose well.
Are there some here ready to decide hastily against God and heaven? Have
you listened to the entire message which, in various ways, God has spoken?
Have some of us used the penknife in days gone by? Has the message of the
Saviour no power to affect us now, because of certain action of ours in the
past, which has torn up, as it were, the communication between God and
ourselves? Are we on this account conscious of no desire or inclination to be
better than we are? Let us humbly entreat the Lord we have insulted to speak
 again. Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth. No, I am not Thy servant; but I
fain would be; nor am I sure that I can hear. I destroyed my hearing by my
own act; but oh, for the sake of the dear Saviour, who bade the Gospel be
preached to every creature, speak again, Lord, and make me listen. (W.
Carey Sage, M. A.)

A fool and his penknife

All things were hastening to a general clash and ruin unless they speedily mended
their ways; and the king and his flatterers were living, as such gentry do, in a fools
paradise. Jeremiah saw it with the seers illumined eyes. It came to him as the Word
of the Lord, and as the Word of the Lord he wrote it down on a roll of parchment.
The roll was brought to the king, as he sat enthroned in one of his palaces, with his
courtly parasites and sycophants around him. It contained no flattery. It was a black
picture of the kings misdoings, and the terrible consequences which some near
morrow would bring. The royal sinner did not like it. What sinner does, whether he
be king or beggar? He did not want to think about to-morrow. No man on the
highway to destruction does.

I. NOW THAT PICTURE OF THE KING WITH THE PENKNIFE IS OFTEN REPEATED IN
VARIOUS WAYS. The Bible has been so often attacked by that instrument that if it
were not the indestructible Word and work of God it would long since have
disappeared. People have always been so busy cutting out what they did not believe,
or what they did not like, that really it is only by a perpetual miracle that there is any
of it left. I thank God that I have still my Bible, and believe in it in spite of all the
cutting and paring down that has been done. Somehow it stands the fire and comes
out unharmed, no matter what furnace you pass it through. Critics have their day,
and Jehoiakims do their fooling and die, but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever.

II. I am afraid we all keep that instrument for special occasions, and use it when
we do not wish to face an inconvenient or unwelcome truth. Men who profess the
greatest reverence for the Bible sometimes manage to put out parts which do not
harmonise with their conduct and views. There are our good friends who admire,
honour, revere, and love Christ as the highest man, but stop short of worshipping
Him as Divine. It must surely be a difficult thing for them to read the New
Testament without the penknife.

III. I FEAR WE ARE ALL SINNERS, EITHER WITH PENKNIFE OR THE PASTE. We often
cut out moral precepts and commandments if they do not quite accord with our
conduct. Most of us use the knife on those many words of Jesus and His apostles
which warn us against Mammon worship and covetousness and the love of money,
and tell us not to pay all our devotions to the people who have it. It makes our
conscience easier if we can somehow get these texts put out. Some people do not
always like the Fourth Commandment and kindred injunctions which speak to us
about honouring father and mother and reverencing the hoary head. That is quite
antiquated prejudice, and out of date, they say; let the penknife deal with it.
There are people who talk far too freely, and not always too truthfully, discussing the
faults of friends, and passing on mischievous scandal. I read them what Jesus said:
For every idle word you shall give account. Oh! is that there? they say. I do not
believe it; lend me a penknife. And there are Christian people who find it
desperately hard to forgive; it is as hard as to get a camel through the eye of s needle.
They will keep a grudge and maintain a silent quarrel with a fellow-Christian for
years. I open the book for them and read: If thy brother offend thee seventy times,
and seventy times repent, thou shalt forgive him, &c. Be ye kind, tender-hearted,
forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any. And they stop me and
say, These things are not in my Bible; I have cut them all out. And there are all
those sayings of the Master and His apostles about cheerfulness, gladness,
thankfulness--Be of good cheer; in all things give thanks; be content with such
things as ye have; rejoice always, and again I say rejoice. They are the brightest and
pleasantest sunshine in the Bible; but some of us use the penknife on them every
day. We should all be better Christians if we could lust take the Book as it is, and not
be always forgetting or putting out the parts we least like. But let me not forget to
say that the penknife is used far more constantly, and more in Jehoiakims fashion,
by those who are not Christians at all, by those who are living wholly irreligious
lives. Away with all the warnings, threatenings, counsels, and invitations which
stand in the way of our desires. The soul that sinneth it shall die. The wages of sin
is death. For all these things God will surely bring thee into judgment.
Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap Cut away the roll; burn it; let us
forget the words; out of mind is out of existence; the day of reckoning will never
come. But it does come, nevertheless! The inevitable hour creeps on; the debt stands
though you tear the bill in two and burn both halves. You cannot burn Gods ledger
in which all the accounts are kept. You will have to pay that bill unless, through faith
and repentance and the merits of Jesus, it is all forgiven. (J. G. Greenhough, M. A.)

The indestructible Word

I. EYES OPENED TO SEE. There was a vast difference between Baruch, whose heart
was in perfect sympathy with Jeremiah, and Jehudi or the princes. But there was
almost as much between the faithful scribe and the heaven-illumined prophet. The
one could only write as the words streamed from those burning lips; he saw nothing,
he realised nothing; to him the walls of the chamber were the utmost bound of
vision; whilst the other beheld the whole landscape of truth outspread before him,
the rocks and shoals on the margin of the ocean, the inrolling storm-billows tipped
with angry foam, the gathering clouds, the ship straining in every timber and driving
sheer on the shore. This was the work of the Spirit who inspired him, and whose
special function it was to open the eye of the seers of the old time to the great facts of
the unseen and eternal world, which were shortly to be reduplicated in the world of
the temporal and visible. To speak what he knew, and to testify what he had seen--
such was the mission of the prophet. In our case there is no likelihood of this. Yet
men may be seers still. Two men may sit together side by side. The veil of sense may
hang darkly before the one, whilst for the other it is rent in twain from the top to the
bottom. Happy are they the eyes of whose heart are opened, to know what is the
hope of His calling, what the riches of His inheritance in the saints, and what the
exceeding greatness of His power toward them that believe. It is very important that
all Christians should be alive to and possess this power of vision. It is deeper than
intellectual, since it is spiritual; it is not the result of reasoning or learning, but of
intuition; it cannot be acquired in the school of earthly science, but is the gift of Him
who alone can open the eyes of the blind, and remove the films of earthliness that
shut out the eternal and unseen. It is a thousand pities to be blind, and not able to
see afar off, when all around stand the mountains of God in solemn majesty; as the
Alps around the Swiss hostelry, where the traveller arrives after nightfall, to eat and
drink and sleep, unconscious of the proximity of so much loveliness. If, on the other
hand, you have the opened eye, yon will not need books of evidences to establish to
your satisfaction the truth of our holy religion; the glory of the risen Lord; the world
of the unseen. With the woman of Samaria you will say, We have seen it for
ourselves. They who see these things are indifferent to the privations of the tent-
life, or, as in Jeremiahs case, rise superior to the hatred of man and the terrors of a
siege.

II. THE USE OF THE PENKNIFE. It is probable that no one is free from the almost
unconscious habit of evading or toning down certain passages which conflict with
the doctrinal or ecclesiastical position in which we were reared, or which we have
assumed. In our private reading of the Scripture we must beware of using the
penknife. Whole books and tracts of truth are practically cut out of the Bible of some
earnest Christians. But we can only eliminate these things at our peril. The Bible is
like good wheaten bread, which contains all the properties necessary to support life.
And we cannot eliminate its starch or sugar, its nitrates or phosphates, without
becoming enfeebled and unhealthy. It is a golden rule to read the Bible as a whole.

III. THE INDESTRUCTIBLE WORD. Jeremiah wrote another roll. And the facts to
which Jeremiah bore witness all came to pass. Neither knife nor fire could arrest the
inevitable doom of king, city, and people. The drunken captain may cut in pieces the
chart that tells of the rocks in the vessels course, and put in irons the sailor who
calls his attention to it; but neither will avert the crash that must ensue unless the
helm is turned. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JER 36:24
Yet they were not afraid.

The hardening power of sin

Is it conceivable that men who believed Jeremiah to be a prophet of God should
despise his words? Is it credible that, after preaching for twenty years, those who
listened to him should think him a prophet, and yet throw his sermons in the fire? I
am afraid this is very conceivable and very credible: I see nothing in it a whir more
incredible than in this, that men who dare not deny the Bible to be the Word of God,
should know what is right and not do it, that they should have warning of a far more
fearful captivity than that which was coming on the Jews, and yet should never
tremble. The king of Judah and his people were not in the condition of men who had
been sinning in ignorance, and to whom a sudden message had come from God to
warn them to repent; they had no excuse of this kind, they had been deliberately
disobeying God in spite of the warnings of Jeremiah, they had sinned against light,
as we say, and so they had become blinded and hardened. At first probably, when
they heard the prophet, they felt that they were living wickedly and made resolutions
to amend, but by and by temptation came again and they gave way; then once more
they would hear the warning voice, but somehow it would not this time be so
terrible. Is it difficult to find examples of the like thing now? of men who by little
and little fall from one sin to another, who have been taught as children the way of
God and have been told of heaven and hell, and so are scared at first when they
think that the wages of sin is death; but by and by this truth seems to lose its edge,
sin has gained more hold, and Satan has said as he did to Eve, Ye shall not surely
die; one sin leads to another, and each seems easier than the one before it; things
which once appeared frightful now seem simple and familiar, and thus after a time
the man becomes hardened. This is what the confession of many criminals confirms,
they trace their wretchedness hack to some much smaller sin committed when
young: a boy disobeys his parents, and perhaps would not believe you if you told
him that he had taken one step towards the gallows; and let this may be true. This I
understand by the deceitfulness of sin, to which the apostle refers its hardening
power (Heb 3:13); it is deceitful, because what we call a small sin appears trifling,
because we judge of sins merely in themselves, without considering to what they
lead. If in a war a general were to see a few of the enemys soldiers straggling over
the hills, he might say that they were so few that they were not worth considering,
but would he say so? or would he not rather look upon them as the forerunners of a
great army, would he not prepare at once to resist the host of enemies which he
must know lurked behind? In like manner the sins of childhood are the forerunners
of the great army of the world, the flesh, and the devil, which comes up in maturer
years, and the only safe course is to look upon no sin as trifling, but to root out every
enemy whether small or great, lest perhaps we allow our enemy to gain such
strength as shall end in our overthrow. We will consider first the ease of a man who
seldom or never goes to church. Now I suppose the reason such a man would give is,
that he does not see the use of it. Did he always think so? Most probably he had been
taught differently when a child, he had been taught that God is with His people
gathered together in His Name, that our Lord Jesus Christ is there; he was taught
this, and he once believed it, but now he thinks he is as well at home: how has this
change come about? has he reasoned about it? probably not at all: has any one for
whom he has any respect told him so? certainly not: then what has changed him? it
is the effect of habit; he has been hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. What I have
just said will apply almost without change to the case of a man who never prays. He
was taught to pray as a child, and perhaps he continues the practice, till at length,
because he does not act up to his prayers, he finds the practice tiresome, and so he
finds an excuse to omit prayer occasionally; then he grows more careless and more
irregular, and yet the omission costs him less and less pain, till at last the time
comes when he forgets God altogether, and so starves his soul to death. Or again,
what shall we say of those who continually hear of their duty, and do not do it, or at
all events do it in a very stinted degree? One man is just and kind and liberal, being
scarcely aware of it himself, and another is niggardly and churlish, not because he
thinks it right to be so, but because he has become hardened. It is a thing for every
one of us to think over and pray over, whether we are in all things following God
without reserve, and whether there may not be some point in which we are falling
very grievously short, but to which habit has hardened us. (Bishop Harvey
Goodwin.)

Afraid of the Bible

A celebrated infidel once said, There is one thing which mars all the pleasure of
my life. Indeed, replied his friend; what is that? I am afraid the Bible is true,
was the answer. If I could know for certain that death is an eternal sleep, I should
be happy--my joy would be complete. But here is the thorn that stings me--this is
the sword that pierces my very soul: if the Bible is true, I am lost for ever. This is
the Bible upon the truths of which many have lived, and in the belief of which many
have died. Oh, how terribly afraid would they have been if anyone had been able to
show that it was untrue! For upon its truths all their hopes are built. An untrue Bible
would mean an untrue Christ; and a Christless death would be a death of doom to
them. (Quiver.)

A foolish bravery

I. IT IS A FOOLISH BRAVERY TO IGNORE FACTS. Just that did Jehoiakim. It was a fact
that he had sinned. It was a fact that Jeremiah was Gods prophet. It was a fact that
God, by the mouth of Jeremiah, had spoken doom for the sin of Jehoiakim unless he
should repent. But Jehoiakim would have nothing of these facts. He cut the roll to
pieces and threw it in the fire, &c. This did not change the facts.
1. It is a fact that good is what ought to be.
2. It is a fact that God is the good.
3. It is a fact that evil is what ought not to be.
4. It is a fact that the good which ought to be must be against the evil which
ought not to be.
5. It is therefore a fact that God, who is the good which ought to be, must be
Himself against the evil which ought not to be.
6. It is, therefore, a further fact that if I choose the evil which ought not to be,
the good God, who must be against the evil which ought not to be, must be
against me.

II. IT IS A FOOLISH BRAVERY TO IMAGINE YOURSELF AN EXCEPTION FROM THE

WORKING OF THE DIVINE LAW. Have you never been subdued into a vast awe, as the
absolute irreversibleness of natural law has been pressed upon you? It is because
natural law is so unchanging that we may build our cities, and send our ships, and
plough our fields, and reap our harvests. But there is another and a fearful side to
this irreversibleness of natural law. When, for any reason, man stands athwart one
of these great natural laws, the penalty for violation is sure to smite. And this is as
true in the moral realm. It is a foolish bravery to think yourself an exception to Gods
law. He said it--there am many who think it who do not so plainly say it--that young
man, whom I was seeking to dissuade from courses of dissipation. Oh, he
answered, it may hurt other fellows, but it wont me; I am an exception. How
crammed with folly such temerity!

III. It is a foolish bravery to refuse truth which you dislike.

IV. It is a foolish bravery to go on heedlessly, saying, i dont care.

V. It is a foolish bravery to refuse repentance. (W. Hoyt, D. D.)

The guilt of indifference to Divine threatenings
1. The man who hears Gods threatenings without being afraid, and His kind
invitations and promises without being melted, does in effect say to His face,
I consider nothing which Thou canst utter as of sufficient importance to
excite the smallest emotion; neither Thy favour nor Thy displeasure is of the
least consequence to me; I dread not Thy threatenings, I regard not Thy
promises; after Thou hast said all that Thou canst say, I remain perfectly
unmoved, and prepared to execute, not Thy pleasure, but my own. And if this
does not express the utmost contempt of God, what can express it?
2. This sin also involves and indicates the highest degree of unbelief, of that
unbelief which makes God a liar. When a man brings us intelligence of most
important events, of events in which, if true, we are deeply interested, we
cannot tell him more plainly that we disbelieve everything which he has said,
than by remaining perfectly unaffected. He then who is but in a small degree
affected by Gods Word, has but little faith in it, and he who is not at all
affected by it has no faith in it at all. He is as completely an infidel as anyone
who ever gloried in the name.
3. Those who hear or read the Word of God without being affected, display
extreme hardness of heart. They show that their hearts are absolutely
unimpressible by any motives or considerations which infinite wisdom itself
can suggest; that they are of so much more than flinty hardness, as to resist
that Word which God Himself declares to be like a fire, and a hammer, that
breaketh the rock in pieces. (E. Payson, D. D.)

JER 36:26
But the Lord hid him.

Hidden, but radiant

The Lord hid him. What that precisely means it is impossible to say: Was there a
John of Gaunt for this Wycliff, an Elector of Saxony for this Luther? Did Ahikam,
who had before interposed on his behalf, or his sons--Gemariah, who lent Jeremiah
his room in the Temple for the reading of his roll, and Gedaliah, who became
Governor of Judah after Zedekiahs deportation--take the prophet under their care?
Or was this hiding something more Divine and blessed still? These Divine hidings
are needed by us all. We must obey the voice that cries to us, as it did to Elijah, Get
thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself. We are too prominent, too
self-important, too conscious of ourselves. And God must sometimes hide us in the
sick-chamber, the valley of shadow, the cleft of the rock. He calls us to Zarephath, or
Carmel, to the privacy of obscurity, or of solitude. It is stated that on one occasion
when the dragoons of Claverhouse were scouring the mountains of Scotland in
search of the Covenanters, a little party of these godly folk, gathered on the hillside
for prayer, must have fallen into their hands had not a cloud suddenly settled, down,
effectually concealing them from their pursuers. Thus the Son of God still interposes
for His own.

II. HE RE-EDITED HIS PROPHECIES. To this period we may refer the Divine
injunction: Thus speaketh the Lord, the God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the
words that I have spoken unto thee in a book (Jer 36:2). It may be that throughout,
this period Baruch continued to act as his faithful amanuensis and scribe. He, at
least, was certainly included in the Divine hidings (Jer 36:26-32). It was at great
cost to his earthly prospects. He came of a good family, his brother being Seraiah,
who held high office under King Zedekiah, and he cherished the ambition of
distinguishing himself amongst his compeers. He sought great things for himself.
But he was reconciled to the lot of suffering and sorrow to which his close
identification with Jeremiah led him, by a special revelation assuring him of the
speedy overthrow of the State; and that, in the general chaos, he would escape with
his life (45). By the aid of this faithful friend, Jeremiah gathered together the
prophecies which he had uttered on various occasions, and put them in order,
specially elaborating the predictions given in the fourth year of Jehoiakim against
the surrounding nations. The word of the Lord came to him concerning the
Philistines, and Moab, and the children of Ammon and Edom, Damascus and Kedar.
This time of Jeremiahs seclusion was therefore not lost to the world. It was fruitful
as Bunyans in Bedford Gaol; Luthers in the Wartburg; Madame Guyons in the
Bastille. Unseen, the prophet busied himself, as the night settled down on his
country, in kindling the sure light of prophecy, that should cast its radiant beams
over the dark waters of time, until the day should dawn, and the day-star glimmer
out in the eastern sky. (F. B. Meyer,. B. A.)

JER 36:27-32
Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words.

The Word of God cannot be burnt

I. THE WORD OF GOD IS IMPERISHABLE. The truth is not pen and ink, parchment
and words, but a force of an unchangeable character. It borrows material forms for
garments, and uses outward methods for expression; these change, but truth never.
Changes are observable in nature, but its laws remain firm. The process of
destruction and restitution is ever on the march. The lily will fade, and the rose will
perish, but the law of their life will say to the elements, Take thee another roll, and
write another lily and another rose. The pattern is never destroyed. Truth, law,
symmetry, beauty, and life are emanations from the Eternal Mind, abiding
immutable in the midst of change. Revelation has assumed aspects, many of which
have passed away. The centre of all religious truth is the Saviour--Jesus Christ, the
same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. Whatever talents we possess, or whatever
circumstances affect us, if there is a straight line from the heart to Jesus--if we are
bound to Him by the radius of love--our lives will express the old truths, and present
the old faith which animated patriarch, prophet, priest, apostle, and martyr.

II. OPPOSITION TO THE WORD OF GOD WILL NOT AVERT THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN.
Why did the king precipitate the destruction of the Book before its contents were
examined? If the moral condition of the people was wrongly described, facts would
have disproved the fiction; if the threatened invasion by the King of Babylon was a
myth, time would have revealed it. Evidently Jehoiakim found that the entrance of
Gods Word brought with it light, and that the spectacle it discovered was too
frightful to contemplate. Either he must burn the roll, or the roll would burn him.
Sin prevailed, and the roll was burnt. Was it a victory? Three months before the
destruction of the city, Jehoiakim died a miserable death. The Florentine
philosopher declined to look through Galileos telescope, fearing he might see in the
heavens some movement which would contradict his old view that the sun revolved,
and the earth stood still Sinners fear to look at themselves through the Word of God.
Dr. South wrote many years ago those words, Truth is so connatural to the mind of
man, that it would certainly be entertained by all men, did it not by accident
contradict some beloved interest or other. The thief hates the break of day; not hut
that he naturally loves the light as well as other men, but his condition makes him
dread and abhor that which, of all things, he knows to be the likeliest means of his
discovery. God is not in all the thoughts of the wicked, but there is another roll, and
God is there. Impressions of sin, of death, and of a judgment to come have suffered
violence, and have been wiped off human recollection, at least for a time, but they
are written in the other roll. The last vision which terrified the soul of Jehoiakim was
the other roll The authority of truth is inviolable, which no penknife can cut, and no
fire burn. Let the Word of God shine into our heart, expose its follies and impurities,
and the blush on the cheek will be the dawn of a better day.

III. THERE IS A GRACIOUS PURPOSE IN THE REITERATION OF THE WORD OF GOD.

Jeremiah and Baruch retired to re-commit to writing the contents of the first roll
This was done to give Judah another chance of escape from the impending storm.
Although the roll was fun of denunciation and warning, yet the terms of peace are
included in the declaration of war. Prophet after prophet brought to Israel the re-
written message. This is set forth in the parable of the barren fig-tree; the end of all
Gods dealings is fruit unto life everlasting. What have we done with the second roll?
Nature has re-written her message. Providence speaks again in terms of mercy.
Gospel truths come up afresh, like the flowers in the garden. True, we have turned a
deaf ear; but is it so still? Do we persist in unbelief?

IV. ALL ATTEMPTS TO FRUSTRATE THE WORD OF THE LORD MUST IGNOMINIOUSLY
FAIL. The Word of God has been assailed by every conceivable opposition. The
learned, with the sharp penknife of criticism, and the unlearned, with the fire of
raillery, have made the attempt to destroy the authority of Gods written Word, but
they no more succeeded than if they had dug a grave in which to bury the law of
gravitation. Julian the apostate, and Gibbon the historian, cut and burnt the roll, but
they were as grass, The grass withereth, &c. There was once a printing-press used
solely to manufacture penknives to cut the roll; that press was afterwards used to
print Bibles. The house in which Hume wrote against miracles was converted into a
committee-room for the promotion of religious truth. Conviction of sin is the voice
of God in the soul. Drown it you never can. Close the covers of the Bible, and fasten
them with a clasp, but its very silence is louder than thunder. Messages and
messengers come anew to remind us of our duty towards God and man. Let us bear
in mind that the Word of the Lord is a hammer to break the rock; a fire to consume
the stubble. Its wisdom is unbounded, backed by infinite power. Heaven and earth
will dissolve before one iota of the Word will fail. Let us surrender our hearts to its
power. (T. Davies, M. A.)
The sacred oracles

I. The committing of the mind and will of God to writing. This is important.
1. Because the knowledge of them must be preserved and extended.
2. Because there was no way of preserving and extending this knowledge to be
compared to this.

II. What think you of those who would destroy the Scriptures?
1. The enemies who deny its authenticity. Surely those precious pieces of
antiquity which are found in the Book of Genesis--who would not wish to
admire and preserve them? But the Vandalism of infidelity would fling them
all into the fire, and fix our eyes on the darkness and dreariness of two
thousand years ago.
2. View these men as to their patriotism, or their regard to public good. What
benevolence was seen in the pagan world? Produce one instance in which the
philosophy of Greece or Rome ever established an infirmary or an hospital.
3. View the enemies of the Bible, with regard to their charity and compassion.
What do you think of the human being that would take away the Bible, dash
this only cup of consolation from the parched lip--that would pull down the
only refuge to which the polluted sinner can escape from the storms of life--
that would deprive him of a resource to which, by and by, there will be an
entire enjoyment, and that gives him the consciousness of present support?
What can you think of a man that would do this, while he knows that he has
nothing to substitute in the room of it, and that if the thing be a delusion, it
is a solace which can be obtained in no other way?
4. View these men once more as to their guilt. This may be fairly determined
from their doom. Oh, say some, we are not accountable for our belief! To
which we answer that if we are not accountable for our belief we are
accountable for nothing; for all our actions spring from belief; and infidelity
does not arise from want of evidence, but from want of inclination.

III. Some things which seem likely to injure revelation, and which yet prove its
advantage.
1. The attacks of the infidel on its divinity. What has been the consequence of all
his opposition? Why zeal in its diffusion; and able articles brought forth in
its favour; for inquiry is always friendly to truth, as darkness and
concealment are friendly to error.
2. The sufferings of its followers by persecution. The periods of suffering have
been always the most glorious for Christianity; the brethren have been
united and endeared the more to each other; the Spirit of glory and of God
has rested upon them; their sufferings have arrested attention and induced
sympathy; the witness of their sufferings has been found to be impressed,
and they have been led to inspire the principles that would produce such
effects.
3. The divisions and parties that have sprung up among its professors. The
differences which subsist amongst all those who hold the Head do not affect
 the oneness of the Church; they are only so many branches which form one
tree--so many members which form one body. By these they have always
proved stimulations to each other: they have awakened and increased
emulation and zeal; and religion has always been upon the whole a gainer by
them.
4. The failings of its members. It would seem impossible any good should arise
from these to the cause of the Gospel. And yet what is the fact? No thanks to
themselves--even these scandals have been overruled for good. These
scandals were foretold by the Scriptures; and, therefore, they are pledges of
their truth; these have shown that the Gospel is Divine and almighty--
because it can bear to be betrayed from within as well as assaulted from
without. The excommunication of these persons has always strikingly shown
the purity of the Church, and that they cannot bear those that are evil; while
the true professors have been led, by these instances, to fear, and tremble,
and pray.

IV. Admonitions.
1. Be persuaded of the stability of the cause of revelation.
2. Apply Scripture to your own use, and apply it to the purposes for which it has
been given.
3. Be concerned for the spread and diffusion of it. (W. Jay.)

Cutting up and burning his Bible

True, those were very anxious times. Party feeling ran high, and we may find this
much excuse for the foolish king, that party feeling carried him away. The last days
of the kingdom of Judah had come. Two rival nations were seeking her alliance, each
as a protection against the other. The good Josiah had favoured Babylon, and even
fought against Pharaoh Necho, king of Egypt. In the great battle of Carchemish,
Josiah lost his life, but the party favouring alliance with Babylon was strong enough
to secure the election of his son Shallum as king, rather than the elder son,
Jehoiakim, who seems to have favoured the Egyptians. Shallum, however, only held
the throne for three months, and then Jehoiakim succeeded. Now Jeremiah, as the
prophet of God, had distinctly, and over and over again, advised alliance with
Babylon. He was consequently in disgrace when Jehoiakim came to the throne, and
the Egyptian party gained the upper hand. He was no longer able to declare the
Divine message freely in the streets, and at the court. But what is to be done with the
roll? It was a great fast day; a national humiliation on account of the national peril.
The people were crowding in from the district round, and were assembling for
solemn services in the Temple courts. There the roll must be read. Baruch knew the
peril, and shrank from the task, until comforted by an assurance of personal
protection. They felt the news of all this must be taken to the king. They knew his
impulsive willfulness so well that they feared to take the roll into his presence.
Jehudi began to read, and the king began to grow angry at the Divine disapproval of
his plans, and presently he seized the scribe s knife, as it lay on the ground, stripped
a piece of the skin off, and threw it on the fire; and then, emboldened by his wilful
act, proceeded to cut strip after strip, until the entire roll was consumed. What a
daring act! And what a foolish act! More foolish than wicked, for he could not silence
Gods Word, or alter Gods will in that way. It is very important that we should
recognise the distinction between the revelation of Gods will to a man, and the
particular form in which that will may be made known to him. It is not the mere
wording of the message that is our chief concern, it is the message itself. Men
nowadays are finding so much to complain of in the mere form and wording of the
Bible, that there is grave danger of their failing to heed that Bible as it comes closely
up to each one of them, saying, I have a message from God unto thee. And is our
message to be refused because the form of its setting is unpleasing to fastidious
tastes?

I. GODS MESSAGE TO US MAY BE AN OFFENCE TO US. It is when it opposes our

inclinations. It is a wholly wrong attitude in which to stand towards Gods Word, if
we think to judge it by our inclinations and preferences, approving it only if it
accords with them. Gods will and Word are the standard by which we must test our
inclinations, and they are stamped as wrong if we cannot gain the Divine approval.
But so often our condition of approving the Bible is, that it shall comfortably allow
us to follow the devices and desires of our own hearts. We shut it up, we put it on
the upper shelf, out of reach, when we have a half fear that it will-speak with an
arresting voice, and say, What doest thou here, Elijah? And the Bible is an offence
when it convicts us of our sins. The sin of our day is this--we are attempting to judge
Gods Word instead of to receive it. We conceitedly criticise it, instead of reverently
listening to it. We are making ourselves the standard for ourselves; and are
determined that we will have nothing in the Bible that we do not like.

II. OUR OFFENCE MAY END EXPRESSION IN INJURY TO THE WORD. That injury is not
always coarse and vulgar like the injury done to the roll by Jehoiakim.
1. In subtle ways we injure it, nowadays, by making it out to mean what it suits
us to think it means, and by picking out bits here and there which are of
doubtful authority; and so creating a general suspicion of the authority of the
whole.
(1) Generally undermining its authority. Men begin at the Old Testament.
They cut strips out here and there. They would persuade us that the early
chapters of Genesis are only legends, and the history of the patriarchs
only uncertain traditions. Oh, poor Bible of our fathers!
(2) Evaporating or changing its meaning. If anything strikes hard against
sin, explain it away. If any dark shadows are thrown on the eternal future
of impenitent sinners, exaggerate your representations of the love of
God, be quite unqualified in your statements, and boldly declare that you
would not punish sinners so vigorously, and therefore you are sure God
will not. If you hardly dare cut a piece out of the Word, use the knife to
scratch out what you do not like, and write over what you think would be
suitable.
(3) Refusing to admit the applications of the Word to ourselves.
2. How utterly foolish all this is! We cannot change one declaration of Holy
Scripture. We cannot prevent the execution of one threatening. We cannot,
by any of our devices, secure a comfortable arrangement for impenitent
sinners in the next life.

III. GODS WILL CAN NEVER BE FRUSTRATED BY ANY INJURY WE MAY DO TO HIS
MESSENGERS, OR TO HIS MESSAGE. Because though it is in a message, it exists apart
from the message. Jeremiah can soon write it all over again. Moreover, the
attempted injury cannot fail to rouse further vindications of Gods outraged majesty.
Kings never pass lightly by the insults that are offered to their ambassadors. And the
Word of God does but tell of providential workings that go on, in spite of anything
that may happen to the message that reports them to us. To destroy the Word is as
foolish and as useless as for the ostrich to hide her head in the sand, and convince
herself that there is no danger, when the hunters are every moment nearing her.
(The Weekly Pulpit.)

Burning the Scripture

The 98th annual report (1902) of The British and Foreign Bible Society contains
the following experience of Colporteur Galibert: Calling at a handsome house, he
explained his object to madame. How much do you ask for your whole load of
books? she inquired. Nine francs, he answered, supposing that the lady wished to
make a free distribution of the Scriptures. She paid the price and then called the
servant, Take all these books and throw them into the fire. Madame said Galibert,
here is your money; give me back my books. No! said the lady. I have paid you,
and you may go. But when you pass this way again, dont forget to call; Ill buy your
books again. Madame, says Galibert, I will go; but let me tell you that the very
Word of God which you have destroyed will rise up to judge you at the last day.
Hatred of the truth teller
Macaulay tells of a rich Brahman who saw a drop of sacred Ganges water under
the microscope, and bought the instrument and dashed it to atoms that it might not
by its revelations rebuke his superstitious practices. In a similar way did Jehoiakim
treat Gods Word because it revealed his character in its true light, and set in array
the judgments for sin which were gathering about him. (C. Deal.)

The indestructible power of Gods Word

It was burned, but Jeremiah lived, and Jeremiahs God lived. Therefore to burn it
was not to destroy it. Another spell of work for Baruch, and the loss was repaired.
Like the fabled blood-stains on some palace floor where murder has been done, and
all the planing in the world will not remove the dark spots, Gods threatenings are
destroyed, as men think, and presently there they are again, as plain as ever. It is
true of the written Word, which men have tried to make away with many a time in
many a way, but it liveth and abideth for ever. It is true of the echoes of that Word
in conscience, which may be neglected, sophisticated, drugged, and stifled, but still
sometimes wakes and solemnly reiterates its message. And all that Jehoiakim made
by his foolish attempt was that the new roll had added to it many like words. The
indestructible Word of God grows by every attempt to silence it. Each warning
neglected increases guilt, and therefore punishment. The fabled sibyl came back,
after each rejection of her offered books, with fewer volumes at a higher price. Gods
Word comes back after each rejection with additions of heavier penalties for darker
sins. We but draw down surer and more terrible destruction on our own heads by
refusing to listen to the merciful voice which warns us that the floods are out, and
the ruin of the house impending, and bids us floe from it before the crash comes. (A.
Maclaren.)
Efforts to destroy the Christian books in Madagascar
The purpose to extinguish Christianity was firmly determined on. The week after
the Queen Ranavalonas message had been delivered, every person who had received
books was ordered to deliver them up, without retaining even a single leaf, on pain
of death. This order was severely felt; few obeyed it literally, and in the distant
provinces scarcely any obeyed it at all (Jacox.)

JEREMIAH 37

JER 37:9-10
Thus saith the Lord, Deceive not yourselves, saying, The Chaldeans shall surely
depart from us: for they shall not depart.

The punishment of evil

The great teaching of the text is that we must not allow appearances to mislead us
respecting the fact and certainty of the law of retribution. God has threatened the
transgressor with severe penalties, and we may be sure that these penalties will be
inflicted, however unlikely such retribution may sometimes seem, and however long
it may be delayed. By wonderful ways God brings His judgments to pass.

I. WE MARK SOME ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION FURNISHED BY THE

HISTORY OF THE NATIONS. Very memorable was the retribution that Israel brought on
Egypt. At the other end of their national history, Israel itself furnishes a most
striking illustration of the working of the law of retribution through all
improbabilities. When the Christ was crucified through weakness, the people cried,
His blood be upon us, and upon our children. How unlikely did it seem that the
Victim of Calvary could ever be avenged upon an unjust nation! And yet that
wounded Man rose up invested with strange powers, and burned their city with
fire. And let us not think that these instances of retribution are to be placed in the
category of the miraculous; they were the natural consequences of great denials of
truth and justice. Men unjustly pierced through are terrible avengers in all ages
and nations. For centuries did the kings and nobles of France oppress the peasantry;
it is impossible for us to think adequately of the vast hopeless wretchedness of the
people from the cradle to the grave. When Louis XVI. came to the throne it seemed
incredible that the long-suffering people would ever avenge themselves upon the
powerful classes by whom they were ground to the dust, and yet by a marvellous
series of events the wounded men arose in awful wrath, burning palaces with fire
and trampling greatness underfoot. Pierced through were those hungry hopeless
millions; but the day of doom came, and every bleeding wretch arose invincible with
torch and sword. For generations the African was wronged by the American; the
negro had no military, political, or literary power; he was bought and sold as are the
dumb driven cattle, and it seemed as if the fetters of a shameful degradation were
riveted upon him for ever. Was there a shied or spear seen among forty thousand in
Israel? As late as 1854 Wendell Phillips wrote despairingly, Indeed, the
Government has fallen rote the hands of the slave power completely. So far as
national politics are concerned, we are beaten--theres no hope The future seems to
unfold a vast slave empire united with Brazil, and darkening the whole West. I hope
I may be a false prophet, but the sky was never so dark. And yet immediately after
this the wounded men arose, deluging the land with blood, and burning the cities
of the great Republic with fire. Some of our writers argue that retribution does not
follow on national wrong-doing, because territory gained by cruelty, treachery,
bloodshed, is not as a matter of fact torn away from its guilty conquerors, but such
ill-acquired territory remains a permanent portion of their splendid empire. But
there are other ways of inflicting retribution upon a nation than by immediately
depriving it of provinces. There is something very like irony in the government of
God, and He sometimes punishes the victors through the spoil. Our Indian Empire
is said to have been ill-gotten, and yet we retain it, that country being to Britain
what the tail is to the peacock--our glory and pride. But the gilded train, it will be
remembered, has been already splashed with blood, and the end is not yet.
Retribution may not come in the form of specially inflicted judgments, but it will
come. No pestilence, war, earthquake, or famine marks the Divine displeasure, but
the retribution arises out of the iniquity. With great injustice and cruelty the French
drove out the Huguenot, but in expelling these sons of faith, genius, industry, virtue,
the French fatally impoverished their national life, and they are suffering to-day
from these missing, elements which none may restore. Retribution may not be
revealed in material disaster, but it will come. As Mommsen, one of the greatest of
historians, declares, History has a Nemesis for every sin ! It may seem that all
might and majesty are with an unjust nation and that wounded men only are on
the other side; but at Gods call wounded men are Michaels wielding flaming
swords. The foolishness of God is wiser than men. Sometimes we are greatly
amazed and perplexed at the way in which history unfolds itself--it would seem as if
the diplomacy of evil were too much for the Ruler of the world, as if Providence
made hesitating moves, weak moves, fatal moves; but we have only to wait a while to
know that Gods foolishness is wiser than men. He taketh the wise in their own
craftiness; The Lord shall have them in derision. The weakness of God is
stronger than men. The sun is sometimes weak, but its earliest ray in the dawn is
more than all our electric lights, the first faint beam of the spring is infinitely more
than all the sparks of our kindling; the sea is sometimes weak--it is a mill-pond, we
say--but in its softest ripple is a suggestion of power that fills us with awe; the wind
is sometimes weak, but in the gentlest zephyr is hinted the majesty of infinite
strength. Nature shows how the weakness of God is immeasurably stronger than
men; so does history with equal clearness. The oft-quoted saying, Providence is
always on the side of the big battalions, is one with an imposing sound, but it is
disproved by history over and over again. The worlds Ruler defeated Pharaoh with
frogs and flies; He humbled Israel with the grasshopper; He smeared the splendour
of Herod with worms; on the plains of Russia He broke the power of Napoleon with
a snowflake. God has no need to despatch an archangel; when once He is angry, a
microbe will do.

II. WE NOTE THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE.

The great law works infallibly in the personal history as it does in the national life.
God has wonderful ways of confounding us, and we may be sure that our sins will
find us out.
1. Let us not permit ourselves to be deceived by flattering prophets. Loudly does
 revelation declare the obligation of righteousness, and grievous are the
judgments that it pronounces against transgressors, but this in our age has
been accepted in quite a modified sense. Men will now hardly allow such a
word as, wrath; they will not permit a man to suffer simply as a
punishment for his sin; the violation of laws human and divine must be
condoned and passed over with the ]east reprobation and vengeance. Let us
rejoice in the growth of the sentiment of humanity, but we must shut our
ears to the effeminate and sentimental teaching which will inevitably relax
and destroy a noble morality. God is merciful, but fire does not forget to
burn, teeth to tear, water to drown, and no transgression of the law can pass
without detection and punishment. And it shall come to pass, that him that
escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay. Gods complex system of
retribution permits not the cleverest sinner to slip through.
2. Let us not deceive ourselves because appearances seem to promise immunity.
Our modem knowledge of science, of the unity and interdependence of all
things, of the continuity and persistence of force and motion, of the
inviolable integrity of all organisms, ought to make it easy to us to believe
that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he reap, however appearances may
promise otherwise. Let us not be beguiled by the immediate aspects of life
and circumstance. Gods blind men watch us; His lame men run us down;
His deaf men filch our secrets; His dumb men impeach us; His wounded
men arise, every man a messenger of revenge.
3. Let us not deceive ourselves because judgment is delayed. In contending with
God we are plotting against a Wisdom that seems sometimes to hesitate and
fail; but never is that Wisdom more profound than in the moments of
seeming perplexity, and if we yield to flattering hopes of victory, our final
overthrow will only be the more complete and irreparable for these
protractions of the conflict. In contending with God we are warring with a
Power that ever and anon seems baffled and beaten; it seems to retreat, it
allows us to win skirmishes here and there--only the more conspicuously to
crush us in the decisive battle, if we persist to fight it out to the bitter end. In
contending with God we are provoking a Justice which sometimes seems
incapable of asserting itself; but inveterate perversity discovers in the event
that all such hesitations and delays were the whettings of a sword which
needs not to smite twice. Slowly it may be, but surely, do we ripen for
judgment; and when once ripe, how little a thing is necessary to precipitate
the calamity! As the Hindoos say, When men are ripe for slaughter, even
straws turn into thunderbolts.
4. Let us improve the gracious respite. Many rebel altogether against the
doctrine of grace, sternly insisting on inexorable law, justice, retribution;
they utterly reprobate the ideas of repentance, forgiveness, and salvation.
But mercy is a fact as much as justice is. Within that great system of
severities we call nature there are ameliorative arrangements softening the
rigours of broken law; in human life and government, too, which is nature
still, only on a higher plane, mercy and forgiveness assert themselves, and
society greatly prizes the gracious quality; and it is therefore a mistake,
judged by the light of nature, to make an antithesis of equity and grace, as if
these qualities were mutually antagonistic and eternally irreconcilable--they
both exist side by side in this tangible human world with which we are so
 familiar. Now, the grand burden of the Gospel is to bring into fullest light
that doctrine of mercy hinted by nature, and to show us that grace is not
arbitrariness, the negation of law, the neglect of justice, but that the fullest
and most splendid revelation of grace may take place on the basis of eternal
truth and justice. (W. L. Watkinson.)

JER 37:11-21
And it came to pass, that when the army of the Chaldeans was broken up from
Jerusalem.

Jeremiah persecuted
After the captivity and death of Jehoiakim, his brother Zedekiah, another son of
Josiah, sat upon the throne. He seems to have been of weak and superstitious rather
than of vicious character, though it is said that neither he nor his servants, nor the
people of the land, hearkened unto the words of Jeremiah. They Seemed to be
infatuated with the idea that Jerusalem had, with the help of their Egyptian allies,
strength to resist the assaults and siege of the Chaldeans. False prophets had
persuaded the king that he would break the Chaldean yoke, and as this event was
more favourable to his own wishes than were the stern words of Jeremiah, they had
been accepted as truthful, while the true prophet was discredited. Jeremiah seems to
have been at liberty in the meantime. The king had sent a message to him to pray for
the deliverance of the city from the besieging Chaldeans. Jeremiah had again told
the king plainly that the city was doomed. The Egyptian army had in the meantime
come up, and the Chaldeans had withdrawn. Yet the Word of the Lord came to
Jeremiah to tell the king that this was but a temporary withdrawal of the enemy;
that they would return again; and, moreover, that even though the Chaldeans should
be reduced to a few wounded men, even they should rise up and burn the city. When
God was for Jerusalem, He could make them victorious over their foes, though they
were but a handful, and without weapons; but when He was against them, He could
make their foes, however small a company of wounded men, to have complete
victory over them.

I. JEREMIAH IMPRISONED. The advent of the Egyptian allies had compelled the
Chaldeans to raise the siege; and the gates of the city were opened so that the people
could go in and out again at will. This opportunity was seized on by Jeremiah to
leave the city for the country, which action led to his arrest and imprisonment.
1. Jeremiah goes forth. The question of what was the object for which the
prophet left the city, has given rise to much discussion. The reading of the
authorised version simply is that he went (or purposed) to go into the land
of Benjamin, to separate himself thence in the midst of the people. This is
not very intelligible. It has been supposed that there was a new allotment of
land in the tribe of Benjamin, and that Jeremiah had gone up to secure his
portion. The simple fact is that, having left the city or been observed in the
act of so doing, suspicions as to his purpose were aroused in the mind of the
keeper of the gate, and so he was arrested. Jeremiah was perfectly free and
within his rights as a citizen to depart from the city if he chose, and to go up
 into the land of Benjamin, where he belonged; but whether he was wise
under the existing circumstances is a question
2. Accused and arrested. As the prophet was departing from the city by the gate
of Benjamin, a captain of the guard being there and recognising him, either
suspected him of desertion to the enemy, or hating him for his prophecies
against Jerusalem, feigned suspicion, charged him with the treason of
intending to desert the city and go over to the Chaldeans, and arrested him.
The times were critical, and suspicions were rife on every hand. Jeremiah
had persistently declared that the city would fall into the hand of the
Chaldeans; had advised the king and the people quietly to accept the
situation and surrender; had warned them again and again that resistance
was not only useless, but would bring worse calamities upon them. All this,
of course, irritated the people, and made Jeremiah very unpopular. Though
he was free in the city, he was the object of universal execration and hatred.
Under these circumstances it would have been wiser for Jeremiah to have
remained in the city and taken his part with the inhabitants; certainly it was
unwise to lay himself open to a suspicion of desertion by leaving the city at
such a time, just after the delivery of his last message to the king. Possibly he
did not think that his visit to the country would be misconstrued. Innocent
men are not always men of prudence. Jeremiahs visit to the country may
have been perfectly justifiable and harmless, yet it had She appearance of
evil to those who were of suspicious inclinations. It is not always wise to do
the lawful things which lie before us, even though there be no actual harm in
the action. The prophets business to the country seems to have been entirely
of a private character. Perhaps he was disgusted with the king and people,
and just left the city in that state of mind. In any case he should have taken
counsel of God and considered the circumstances before exposing himself to
the suspicions and malice of his enemies. In times of excitement and
contention between God and an evil-thinking generation, His servants have
need to walk with the greatest circumspection. On the other hand, the action
of the captain of the guard was most reprehensible, and illustrates the
injustice with which unbelieving and wicked men are commonly disposed to
treat Gods people. He had no real ground for suspecting Jeremiah of
treachery and desertion to the enemy. But enemies who wish to find an
occasion against Gods people can readily do so. Unbelievers are apt to judge
the actions of Gods people by their own method of procedure. I heard an
officer in the English army say last autumn that all missionaries in India
were the merest mercenaries; that their only motive in coming out here was
salary. I asked him why, and on what ground he made such a charge. His
reply was that he could conceive of no other motive, and admitted that
nothing would induce him to devote his life to trying to convert heathen but
a good round salary. I immediately denounced him as a mere mercenary
soldier and not a patriot.
3. Jeremiahs denial. Upon being charged with treasonable intentions m leaving
the city, Jeremiah indignantly denied that he had any such purpose. He met
the charge with a simple sharp word. It is false; or, as the margin has it: A
lie; I fall not away to the Chaldeans. He was both indignant at his arrest,
and, perhaps, from the heat of his denial, more so still at the charge of
treachery. To defame a mans good name is often more intolerable than the
 prospect of endurance of any amount of physical suffering. Joseph in Egypt
thus suffered, being innocent; Moses suffered in like manner; David seemed
to care more that Saul could think him capable of conspiring against his life
than for the persecution with which he was pursued, and sought more
earnestly to clear his name than to save his life. The first question that arises
out of this part of the story is: How should we meet such false charges as this,
under which Jeremiah was arrested? That must depend on circumstances.
Paul defended himself by an elaborate argument. Jesus adopted more than
one method. Oftentimes He refuted the charges which the Jews brought
against Him, by showing them how absurd their statements were, as in the
case when they charged Him with being the agent of the devil. Again, when
He was under the cruel and awful charge of blasphemy, when death was
hanging over Him, He met the judge and false witnesses with perfect silence.
Silence does not always give consent. There are circumstances when it is
better to suffer both in reputation and body rather than attempt a defence.
There may be higher interests involved even than the preservation of a good
name and life itself. While it is perfectly right to assert innocence if one be
innocent, sometimes silence is a more effectual answer than denial. Time
often proves the best vindicator. I once heard Mr. Spurgeon say that he never
attempted to brush off mud that was thrown at him, for he was sure that to
attempt to do so would only result in smearing himself with the filth; but
that he always waited till it was dry, and then he could deal with it as dust,
and get rid of it without a stain being left behind. It has been truly said that if
we only take care of our characters, God will in the end vindicate our
reputations (Mat 5:11-12). Though Jeremiah indignantly denied the charge,
the denial did him no good. It was not the truth which his enemies were
seeking, but only an occasion to persecute him. So we are told that the
captain hearkened not to him, but carried him to the princes.
4. He is imprisoned. Irijah took the prophet to the princes. These were not the
same who befriended him in the previous reign and took measures to conceal
him from the wrath of Jehoiakim, but another cabinet who were in authority
under Zedekiah. They were as willing to believe the charge of treason against
Jeremiah as was the captain to prefer it. We have, however, learned that to
suffer for Christs sake is a part of the privilege which is accorded to every
disciple. There seems to be a double necessity for this. First we must
ourselves, even as did Jesus Himself, learn obedience by the things which we
suffer, and so to be perfected through suffering (Heb 5:8; Heb 2:10; comp.
1Pe 2:21; 1Pe 2:23; 1Pe 5:10). Besides, it is a matter of clear demonstration
that suffering for the truth has always been the most powerful testimony
thereto.

II. THE KING AND JEREMIAH. After the prophet had been many days in prison, the
weak king sent for him secretly, and brought him out of prison to make inquiry of
him. This was a triumph for Jeremiah and a humiliation for the king. In the long-
run, the highest and haughtiest enemies of God will have to bow to the lowliest of
His friends. There are many instances where men who have scoffed at religion and
mocked at His messengers have, in moments of great fear and extremity, sought out
the very people whom they have despised and persecuted to beg for intercession
with God on their behalf. The city was apparently re-invested by the Chaldeans, and
in great straits for food (verse 21), and the king hoped that at last the prophet would
relent and secure some favourable word from the Lord. He seems, like all
unbelievers, to have had the curious idea of God, that He might be brought round to
favour if only the prophets could be won over first (Num 22:23.).
1. Is there any word from the Lord! This was the kings question put to
Jeremiah. The Lord had previously given to the king a very sure word (verse
10), but he still vainly clung to the hope that the word of God would be
altered, though there was not the least evidence that the king or the people
had altered their lives. There are many persons in our day expecting that in
the end, notwithstanding that the word of God, finally communicated to us
in the Bible, is Gods last word to this world, the Almighty will change His
mind and not punish persistent sinners. Yet there was a word from the Lord.
It was very brief, and exactly to the point. And Jeremiah said, There is: for,
said He, thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon. Now
this was a very brave and courageous action on the part of Jeremiah. If ever a
man might have been tempted to temporise and prophesy smooth things,
this was the time. There is nothing more sublime in this world than a clear
and undisguised declaration of the truth under any and all circumstances.
2. Jeremiah pleads his own cause. Having first delivered the message from the
Lord, wholly regardless of what might be the effect upon the mind and
disposition of the king, he now ventures to plead for his own release from
prison. It is a great testimony to Jeremiahs loyalty to God that he suffered
his own private and personal interests to be in the background until he had
delivered the Lords message. He put his plea on two grounds: First, his
absolute innocence of any wrong done to either the king or the people. Why
had he been cast into prison? The only thing that could be said against him
was that he had delivered the Lords word as he had received it. Could he do
less than that? (Act 4:19.) Would the king have had him speak lies to please
the princes and the people, which must ultimately have brought them much
damage? Secondly, he appeals to the truth of his predictions, and asks the
king to produce the false prophets who had flattered him and the people with
pleasant lies (Jer 28:1, &c., 29:27-32). Had their false prophecies done the
king any good? Was it not now manifest that they were false friends as well
as false prophets? He therefore pleaded with the king not to add to his
already heavy account of iniquity by keeping him unjustly in prison.
3. The prophets sufferings mitigated. The king was evidently moved by the
prophets plea; but he was afraid of his princes, and did not dare to grant the
full petition of the prophet, but he so far ordered a mitigation of his
imprisonment, that he was taken out of the stocks and the dungeon and
simply confined in the gaol court. Jeremiah was, as we have said, a shrinking
and retiring man by nature, and keenly sensitive to physical pain. His
imprisonment was very severe, though there was worse in store for him (see
the next chapter). He felt that to stay in that dungeon and in the cabins
would end in his death. The king softened his imprisonment and ordered the
prophet to be fed with a piece of bread from the bakers street as long as
there was bread to be had in the besieged city. In this incident we see how
God tempers the severity of suffering even when He does not entirely deliver
us from it. (G. F. Pentecost, D. D.)
 JER 37:17
Is there any word from the Lord?... There is.
Is there any word from the Lord?
The man who asked this momentous question belonged to the class of solemn
triflers. He came with the right question in his mouth, and sometimes to get a right
question is to be half-way on to the answer. To get the question rightly stated is
ofttimes already the answer half-given. And he came with his question to the right
quarter. He had come to the man that had a living connection with God. Yet we
know from the way he treated the answer to the question that he came in the wrong
spirit. Not that there was any gaiety or carelessness about his manner. He was as
solemn as solemn could be when he asked this question of the prophet of God, Is
there any word from the Lord? But he went away to show that he had been merely
trifling with the question. And what was possible for Zedekiah is possible for you
and for me. We may come to the Word of God with the right question in our mouth,
we may come with a solemn reverent manner about us, we may pride ourselves that
we are not of those who make jokes about the Word of God, or treat the ordinances
of Gods house with any levity, we may pride ourselves that we are not of those who
turn the house of God into a theatre or place of amusement, we have the conviction
that the institution of Gods house is meant to get us into a closer connection with
God, we believe that the Word of God which lies before us is a very message from
God to man, and we come to the open Bible Sunday after Sunday with this question
professedly, Is there any word from Jehovah? any word from Jehovah about my
duty for to-day, about my duty for to-morrow--is there any word from Jehovah? We
have got the right question, and we come in a reverent manner. God forbid that we
should be triflers as Zedekiah was, and mistake solemnity of manner for obedience
to the Word of God. By his sword on the field of battle the King of Babylon had won
this right--the right to put on the head of whomsoever he would the crown of Judah.
He offered it to Mattaniah; he offered it, accompanied by one condition. The King of
Babylon could not afford that Judah should form an alliance with Egypt, that great
rival power to him. He was in a gracious mood, and though he had conquered Israel,
he was willing that an Israelite--one of the seed royal should yet hold the throne of
David. And in that gracious mood he offered to Mattaniah the throne of Judah,
accompanying his offer with this simple condition: he asked him to swear loyalty to
the King of Babylon, and take an oath of allegiance to the King of Babylon. It was
meant to keep the King of Judah from forming an alliance with a hostile power,
from forming an alliance with Egypt. And Mattaniah had sense to see it was a grand
offer that was made him. He knew that this king had power to take him away in
chains to Babylon, and to take his people with him. He knew that human nature was
frail, he knew that this new-made king had much reason to keep him walking in the
path of gratitude. But knowing that human nature was frail, he wanted to fence him
in by the continual remembrance of that oath, and he changed his name from
Mattaniah, the gift of Jehovah, to Zedekiah, the justice of Jehovah. And ever
afterwards when that kings name was mentioned, it would take his mind back to
that oath when he sware by the justice of Jehovah that he would be loyal to the king
who had so befriended him. At first he felt no inconvenience from his vow, but as
the years passed on his gratitude seemed to melt away. The King of Egypt made
overtures to him, and his people were inclined to listen. He had prophets in great
number, and they urged him to accept the overtures of the King of Egypt. There was
one prophet in his city that warned him that he could not do a dishonourable thing
and prosper. There was one prophet who reminded him that the man of God was a
man who, though he swore to his hurt, would keep his oath. We may suppose that
Jeremiah pleaded with Zedekiah even with tears Do the righteous thing. What will
the heathen nations say, what will outsiders say, if the people of God break their
bargain and lightly hold their oaths? Will not they, blaspheme the God of Israel? An
honourable heathen man will keep his oath. So spoke Jeremiah, as he pleaded with
his king, but his warning voice fell unheeded on that deaf ear. By and by came the
army of the Chaldeans and besieged Jerusalem. They were closely shut up for a
while, and still the prophet of God was allowed to remain in the prison. The king had
secret hopes that the King of Egypt would come to his help, and so long as he had
hope from another quarter he would not trouble the messenger of God. By and by
the army of the Chaldeans removed from the city. They went away to fight the army
that was coming from Egypt to help the besieged. The general that was at the head
of these forces knew well how to conduct a campaign. He had no desire that the
army that was coming to help Israel should get the length of Jerusalem. He would
rather deal with them separately. He went and met the army and turned it aside the
way that it came, and then he came back to the city and closely invested it on every
side. Then, when all hope of Egypt was shut off; then, when Zedekiah had proved
that they who lean on Egypt lean on a broken reed which enters into the heart of
man and pierces him; then it was that the old, old story was told. When death is
thundering at the door the scoffer takes down the Bible from the shelf. So was it with
Zedekiah. So long as he had one single hope from men, of being himself able to
overcome, or of getting help from Egypt--so long he left the prophet of God to pine
in the prison cell, and did not feel it necessary to go and seek help from him. But
when at last all hope of being saved in any other way was taken away, then he
secretly came to the messenger of Jehovah as the scoffer secretly takes out the Bible
and tries to find out what the Word of the Lord is. Then he came and asked this
question, Is there any word from the Lord? Zedekiah had made God the last shift,
and God had a good excuse for withholding any light from the king who had acted so
dishonourably. But He is long-suffering, He is patient, even though we make Him
the last shift. Even from the bed of death ofttimes He hears the cry for mercy and
reveals His will. There is, said Jeremiah, there is word from the Lord to thee.
Thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon. An honest, kindly,
blunt, definite statement. Thou shalt delivered into the hand of the King of
Babylon. Ah, sometimes we have seen it in the individual, that deceitful disease
consumption has laid hold on him, and the prophets of smooth things say, You will
get better; and they feed his hopes upon this; and the prophet of God comes his way
and tells him he is a dying man, that there is no escape for him. It is felt to be
impend. The prophets of smooth things would not have plainly said, Thou shalt be
delivered into the hands of the King of Babylon. They would have hid that. But this
is the kinder way of the two. Yet Zedekiah did not act upon the light that he had
received. Somehow he had a hope that he would escape. Even though the walls had a
breach in them there was that private way of escape. That was his last resource, and
so long as he thought there was the least possibility of escape he was scarcely
prepared to receive the Word of the Lord, this message that God had sent to him, so
that he did not act upon it. He bore no grudge to the prophet for speaking so plainly.
He had no unkindly feelings towards him, but the opposite, he had very kindly
feelings towards him, and was willing to run a serious risk of difficulty with his
cabinet rather than not do kindness to the prophet of Jehovah, the faithful servant
of king and country. And thus it came to pass that they were again brought together
in friendly conference. He had done an act of kindness to the prophet of the Lord.
The cup of cold water that is given to a disciple never loses its reward. After that
deed of kindness done there was a fuller revelation of the will of God. At first it had
only been, Thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon, and the
second time Jeremiah pointed to the way of salvation. Escape there is none if you
are to trust to your own power to fight or to trust to Egypt. There is no escape; thou
shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon. The simple question is
whether you are going just now to give yourself into his hands or are going to wait
until you are dragged by force by his servants into his presence. Go forth now. he
says, and surrender to him, and though thy sin has been great he will pardon thee.
Surrender to him, lay down thine arms, yield to him, and thou shalt live, and thy city
shall be saved. It was a double-sided message this. The first part of it was, Thou
shalt be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon. That was certain. The
second part was, If thou surrender now thou shalt find salvation. This is a message
for us to-day. Have not we acted as that ungrateful king acted? Although rebellion
was in our blood, has not God treated us with grace and given us this fair earth, and
life on such an earth as this is a blessing not to be lightly esteemed. And our King,
when this race rebelled, might easily have swept it off. Instead, He gave us another
chance also. And though He treated us so kindly, allowed us with rebellion in our
very hands to love and enjoy the benefits of life on this fair earth, have not we done
just what Zedekiah did, forgotten allegiance to our gracious King and listened to the
overtures of His enemy, and gone and done what Satan wanted us to do? And our
city, what is it but the city of destruction? We see that death is coming nearer,
escape there is none, and we come to the Prophet of God, not to Jeremiah, but to
Jesus, who is the Mediator of the new covenant, and we say to Him, Is there any
word from Jehovah? And He says, There is. Thou shalt surely die, thou shalt
surely be delivered into the hands of God. We cannot escape. We will be delivered
into the hands of the King against whom we have rebelled. That is one fact there is
no blinking of. And we say, Is that all the message? Thank God it is not all. Jesus
says, There is a way of salvation. Dont wait until you are taken and dropped by
force into His presence by that servant of His that is called Death. But go forth now
and yield to Him, surrender to Him, and all will be well. Let us mark well the penalty
that followed Zedekiah for his disobedience to the Word of Jehovah. He went away
clinging to that hope that he would yet escape. He did not act upon the light that he
had been given. He still had the hope that he would escape by that private path, by
the way of the kings garden, and so he had not courage to go out and put himself
into the hands of the princes and the King of Babylon, the princes that were at the
head of the army. He did not act upon the light he had received when Jeremiah
pleaded with him to do it. Obey, said he, the voice of the Lord, and it shall be well
with thee and thy house. All that Zedekiah could say was, I am afraid the Jews will
mock me if I do--mock me, they will mock me. He had not a doubt that
Nebuchadnezzar would pardon. He knew there was pardon awaiting him out there,
he knew there was life awaiting him out there, but he knew that he would be mocked
if he did it. Many a one has been laughed into hell; I never knew of any one being
laughed out of it. Ofttimes the young seeker feels that it has come to a point, and,
just when he is taking the step, it is the jeer of the companion that comes in. I am
afraid my companion will mock me. A godless companion will mock you. What of
that? Are you not manly enough to be laughed at? They will mock me, said poor
Zedekiah, and he had not courage to be mocked. That cursed pride had scared him
past the gate that led to salvation. And by and by there was a breach in the walls,
and the princes of the King of Babylon s army were in the breach, and when
Zedekiah saw that, he took the secret way of escape; and by night he made for the
hills away down through the ravine that led to Jericho, escaping away to the hills of
Palestine. But the army of the Chaldeans pursued after him and overtook him on the
plains of Jericho, and brought him before the king. Then he saw his two sons put to
death before his eyes; then they came to him and put his eyes out--be was only
thirty-two years of age; then they loaded him with fetters, and condemned him to
this awful imprisonment for life. And the bitterest pang in the torment of all, he had
this knowledge, that he might have escaped it if he had only done what the Lord had
wanted him to do. Had I only obeyed the voice of Jeremiah I might have had my
two sons yet; I would have had my eyesight; I would not have had these chains. It
was the sting of the scorpion in his torment, this memory of what might have been,
had he only taken the step--a single step of surrender. (James Paterson, M. A.)

JEREMIAH 38

JER 38:1-4
The words that Jeremiah had spoken unto all the people.

Unpatriotic in appearance
Rays of hope had arisen in the clouded sky of the, nation. An Egyptian army was
on its way to the city. Thus, it was believed, the Chaldeans would be compelled to
raise the siege, which had been growing ever closer, so that first hunger and then
starvation stared its inhabitants in the face. An escape from their horrible position
seemed possible through an alliance with the Egyptian king. These hopes were
dashed to the ground by the emphatic word of the prophet: This city shall assuredly
be given into the hand of the army of the King of Babylon. He even went beyond
this, and urged desertion to the enemy: He that abideth in the city shall die by the
sword, the famine, and the pestilence; but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall
live. All this seemed, not only unpatriotic, but treasonable. It has been well said,
No government conducting the defence of a besieged fortress could have tolerated
Jeremiah for a moment. What would have been the fate of the French politician who
should have urged the Parisians to desert to the Germans during the siege of 1870?
Jeremiah seemed a veritable Cassandra, and Cassandras, even if, as in this case,
their warnings are but utterances of the inevitable, can only expect to be met with
resentment and persecution. (W. Garret Horder.)

Patriotism
True patriotism is love of ones native land. A good deal of modern patriotism is
love of some one elses land, coupled with an unchristian hatred of other countries.
Sometimes people ask whether Christianity and genuine patriotism can go together.
For a sincere Christian will love all mankind. Racial hatred is a crime in the eyes of
Christ, who teaches us that One is our master, and all of us are brethren, and that
we are to love our neighbour as ourself. A Christian can be a most sincere patriot,
indeed the only true patriot. Christians are to love the whole world, as Jesus did.
Yet, by natural association the soil of our fatherland is endeared to us by a thousand
hallowed memories, which the soil of another land cannot recall. I think the
limestone hills of Galilee, and the lap of the waters on the shores of Gennesaret were
dearer to Christ than the seven hills of Rome, or the flow of the golden Tiber. Our
Lord broke His heart over Jerusalem, the city of His love, as He saw the doom from
its worn sandals shake the dust against that land. Christ was a patriot, and the
thing that cut His heart most painfully was not so much the coming destruction of
Jerusalem, as the national sin which caused that national ruin. So, too, a Christian
patriot will love his countrys honour even more than its wealth and material
greatness. He will value the good name of his fatherland, and the moral and
intellectual elevation of his countrymen, far more than mere additions to its
territory or additions to its wealth. And a true patriot will love his own land without
hating other countries. The Christian must love other lands too, and seek their
highest welfare. Charity begins at home: but it is a poor charity that ends at home.
Love for other lands prompted the founders of missionary societies, which have
been of such incalculable blessing to the civilisation of mankind. A true patriot will
stand up for his fatherland; if others seek to enslave it he will make sacrifices for the
home of his birth, as England did when the Spanish Armada threatened our liberty
and our religion. But a Christian patriot will not do anything to cause hatred of
another country. He will aim at making all the nations love one another. If he finds
others trying to sow the seed of wicked hate, or if he sees his own land doing wrong,
the Christian patriot will dare to speak the truth. When Lord Chatham urged
England not to make war on the United States he was howled down by the bastard
patriots of the day. But history stamps him as the true patriot, his opponents as the
false ones. When John Bright spoke against the folly of the Crimean War he was
made the butt of newspaper gibes, and nine-tenths of his countrymen laughed at
him or sneered at him. But history shows that John Bright was right. He was the
true patriot. The false patriot holds that you must never criticise your countrys
dealings with other lands. Perhaps the hardest duty that ever falls on a man who
loves his fatherland is to point out that his country is doing wrong. That heavy duty
fell often to the lot of Jeremiah. The Jews had so long persisted in idolatry that
Gods marvellous patience could bear with them no longer. After repeated warnings,
all in vain, God told the people, by His prophet, that they would go into the land of
bondage as a punishment for their sin. God also told Jeremiah to inform his fellow-
countrymen that it was useless to struggle against the troops of Nebuchadnezzar.
God had sent that monarch to chastise the rebellious Jews, to take them into
captivity, and to bring ruin to the nation, because of its sin. This painful duty of
urging the Jews not to resist, not to persist in a hopeless struggle, was heartbreaking
to a true patriot like Jeremiah. The princes, who had no real faith in God, naturally
thought Jeremiahs action most unpatriotic. Disbelieving in God, disbelieving in
religion, disbelieving in Jeremiahs prophecies, no wonder they said, This man
seeketh not the welfare of the people, but their hurt, Poor Jeremiah! The bastard
patriots of Jerusalem sneered at him, called him a Little Palestiner, said he was in
the pay of the Chaldeans. Poor Jeremiah! He had no love for the Chaldeans in
preference to his own nation. Nay, he loved the Jews with all their sins more than
the heathen Chaldeans, who were only instruments in Gods hands for punishing the
guilty Jews. But he knew it was no use to resist. He knew that he had received a
message from God. He knew he must deliver that message, though at the risk of his
life. Like a brave hero and a true patriot he told his people of their folly, of their sins,
and of their approaching doom. He met with the usual brickbat argument, brute
force; he was put into a well, put into captivity, and ill-treated in various ways. But
every word he spoke came true. And when the Chaldeans had utterly destroyed the
city and crushed its inhabitants, the captain of the guard set Jeremiah free and said,
Will you return with me and find a comfortable home in Babylon? Jeremiah was a
true patriot, therefore he chose to share the sufferings of his people, though they had
so grievously wronged him. The comfort and luxury of Babylon were rejected by the
simple, honest patriot, who preferred to dwell in poverty among the people of the
land. If those false patriots, who cried him down, had had a chance of the ease and
comfort offered to Jeremiah, how they would have jumped at it! They would have
preferred Babylons fleshpots to Palestines poverty and want. But Jeremiah chose to
share his peoples abject poverty and utter wretchedness. The intense, broken-
hearted patriotism of Jeremiah stands out for all time in the magnificent
Lamentations that he wrote, with his pen dipped into his hearts own blood. They
are the saddest writings in the world. And what made the Jews ruin so intensely
sorrowful to Jeremiah was the fact that it was so richly deserved. Therein was the
sting. And he knew that there could be no improvement in their lot till their lives
became better. He is the ideal of a patriot. Some false teachers have been and are
trying to breathe into England a spirit of defiance to other lands, and an unbounded
lust for territorial extension of our Empire. These teachers are attempting to stir up
racial hatred. A very recent author declares that Germany must be blotted out by
England, because she is our great rival in trade. As readers of history we know the
curse of the racial hatred that existed between England and France in the time of the
first Napoleon. And as Christians we know how fiendish is the advice to cut the
throat of a neighbouring nation because she is a commercial rival. Christians do not
advocate doing away at once with all soldiers and sailors. Like policemen, they are
necessary at present. And we know that our sailors and soldiers will always do their
duty bravely. The Christian Church protests against this modern bastard patriotism,
which is much the same as piracy, against this glorification of brute force, against
this reversion to savageism, against this contempt for all that is gentle, spiritual,
Christ-like. Such principles work--
1. Mischief in the social and political world;
2. Mischief in the realm of literature, and all that leads to the higher
development of man;
3. Mischief to religion.
These principles work mischief in the social and political world. At the end of last
century and the beginning of this, how deplorable was the condition of the workers
of this land. Why? Because of our incessant and unnecessary wars with France.
These principles of false patriotism work much evil in the realm of literature, and all
that leads to the higher development of man. The patriotism which means lust for
other peoples land, and hatred of other nations, may produce a Soldiers Chorus,
but it will produce no Tennyson, no Shakespeare. Since the German Empire became
cursed with militarism it has produced no great writers. The essence of the highest
literature is to be cosmopolitan for all the world. The Republic of Athens was a
commercial, a scientific, an artistic city. The kingdom of Sparta was military to the
highest degree. Military Sparta has left us no literature. Civic Athens has left us a
literature which even to-day is a wonder of the world. That is natural. The habitual
practice of blind obedience, necessary for the soldier, is the greatest foe to thought,
and prevents men from learning how to form judgments and pass opinions.
Militarism must be for the masses of the soldiery unintellectual. Our literature
during the last few years has in some respects deteriorated sadly. One of the aspects
of its decadence is its excessive glorifying of the military spirit. Swarms of books for
boys have been published the last twenty years, and they are very largely
glorifications of physical force. That is a reversion to the savage. The principles of
this false patriotism work deadly mischief to religion. This spurious patriotism is not
love of ones country so much as love of more country. It is hatred of other mens
patriotism. It cannot understand that foreigners may and ought to love their
fatherland even as we do ours. Such teachings lead to bitter hatred instead of love.
Racial hatred is as ungodly as it is idiotic. Nelson used to say to his sailors, Fear
God, honour the king, and hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil. How could they
fear God if they hated Gods children? Every Frenchman was as much loved by God
as every Englishman was loved. The business of the Christian Church is to spread
love and not hate, to tone down animosities, not to stimulate them. Though the
student of history sees how insane and utterly unnecessary most wars have been,
war may sometimes be a stern necessity. But the glorification of war is earthly and
unchristian. The only argument for militarism worth anything is that it develops
pluck. Well, so did gladiator fights. Shall we reintroduce them? Pluck may be
learned on the football-field as well as on the field of slaughter, where the animal
passions of savageism are let loose. If we are Christians we will turn away from this
bastard patriotism which ends in hate of other lands. We will love our country
dearly. If occasion comes, we must make great sacrifices for her. But we will ever
preach the gospel of love against the badspel of hate. We will preach the superiority
of intellectual pursuits to the pursuit of war. We will preach the blessedness of
elevating mankind to the spiritual rather than drag humanity down to the animal.
(F. W. Aveling, M. A.)

JER 38:5
For the king is not he that can do anything against you.

Zedekiah weakened and ruined through fear of man

Zedekiah was one of those unfortunate characters, frequent in history, like our
own Charles I. and Louis XVI. of France, who find themselves at the head of affairs
during a great crisis, without having the strength of character to enable them to do
what they know to be right, and whose infirmity becomes moral guilt. The princes of
his court had him completely under their influence (Jer 38:5). The king is not he
that can do anything against you. This view of his character is the key to Jer 38:17.
The king had some sympathy with the imprisoned prophet. He had also a desire to
hear the Word of the Lord; but he was afraid of the princes. He did not dare openly
to show his sympathy, openly to declare his reverence for the Divine message; so he
had a secret interview with him. Jeremiahs address to the king may be divided into
three parts--
(1) A prophecy,
(2) A personal defence,
(3) A request.
 He declared that the King of Babylon should be victorious; he also declared his
own innocence of any design against king or people, and compared his own conduct
with that of the prophets who, to please the people, had spoken smooth things unto
them; and he asked for some alleviation of his treatment.

JER 38:7-13
Ebed-melech the Ethiopian.

Ebed-melech the Ethiopian

A slave from the Soudan, an eunuch in the household of Zedekiah, King of Judah,
is by the side of the great Jeremiah, a humble servant yet an efficient protector. The
slave and the prophet in our thought abide together.

I. THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHICH BROUGHT THE TWO TOGETHER AND CAUSED THE
STRANGE CONJUNCTION. The prophet is cast into a dungeon, deep and loathsome.
Into the slime of its unfloored depths he sinks, and there he lies. Left to die and rot
in the dungeons mud! No. One mans voice is raised, one mans hand works. But no
son of Israel is he; only a slave of the royal household, a heathen from a far-off land,
with a black skin but a pure heart.

II. THE DELIVERER. What his own name was we know not, for among the royal
servants he was known only as Ebed-melech, the kings slave. Whether he was of
the original Hamitic or of the invading Semitic stock we cannot conjecture, save
that, from his position, there is an inherent probability that he was of the former.
We are at liberty, then, to conceive of him as a black, though probably not a negro,
torn from his home, either as a boy or youth, to meet the demands of the market at
Meroe; and then, in the way of traffic, passed on through Egypt, till at last he passed
into the palace of the King of Judah. We can next conceive of him, by the exercise of
the qualities of intelligence, fidelity, and prudence, promoted to the important post
of superintendent of the royal harem. He would thus come into contact with
Jeremiah, who, as the last of the prophet statesmen of Judah (as he has been
called), had for many years compelled for himself a place in the councils of the
nation The simple nature of the Ethiopian, uncorrupted by the vices of palace life,
would recognise the moral and spiritual elevation of the prophet, and would yield a
homage and a love of which the heartless courtiers Who despised him were
incapable. His position brought him into frequent intercourse with the king;
perhaps gave him a free access to his presence. None could know better than he his
weaknesses and his vices; hut he would also know, as most could not, that in his
debased mind were certain possibilities of justice and generosity to which an appeal
might be made. Hopeful or hopeless, the brave heathen resolves that appeal there
shall he. And after a right honest and straightforward fashion he sets him to his task.
Well done, slave! Bravely spoken, Soudanee! Was there another man in all
Jerusalem man enough to have done thy work! I trow not. But it is an ill turn thou
hast done for thyself! Where is thy prudence, man? Who is this Jeremiah for whom
thou art pleading? The lost and almost the last advocate of a lost cause. Who are
these men whom thou art arraigning? The magnates of the realm, in whose hands
the king is but a feeble, though it may be a well-meaning puppet. What supports
canst thou expect to secure? None, unless it be the secret friendship of a few
frightened men, whose favour is nought. What enemies canst thou not fail to make?
The princes of Judah, whose frown may be death. But fear not, thou kings slave!
Chariots and horsemen are upon the hills round about thee. There is an unseen
Friend whose favour is life; and there is an immortal Church to call thee blessed.
The kings better nature is roused by the appeal. Rising for the moment above the
unkingly fear of his nobles, he exercises his royal prerogative, and commissions
Ebed-melech, to take a sufficient force and release the prophet from the dungeon.
Speedily, tenderly, and joyfully it is done. The forethought displayed, the various
precautions to secure the exhausted victim from further danger or discomfort, are
minutely and gratefully detailed.

III. THOUGHTS WHICH SUCH AN INCIDENT AROUSES IN THE MIND. It would be easy
to descant upon the moral lessons which the incident teaches, to make Ebed-melech
the peg on which to hang edifying reflections. He might easily be made into a lay
figure to do duty for the showing off of such thoughts as these: that God uses
instruments selected from among the lowly as well as the lofty; that the faithful
discharge of the offices of commonest humanity is noted, approved of, and will
finally be owned by the God of providence; that in most unlikely places, among most
unlikely classes, Gods servants, His because servants of righteousness and
humanity, are to be found; that He has His hidden ones where the eye of man
suspects not; and that the faith that God desires to see in men is that trust in Him
and that supreme homage to the claims of charity and truth which will cause them
to do right, and leave the issues to work themselves out as they may in subjection to
His will. But I do not desire the man to he lost in the meditations. I want us to see
men under the influence of motives that may he ours, to enter into the human
feeling, to sympathise with the human surrender, and to behold in these that which
God loves to behold in His creature-children. Jehovah says, Thy life shall be for a
prey unto thee, because thou hast put thy trust in Me. A thought of comfort,
quickening, and strength is here suggested; those who do right, follow charity, work
humanely--not because these things will pay, but because they are what they are,
leaving consequences to come as come they may--these are trusting God, these are
His worshippers, even though they have never learned His name. (G. M. Grant, B.
D.)

Deliverance from an unwonted quarter

Strange, too, was the quarter from which deliverance came to the prophet. Not
from the company of priests to which he belonged; not from that of the prophets of
which he was the greatest member of that age; not even from his brethren
according to the flesh, but from an alien to the commonwealth of Israel--an
Ethiopian, a son of the despised Ham. It is very curious and beautiful to find these
Scriptures--Jewish though they be--studded over with bright examples of goodness
from the nations around. One of its noblest prophecies is from the mouth of Balaam
the Midianite. Deliverance came to its greatest prophet (so far as action goes) from
Zarephath, which belongeth to Sidon, from a woman that was a widow. What
Thomas Carlyle called the grandest thing in all literature is from Job, who probably
was not of the seed of Abraham. And when we come to the New Testament, in a
Roman soldier Christ found faith nobler than that of any in Israel, and in a
Samaritan woman He found His first missionary. The Jew might stand aloof in
proud isolation, but the Book he reverenced called nothing common or unclean.
(The Quiver.)

Ebed-melech, the model of kindness

I. IT IS EASY TO SHOW KINDNESS. Some things are very hard to do. We know for
how many years the Government of England, of our own country, and of other
nations, have been trying to find the way to the North Pole. How much money has
been spent, and how many valuable lives have been test in these attempts! And vet
they have never succeeded. Getting to the North Pole is a very hard thing to do.
Some things can only be done by those who have plenty of money. But it is very
different with the work of showing kindness. There is nothing hard about this. We
do not need much money to do it. The poor can show kindness, as well as the rich.
Ebed-melech was a poor coloured man--the slave of King Zedekiah; yet he managed
to show real kindness to the prophet Jeremiah. He wag the means of saving his life.

II. KINDNESS IS USEFUL. Ebed-melechs kindness was useful to Jeremiah, because

it saved his life. He lived for years after this, and was the means of doing a great deal
of good to the people of Israel who were living then. Jeremiah has been useful to the
Church of God, ever since that day, by the prophecies which he wrote. And a large
portion of those prophecies was written after the day in which Ebed-melech saved
his life. And this shows us how great the usefulness was of Ebed-melechs kindness.
And in learning to show kindness to others, there is no telling how much good we
may do.

III. KINDNESS IS PROFITABLE. God sent word to Ebed-melech, by Jeremiah, that

when Jerusalem should be taken by the Assyrians, He would put it into their hearts
to show kindness to him by sparing his life. And so it came to pass. (R. Newton, D.
D.)

Put now these old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine arm-holes
under the cords.

Gentleness in doing good

I. THE EXAMPLE OF EBED-MELECH SHOULD BE FOLLOWED BY THOSE WHO WISH TO

SHOW REAL KINDNESS TO THE POOR. When poverty cometh as an armed man (Pro
6:11), blighting hope, and bringing wretchedness in his train, a heart must be harder
than stone, which is not moved with compassion. To show kindness to the needy, at
the right time, and in the best way, should be the study of those who would be
followers of Jesus. Experience has shown that it is generally far better to put people
in the way of getting employment, than to make them feel their dependence by
directly relieving their wants.

II. A LESSON FOR THOSE WHO ARE ANXIOUS TO RESCUE PERISHING SINNERS FROM
GOING DOWN TO THE PIT. Harsh words are quite out of place, even to the most
depraved; and we can hardly claim to be disciples of Him who will not break the
bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax (Isa 42:3), if we venture to speak
them. It is far better to lower the silken cords of Divine love, and the soft cushions of
the promises, and to address words of encouragement to those who are groping in
darkness. He that winneth souls is wise (Pro 11:30). The word winneth is the
important one. It suggests something besides labour and painstaking. Winning
implies gentleness, and a sincere interest in the souls of others. No one will be made
better by scolding, or sarcasm; but he who will imitate Ebed-melech, in his
thoughtful tenderness, will be successful in his work.

III. The example of Ebed-melech deserves to be remembered by those who would

bring others into the fold of Christs Church. Very little is ever accomplished for the
Master by harsh and uncharitable controversy. (J. N. Norton, D. D.)

The captive rescued

Here we see tenderness and compassion. There is much in doing a kind action in a
kind way. A charity may be so given as to wound the recipient; and a good deed,
accompanied by kind words, is like a gem set in pure gold. Let us ever be careful that
when we try to help others, we do our task with tenderness to the feelings and
prejudices of those we would aid. But the events of old times were full of
foreshadowings of the great central fact of the worlds redemption.
1. In Ebed-melech, therefore, we may behold a type of One who comes forth
from the palace of the Great King to loose the captives chains. Our Saviour
stoops down to help us. The cords of His love and compassion lift us up, and
restore us to that service which is perfect liberty.
2. But again, in this narrative there is a very good illustration of the too often
forgotten truth that in mans redemption he has his own part to do. If it was
Ebed-melech who let down the cords, yet Jeremiah had to fix them under his
arms to such a position that he might safely be drawn up. Work out your
own salvation is the plain direction of the apostle.
3. Again, there seems to be a lesson of instruction in this point--that the rags
and castaway fragments of garments were made useful in the way of making
easier the deliverance of Jeremiah, things which were worthless in
themselves used for a good and excellent purpose. So many things, at which
men scoff, saying, How can they save souls? are, by Gods blessing, made of
use.
4. Lastly, let us take Ebed-melech for an example. Can we not strive to rescue
some soul! Cannot we, like the thirty servants of the king, aid in letting down
the cords, or protect those who are doing so? We may at least lower down the
cords of prayer and entreaty. (W. Hardman, LL. D.)

Ropes and rags

The story is an illustration of the way God saves men. Jeremiahs danger and
deliverance were very real. In that dungeon he is, indeed, in an horrible pit. No
hope of escape. No light, no firm standing, every prospect of death, and in no long
time either. Would to God that we preachers could see the real danger to which
sinners are exposed! Jeremiah was delivered, brought up out of the miry clay. But
the prophets salvation was only a feeble picture of what Gods grace does for those
who take hold on Jesus. He remained in the courts of the prison. Whom the Son
makes free are free indeed. We who rest in Jesus may walk about the courts of the
Kings palace.

I. Mark you, HELP ALWAYS COMES FROM ABOVE. Jeremiah found it so. It was
useless to try to climb out of the dungeon, it was only to fall deeper into the mire.
Salvation is of the Lord. You cannot save yourself. The effort will only exhaust you.
Cry unto the Lord. Say, O Lord, deliver my soul. He is sure to hear your cry. Ebed-
melech is only a very poor picture of Jesus. The Saviour does more than send down a
rope. He comes Himself and lifts us up. Although Ebed-melech may be a very poor
type of Jesus Christ, he is a very good picture of the style in which one man may help
another.

II. HE HAD SYMPATHY. Now, sympathy is the mother of help.

III. EBED-MELECH DID NOT ALLOW DIFFICULTY TO DETER HIM. Some men can work
hard so long as there are no difficulties; opposition to them is like a hill on a jibbing
horse; they must stop now: they did not look for this sort of thing, you know. Just
so, the eunuch found it was not easy--it never is--to undo wrong. A stout heart to a
stiff brae, is common sense as well as right. If you mean to help others, you will
have to pull hard against the stream.

IV. EBED-MELECH TEACHES US TO SPARE THE FEELINGS OF THOSE WE HELP. He

lowered down the old rags and clouts he had gathered, and bade the prophet put
them under his armpits, so as not to have them cut by the ropes. The rope of
deliverance should not cut the flesh of those we save. This is not always thought of.
We may wound men in helping them, and they may like the remedy less than the
disease. We should think of the feelings, as well as the wants of those we help. Shall
we not imitate Him of whom it is said, He will not break the bruised reed? When
we take the rope, let us not forget the old rags as well.

V. Among the practical lessons of this story, there is the great truth that ONE MAN
MAY SET OTHERS GOING. Ebed-melech went to the king for help, and he gave him
thirty helpers. In the thirteenth verse, we read, So they drew up Jeremiah. How
many times this happen! Robert Raikes had no idea how many wheels his would set
in motion. Muller of Bristol has many imitators, and thousands of orphans are fed
and clothed that he will never know of. If you will only begin, others will follow you.
Do not wait for others to start with you; be content to go alone. It was David
Livingstone that set Stanley and Cameron to work, and the end of that lonely
travellers work will be seen when a highway shall be there, and the ransomed of
the Lord shall return with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads, and sorrow
and sighing shall nee away; but if Livingstone had waited for others, he would have
died, in comfort, it may be, but could not have had a grave in Westminster Abbey,
nor have set in motion the plans which are sure to issue in Africas deliverance.

VI. Let, us learn THE VALUE OF DESPISED AND CAST-OFF THINGS. The prudent
chamberlain had seen under the treasury the old cast clouts, and old rotten rags.
No one else saw any value in them, but he put them to a good use. What a number of
things are cast aside, like these old rags! Do you see yonder woman in such dismay?
She has been upstairs looking at some old dresses, and finds that the moth has been
there before her, and they are useless. Would it not have been better to have given
them to her poor relations, or to that widow who has such difficulty to find clothes
for her little ones? Have you not old magazines that would gladden the heart of
some of those intelligent paupers who never get any lively reading, or save from
ennui some convalescent in the hospital? Look and see what you have under the
treasury. (T. Champness.)

The tenderness of Ebed-melech

Negro though he was, Ebed-melech was a gentleman. He is not so bent on
delivering the prophet that he cares not how it is done. He will not bruise the
prophets skin in saving the prophets life. These old cast clouts and rotten rags do
not present a very savoury picture; but the feeling that prompted their use is both
pleasant and thoughtful. Many a good deed is spoilt by the manner of its doing.
Some people pride themselves upon their roughness; they think it a sign of
manliness. Their idea of manliness wants revision. Do such ever think of the
meaning of the very name they claim--gentleman? Do such realise that it is not only
manlike, but Godlike, to be gentle! Did not one of the psalmists exclaim, Thy
gentleness hath made me great? Ebed-melechs deliverance of the prophet from the
mire was a great deed, but the tenderness with which it was done makes it many
times greater. (The Quiver.)

JER 38:19-20
I am afraid of the Jews.

Fatal timidity
I remember very well, when I first went out to Australia, that one fine evening a
little bird was seen to be following the ship, evidently a land-bird driven out to sea.
When the little thing got tired it tried to alight on some portion of the rigging,
though it seemed afraid to do so. On one occasion the captain stretched forth his
hand and tried to take hold of the little bird, but it eluded his grasp and went back
far away into the darkness of the night, falling upon the waves without the hope of
rescue. (T. Spurgeon.)

Obey, I beseech thee, the voice of the Lord.

Obedience
I remember, years ago, entering the bed-chamber of an eminent saint, one
autumn morning, whose diminishing candles told how long he had been feeding on
the Word of God. I asked him what had been the subject of his study. He said he had
been engaged since four oclock in discovering all the Lords positive
commandments, that he might be sure that he was not wittingly neglecting any one
of them. It is very sad to find how many in the present day are neglecting to observe
to do the Lords precepts--concerning His ordinances, concerning the laying-up of
money, the evangelisation of the world, and the manifestation of perfect love. They
know the Lords will, and do it not. They appear to think that they are absolved from
that observing to do, which was so characteristic of Deuteronomy. As though love
were not more inexorable than law! (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JEREMIAH 39

JER 39:1-10
In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, came
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon.

The downfall of Judah

The siege and sacking of Jerusalem under Nebuchadrezzar is the most tragic story
in history. The second destruction of the city under Titus, the Roman general, was
analogous, but did not equal the first in horror of detail. The siege was more
prolonged under the king of Babylon, the resistance by the Jews more desperate,
and the determination with which the people held out more stubborn, preferring
starvation to surrender. During those eighteen months the city presented an awful
spectacle; delicately reared princesses were seen clawing over dung-heaps and street
refuse to find a morsel of food; the once snow-clad Nazarites walked the streets in
filthy garments; the fairest and best-looking of the people were reduced to the
merest skeletons; desperation of hunger forced fond mothers to boil and eat their
own children. The horrors depicted even in outline by the sacred writers almost
beggar the imagination. The king of Judah was the vassal of the king of Babylon, but
being deceived by false prophets he rebelled against his foreign sovereign, and
sought, through an alliance with the king of Egypt, to throw off the Chaldean yoke.
Hearing of this attempt at rebellion, the Chaldeans had sent a strong detachment of
their army to reduce Zedekiah to obedience, when an Egyptian army making its
appearance forced them to raise the siege. Subsequently the Egyptian army was
defeated, and then, with his entire army, Nebuchadrezzar came up and besieged
Jerusalem for eighteen months, and took it. Jeremiah had persistently warned the
king that it was folly to contend with Babylon, for the Lord had determined upon
their captivity. So the king and the princes not only rebelled against the king of
Babylon, but set themselves in defiance against God Himself.

I. JERUSALEM TAKEN AND SACKED. The prophet does not dwell on the details of the
siege, as it was no part of his plan to detail the military processes by which the holy
city was at last put into the hands of the Chaldeans. His purpose was simply to
record the fact, and thus mark the fulfilment of Gods word. After eighteen months,
in which the city had been completely invested, a breach in the walls was effected,
and the Babylonian army was in full possession. The princes of the Chaldean king
entered the city and took up their headquarters in the middle gate. This was
probably the gate through an inner wall within the city which surrounded the
citadel. At any rate, the presence of these Babylonian princes in that place showed
that the city was entirely in their hands. For further details, compare 2Ki 25:1-30.
with our present text, and Jer 52:1-34. These three accounts are substantially the
same. For details of the horrors and sufferings of the inhabitants of Jerusalem
during the siege, compare Lamentations (especially chap. 4.), in which the
heartbroken prophet pours forth his sorrow over the downfall of the city, and
especially over the woes which had come upon his people. See also Eze 4:5; Eze 4:12;
Eze 21:1-32., where minute prophecies of the downfall of the city are recorded. After
the subjugation of the city, and the flight, capture, judgment, and imprisonment of
the king, under the command of Nebuzar-adan, the captain of the guard, the
Babylonian soldiers burned the city, including the Temple, kings palace, and all the
houses of the princes and chief men; the walls were razed; the whole city was turned
into a waste and ruinous heap (verse 8; 52:13, 14). Jeremiah laments the destruction
of the glorious city of God in these sad and pathetic words: How doth the city sit
solitary, that was full of people; how is she become a widow, she that was great
among the nations . . . She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her
cheeks; among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her; all her friends have dealt
treacherously with her; they are become her enemies . . . And from the daughter of
Zion all her beauty is departed . . . How is the gold become dim; how is the most fine
gold changed; the stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street.
The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as
earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter (Lam 1:1-2; Lam 1:6; Lam 4:1-
2). The great lesson to be deeply pondered from this awful judgment upon
Jerusalem is the certain retribution of God upon persistent sin. No honest and
thoughtful man can read these prophetic and historic records without being
profoundly impressed with the longsuffering mercy of God toward sinners, and the
certainty of retribution following upon unrepented and persistent sin. Gods
judgment may be slow in coming, but it is as sure as it is slow. How long He had
borne with Judah and Jerusalem before He began to pour out His fury upon them!
Long God postpones His judgment, when once it sets in, it goes on to the end,
though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. What a
culmination of calamities at the last! There is no stopping or turning them back. All
the skill, the courage, and the endurance which Jerusalem brought to bear in order
to avert this awful judgment, availed nothing. When the time for judgment comes it
is too late for prayer and entreaty. When will men learn this lesson? We have not to
do with the judgment upon Judah and Jerusalem, but with that which is coming
upon all men who, like this apostate people, despise Gods Word, and believe not
His prophets. No amount of theory or argument will prevent the doom of the
persistent sinner. Men may say that death ends all; but the resurrection of Jesus
proves that it does not; men may say that God is too merciful to punish sinners
according to the declaration of the Scriptures; but is He? Let the story of the flood;
the overwhelming fate of Pharaoh; the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; the
terrible calamities that came upon Israel and Judah, be our answer. After Gods
mercy has been ruthlessly trampled under foot, then His righteous retribution
comes, and proceeds to the bitter end.

II. THE FLIGHT AND CAPTURE OF THE KING. When the king saw the city in the
possession of the enemy, he hastily gathered his army and family, and by night fled
from the city by a secret way through his garden, and between two walls which
concealed his movements (verse 4, 52:7; 2Ki 25:4). His flight, however, was of no
avail; for though he nearly effected his escape, having reached the borders of the
Jordan, his absence was discovered, and the Chaldeans pursued after him; and,
while his army was scattered abroad, probably on a foraging expedition, the king
and his family and the princes that were with him were captured. Too late the king
sought safety in flight. It was not to be. God had decreed his capture, and no
precaution could prevent it. Had he heeded the warning of Jeremiah, who brought
him the word of God, and surrendered to the king of Babylon, his own life would
have been spared, his childrens lives would have been spared, his princes lives
would have been spared, and the glorious City of God would have been spared (Jer
28:17-17). The king was a weak man, and hesitated to do the word of God because he
was afraid of being taunted with cowardice by his nobles and the people. How many
men are cowards before their fellow-men, and yet bravo before God! They fear the
reproach of weak, feeble, and sinful men, but fear not the Word of God. Surely the
sorry flight of the wretched king from his ruined city, a fugitive from God and the
king of Babylon, was infinitely more humiliating than an honourable surrender to
Nebuchadrezzar. How many will seek salvation wildly when it is too late! Let it be
remembered again that, when once the master of the house is risen up, and hath
shut the door, then flight or petition is of none avail. When once Jesus ceases to be
the Advocate of sinners, and becomes their Judge, then repentance is too late, and
no man may flee the judgment. What unutterable miseries are added to the main
consequences of our sins, when we think of what might have been, had we not
been too late!
1. Prophecy and its fulfilment. In connection with the flight, arrest,
condemnation, and punishment of the king, we have a most remarkable
series of prophetic fulfilments. Ezekiel, under the command of God, had
before this final calamity, by means of pantomime, as well as by clear and
unmistakable words, depicted every detail of the kings flight, capture, and
punishment. Read Eze 12:1-13. Thus have we seen the king laden with his
valuables, fleeing at night, digging through a wall to escape the Chaldeans;
we have seen God spreading His net, catching and delivering him over, to be
first blinded, then loaded with chains, carried to Babylon and thrust into
prison; there we have seen him die. How impossible to have understood
Ezekiels prophecy until it was fulfilled; how then does it appear to have been
the very letter of subsequent fact!
2. Arrested, condemned, and punished. The details are briefly but graphically
told. When the soldiers arrested the flying king, they brought him to the king
of Babylon, who
(1) gave judgment upon him. Zedekiah was, according to the law of
nations, a traitor to the king of Babylon, who had set him upon the
throne of Judah as his vassal, and against whom Zedekiah had rebelled.
So while the Chaldean king was carrying out Gods decree against
Zedekiah for his persistent sin and equity, he was also executing his own
law upon him as a rebel. Gods providence ever fits in with the ordinary
workings of human history.
(2) The first part of the judgment was that the sons of the king should be
butchered before his eyes. What a horrible thing this was! Alas for that
poor king! He had brought this upon them. What may be the agonies of a
sinful father who, through precept and example, has encouraged his own
sons to infidelity, and the final loss of their souls! Then followed the
slaughter of the nobles before his face; this too was in part his doing; for,
 though the king s action in holding out against the king of Babylon,
contrary to the counsel and entreaty of Jeremiah, was due to his fear of
the nobles, yet as king it was his duty to have asserted his authority and
saved them and the city in spite of their mockeries of Gods word.
(3) Finally the king of Babylon ordered Zedekiahs eyes to be put out, then
loaded him with chains, sent him to Babylon, and there cast him into
prison, until death released him into the other world. Let us hope that a
gate of repentance was opened for him before he passed thither. But
what an awful punishment for a king and a father! The last impression on
his brain from this world was the awful sight of his butchered sons and
nobles. Who can tell the horrors of his lonely confinement, shut up with
these memories for ever haunting his dark soul? Men choose the ways of
sin in this life, counting them to be good things, but they forget that in
the hereafter the evil things which they contemptuously denied will be
their portion, soured with memorys poisoned sting.

III. THE BLESSED POOR. Only one ray of light penetrated the dark cloud of doom
that hung over and burst on Jerusalem. The city burned with fire, the Temple
destroyed, her fair stones scattered, the king and his family, the princes and nobles,
and all the citys inhabitants carried away, slain, or held in a wretched captivity,
which brought them nought but sighs and tears; what exception was there in all this
misery? Just this; and it is not unsuggestive. The wretchedly and miserably poor
were left behind; and more; for the captain of the guard, acting for the king of
Babylon, gave them fields and vineyards. In the general judgment that overwhelmed
Jerusalem, the sparing of these poor people and the gift to them of fields and
vineyards suggest to us the blessings that are in reserve for those on earth who,
though poor in this world, are rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which He has
promised to them that love Him (Jam 2:5). It also suggests the beatitude of Jesus:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the
meek, for they shall inherit the earth (Mat 5:3; Mat 5:5). God will not forget such.
Here is seen Gods reversal. The rich and great of Jerusalem, who had grown so by
grinding oppression of the poor, are carried away captive, slain with the sword and
cast into prison, while those whom they oppressed are now inheriting their lands
and vineyards (Isa 57:15; Isa 66:2). Till the captivity the poor were only a portion of
the people, but now they were the whole. This event, therefore, would seem to
indicate that the poor, meek, and contrite in spirit are the whole sum of those who
shall constitute the people of God in the day of judgment. (G. F. Pentecost, D. D.)

He put out Zedekiahs eyes.

Non-acceptance of chastisement
We sometimes act as though we thought that dispensations of light and joy were
made to draw us to God; those of darkness and sorrow the reverse; but that is our
mistake; our thought must be God in all. And here God makes the announcement
of the chastisement in a manner worthy of Himself--in the midst of judgment He
remembers mercy. He commissions Jeremiah to promise circumstances of
alleviation and gracious dealing; even though the trouble remain. The trouble and
its alleviations were to exist side by side. But now, what are the speakings of this
moreover to us?
1. It says to us, Reject not bounded chastisement or trial, for you know not how
wide God may remove those bounds, when it comes upon you as something
rejected by you, but inflicted, whether you will or no, by Him.
2. It says, Be sure that God will carry His own way. Look upon all resistance of
His will as madness, as full of mischief for yourself.
3. If we reject what God thus ordains, we may rest assured that we are laying up
for ourselves a long period of sad thought, peopled with sad memories.
4. Though the chastisement or the trial God announces be heavy, still let us be
assured that it is the lightest possible under the circumstances.
5. Let us believe that God has terrible reserves of chastening dealings. We think
that each trial, as it comes, is the worst that can be; sometimes a man in folly
and desperation feels as though God could do no more to him; but the
reserves of the Lord in this way, as in blessing, are illimitable--take care, lest
a worse thing come upon thee.
6. We may, and must leave it to God to take care of us, when leading us into
either discipline or chastisement.
7. Instead of fretting and troubling ourselves unduly, and setting our minds
upon finding out fresh and fresh elements in our trial, let us count up some
of the moreovers of what might have come upon us; some of the
moreovers of the mercies which are bestowed.
8. Let us be careful to keep ourselves well within the line of Gods action with us,
and not to subject ourselves to mans. It is not Gods purpose to make a full
end of us; He means to deal wisely and admeasuredly with us; He means us
to taste that He is gracious; to have reason to believe that He is so. (P. B.
Power, M. A.)

JER 39:15-18
I will surely deliver thee, and thou shalt not fan by the sword, but thy life shall be
for a prey unto thee.

Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, one of the Lords hidden ones

It is strange that, amongst all the tracts and biographies and scriptural stories
which the press sends forth, one never meets the name of Ebed-melech the
Ethiopian. It shows that Scripture history is either little read or little understood. It
makes one doubt whether those whom either the world or the Church is admiring be
those whom He that looketh not on the outward appearance, and seeth not as man
seeth, will delight to honour in the day when He maketh up His jewels. Although, for
aught we know, he never was a member of any church upon earth, being a poor
heathen, brought from a land that the light of Gods revelation had never reached,
he is held up in the Book of God to our admiration and imitation, in contrast with
the whole Church and nation that was in covenant with God in ancient times; and
even under the New Testament, if we honoured saints at all, his name should hold a
conspicuous place in our calendar of worthies and illustrious confessors of the faith,
for he was, like ourselves, a Gentile man, and it was by faith he obtained a good
report from God Himself. Jerusalem was to fall, but Ebed-melech the Ethiopian
would stand in the evil day. As he had delivered the prophet from his dungeon, and
from the cruelty of the princes his persecutors, and the danger of a horrible death,
he himself would be delivered in the day of danger, and the men of whom he was
afraid would not have it in their power to take his life, or injure a hair of his head.
God would be his saviour, and shows him beforehand the certainty of his salvation.

I. What a blessed providence is that of God, over the least as well as the greatest
men and things, especially over the good without respect of persons.
1. No one is forgotten before God, and nothing that concerns the least left out of
the regard of the Father of all. The one who was the object of special care to
the God of Israel, the Lord of hosts, in the day of Israels final overthrow, was
one of these who were least regarded by men upon earth, a slave, a eunuch,
an Ethiopian, an uncircumcised heathen, an alien from the commonwealth
of Israel, a stranger to the covenant of promise. Who then is forgotten by the
God of Israel?
2. God is far from confounding the righteous with the wicked in His judgments.
3. So far from confounding the righteous with the wicked, God contrasts them
with one another. What brighter display of Divine righteousness can there be
than the salvation of the least of saints in the midst of the destruction of a
whole nation, or church of sinners, like the Jews here, or like Christendom,
to whose doom we are to look forward?

II. What encouragement to the lowliest to work out their salvation with
cheerfulness and patience, as well as with fear and trembling, after the example of
Ebed-melech the Ethiopian!
1. Why are such actions as this of Ebed-melech those which in the sight of God
are of great account? Because they are acts of self-denying love and self-
sacrifice; because they are thus, God Himself in the text expressly says, the
fruits of a living faith in God.
2. It is not his circumstances that prevent any man from becoming great before
God, great as Ebed-melech, for it is not his circumstances that prevent any
from becoming good, from having the same character, and manifesting in his
place the same heroic and holy spirit.
3. Woe to us if we are not like Ebed-melech in unselfishness, or in self-denying
love, the fruit of faith! Church membership, Church privileges, Church
knowledge and advantages of whatever kind, what will they prove but the
condemnation of those who are not like Ebed-melech in character?

III. What blessed hope for the future does Ebed-melech bring to many of whom
the world is not worthy, and who are by the world and by the Church unknown!
1. Kindness to those whom the world despises, or the worldly and ungodly
church reprobates or persecutes, is not the least part of the duty of
Christians, or those who would be saved in the day of wrath, like Ebed-
melech.
2. How different is public opinion in a corrupt church or age from the judgment
or truth of God! (R. Paisley.)
 JEREMIAH 40

JER 40:1
Being bound in chains.

Jeremiah in chains
There is sadness In a shackle and bitterness In bonds. Many men part with life
rather than liberty. Speaking humanly, Pauls lot In chains would have been
intolerably irksome; but his soul was free! They could not chain his spirit. It is
melancholy to watch the attitude of a caged eagle; its eye is dull, its plumage droops.
The chain is round the spirit of the creature of the skies. Not so with the Christian
soul. It is not the shackle on the wrist that constitutes the slave, said Robertson of
Brighton, but the loss of self-respect. In Christian service we learn to reverence
self. Our only bonds are the bonds of love. Our manhood is exalted, our service is
liberty. (Christian Commonwealth.)

JER 40:3
And have not obeyed His voice.

Unheeding warnings lead to ruin

If I were in a boat on the river in the rapids, it would not be necessary to insure
my destruction that I should enter into violent controversy with those who would
urge me from the shore to take heed and come to land. All I should have to do would
be to shut my ears to their entreaty, and leave myself alone; the current would do
the rest. Neglect of the Gospel is thus just as perilous as the open rejection of it.
Indeed half the evils of our daily life in temporal things are caused by neglect, and
countless are the souls who put off the seeking of the kingdom of God, and the
righteousness thereof. (W. Bates.)

JEREMIAH 41

JER 41:1-10
Then arose Ishmael.

Devils incarnate
1. If ever there was such a one, this Ishmael was of whom these verses tell. His
atrocities remind us of the Indian Mutiny, its leader, and the well at
Cawnpore (cf. Verse 9). Treachery, ingratitude, murder, massacre, greed,
cowardice,--all are gathered in this detestable character (cf. Mr. Groves
article Ishmael, Smiths Dictionary of the Bible)
 2. And such men are permitted to be. So clearly seen is this, that every drama
has its villain; they are recognised as having definite place and function in
this poor life of ours.
3. Can we explain this permission? Wherefore are such men created and
preserved? It is s part of the great question of moral evil, for the full solution
of which we must wait. But the existence of such men as this Ishmael is but
one out of the many terrible facts in Gods providence, such as plague,
famine, earthquake, &c.
In regard to such men, we can see some purposes that they subserve.
1. They make evident the hideous capacities of evil which are in our nature, and
the need, therefore, for Gods restraining grace.
2. They are warnings to increased watchfulness on the part of those in whom the
tendencies to like evil exist.
3. They are Gods scourges for mens sin (cf. Attila, the Scourge of God).
4. They weld together the people they oppress in one common league against
them, and thus out of scattered tribes a nation is formed.
5. They clear out much that is evil (cf. French Revolution; Napoleon). But,
sometimes as here, we cannot see what good they do; and then we can only
wait. (W. Clarkson, B. A.)

JER 41:8
So he forbare, and slew them not among their, brethren.

Sin hindered by sin

Ishmael would have killed these men but for his greed of the wealth they had. It is
satisfactory to think he never gained possession of it. Nevertheless, his greed made
him guilty of one sin less. This story suggests that--

I. God has many ways of hindering sin. There is--

1. The best way of all. By granting a true repentance and His Holy Spirit,
creating the clean heart and renewing the right spirit.
2. But there are other ways. By keeping the opportunity and the will apart. How
much of our freedom from sin do we owe to this blessed providential
severance! By fear of present evil consequence of our sin.
3. And sometimes, as here, by one sin getting in the way of another. Thus pride
holds back not a few; not love of God, gratitude to Christ, love of holiness,
hut pride. And covetousness checks the sinner in many sins he would be
guilty of but for this. Anger, breaking up the alliances of transgressors; as
when, in the days of Jehoshaphat, the Ammonites who were coming against
him fell out one with the other (2Ch 20:22). When thieves fall out, honest
men come by their rights. (W. Clarkson, B. A.)

Sensual self-indulgence
The vilest Roman emperors were those who least persecuted the Church--
Tiberius, Commodus, &c. They were too absorbed in their own indulgences to
trouble about the Christians.

II. BUT THESE OTHER WAYS LEAVE MEN AS GREAT SINNERS AS BEFORE. The question
is not as to your freedom from transgression so much, but--what kept you free? Only
the first and best way is accepted of God.

III. NEVERTHELESS, LET US BE THANKFUL THAT SIN IS SELF-DESTRUCTIVE IN ITS VERY

NATURE. It is a blessed anarchy, for it protects many who would otherwise suffer.

IV. But for ourselves let us seek that sin may be destroyed by Christ. (W.
Clarkson, B. A.)

JER 41:17
And dwelt in the habitation of Chimham.

Too near the edge

This is one of the reflections that come to us as we read of the place whither
Johanan led his followers, and as we see the events that happened immediately
after. This chapter is a record of disappointments. First the hopeful prospects of
Gedaliahs governorship, which seemed starting so fairly and happily for all, these
are shattered and overthrown by the villainous conduct of Ishmael. Then it is a
grievous disappointment that we do not hear of Ishmaels death, only of his escape.
That such a wretch should escape with his life seems a reflection upon that justice
which generally follows on the track of wrong-doers such as he was, and metes out
to them their due. Escape seems too lenient a dealing with them. And now here is
another disappointment that Johanan, instead of seeking to follow in Gedaliahs
footsteps, should be for leading the people down into Egypt. At the caravanserai of
Chimham, in Bethlehem--the natural halting-place on the way to Egypt--Johanan
held a council of war, and then, against the prophets advice, finally determined to
abandon their homes, and to make for the refuge, to which the worldly Israelite
always had recourse, across the Egyptian border. It was a bad place to halt at; it was
too near that beguiling land, the witchery of which not a few of them had long been
feeling and would now feel more than ever. Whenever Israel went thither, it was
always a going down into Egypt. This was, more true morally and spiritually than
even geographically, to which the word down, of course, refers. And the present was
no exception. Looking at them there at Chimham, we note--

I. THE RESEMBLANCE THEY OFFER. Are they not like all those who tamper with
temptation? They know, as Israel knew, that they are in a forbidden path, and yet
they do not keep clear of it. Like moths fluttering around the flame, so men will dally
with sin. They know that to yield would be both most wrong and ruinous, and yet
they go close to the border.

II. THE REASONS WHICH GOVERNED THEM. THE Jews came to Chimham because
their will had already consented to go further--on and down into Egypt. For like
reasons men come to such places. There has been already the secret yielding of the
will. There was no need of the Jews being at Chimham. It was not the way back from
Gibeon. It was a deliberate going into temptation. So those who act like them have,
as they, already consented in heart. And the causes of that consent are akin. They
falsely feared what the Chaldeans might do, though there was no ground for such
fear; and they falsely hoped for good--freedom from war and want--which they
never realised. And such persons will ever magnify both the difficulties of the right
path and the looked-for pleasures and advantages of the wrong. Thus would they
persuade themselves that the right is wrong and the wrong is right.

III. THE RESISTANCE THEY SEEMED TO MAKE. The Jews did not yield all at once.
They appeal to the prophet. They ask his prayers. They, make repeated and loud--
much too loud: Methinks he doth protest too much--professions. They wait
patiently the prophets message. And yet all the while (verse 20) they were
dissembling in their hearts, regarding iniquity there (history of Balaam). They
would have God on their side, not themselves on Gods side. All this is most
melancholy matter of fact with those who, of their own accord, go too near the edge.

IV. THE RESULTS THAT FOLLOWED. Of course they went over the edge; such people
always do. They showed the insincerity of their prayers by their anger when they
were denied (Jer 43:2, &c.). They escaped none of the evil they dreaded; they gained
none of the good they expected. So disastrous did this step appear to the next and
to all subsequent generations of Israel, that the day of Gedaliahs murder, which led
to it, has been from that time forth and to this day observed as a national fast. It
seemed to be the final revocation of the advantages of the Exodus. By this breach in
their local continuity a chasm was made in the history, which for good or evil was
never filled up. Yes; they who will go so near temptation will go into it, and be
borne down by it to their sore hurt and harm.

V. THE REMEDY RECOMMENDED. Jeremiah urged them to return to their own land
and stay there (Jer 42:8, &c.), promising them the blessing of God if they obeyed,
and threatening His sore anger if they did not. This counsel ever wise. Get away
from the border-land back into safety. Think of what will follow on your conduct--
the blessing or the curse. Stay not in all the plain, but escape for thy life. As the
angels hastened Lot so would we hasten all those who have foolishly and wrongly
chosen to go too near temptations edge. (W. Clarkson, B. A.)

JEREMIAH 42

JER 42:1-6
All the people . . . came near, and said unto Jeremiah the prophet.

The people and the prophet

I. PRAYERFULNESS. Pray for us. The prophet was implored to intercede with God
on behalf of his countrymen. That which prosperity had failed to teach, was quickly
learned in the day of adversity. God is honoured when His people cast themselves on
His all-sufficiency; and He will repay their confidence by revelations of enlarged,
and ever-enlarging, favour.

II. TEACHABLENESS. That the Lord thy God may show, &c. Matthew Henry well
says, In every difficult and doubtful case our eye must be up to God for direction:
we cannot be guided by a spirit of prophecy, which has ceased; but we may pray to
be guided in our movements by a spirit of wisdom, and the hints of providence.
1. A teachable spirit is not a credulous spirit. It does not believe, except on
evidence; as the preacher is to persuade men, so is he ever to re-echo the first
words God addresses to His rebellious creatures, Come, now, and let us
reason together.
2. A teachable spirit is not a captious spirit.
3. A teachable spirit is not a reluctant spirit. (W. G. Barrett.)

The Lord shall answer you, I will declare it unto you.--

Portrait of a true preacher

I. THE TRUE PREACHER SEEKS HIS MESSAGE FOR THE PEOPLE FROM HEAVEN. I will
pray, &c. There are preachers who seek their message from the theories of
philosophy, from the works of literature, from the conclusions of their own
reasoning. But a true teacher looks to Heaven. In his studies his great question is,
What saith the Lord; in his ministration his language is, Thus saith the Lord. We
cannot render the spiritual service to humanity, of which it is in urgent need, by
endeavouring to instruct it with human ideas, even though they come from the
highest intellects of the world. The ideas of God can alone renovate, spiritually
enlighten, purify, ennoble, and save the human soul.

II. The true preacher DELIVERS HIS MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE FULL AND FAITHFULLY.
I will keep nothing back from you.
(1) Though it strike against your prejudices.
(2) Though it enkindle your indignation. (Homilist.)

JER 42:20
For ye dissembled in your hearts, when ye sent me unto the Lord your God,
saying, Pray for us.

The hypocrisy of desiring the prayers of others without a suitable

conduct

I. CONSIDER ON WHAT PRINCIPLES DESIRING THE PRAYERS OF OTHERS IS GROUNDED.

They are these; that it is our duty to pray for one another; that God hath often shown
a gracious regard to the intercessions of His servants for others; and that it is very
desirable, especially in some particular cases, to have an interest in them.

II. WHEN THEY WHO DESIRE THE PRAYERS OF OTHERS MAY BE SAID TO DISSEMBLE IN
THEIR HEARTS. They do so when they desire them without sincerity; when they will
not pray for themselves; when they will not use proper means to obtain the blessings
they desire; and especially when they will not do what God by His Word and
ministers requireth.

III. THE HYPOCRISY AND EVIL OF THIS CONDUCT. It is an affront to the all-seeing
and holy God; it is likewise deceiving their friends; and prayers offered for such
persons are not likely to be of much avail. Application--
1. We may hence learn, with what dispositions of mind we should desire the
prayers of others. Whenever we ask the intercessions of others, let it be in
sincerity; with a firm persuasion of the power of prayer; that it is not in vain
to seek God; and that it is our duty to engage the assistance of our friends, by
their application to the throne of grace. Be solicitous that you concur with
them by praying yourselves without ceasing in the best manner you are able;
and with your chief dependence for acceptance, not on your own prayers, nor
those of your friends, but the mediation of Jesus Christ.
2. That we should be ready to pray one for another. Whenever we think of an
absent relation or friend, or hear of him, or receive a letter from him, let us
lift up our hearts to God for him in a short petition, as his circumstances may
require. But we should be particularly mindful of those who desire our
prayers.
3. It is peculiarly wicked to dissemble in our hearts, when we profess
dependence on the intercession of Christ. (Job Orion, D. D.)

Dissembling with God

I. CONSIDER, WHAT WAS THAT GREAT AND GENERAL DUTY, AGAINST WHICH THE
JEWS, ON THE OCCASION BEFORE US, REBELLED. Ye disembled, said Jeremiah, in
your hearts. Dissimulation, like other sins, admits of degrees. The heart may
dissemble radically and entirely, so as to be wholly hypocritical; so as not to feel any
portion of that love to God, of that faith, of that gratitude, of that sense of duty, of
that purpose of obedience which the tongue expresses. Or it may dissemble
partially; feeling weakly and insufficiently those sentiments towards Him, which
dwell with parade and seeming warmth upon the lips. The doom which awaits the
complete hypocrite, cannot be doubted. Let the partial hypocrite beware, lest he at
last come to the same place of torment.

II. Consider, each for himself, how strong is the probability that you may be
guilty, in a greater or a less degree, of dissembling in your heart before God. We
have in our hands the Word of God, which describes the character of a true
Christian. We have before our eyes the practice of the world. When we compare
them, we cannot but perceive how vast is the number of professed Christians who
evince little of the spirit of true Christianity in their principles and conduct: and
therefore stand self-convicted as dissemblers in their hearts before the Most High.
When you call to remembrance the multitudes even among those who styled
themselves the followers of God, which in ancient times the sinfulness and
deceitfulness of the heart betrayed into hypocrisy: when you survey the multitudes
of His professed followers, which in this your day the same sinfulness and
deceitfulness render hypocritical before Him: have you not reason for serious dread
that you may yourself be found a dissembler in His sight?

III. A scriptural rule, which may assist you in discovering whether, if the Son of
God were now to call you to judgment, you would be found dissemblers in your
hearts. Where your treasure is, saith our Lord, there will your heart be also. In
other words, Whatever be the object which you judge and feel to be the most
valuable; concerning that object will your heart snow itself to be the most steadily
and the most deeply interested. Apply this rule to yourself. Thus you may discover
with absolute certainty whether your heart is fixed upon God, or whether it
dissembles before Him.
1. Compare the pains which you employ, the vigilance which you exercise, the
anxiety which you feel, concerning worldly objects, on the one hand; on the
other, concerning religion.
2. When you receive a kindness from a friend, you feel, I presume, warm and
durable emotions of gratitude, and an earnest desire to render to your
benefactor such a return, in proportion to your ability, as may be acceptable
to him. You are receiving every day from God blessings infinitely superior to
all the kindnessess which can be conferred upon you by any of your fellow-
creatures. Do you feel then still more lively and durable emotions of
gratitude to Him?
3. Your worldly prosperity is an object which you pursue with industry and
solicitude. Are you still more diligent, more anxious, in pursuing the welfare
of your soul?
4. You have various occupations to which you resort, as opportunities offer
themselves, from inclination and choice. Among these is religion to be
found? Does religion stand at the head of them?
5. When you are informed of the events which befall another person, you rejoice,
if they are such as promote his worldly advantage; you lament, if they impair
it. Do you experience greater joy when you are assured of his advancement in
religion? Do you experience greater sorrow if you learn that he has gone
backward in the ways of righteousness? (T. Gisborne, M. A.)

Insincerity in prayer
Rarely do men come to Christ, says Leighton, as blank paper--ut tabula rasa--to
receive His doctrine; but, on the contrary, all scribbled and blurred with such base
habits as malice, hypocrisy, and envy.

JEREMIAH 43

JER 43:8-13
 Take great stones in thine hand, and hide them in the clay in the brick kiln.

Jeremiah hides the stones in the brick kiln

I. They preached of the historic past.

1. From the soil in which they were found. They were stones of Egypt.
2. The place where they were buried--the brick kiln--must have carried their
thoughts back to the hard labour of their ancestors under the lash of the
taskmasters (Ex 9:8).
3. The burial of the stones beneath the ground might have suggested the past
condition of Israel in this same land; they were buried under the oppressive
tyranny of the heathen monarch and his people, and had been raised, as it
were, from a grave of degradation and lifted into a new life as a free people
by the mighty hand of God.

II. They prophesied of the future.

1. The only refuge from the displeasure of God is to be found in God Himself.
2. Unbelief in the Divine Word will not prevent the fulfilment of it.
3. The true minister of God will not be deterred by opposition from declaring the
judgments, as well as the mercies, of God. (A London Minister.)

JEREMIAH 44

JER 44:4
Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate.

The thing which God hates

I. What sin itself is.

II. God hates it.

1. Because it is contrary to His own nature.
2. Because it is unnatural in His creatures.
3. Because it transgresses holy, just, and good laws.
4. Because it defiles and injures the entire human nature. It brings a withering
curse upon every stage of life, and upon every development of life, and upon
every phase of life, and upon every department of life.
5. Because it makes men curses to each other.
6. Because it ignores or it rejects the Divine government.
7. Because wherever sin exists, except as it is checked by Gods mercy, it has the
dominion.
 8. Because wherever it is introduced, it spreads.
9. Sin requires God to inflict upon men of every class and kind, that which He
assures us, upon His oath, He has no pleasure in.
10. Their continuing in sin tramples under foot the blood of Jesus. (S. Martin.)
The popular estimate of sin

I. WHAT IS SIN? Theology is determined by the answer. Sin is only negation as

cold is the negation of heat; darkness, of light; disease, of health. So we are told.
Well, I know that I shiver to-night under the negation of heat. I grope under the
negation of light, and feel a very positive thorn in the flesh. Away with this juggling
of words! Sin is a fact and must be dealt with.

II. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THE NEW LIFE? If Sin be easy to control, no helplessness
is felt, no great change of being is accepted, no outside help is needed. If you fancy
that one bad deed is cancelled by another good one, and that you are all right at
heart, although often wrong in action, you will not seek salvation.

III. WHAT DISCLOSURE DOES SCRIPTURE MAKE? An abominable thing. What does
sin propose to do? It defies God and would usurp His throne were it possible. The
smallest infringement of the principle of honesty in social life breaks up the
confidence of man in man and introduces destructive tendencies. The greater the
transgression, the more destructive are the results.

IV. WHAT ABOUT THE REMEDY OF SIN? We know not all the counsels of God, but
we know enough of the covenant He made with His Son Jesus Christ to say that by
His vicarious atonement we are freed from the penalty of sin, and by the washing of
regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Ghost we are made pure--the past and
future are covered by His meritorious work. (C. S. Robinson, D. D.)

Gods expostulation with sinners

I. The description of sin here given by God.

1. We call those objects abominable which excite in us the sensations of loathing
and abhorrence. That such is the nature of sin, even in its most agreeable
forms, may be learned from the various figures under which it is represented
in the Word of God. Whatever is revolting in corruption, loathsome in
uncleanness, or hideous in deformity, is there brought forward, in order to
give us some idea of its abominable nature.
2. It must be considered not only as loathsome to God, but as exciting in Him
the desire of its destruction, and an inclination to execute vengeance upon all
to whom it is an object of delight. From an abominable object we naturally
turn away; but what we hate we seek to destroy.
(1) Sin is hateful to God, as it is the very reverse of His nature.
(2) Sin is hateful to God, as it is a transgression of His law.
(3) Sin is hateful to God, as it opposes His designs.
(4) Sin is hateful to God, as it is an expression of enmity in the heart against
 His very being.

II. The manner in which God beseeches us to abstain from sin.

1. We are naturally prone to wickedness.
2. God hath designs of mercy towards our guilty race.
3. The salvation of sinners is accomplished in a way perfectly consistent with
their freedom as moral agents.
4. God is deeply concerned for the salvation of sinners.

III. Some considerations that ought to induce us to hearken to the voice of God,
and do what He requires.
1. It is God why, expostulates with you,. and beseeches you to abstain from sin.
2. The extreme folly of sin is another consideration, that may induce you to
abstain from it.
3. The fatal consequences of continuing in sin, especially after we haven been
called to repentance, is a consideration that ought to induce you to hear, and
do what the Lord requires. (G. Campbell.)

Argument against sinning

I. GOD DENOUNCES SIN WITH ABHORRENCE. He calls it an abominable thing. Sin

is represented in the Bible as a loathsome, odious, revolting, execrable thing. All
kinds of sin are an abomination. Lying lips (Pro 12:22). Pride (Pro 16:5).
Wicked thoughts (Pro 15:26). Wickedness in all its forms (Pro 15:9). Sin is
essentially an abomination. Three things show this:--
1. The misrepresenting conduct of the sinner. Sin has a self-hiding, self-
dissimulating instinct.
2. The universal conscience of mankind. Injustice, falsehood, self-seeking
impiety, with all their kindred sins, the conscience of the world abhors.
3. The history of the Divine conduct towards our world.
(1) Look at the judicial inflictions recorded in the Bible: expulsion from
Eden, the deluge, the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, the destruction of
Jerusalem, &c.
(2) Merciful interpositions. How has mercy wrought, through all past ages,
to sweep abominations from the world! through patriarchs, prophets,
apostles, holy ministers, and Christ Himself. He came to put away sin:

II. GOD HATES SIN WITH INTENSITY. He says, I hate it. The Infinite heart revolts
from it with ineffable detestation.
1. He hates it, for it is deformity, and He is the God of beauty. How offensive to
the artist of high aesthetic taste and culture, are figures introduced into the
realm of art, unscientific in their proportions, and unrefined in their touch!
2. He hates it, for it is confusion, and He is the God of order. Order, says the
poet, is Heavens first law.
3. He hates it, for it is misery, and He is the Cod of love. Every sin has in it the
 sting of the serpent, which, if not extracted, will rankle with fiery anguish in
the soul for ever. God hates this evil, for He desires the happiness of His
creatures.

III. GOD PROHIBITS SIN WITH EARNESTNESS. Oh, do not this abominable thing.
What depths of fervid loving solicitude are in this Oh!
1. Do it not; you are warring against your own highest interest.
2. Do it not; you are warring against the well-being of the creation.
3. Do it not; you are warring against ME. Every sin is a war against My ideas, My
feelings, My plans, My institutions. (Homilist.)

Lifes lameness: the character of sin

The church bells were ringing out a merry peal of welcome as a bride and
bridegroom left the church after the marriage service. The bride was given some
flowers as she passed to her carriage, and a small drop of water fell from a flower on
to the brides light dress. Soon after, a slight stain was noticed there, and the remark
was made: A spot of sin as small as this would shut either of us out of heaven. That
remark was perfectly true. A little speck of dust on the lens of a telescope will mar its
powers of vision. A tiny hair in the mainspring of a watch will suffice to stop the
machinery, So one little sin, secretly cherished and wilfully indulged, will choke up
our soul s communion with God and destroy our spiritual comfort. What, then, is
sin? Sin is rebellion against God. Self-love is the secret of sin. The hidden principle
of all sin is rejection of the will of God. None of Gods commands are grievous, and
therefore the question of our obedience is made to turn precisely on the will of God.
God alone is independent. He has made us for Himself; and the more we seek to
bring our wills into subjection to His, and our lives into complete dependence upon
Him, the happier and the holier shall we become. As a train was speeding along the
railroad in the north of England the other day, a spark from the engine set fire to a
shrub in a plantation near the line, and then the fire spread to a forest, where it
raged for two days, doing immense damage. Who would have thought that such a
result would arise, from a little spark? Yet so it is in the world of life--great results
spring from the most trivial causes. Our hearts are, like those dry trees, ready to
burst into a blaze when touched by the spark of sin. Therefore we must beware of
sin. When Canova, the great Italian sculptor, was about to commence his famous
statue of the great Napoleon, his keenly observant eye detected a tiny red line
running through the upper portion of the splendid block of marble which had been
brought from Paros at enormous cost. Others saw no flaw, but the great sculptor
detected it, and he refused to lay chisel upon it. The very perfection he aimed at
compelled him to reject the marble block. Now if there is a flaw in your life, others
may not see it, but God most assuredly will. And that there is such a flaw God
declares. His Word asserts, All have sinned (Rom 3:23). There is none that doeth
good, no, not one (Psa 14:3). During a naval engagement off Copenhagen, Admiral
Parker signalled the ships to cease action. Nelson did not wish to retire his ship.
When informed of the Admirals signal, he looked through the telescope with his
blind eye, and exclaimed, I see no such signal He persistently deceived himself in
order that he might continue the fight. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves, and the truth is not in us (1Jn 1:8). But we deceive no one else. It is no
excuse for a man to say he does not steal, does not lie, does not swear, does not
covet. Neglect of known duty is sin. Man has a duty to God (Mat 22:37). Not to love
God is sin. And the Bible not only charges man with not loving God, but it speaks of
man as being in a state of enmity against God (Rom 8:7). Therefore he cannot
restore himself. It is a stormy night by the sea-shore. The wind is howling and
moaning, and ever and anon with boisterous gusts threatening violence to the
shipping in the harbour. The sea is lashed into a seething foam. On the beach are
scattered groups of people--men hurrying to and fro with excited determination,
and women wringing their hands in mute agony and mingled prayer. You look out to
sea. In the darkness of the night you can see nothing, but you can tell by the whirr
and rush of the rocket apparatus, by the cries of the life boatmen, that a vessel is in
danger. You know there is a ship in distress by these signs, though you may not
know the extent or reality of her danger. So, when I see the Lord Jesus Christ leaving
His throne in glory, living a life of anguish, and dying a cruel death, I learn that sin
is a terrible reality. Oh, what a hideous, fiendish monster is sin, when it turns its
cursed enmity against the blessed Son of God, and imbrues its cruel hands in His
precious blood! The Emperor Arcadius and his wife Eudoxia had a very bitter feeling
towards St. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople. One day, in a fit of anger,
the Emperor said to some of his courtiers, I would I were avenged of this bishop!
Several then proposed how this should be done. Banish him and exile him to the
desert, said one. Put him in prison, said another. Confiscate his property, said a
third. Let him die, said a fourth. Another courtier, whose vices Chrysostom had
reproved, said maliciously, You all make a great mistake. You will never punish him
by such proposals. If banished the kingdom, he will feel God as near to him in the
desert as here. If you put him in prison and load him with chains, he will still pray
for the poor and praise God in the prison. If you confiscate his property, you merely
take away his goods from the poor, not from him. If you condemn him to death, you
open heaven to him. Prince, do you wish to be revenged on him? Force him to
commit sin. I know him; this man fears nothing in the world but sin. Is there no
lesson here for you and me? (A. Finlayson.)

Divine pleading
If anyone suffers very keenly from nervous exhaustion, it seems sometimes almost
impossible for him to bear the noise of a child who persists in running heavily
overhead. He will adopt a pleading rather than an angry tone: My child, do not do
this again; I cannot bear it. Let us think of Gods holy nature as more sensitive to
sin than the most highly-strung nerves to noise, and hear Him saying, whenever we
are on the point of committing sin, Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate.
(F. B. ,Meyer, B. A.)

JER 44:16
As for the word which thou hast spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we will net
hearken unto thee.

The ministerial message and its reception

I. It devolves on ministers to speak to sinners in the name of the Lord.

 1. They represent to them their deplorable situation; they describe to them the
horrors of the pit wherein there is no water, in which they lie; the miseries of
that prison in which they are closely confined; the unprofitableness of the
drudgery in which they are engaged; and the tribulation and anguish which
they have to expect. Knowing the terrors of the Lord, they persuade men;
and sensible that, if they are unfaithful, the blood of souls will be required at
their hands, they are instant in season and out of season, if by any means
they Could persuade them to flee from the wrath to come.
2. They do all this in the name of the Lord.
(1) They speak in obedience to His command.
(2) They speak in perfect agreement with the Divine word.
(3) They preach in the hope of promoting His glory.

II. The unpleasant reception with which their message often meets. We will not
hearken.
1. We hope that there are but few who would plainly say this in words; who are
so hardened as to glory in their shame; or so incorrigible as to tell Gods
ministers that they cast His words behind their back, as unworthy of
attention, and beneath their notice: yet we are persuaded that there are
many professors who say this in their hearts, and who will not see when the
hand of God is lifted up; for if this were not the case, would ministers so
often have to lament over them, saying, Oh, that they were wise; and, Oh,
that there were such a heart in them, to keep His commandments and do
them? Careless hearers all say, We will not hearken unto Thee. And oh,
how few are there that will hear believingly! The word does not profit, not
being mixed with faith in them that hear it; men often reject the counsel of
God against themselves, and disbelieve the record that God has given of His
Son. Their conduct shows that they believe not in the name of the only-
begotten Son of God.
2. What is the reason that they will not attend to those things, which, it is
evident, belong to their peace?
(1) Because they are in league with sin.
(2) What your ministers preach loudly speaks your condemnation.
I would say, by way of inference, In what an awful state are those persons who are
making the resolution contained in the text. They are evidently exposed to the loss of
their privileges; to hardness of heart, and contempt of Gods Word and
commandments; and to utter and eternal destruction. (T. Spencer.)

JEREMIAH 45

JER 45:5
Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.
Seeking great things
 Baruch, the companion of Jeremiah, to whom these words were addressed, was a
young man of learning, who had probably formed large expectations of distinction,
which were sadly disappointed by the calamities which befell his country. The
prophet checks his aspirations in the strong language of our text: Seekest thou
great things for thyself? seek them not. It is the selfish seeking of the great things of
this world and the eager pursuits of them, as if they were of supreme importance,
which is censured by the prophet.
1. They who thus seek them are least likely to attain them. It is said there is a
fiery light which appears in marshy places, floating just above the surface of
the earth, so volatile in its nature that the least breath moves it, and
consequently those who rush towards it most eagerly, create a current of air
which drives it from them, and it thus leads them on to miry places for their
destruction; while, if they would quietly sit down it might float near them, or
rest upon them when there was no agitation in the atmosphere to repel it. So
is it with the great things of this world, they often fly from those who pant in
the chase after them; they frequently rest upon those who reach after them
more quietly. One of the wealthiest individuals in a distant city, who spends
immense sums for benevolent purposes, was heard to say, that he hardly
knew how his property came to him; it seemed to increase without effort on
his part, and whether he would or no. The reason may have been because he
was not selfishly eager in the pursuit of it, and because he consecrated it to
good objects, and therefore God blessed him as He did Solomon.
2. They who selfishly and eagerly seek the great things of the world, are apt to
have some sore trial coupled with success, if they are successful. Look at all
history; when were its great men so wretched, as when they had attained the
highest point of exaltation! He has gained everything, said a companion of
Napoleon, when he was in the zenith of prosperity, and yet he is unhappy.
So true is this, that one almost dreads entering upon a state of great worldly
aggrandisement, or to see others entering upon it, lest something should
happen to mar all. We feel as we do when one is on a lofty spire, admiring his
elevation, but almost afraid to look at him lest he should fall God has wisely
connected such checks with worldly greatness, to teach us not to set our
hearts upon it, and to enforce the prophet s warning, Seekest thou great
things for thyself? seek them not.
3. The thought of death should teach the vanity of the selfish and eager pursuit
of worldly greatness. How one severe fit of sickness will change the aspect of
all the glitter of the world! In health it is like the panoramic view where
splendid palaces and cities pass before our delighted eyes; in sickness the
glass is taken away, and a little painted daub is seen, no bigger than ones
hand. And death shuts out even that from our sight. Millions for an hour of
life, was the dying exclamation of one of Englands proudest queens. It is
further humiliating to all worldly aspirations to see how small, a vacancy one
makes among the living by his death. Think of any person, however great he
may have been, who has been two years dead, how little is he missed! how
everything goes forward just as smoothly without him! What then, in
conclusion, is the view of the great things of this life to which such reflections
lead? The proper view seems to be, not to despise the things of this world,
but to be sure that our supreme affections are on those of another and a
better; not to reject the good gifts of this life, but neither to toil for them as if
 they were all in all to our happiness, nor to use them, when gained, for our
own selfish gratification. (W. H. Lewis, D. D.)

Seeking for great things

We wish, so to speak, not to annihilate the passions of human nature, which sin
disturbs and perverts; but, if possible, to convert them, and turn them into another
direction. You love pleasure, and we wish you to have pleasure; only we would draw
you off from the pleasures of sin for a season, to the joy of Gods salvation; we
would draw you from the filthy puddle to the water of life, clear as crystal, which
proceedeth from the throne of God and of the Lamb. You love wealth; we wish you
to love it, and to obtain it; but not the deceitful riches, as the Scriptures call them,
but the true riches, the unsearchable riches of Christ. You are ambitious, and we
wish you to be so; you wish to rise, and we wish you to rise; you wish to be great, and
we wish you to be great; and therefore we would open a career of glory and
grandeur, in pursuing which you will be placed far above philosophers, and
politicians, and heroes, and kings; dwelling on high, and being quickened
together with Christ, raised up, and made to sit with Him in the heavenly places.
There are four reasons why you should not seek great things for yourselves on
earth, and four reasons why you should seek those things that are above.

I. THE ONE IS UNCERTAIN IN ACQUISITION--THE OTHER SURE. A great deal of what is

called earthly greatness is placed beyond the reach of many, whatever they may do.
Many are poor, and they have not the opportunities and the means of becoming
affluent. Many cannot fill the seats of learning and of science; they have not
capacities to acquire the needful treasures. But here is a reason why you should
seek those things which are above; for these are always sure in their attainment. In
the work of the Lord the servant may become equally great with the master; for
moral greatness does not consist in doing great things, but in doing little things with
a great mind. And these are accessible to all.

II. THE ONE IS FLEETING IN POSSESSION--THE OTHER DURABLE. What is all history,
but a relation of the revolutions to which all worldly things are liable--of the rich
despoiled of their wealth, of nobles stript of their honours, of princes dethroned,
exiled, imprisoned, put to death--Pharaoh in the Red Sea, Nebuchadnezzar eating
grass like an ox, Belshazzar the conqueror and the conquered, Napoleon the
emperor and the captive! These instances, perhaps, are too peculiar, and too remote,
and national, to impress many of you: look therefore nearer home; look at those
things which will touch you. What is honour, but a noise of airy breath? What is
popularity? It hangs on the wavering tongue of the multitude, who are like the waves
of the sea, driven to and fro and tossed; now rolling towards one shore, and now
towards another, according to the gale; now crying Hosannah, and now Crucify
Him, crucify Him. Yes, wherever on earth you lay up treasure, you must lay it up
where moth and rust do corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. And
here is another thing to be taken into the account too. Allowing that these things
could be perpetuated in your possession to the end of life, they can be possessed no
longer. You have only a life interest in any of them. Shall I set my heart on that
which is not, and that from which I am so soon to be removed? But now this is a
reason why you should seek those things that are above; for he that succeeds here
(and we have shown that you will succeed if you seek them), has chosen, as our
Saviour says, that good part, which shall never be taken away from him. He has
seized a blessedness which is independent of external accidents, independent of the
revolutions of states, independent of the vicissitudes of time, independent of the
ravages of death, independent of the conflagration of the last day: so that when the
heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent
heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burnt up, he can stand
upon the ashes of the universe and say, I have lost nothing; I look for new
heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

III. THE ONE IS UNSATISFACTORY IN ENJOYMENT--THE OTHER SATISFYING. Take the

great things you would here seek after for yourself; allowing that you attain them
(and you have heard that the attainment is uncertain)--allowing that you could
retain them (and you have heard that the retention is impossible)--yet there is no
real contentment in them. Ahab was king of Israel Was he satisfied with his
dominion? No; he covets Naboths little vineyard; and because he cannot obtain it,
he is sick forsooth and takes to his bed and can eat nothing. Some of the Roman
emperors, who strode over the world, were the most wretched of all beings; they
were burdens to themselves. I was one day walking with rich individual over his
estate; his mind was in a serious mood, and I endeavoured to avail myself of it; and
he made this very wise remark, Sir, said he, those who have not succeeded in the
world always impute their dissatisfaction to their want of success; they are not
aware of the insufficiency of these things themselves. Oh! say they, could we obtain
them, we should be happy. But those of us who have succeeded, and have obtained
them, and find ourselves no nearer happiness than before, are the men who know
that the fault lies in the things themselves. But this is a reason why you should
seek those things which are above. They are satisfying.

IV. THE ONE IS DANGEROUS AND INJURIOUS IN INFLUENCE--THE OTHER SAFE AND
BENEFICIAL. Yes; the great things you seek here for yourselves, owing to our
depravity, are full of peril. Who is the Lord, says Pharaoh, that I should obey
Him? How, says our Saviour, can ye believe, who receive honour one of another,
and seek not the honour which cometh from God only? Even good men, with
regard to these great things, as they are called in our text, want peculiar grace, or
they will not be proof against their evil influence. Hezekiah could not bear the notice
taken of him by the ambassadors of Benhadad; his heart was lifted up; therefore
was wrath upon him and all his people. I never yet saw a Christian improved by his
rising in the world: I have seen many who have been injured by it: I have seen many
who have been less constant and regular in their attendance on the means of grace,
though they had more leisure, and could command a vehicle: I have seen those who
have given less afterwards--not less comparatively, but less absolutely; some of them
who gave gold, then gave silver, and some even copper. Wherefore, once more,
Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not; but seek those things which
are above. There safety is. These are not only blameless; but they are profitable--
profitable unto all things; having promise of the life that now is, and of that which
is to come. These, instead of polluting the mind, will purify it; they will draw you off
from earth, instead of allowing you to settle here. Instead of elevating you, they will
clothe you with humility; instead of leading you away from your God, they will
connect you with Him; they will prepare you for every condition in which you can be
found. Therefore you cannot have too much of these. (W. Jay.)
The folly of ambition

I. The first reason for not seeking the great things of earth and time is, that THEY
WILL NOT BE ATTAINED. We do not deny that the energy and perseverance of an
ambitious man will accomplish great results, but we affirm confidently that he will
never attain what he desires. For his desires are continually running ahead of his
attainments, so that the more he gets the more he wants. He never acquires the
great thing which he is seeking in such a way as to sit down quietly and enjoy
contentment of heart. Alexander, we are told, having conquered all the then known
world, wept in disappointment because there were no more worlds for him to
overrun and subdue. In this way, it is apparent that he who is seeking great things
here upon earth will never obtain them. He is chasing his horizon. He is trying to
jump off his own shadow. As fast as he advances, the horizon recedes from him; the
further he leaps, the further his shadow falls. His estimate of what a great thing is
continually changes, so that though relatively to other men he has accumulated
wealth, or obtained earthly power and fame, yet absolutely, he is no nearer the
desire of his heart--no nearer to a satisfying good--than he was at the beginning of
his career. Nay, it is the testimony of many a man, that the first few gains that were
made at the beginning of life came nearer to filling the desires of the mind, and were
accompanied with more of actual contentment, than the thousands and millions
that succeeded them.

II. IF THEY COULD BE ATTAINED THEY WOULD RUIN THE SOUL. It is fearful to observe
the rapidity with which a mans character deteriorates as he secures the object of his
desire, when the object is a merely earthly one, and the desire is a purely selfish one.
Take, for illustration, the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. He aimed at a universal
empire in Europe. And just in proportion as he approached the object of his
aspirations, did he recede from that state of mind and heart which ought to
characterise a dependent creature of God. We always associate him with those pagan
demi-gods, those heaven-storming Titans, who like the Lucifer of Scripture are the
very impersonation of pride and ambition But such a spirit as this is the worst
species of human character. It is the most intense form of idolatry--that of egotism
and self-worship. It is the most arrogant and defiant form of pride. It would scale
the heavens. It would dethrone the Eternal. The same effect of mere worldly success
is seen also in the walks of everyday life. Cast your eye over the circle in which you
move, and select out those who are the most greedy of earthly good, and are the
most successful in obtaining it, and are they not the most selfish persons that you
know? It is here that we see the moral benefit of failures and disappointments. Were
men uniformly successful in their search after great things; did every man who
seeks wealth obtain wealth, and every man who grasps after power obtain power,
and every man who lusts after fame become renowned, the world would be a
pandemonium, and human character and happiness would be ruined. Swollen by
constant victory, and a sense of superiority, successful men would turn their hands
against one another, as in the wars of the giants before the flood. There would be no
self-restraint, no regard for the welfare of others, no moderate and just estimate of
this world, and no attention to the future life.
 III. GREAT THINGS, so far as they are attained at all in this world, ARE
COMMONLY ATTAINED INDIRECTLY. Saul, the son of Kish, was sent out by his father to
find the asses that had strayed, but he found a kingdom instead. Look into literary
history, and see how this is exemplified. The most successful creations of the human
reason and imagination have rarely been the intentional and foreseen products of
the person. The great authors have been surprised at their success; if, indeed,
success came to them during their lifetime. But more commonly their fame has been
posthumous, and their ears never heard a single note of the paean that went up from
the subsequent generations that were enchanted with their genius. Shakespeare and
Milton never read a single criticism upon their own works; and to-day they neither
know anything of nor care for the fame that attends them upon this little planet.
Look, again, into the circles of trade and commerce, and observe how often great
and lasting success comes incidentally, rather than as the consequence of
preconceived purposes and plans. The person simply endeavoured to provide for the
present and prospective wants of those dependent upon him, with prudence and
moderation. He obtained, however, far more than he calculated upon. Wealth came
in upon him with rapidity, and that which he did not greedily seek, and which he
never in the least gloated upon with a misers feeling, was the actual result of his
career in the world. Seekest thou, then, great things for thyself? seek them not. They
will not come by this method. Seek first of all the kingdom of God, and His
righteousness; and then all these minor things, which the world and the deluded will
be likely to attain even by the most engrossing and violent efforts devoted to the sole
purpose of obtaining them.

IV. GREAT SORROW SPRINGS FROM GREAT ASPIRATIONS, WHEN THOSE ASPIRATIONS
ARE UNATTAINED. There is only one species of aspiration that does not weary and
wear the soul, and that is, the craving and cry of the soul after God. Humboldt, who
had surveyed the cosmos, and who had devoted a long existence to placid
contemplation of the processes of nature, and had kept aloof from the exciting and
passionate provinces of human literature, said in his eightieth year, I live without
hope, because so little of what I have undertaken yields a satisfactory result. This is
the penalty which ambitious minds pay for seeking great things. There is an
infinite aspiration, and an infinitesimal performance. The hour of death, and the
failing shadows of an everlasting existence, and an everlasting destiny, bring the
aspiration and the performance into terrible contrast. Go down, once more, into the
sphere of active life, and see the same sorrow from the same cause. Look at that man
of trade and commerce who has spent his life in gigantic, and, we will suppose,
successful enterprises, and who now draws near the grave. Ask him how the
aspiration compares with the performance. He has generally accomplished, we will
assume, what he undertook. The results of his energy and capacity are known, and
visible to all in his circle and way of life. His associates have praised him, and still
praise him; for he has done well for himself, and for all connected with him. But he
writes vanity upon it all. When he thinks of all the heat and fever of his life, all his
anxious calculation and toil by day and night, all his sacrifice of physical comfort
and of mental and moral improvement, and then thinks of the actual results of it all-
-the few millions of treasure, the few thousands of acres, or the few hundreds of
houses--he bewails his infatuation, and curses his folly.
1. In the light of this subject and its discussion, we perceive the sinfulness of
ambition.
 2. We see in the light of this subject, the complete and perfect blessedness of
those who are free from all ambitious aims and selfish purposes; who can
say, Whom have I in heaven but Thee? &c. (G. T. Shedd, D. D.)

Seek not great things for yourself

I. SEEK NOT GREAT THINGS FOR YOURSELVES, FOR SELF OUGHT NEVER TO BE AN
ULTIMATE OBJECT. The glory of God is the only legitimate aim. The glorification of
God is not to be sought as a mean to the good of the creature, but the reverse--man
would be exalted above God. Even great spiritual things arc not to be sought for our
own purposes and exaltation--names sake. There is no hardship in this, for if we
seek the glory of God, our own enjoyment will follow.

II. Seek not great things for yourselves, for you thereby render them the objects
of idolatrous worship.

III. Seek not great things for yourselves, for to do so is to subordinate the
discharge of duty to their acquisition and enjoyment.

IV. Seek not great things for yourselves, for by doing so you will involve
yourselves and others in much positive suffering.

V. Seek not great things for yourselves, when the Church of Christ requires your
sympathy and your efforts.
Baruch. (Jas. Stewart.)

A dissuasive from ambition

I. When we may be said to seek great things for ourselves.

1. When we seek a larger portion of worldly good than is necessary. But still the
question returns, How much is necessary? If men were to answer this
question, they would soon prove that few or none are guilty of violating the
command in our text; for they all pretend that they seek no more than is
necessary. But by this term they usually mean all that would be necessary to
gratify their sinful inclinations and desires. Now mans chief end is to glorify
God, and enjoy Him for ever; or, in other words, to obey Gods will and
receive His everlasting favour. More than this no man needs; more than this
no man ought to seek.
2. When we seek them for ourselves only, or seek them merely with a view to
self-gratification or self-aggrandisement.

II. Some of the reasons why we should not seek great things for ourselves.
1. Because it is the sure way to multiply our disappointments and sorrows. In the
lottery of life there are few prizes, and many blanks. He, then, who seeks
great things for himself, engages in a pursuit in which it is exceedingly
probable he will be disappointed; and the more ardent are his desires, the
more eager his pursuit, the more keen will be the sufferings which his
 disappointment will occasion. But this is not all. The man whose pursuit is
crowned with success, will be no less disappointed than his unsuccessful
neighbour. After he has obtained great things, he will find himself as far from
happiness, find his desires as unsatisfied, his mind as discontented as before.
His desires will increase with his success. Nay, they will increase much faster
than his success.
2. Another reason may be drawn from the nature and situation of the world in
which we live. Might we not as easily employ our time and exertions in
building upon a quicksand, or upon ice which the summers sun will melt
away!
3. Another reason may be found in our own character and situation. We are
ourselves sinful, dying, and accountable creatures. We have, therefore, a
great work to do, no less a work than securing the favour of God, and
obtaining the salvation of our immortal souls, a work which demands our
time, our attention, our utmost exertions. And can we, in such a situation,
find leisure or inclination to seek great things for ourselves here? to seek
them while death is at the door; while the Judge is at hand; while eternity
draws near; while our souls, unprepared, are in momentary danger of
sinking beyond the reach of hope or mercy?
4. Another reason is, that seeking them is incompatible with the duties which we
are required to perform; and of course incompatible with our best interests.
Man has but one soul, but one heart, but a certain limited portion of time,
strength, and energy. He cannot, then, give his heart to God and to the world
at the same time. (E. Payson, D. D.)

Ambition

I. THE EVIL DENOUNCED. It may be viewed under three aspects.

1. There are some who pursue worldly objects that are far above them.
2. There are some who pursue with undue eagerness worldly objects they might
reasonably hope to attain.
3. There are some who pursue all classes of worldly objects in a selfish spirit.

II. The reasons why it is denounced.

1. Because it attaches excessive value to worldly objects.
2. Because it misapprehends the comparative advantages of the different ranks
in the social scale.
3. Because it overlooks the duties which arise out of the relations we sustain to
our race and our Maker.
4. Because it ignores all the facts, and objects, and interests, and blessings of the
spiritual world. Address--
(1) Worldlings.
(2) Christians. (G. Brooks.)

A great missionarys self-effacement

When Stanley found Livingstone in the heart of Africa, he begged the old heroic
missionary to go home. There seemed to be many reasons why he should go back to
England. His wife was dead; his children lived in England; the weight of years was
pressing upon him, and the shortest march wearied him. He was often compelled to
halt many days to recover strength after his frequent attacks of prostrating illness.
Moreover, he was destitute of men and means to enable him to make much practical
progress. But like the great apostle to the Gentiles, none of these things moved him,
nor counted he his life dear to himself. No, no, he said to Stanley; to be knighted,
as you say, by the Queen, welcomed by thousands of missionary enthusiasts, yes--
but impossible. It must not, cannot, will not be. I must finish my task, and do what I
can to bring Africa to Christ.
Thought self mars the finest work
Every artist longs to have his work thought well of. But the higher artist seeks first
truth and beauty, and hopes for praise as the meed due to them. The lower artist is
so thirsty for praise, thinks so much more about himself than about his work, that he
turns aside to make a display of his strength or skill. He is not wholly given to
bringing forth truth and beauty, but he is hankering to strike the beholder s eye with
his originality or power. This I take to be the secret of--s aberrations. His pictures
show wonderful force of painting; but what spoils them is that, instead of calmly
striving to raise his painting to the highest, he has itched to amaze you by his
boldness. (Charles Buxton, M.P.)

The folly of self-seeking in Christs service

Spurgeon in a late sermon hits off a very common fault noticeable among
Christian workers: The hen in the farmyard has laid an egg, and feels so proud of
the achievement that she must cackle about it; everybody must know of that one
poor egg till all the country round resounds with the news. It is so with some
professors: their work must be published, or they can do no more. Here have I, said
one, been teaching in the school for years, and nobody ever thanked me for it; I
believe that some of us who do the most are the least noticed, and what a shame it
is! But if you have done your service unto the Lord you should not talk so, or we
shall suspect you of having other aims. The servant of Jesus will say, I do not want
human notice; I did it for the Master; He noticed me, and I am content. I tried to
please Him, and I did please Him, and therefore I ask no more, for I have gained my
end. I seek no praise of men, for I fear lest the breath of human praise should
tarnish the pure silver of my service.
How to lose thought of self
When a dog is not noticed, he doesnt like it. But when the dog is after a fox he
dont care whether he is noticed or not. If a minister is seeking for souls he will not
think of himself. Self is forgotten in a single aim to save others. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Ambition true and false

It is related of the late Charles Haddon Spurgeon that at the commencement of his
ministry, when he was beginning to feel conscious of the wonderful powers with
which God had endowed him--like most young people, I suppose, for he was but a
boy, or little more than a boy at the time--he was one day walking across a common
and seemed to hear, as it were, a voice speaking to his innermost consciousness in
the terms of my text, Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not. Mr.
Spurgeon accepted the text which flashed into his mind as a Divine message and
monition, and from that moment made a fuller consecration of himself, his life, his
opportunity, his power to the service of the living God. We know the result, and
looking back upon it we know, much better, I venture to think, than he did even on
the day of his death, but not better than he knows it now, he chose the good part,
which was not taken from him. He set his affections on things above, not on things
of the earth. Mr. Spurgeon deliberately renounced worldly ambition. That is what I
want you to do. But do not make any mistake and think that I mean you to renounce
ambition in the truer sense, because Mr. Spurgeon certainly did not. I want you to
see what is the difference between ambition false and ambition true, and to
endeavour, if I can, to clear away some confusion of thought which clings around
this particular subject. What is ambition, as commonly understood? You will gather
it, I think, from such familiar phrases as that last infirmity of noble mind, or by
this sin fell the angels. It takes many forms. If one wished to suggest a name or a
life in which ambition had freest and most unrestricted reign, I think you would
name Napoleon. He is the classical, outstanding instance; not that, I am quite sure,
he is any more guilty than thousands of persons before him and since. But in
Napoleon ambition, insatiate and unconcealed, had undisputed sway. He waded to
his throne, as has been said, through the blood and tears of millions. I never care to
be too hard on a conventional type of a particular failing for fear one should happen
to be wrong, but Mr. Gladstone said of Napoleon that perhaps he had the mightiest
intellect that was ever packed into a human skull. Judged by the facts as they appear
to us, that intellect was prostituted. It never was exalted as it might have been, and,
as I believe sincerely, God meant it to be. Yet another type is Cecil Rhodes. Here,
again, I speak somewhat diffidently, because it is possible that very different
opinions in regard to the worth and work of Cecil Rhodes obtain in this
congregation. But this is my view of his life. He had a great idea as to the position
and place of England in the world. More than that, he believed in the mission of the
Anglo-Saxon race. But he was not too scrupulous in his attempts to realise his ideal,
if we may judge by the facts as they appeared to us. It was a form of ambition not so
despicable as Napoleons, because it was less self-centred, but I venture to think it
was materialistic and mistaken, and now that the great man has gone there are
thousands upon thousands of us who, looking upon his career, pronounce those
saddest words of the tongue or pen, the saddest of all, it might have been. Cecil
Rhodes was a great empire builder, we are told. He might have been more than that.
He sought great things, and he saw himself associated with them. Do you feel, you
young men, that his is the highest ideal and the type to which you would like to
conform your character? I trust to he able to show before I close that it was not. You
men of the world know perfectly well how you weigh each other up. You see a good
thing done for which a man is receiving an amount of public credit, and you
promptly ask, What is his aim? What axe has he to grind? You can scarcely bring
yourself to believe in disinterestedness at all, because, so far as you have been able
to see, people who were apparently disinterested, really had some ulterior motive
that would not hear the light. You know among your associates, for example--in the
business house, it may be--the difference between the man of modest ambition and
the man of vaulting, unscrupulous ambition. You prefer the former, but you never
believe that he has no axe to grind at all. In most cases you are right, but beware of
general statements. I think the chief danger of to-day is not that men are too
ambitious, but that they serve the wrong form of ambition. There are fellows in your
business--perhaps a good many of those who are here present could be included in
the category--who are at fault not because they have too much ambition, but because
they have not enough of the right sort. The man who will not work, the man who will
not aspire-and there are plenty of them in our country--the man who never wishes
to be any better or more powerful, or to live his life more completely than now, is of
no benefit to society, and his selfishness is as real as the selfishness of any Napoleon
You owe something to God, you owe something to men. There is not one among you
who is an isolated unit. I have with me here an extract from Carlyle, which I think
can put more clearly than I can the distinction between the true ambition and the
false. Let me say that there are two kinds of ambition, one wholly blameable, the
other laudable and inevitable The selfish wish to shine over others, let it be
accounted altogether poor and miserable. Seekest thou great things for thy, self?
seek them not. This is most true. And yet I say, continues Carlyle, there is an
irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude
which Nature has made him of, to speak out and to act out what Nature has laid in
him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay, it is duty, the duty of duties. For man the
meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this--to unfold
yourself, to work what thing you have the faculty for. It is a necessity for every
human being, the first law of our existence. I am going to try and spiritualise, if I
can, that wonderful principle set forth by Carlyle. True ambition is to live out what is
in you for the sake of Him who gave you life. It is a wonderful, it is even an awful,
thought that God Himself finds fulfilment through what you are. Gods work is being
done, God s thoughts and purposes are being realised by these commonplace men
and women that I see around me, and every one of you is the embodiment of the
Divine. Would you shrink and shrivel that Divine which God has given you? It is to
be manifested not only for your own sake, nor chiefly so, but for the sake of Him
who gave it and to mankind. I want to warn you against misusing Gods great gift,
your own soul. You are a unique product in the universe, and there are unmeasured
possibilities before every man here. Each of us, all of us are citizens of eternity. The
true ambition is that of a man who is not afraid to endure, not afraid to sacrifice, not
afraid to spend his soul, for in giving he is gaining, and he shall have more
abundantly. Now, young men, I want to warn you before I go on against possible
disappointment even in your endeavour to live up to your ideal. It may be that while
I have been speaking in these terms to you some old and wise man m this assembly
may have been thinking to himself, That preacher will change his tone in a few
years when he knows how sadly life can disillusion and can trample upon our
ideals. Oh, the tragedies of life, the hopes blighted, the old men who are just doing
their days work in patience that no longer one can expect. Well, you are only saying
what has been said before. That poor, wayward genius, Percy Bysshe Shelley, saw a
little farther than the disappointment when he told us in so many words that it is
never possible for the soul to live itself out completely here. How should it be?
Because here is not the close of our destiny. It will take all eternity for you to live out
what God has put in. Never think that you are going to live out all, but I think you
will save yourself from disappointment if you will only say, It is possible for me to
get on the right track now and be living out in time that which I shall live out better
when eternity comes. It is possible for you to give a whole-hearted, unselfish
allegiance to a great ideal, and that not for your own sake. There is a Divine idea
pervading the visible universe, the spirit of truth and beauty and good. We are called
to service, every one of us is called to reveal and express it in some fashion. For us it
is embodied in Jesus Christ. I cannot but halt there. The Christ contains for me all
that humanity is able to aspire to or understand, the great Divine ideal. The life that
is given to Christ is well invested. It has produced the best results in the history of
human character. What a man was Paul! The Christ crossed his path, and this
ambitious, zealous, burning soul changed to something else, Saul the persecutor
became. Paul the apostle, lived a suffering life and died an obscure death in a
Roman prison; and this was his verdict when the evening came--I have fought the
good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith . . . I am now ready to be
offered. Paul knew that his life was hid with Christ in God. He knew that this is the
shadow time, the other side is the reality. The Masters comment on the choice is
this--I will show him how great things he must suffer for My names sake. Young
men, I strongly urge you, choose the life wherein you can throw your best energies
for God. Have a purpose therein. Do not fear to give it Him back. Beware of seeming
to drift into a destiny. Let your choice be rational, let it be strong, let it be pure. By
and by you shall do greater things than these. In time be faithful to the little that you
can do, that in eternity you may do the more for God. Believe that you have a
vocation, a vocation for God. You will not live out all that is within you here. You
cannot. But if you live only for yourself here you will be a wretched man. Give the
best to God. We have all read that psychological novel, John Inglesant, with its too
self-conscious hero. One character drawn therein, that of a Jesuit, who for s time is
spiritual adviser to John Inglesant, seems to me to be a remarkable one. I know not
whether such a Jesuit ever existed, but you know this, the Jesuits by their system of
training manage to squeeze out of every man upon whom they get their grip any
thought of living for his own self-interest. He becomes the bond-slave of the society.
They have great strength from the fact that they can thus obsess a man, as it were,
de-self him, and make him work for the great organisation. Here is the Jesuits
verdict to John Inglesant upon his own life, an exhortation for his pupil: Choose
your side or your lot; when you have chosen it be true to it all the way. It matters
comparatively little what a man chooses as his course of action provided it be a
worthy one and his conscience tells him so, but when he has chosen, no looking
back. Go straight on, be faithful to the uttermost, cost what it may. A grand and a
glorious ideal for the twentieth century, as well as for the seventeenth. And there is a
Divine principle within us which urges us to do our best to make the world better
than we found it. I have often been struck with the fact that very ordinary people,
who make very small profession of religion, somehow will do this at some part of
their career, in some one of their interests. They feel they must even at a cost do a
little to make the world gladder and to make the world better. I remember the
utterance of the bishop in Victor Hugos Les Miserables. As the convict stands at the
door of the house, proclaiming what he was by his dress and his demeanour, thus
spoke the servant of God, This house is not my house, it is the house of Jesus
Christ. This door does not demand of him that enters it whether he has a name, but
whether he has a grief. Oh, I feel that if our bodies were made the temples of the
Christ as the bishops house was made the tabernacle of his Lord; if our interests,
our opportunities were consecrated to Him, oh, what a difference, majestic, far-
reaching, redemptive it would make to the world to-morrow. And, if I could, I would
like to fill every young soul before me to-night with that Divine ideal. What can we
do, you and I, to bless the world? Just what these noble ones in times past have
done, the Pauls and the Luthers and the Wesleys, not merely ambition, but the
consecrating of everything they possessed to their Lord, and the counting all but loss
if they might win Him. Let us do the same as these. Seekest thou great things for
thyself? seek them not. Seekest thou great things for God? Go on. Live out all that
God has given you as His trustee. Seekest thou joy and blessedness and victory and
power in the highest sense of that word? Would you come to the full stature of your
manhood? Then seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these
things shall be added unto you. (R. J. Campbell, M. A.)

Self-seeking vetoed
This short chapter embodies the history of Baruch, the secretary of Jeremiah.

I. THE VERY EXCUSABLE MOAN (verse 3), Woe is me now!

1. He was probably pained for his masters sake.
2. Probably grieved on account of the unhappy national outlook.
3. Was evidently distressed on his own account. Possibly weary of being
secretary with dangerous duties attached.

II. The very decided veto on his ambitious design.

1. God interpreted his aspiration, whatever its nature.
2. Decidedly nipped the project in the bud.
3. Suggesting by implication that he seek great things for others--Jeremiah, to
wit. To be identified with him was true greatness. Men are engrossed in
themselves, their family, their party, their ism.

III. THE COMPENSATING GUARANTEE. Thy life will I give unto thee.
1. The nation at large would pass through great tribulation.
2. Baruch and his master would be hurried hither and thither.
3. But the secretarys life would be given him as a reward. Baruch lived through
all the dire experiences that followed. Escaped from Egypt to Babylon, and
wrote the Book of Baruch. Who has not enjoyed the compensations of
selfishness? Every surrender of selfhood helps to enrich the soul. (W. J.
Acomb.)

JEREMIAH 46

JER 46:17
Pharaoh king of Egypt is but a noise.

Religious judgments
How the Bible can torment its adversaries!--mock them, contemn them, dash
them in pieces like a potters vessel. Yet it is never mere contempt. The contempt of
the Bible is the penal side of a profound philosophy. Its contempt is as necessary as
its Gospel--nay, more, its Gospel renders its contempt necessary. Our God is a
consuming fire, God is love, the wrath of the Lamb. So when Pharaoh-Necho--
mighty man--is called by the contemptuous term of noise no mere sneer is
employed. This is a righteous judgment, a moral estimate, a correct representation
of things as they are in reality, not of things as they appear to be. In all judgments
we must have regard to distance, proportion, perspective. Pharaoh king of Egypt,
with horses, chariots, swords, spears, hosts of men, is a terrific power; but to a man
standing in the quiet of the Divine sanctuary, Pharaoh king of Egypt is but a noise-
-a waft of wind, a curl of smoke dying whilst it rises. If men would but consider this
law of proportion the whole estimate of life would undergo an instantaneous and
complete reversion. The text brings before us the great subject of religious
judgments--by religious judgments I mean estimates. We must call religion into the
house if we would take a true appraisement of what we possess. Only religion, as
interpreted in Holy Scripture, can tell you what you are and what you are worth.
1. With regard to those religious estimates or judgments, note how fearless they
are. They are not judgments about personal manners, social etiquette, little
and variable customs; they challenge the whole world. We are moved by
their heroism. Religious judgments do not fritter away our time and patience
in discussing little questions and petty problems: they summon kings to their
bar and call nations to stand back and be judged. There is a national entity as
well as a personal individuality. Blessed is the voice that, fills a nation; grand
is the Gospel that spreads itself over the whole world. We cannot do without
the heroic element, the heroic judgment, the broad estimate, the complete
arbitrament, that takes within its purview and decision everything
concerning individual life and general civilisation. You must have the great
call, the sublime challenge, the heroic appeal, the white throne that stretches
itself from horizon to horizon, and before which kings are as little men and
little men as kings--the grand astronomical pomp and majesty before which
all else settles into its right relation. That you have in the Bible, and nowhere
else.
2. The judgments of the Bible are rational as well as fearless. Under all contempt
there is a rock of logic. Why does the Bible contemn things? Because of their
proportion. It knows the exact proportion which everything bears to the
sum-total of things and to the sovereign purpose of the Divine government.
Then the judgments of the Bible are rational because the matter or element
of duration is continually present to the minds of the inspired writers. The
inspired writer has been locked up with God, and turning away from that
glory all other things become as the baseless fabric of a vision. If we could see
God we should be filled with contempt regarding all things, in so far as they
affected to hinder us by their greatness or overpower us by their solidity.
3. Then the judgments of the Bible are also critical. They are very dainty in their
expression: they take the right word with an inspired ingenuity. Pharaoh
king of Egypt is but a noise. You cannot amend that comment. Try to amend
anything Jesus Christ ever said. As well amend a dewdrop; as well paint the
lily. And the nations, according to the biblical estimate, are but a wind that
cometh for a little time and then passeth away; and our life is but a vapour,
dying in its very living. These are the condensations of Omniscience; these
arc the sharpened points whetted in eternity; these stand incapable of
amendment.
4. But fearless, rational, critical--is there no word that comes nearer to my
own necessity? Yes, there is a word that touches us all to-day: these religious
judgments are inspiring. Man wants inspiration every day. The Bible was not
inspired once for all, in the sense of having its whole meaning shown in one
 disclosure. Inspiration comes with every dawn, distils in every dew-shower,
breathes in every breeze; it is the daily gift of God. How are these judgments
inspiring? Because they enable a man who is right in his spirit and purpose
to say, If God be for us, who can be against us? (J. Parker, D. D.)

JER 46:18
As I live, saith the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts.

The oaths of Jehovah

I. The Divine oaths recorded in Scripture exhibit and declare the glory of the
Divine character.
1. As they show forth the infinite condescension of God. He has addressed us not
only in the language of authority and goodness, but also actually
condescended to confirm His own true sayings by the most solemn oaths,
and this He has done, not only upon some one particular occasion, but in
numerous instances, and in every variety of form. Sometimes, Jehovah
swears by one or the other of His natural perfections. The Lord hath sworn
by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength. At other times He swears
by one or the other of His moral perfections, as, Once have I sworn by My
holiness. At other times by His great name, but the most expressive, as well
as the most usual form is that in the text, As I live, saith the Lord God.
2. The Divine oaths furnish a sublime and awful manifestation of the sincere
earnestness of the Divine mind in what He declares unto us in His Word,
with such an attestation.
3. The Divine oaths exhibit also the benevolent solicitude of God for the welfare
of the unworthy creatures whom He thus addresses; or as the apostle
expresses it, the kindness and love of God our Saviour towards man.
4. The Divine oaths intimate the unchangeableness of the Divine mind in
relation to those arrangements in His natural and moral government which
were in that manner established and confirmed.

II. The Divine oaths also serve to illustrate the moral character of man, and to
exercise a powerful influence on his moral and spiritual interests.
1. They strongly corroborate the fact that the human heart is corrupt and
alienated from God. In speaking to His holy angels, who excel in strength,
and are swift to do His will, an oath in confirmation of His Word is
altogether unnecessary. They know His character too well ever to entertain
the slightest suspicion of His truthfulness; but in dealing with fallen and
apostate man, He knew it was necessary to confirm His own faithful words
by most solemn oaths, pledging His own eternal existence on their truth.
2. They serve also as fearful warnings of the perilous condition of the impenitent
and unbelieving soul. Could not an angel have reasonably supposed that in
the face of all the declarations and oaths of Jehovah, recorded in the Bible,
unbelief on the part of man would have been a moral impossibility? After all,
 unbelief is the most common sin in the world, and the sin on account of
which men generally feel the least compunction; the sin on account of which
the Son of God marvelled and was grieved,--men neither marvel nor grieve.
Just as if it was a thing of no moment to treat the eternal God as a liar and a
perjurer! Be not deceived, God is not mocked.
3. They afford the strongest encouragement to believers in their onward
progress to heaven. Christians, during their earthly pilgrimage, have to
contend against many things in themselves and in the world, which are
calculated to exert a most depressing influence upon their hearts. But they
are, nevertheless, favoured with abundant sources of consolation in the
abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, and in the great and precious truths and
promises of the Gospel God, willing more abundantly to show unto the heirs
of the promises the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath:
that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we
might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon
the hope set before us. The firm stability of the ordinances of the covenant
made with Noah, is employed to illustrate the stability and
unchangeableness of the covenant of redemption. The mountains and the
hills are referred to as fit emblems of its eternal immutability. (W. Rees, D.
D.)

JER 46:28
But correct thee in measure.

Chastisement duly proportioned

Correction is like physic, not to be given without good advice and caution. We use
a difference when we go about to hew a rugged piece of timber, and to smooth a little
stick, which you can bend as you please. A fit season must be observed. Cut your
trees at some time of the year, and you kill them; prune them at other times, and
they thrive much the better. Horses too straight reined in are apt to rise up with
their forefeet; when they are allowed convenient liberty with their heads they go
better. (G. Swinnock.)

JEREMIAH 47

JER 47:5
How long wilt thou cut thyself?

The tender inquiry of a friend

Travellers in the East tell us that among the most melancholy scenes they witness
is the following:--Men inflict upon themselves very grievous, voluntary wounds, and
then exhibit themselves in public. They even disfigure themselves with gashes m me
presence of excited throngs. I am speaking of what has occurred even within, the last
few years among the Moslems. When some great prophet or emir is coming that
way, a certain number of fanatical Mahometans take swords, spears, and other
sharp instruments, and gash themselves terribly therewith, cutting their breasts,
their faces, their heads, and all parts of their bodies. Frequently they have taken care
to dress themselves in white sheets, in order that, as the blood flows copiously from
their bodies, it may be the more clearly seen, that they may become the more ghastly
spectacles of misery, or the more fully display the religious excitement under which
they labour. As everything in the East remains for ever the same, thin Moslem
superstition carries us back to the olden times whereof we read in the Old
Testament, when the priests of Baal, having cried in vain to their idol, cut
themselves with lances and with knives. Our translators were probably afraid to
write the harsher words, and so they translated the passage knives and lances, but
they might have written swords and spears sharp instruments of a desperate
character. Thus they displayed their inward zeal, and thus, perhaps, they hoped to
move the pity of their god. The Lord expressly forbade His people, the Jews, to
perpetrate such folly. They were not even to shave the corners of their beards, or to
hack their hair, as the Orientals do in the hour of their grief; and then they were
further prohibited from injuring their bodies by the command (Lev 19:28). Men in
Eastern lands, not only in connection with fanaticism, but in reference to domestic
affairs, will cut themselves to express their grief and anguish, or to make other
people believe that they are feeling such grief and anguish. We may congratulate
ourselves that we are free from at least one foolish custom. The prophet here speaks
to the Philistines who were about to endure the tremendous judgments of God, and,
indeed, to be crushed Out as a nation by the Egyptians and the Chaldeans; and he
says to Philistia How long wilt thou cut thyself? How long would they continue to
bring upon themselves such terrible judgments?

I. I SHALL ASK THIS QUESTION VERY DESPAIRINGLY--How long wilt thou cut
thyself?--for many are cutting themselves very terribly, and will have to feel the
wounds thereof for a long time, neither can we induce them to cease therefrom.
1. I allude, first, to some professors of religion who have been Church members
for ten, twenty, or more years, and yet have practically done nothing at all for
the Saviour. If they were really to awaken to a sense of their neglect, I do not
know how long- they would be in anguish, or how deep would be their
distress; for if Titus mourned that he had lost a day when he had done no
good action for twenty-four hours, and he but a heathen, what would happen
to a Christian if he were really to see his responsibility before God, and to
feel that he has not only lost a day but a year--perhaps many years? Have not
some of you well-nigh lost a whole lifetime?
2. The same may be applied, and applied very solemnly, too, to those who
backslide--who, in addition to being- useless, are injurious, because their
example tends to hinder others from coming to Christ. Oh, if any of you that
name the name of Jesus, and have been happy in His service, and have
enjoyed high days and holy days in His presence, turn aside, I shall use this
lamentation over you! You will do yourselves terrible injury, and I shall
shudder as I see the edged tools of sin in your reckless hands. Every sin is a
gash in the soul. The Lord will bring you back and save you, as I believe; but
oh, how long will you cut yourselves?
 3. There is one thing which comes after these, and comes in connection with
them. If you and I should know that souls have been lost--lost as far as we
are concerned--through our neglect, how long- shall we cut ourselves on that
account? Fathers, if you have never sought to bring your children to
repentance, how will you excuse yourselves? If you have never prayed with
them, or wept with them--if you have never even instructed them in the
things of God, what flattering unction will you lay to your guilty consciences?
What will you say, mother, if your daughter passes into eternity unforgiven,
and you have never tried to lead her to Jesus?
4. One other most solemn use may be made of this question God grant that it
may never be so, but if any one of you should die in his sins, how long will
you regret it, think you? Oh, thou who hast lost eternal life, how long wilt
thou cut thyself? If thou shouldst miss Christ, and miss mercy, and miss
heaven, and miss eternal glory, if there were naught else, how long wilt thou
bemoan thyself? With what depth of anguish wilt thou smart to have lost all
this--to have, in fact, lost all which makes up life and joy!

II. I SHALL ASK THIS QUESTION HOPEFULLY, trusting that in many their sorrow is
nearing- its end.
1. This text may be very profitably and prudently applied to those who have been
bereaved, and who, being bereaved, sorrow, and sorrow to excess. How long
wilt thou cut thyself? Is not thy child in Jesus bosom? Has not thy friend
gone among the angels, to join the sweet singers of God? Is it not a gain to
the departed, though it be a loss to thee, that they are translated to the place
of everlasting bliss?
2. Turning to quite another character, I would use the same expression for
another purpose. There are some persons with whom God is dealing in great
love, and yet they are very rebellious. How long wilt thou cut thyself?
Already they have met with great disasters and misfortunes: they will meet
with many more when the dogs are out hunting, they run in packs. The
plagues of Egypt are ten at least, and every one who plays the Pharaoh may
expect the full number.
3. I might use this expression even to the Jewish nation itself. Ah, God, through
what seas of trouble have they had to swim since the day when they said,
His blood be on us, and on our children!
4. But, now, all this has rather kept me from my main design, which is to speak
to those dear friends of ours who are afflicting their souls with needless
fears. No good can possibly come by a continuance in their unhappy moods:
they are cutting themselves quite needlessly. They might at once have peace,
and rest, and joy if they were willing to accept the Lord s gracious way of
salvation. Despairing and desponding are not commanded in the Gospel, but
they are forbidden by it. Do not cultivate these gross follies, these deadly
sins. Do not multiply these poisonous weeds--this hemlock and this darnel--
as if they were fair flowers of paradise. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

JER 47:6
 Put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still.

War overruled for Gods glory

Notwithstanding all the boasted improvements of modem times, in knowledge
and refinement, wars have not been less frequent than formerly, when mankind
were in a rude and barbarous state. In making this reflection, the philosopher may
profess his astonishment, but the genuine Christian will weep. Such are the
mournful and ruinous effects which sin has produced in the world. Not only has it
filled mens minds with enmity against God, but also with implacable enmity and
revenge against one another.

I. Whence it is that the sword of war may be called the sword of the Lord.
1. Because the seasons in which this sword is drawn are governed or appointed
by the Lord. The kindling of war, or the settling of peace, are appointed by
the providence of that God who ruleth over all the earth. The direction of
cabinets, the ambition of princes, of governors, of statesmen, are only the
instruments which God employs with a powerful and a holy hand, to execute
His will.
2. Because it receives its direction from the Lord. When God gives the
commission, when He opens the brazen gates of destruction, no country, no
city is secured against the ravages of war; and when His providence forms a
wall of protection around a country, no army can prevail, no weapon formed
against it can prosper, for the Almighty God Himself is its fortress, its pillar,
and its strength.
3. Because the execution done by it is of the Lord. It is a saying of King William,
who had himself been in many battles, that every bullet had its billet;
intimating that it was under Gods direction whom to miss and whom to
strike.
4. Because God sanctifies and glorifies Himself in its operation. In the
management of war, the reputation of kings and statesmen, of generals or
soldiers, is considered, but this is only a secondary consideration. The glory
of the Lord, whom the Scriptures call a Man of War, is illustrated and made
conspicuous in the eyes of the world. The slayer and those who are slain are
His creatures and subjects, and the instruments which defend the one and
kill the other are His sword.

II. The reason why all Gods people so ardently long to see the sword of war
sheathed and at rest.
1. Conviction that the wrath of God bringeth upon man the punishment of the
sword, will cause the saints to long earnestly for its being sheathed and at
rest.
2. All Gods people will earnestly long to see the sword of war in -its scabbard
and at rest, when they reflect what multitudes of men are hurried by it into
eternity without thought or preparation.
3. Gods people earnestly long to see the sword of war sheathed and at rest,
when they reflect on the unparalleled distresses and miseries inflicted on
those countries which are the seat of war. Gracious persons are deeply
 affected with the miseries of their fellow-creatures, even though they he
enemies.
4. Gods people earnestly desire to see the sword of war sheathed and at rest,
that Christs Gospel may be propagated throughout the whole world, and its
Divine power and influence felt by all nations. (James Hay, D. D.)

The sword of the warrior the sword of the Lord

As patriots, prophets felt the miseries which they denounced; as mourners, they
lamented the sins which brought on these miseries; and as men, they wept over the
graves of the enemies by whom their country had been harassed and wasted.

I. The sword of the warrior is the sword of the Lord.

1. The seasons in which the sword is drawn and sheathed are appointed by the
Lord. The direction of cabinets, the ambition of princes, and the caprices of
statesmen in these affairs, are subordinated by His invisible influence to His
own will, without violating the order of second causes, or breaking in upon
the freedom of rational agents.
2. The sword of the warrior is put in commission by the Lord.
3. The direction of the sword of the warrior is from the Lord. The seat of war is
marked out, and its bounds circumscribed, in the purpose of the will of God;
and thither the warrior marches without mistaking his way, whether it he to
the shore of Tyrus, the valley of Jehoshaphat, the plains of Blenheim, the
heights of Saratoga, or the mountains of Armageddon.
4. The execution done by the sword of the warrior is of the Lord. A sparrow
falleth not to the ground without our heavenly Father, and in the day of
battle, no soldier loses his life without His knowledge and predetermination.
5. By the sword of the warrior the Lord sanctifies and magnifies Himself.
According to the states of the sufferers wars of conquest and extirpation are
corrections and punishments, and whichever of the sides gains or loses the
victory, the supremacy of Jehovah over all is main, rained, and the glory of
His justice and holiness displayed and magnified. The cause in which the
sword is drawn is always sinful on one side, and frequently sinful on both
sides. But whatever be the quality of the cause, the views of men, or the
issues of the contest, the Lord will not lose His end. He rules in the seat of
war, and commands on the day of battle.

II. The reasons for which mourners in Zion long to see this sword sheathed.
1. Compassion for those who are delivered to the sword, or subjected to the
insolence and rage of fierce and lawless men whose tender mercies are
cruelty.
2. Knowledge of the consequences of driving men unprepared into eternity.
3. The peace of God, which rules in the hearts of mourners in Zion, inclines and
constrains them to cry for the sheathing of the sword of the warrior.
4. Convictions that the wrath of God bringeth upon men the punishment of the
sword, dispose mourners in Zion to long for its being put up into the
scabbard. (A. Shanks.)
The means of terminating war

I. The evils of protracted war.

1. War is a tremendous evil.
2. Well might the prophet desire its speedy termination.

II. The reason of its continuance.

1. War is one of those judgments with which God punishes the sins of men.
2. Till He has effected His purposes by it, no human efforts can bring it to a
close.

III. Means of its termination.

1. The intention of Gods chastisements is to bring us to repentance.
2. On the attainment of this end He will instantly remove HIS judgments from
us.

IV. Some hints respecting those heavy judgments which God has denounced
against sinners in another world, and respecting the best means of averting them
from our souls. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

JEREMIAH 48

JER 48:6
Flee, save your lives.

The Christians flight

Such was the warning addressed to Moab by the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel.
The Chaldeans were about to lay waste the land of the Moabites--a punishment
which they justly deserved for their iniquities and for their long-continued
opposition to the people of God But even in wrath the Lord remembers mercy; or,
to use the beautiful language of the prophet, He stayeth His rough wind in the day
of the east wind. Though Moab shall be punished, her cities overturned, and the
country laid waste and desolate, her princes, people, and priests carried into
captivity, yet an opportunity is afforded for at least a remnant to escape. Flee, save
your lives, and be like the heath in the wilderness.

I. FROM WHAT ARE WE TO FLEE? In a word, from everything that would wean his
heart from God and endanger the safety of his soul, the Christian is to flee--from all
evil and mischief, from sin, from the world, the flesh, and the works of the devil,
from hardness of heart and contempt of Gods Word and commandment.

II. FOR WHAT ARE WE TO FLEE? The life of your soul is concerned; and unless you
flee from what stands in your way to God, and blocks up your return to Him, the
wrath of God will assuredly overtake you, and you will become a prey to your
enemies, to those who seek your life. It is for glory, and honour, and immortality we
should flee--blessings of infinite value, prizes beyond all price--nay, far beyond the
power of human tongue to tell of their inestimable preciousness; we should flee for
the favour of God, the forgiveness of our sins, the worth of our souls, the love and
glory of Christ, and the beauty and happiness of holiness. And we should hasten our
flight, for the time is short, and death advancing.

III. WHERE SHOULD WE FLEE? Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words
of eternal life; and we believe, &c. Such was Simon Peters declaration. Such is the
confession of Gods people still. To the Lord Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, must
the sinner flee. He must go as he is, and he like the heath in the wilderness,
destitute of fruit or value, fit only for fuel, and seek to be engrafted in the living Vine.
For Moab, we may observe, was commanded merely to flee. Whatever would
oppose their progress should be put away. (C. A. Maginn, M. A.)

Flee for your life

I. Whence you are to flee.

II. where you are to flee.

III. How you are to flee.

IV. When you are to flee

V. WHY YOU ARE TO FLEE. (H. Macmillan, D. D.)

JER 48:10
Cursed be he, that doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully.

The sin of lukewarmness in acquiring, and advancing, a

knowledge of Christ

I. AS IT CONCERNS OUR RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND RESOLUTION. Some, professedly

earnest in their search of truth, make no other use of the light that is given them
than to dispute and philosophise about it. Others, acknowledging the testimonies
advanced in favour of it, are discouraged by the difficulties which it presents:
consulting, yet dreading to be instructed; the slaves of their appetites, more than of
their errors, rejecting truth manifested to them, because it would break the fetters
which they love. Others again, still more deceitful in their work, convinced, in a
great degree, of religious truth in their own minds, yet judge not of it by the light
which it leaves there, but by its effect on the rest of mankind. The knowledge of
Divine truth must spring from penitence and humility. Cease to have an earthly
interest in wishing to find religion false, and you will soon perceive it to be true.
Humble yourself before the mighty hand of God; His grace shall then be sufficient
for you, and will lead you into all truth. But cursed is he that doeth any work of that
God deceitfully, who, whilst He giveth His grace to the humble and sincere, has
always scorned the prevaricating and the proud.

II. THE SILENCE WHICH WE OBSERVE IN DEFENCE OF CHRIST, AMIDST THE CLAMOURS
OF THE PROFANE AGAINST HIM. God wants not your aid to support His truth. But He
wants to see His pretended servants not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: and,
although He actually wants not your aid, if He choose to adopt any other method of
preserving His truth in the world, yet it appears to be the method, which in His
wisdom He has adopted, to disseminate it by means of man to man. Your silence will
be taken advantage of by the enemies of your Saviour: and they will think that he,
who says nothing, has nothing to say. He, that is not with Me, saith our Saviour, is
against Me. Let it not be said that the world has its defenders, and that Jesus Christ
has none.

III. AN ACCOMMODATION OF THE SOLEMN TRUTHS OF THE GOSPEL TO THE WISHES

OR PREJUDICES OF THOSE WITH WHOM WE ARE CONCERNED. Thousands are the
miseries that might have been spared this world if the professed believers in God
had all been true to their trust. How many a brother might have been prevented
from imbruing his hands in a brothers blood, if they, to whom the cause of dispute
was referred, had been firm to the dictates of truth. But the false notions of honour
which their friends felt in the moment of anger, they in their cool moments will
sanction and applaud: and, palliating, by every modification, the sin of murder, will
deliberately second a black and wicked passion, and calmly behold two fellow-
creatures, who trusted to their decision, attempting to hurl each other into the
presence of their eternal Judge! (G. Mathew, M. A.)

Of lukewarmness and zeal

I. Here then is the duty of us all.

1. He that serves God with the body without the soul serves God deceitfully. My
son, give Me thy heart; and though I cannot think that nature was so
sacramental as to point out the holy and mysterious Trinity by the triangle of
the heart, yet it is certain that the heart of man is Gods special portion, and
every angle ought to point towards Him.
(1) For to worship God with our souls confesses one of His glorious
attributes; it declares Him to be the searcher of hearts.
(2) It advances the powers and concernments of His providence, and
confesses all the affairs of men to be overruled by Him; for what He sees
He judges, and what He judges He rules, and what He rules must turn to
His glory; and of this glory He reflects rays and influences upon His
servants, and it shall also turn to their good.
(3) This service distinguishes our duty towards God from all our
conversation with man, and separates the Divine commandments from
the imperfect decrees of princes and republics.
(4) He that secures the heart, secures all the rest; because this is the
principle of all the moral actions of the whole man.
 (5) That I may sum up many reasons in one: God, by requiring the heart,
secures the perpetuity and perseverance of our duty, and its sincerity,
and its integrity, and its perfection: for so also God takes account of little
things; it being all one in the heart of man, whether maliciously it omits a
duty in a small instance or in a great; for although the expression hath
variety and degrees in it, in relation to those purposes of usefulness and
charity whither God deigns it, yet the obedience and disobedience are all
one, and shall be equally accounted for.
2. He that serves God with the soul without the body, when both can be
conjoined, doth the work of the Lord deceitfully. Paphnutius, whose knees
were cut for the testimony of Jesus, was not obliged to worship with the
humble flexures of the bending penitents; and blind Bartimeus could not
read the holy lines of the law, and therefore that part of the work was not his
duty; and God shall not call Lazarus to account for not giving alms, nor St.
Peter and St. John for not giving silver and gold to the lame man, nor
Epaphroditus for not keeping his fasting days when he had his sickness. But
when God hath made the body an apt minister to the soul, and hath given
money for alms, and power to protect the oppressed, and knees to serve in
prayer, and hands to serve our needs, then the soul alone is not to work.
3. They are deceitful in the Lords work, that reserve one faculty for sin, or one
sin for themselves; or one action to please their appetite, and many for
religion. We reprove a sinning brother, but do it with a pompous spirit; we
separate from scandal, and do it with glory, and a gaudy heart; we are
charitable to the poor, but will not forgive our unkind enemies; or, we pour
relief into their bags, but please ourselves and drink drunk, and hope to
commute with God, giving the fruit of our labours or effluxes of money for
the sin of our souls: and upon this account it is, that two of the noblest graces
of a Christian are to very many persons made a savour of death, though they
were intended for the beginning and the promotion of an eternal life; and
those are faith and charity.
4. There is one deceit more yet, in the matter of the extension of our duty,
destroying the integrity of its constitution: for they do the work of God
deceitfully, who think God sufficiently served with abstinence from evil, and
converse not in the acquisition and pursuit of holy charity and religion.
Many persons think themselves fairly assoilzied, because they are no
adulterers, no rebels, no drunkards, not of scandalous lives: in the
meantime, like the Laodiceans, they are naked and poor; they have no
catalogue of good things registered in heaven, no treasures m the
repositories of the poor, neither have t e poor often prayed concerning them,
Lord, remember Thy servants for this thing at the day or judgment.
5. Hither are to be reduced as deceitful workers, those that promise to God, but
mean not to pay what they once intended; people that are confident in the
day of ease, and fail in the danger; they that pray passionately for a grace,
and if it be not obtained at that price, go no farther, and never contend in
action for what they seem to contend in prayer; such as delight in forms and
outsides, and regard not the substance and design of every institution; that
pretend one duty to excuse another; religion against charity, or piety to
parents against duty to God, private promises against public duty, the
keeping of an oath against breaking of a commandment, honour against
 modesty, reputation against piety, the love of the world in civil instances to
countenance enmity against God; these are the deceitful workers of Gods
work; they make a schism m the duties of religion, and a war in heaven
worse than that between Michael and the dragon; for they divide the Spirit of
God and distinguish His commandments into parties and factions; by
seeking an excuse, sometimes they destroy the integrity and perfect
constitution of duty, or they do something whereby the effect and usefulness
of the duty is hindered: concerning all which this only can be said, they who
serve God with a lame sacrifice and an imperfect duty--a duty defective in its
constituent parts--can never enjoy God; because He can never be divided.

II. The next inquiry is into the INTENTION OF OUR DUTY. Cursed is he that doeth
the work of the Lord negligently, or remissly: as our duty must be whole, so it must
be fervent; for a languishing body may have all its parts, and yet be useless to many
purposes of nature. And you may reckon all the joints of a dead man, but the heart is
cold, and the joints are stiff and fit for nothing but for the little people that creep in
graves: and so are very many men; if you lure up the accounts of their religion, they
can reckon days and months of religion, various offices, charity and prayers, reading
and meditation, faith and knowledge: catechism and sacraments, duty to God, and
duty to princes, paying debts and provision for children, confessions and tears,
discipline in families, and love of good people; and, it may be, you shall not improve
their numbers, or find any lines unfilled in their tables of accounts; but when you
have handled all this, and considered, you will find at last you have taken a dead
man by the hand, there is not a finger wanting, but they are stiff as icicles, and
without flexure as the legs of elephants.
1. In every action of religion God expects such a warmth and a holy fire to go
along, that it may be able to enkindle the wood upon the altar, and consume
the sacrifice; but God hates an indifferent spirit. Earnestness and vivacity,
quickness and delight, perfect choice of the service, and a delight in the
prosecution, is all that the spirit of a man can yield towards his religion. The
outward work is the effect of the body; but if a man does it heartily and with
all his mind, then religion hath wings, and moves upon wheels of fire; and
therefore, when our blessed Saviour made those capitulars and canons of
religion, to love God, and to love our neighbour, besides that the material
part of the duty, love, is founded in the spirit, as its natural seat, he also
gives three words to involve the spirit in the action, and but one for the body:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind, and, lastly, with all thy strength. If it be in motion,
a lukewarm religion is pleasing to God; for God hates it not for its
imperfection, and its natural measures of proceeding; but if it stands still and
rests there, it is a state against the designs, and against the perfection of God:
and it hath in it these evils:
(1) It is a state of the greatest imprudence in the world; for it makes a man to
spend his labour for that which profits not, and to deny his appetite for
an unsatisfying interest: he puts his moneys in a napkin, and he that does
so, puts them into a broken bag; he loses the principal for not increasing
the interest.
(2) The second appendant evil is, that lukewarmness is the occasion of
greater evil; because the remiss easy Christian shuts the gate against the
 heavenly breathings of Gods Holy Spirit.
(3) A state of lukewarmness is more incorrigible than a state of coldness;
while men flatter themselves that their state is good, that they are rich
and need nothing, that their lamps are dressed, and full of ornament.
These men are such as think they have knowledge enough to need no
teacher, devotion enough to need no new fires, perfection enough to need
no new progress, justice enough to need no repentance; and then,
because the spirit of a man, and all the things of this world, are in
perpetual variety and change, these men decline, when they have gone
their period; they stand still, and then revert; like a stone returning from
the bosom of a cloud, where it rested as long as the thought of a child,
and fell to its natural bed of earth, and dwelt below for ever.
2. It concerns us next to inquire concerning the duty in its proper instances, that
we may perceive to what parts and degrees of duty it amounts; we shall find
it especially in the duties of faith, of prayer, and of charity.
(1) Our faith must be strong, vigorous, active, confident, and patient,
reasonable and unalterable, without doubting, and fear and partiality.
(2) Our prayers and devotions must be fervent and zealous, not cold,
patient, easy, and soon rejected; but supported by a patient spirit, set
forwards by importunity, continued by perseverance, waited on by
attention and a present mind, carried along with holy, but strong desires;
and ballasted with resignation, and conformity to the Divine will; and
then it is as God likes it, and does the work to Gods glory and our
interest effectively.
(3) Our charity also must be fervent: He that follows his general with a
heavy march, and a heavy heart, is but an ill soldier. But our duty to God
should be hugely pleasing, and we should rejoice in it; it must pass on to
action, and do the action vigorously; it is called in Scripture the labour
and travail of love. He that loves passionately, will not only do all that
his friend needs, but all that himself can; for although the law of charity
is fulfilled by acts of profit, and bounty, and obedience, and labour, yet it
hath no other measures but the proportions and abundance of a good
mind; and according to this, God requires that we be abounding, and
that always, in the work of the Lord. (Bp. Jeremy Taylor.)

Cursed laziness
These words form a scriptural bomb which might with advantage be thrown into
the midst of a great many of our Churches, where everything pertaining to the
service is gone through in a precise and proper manner, but where there is an utter
absence of zeal, enthusiasm, and Christlike earnestness. In the A.V. this passage
does not attract much attention. That a curse should be hurled at the head of the
traitor who does the work of the Lord deceitfully surprises no one. But to find a
curse aimed at the merely negligent worker makes us pause, and think, and ask
ourselves questions. The persons here referred to are amongst those who are doing
the work of the Lord.--They profess and call themselves Christians. They have
entered the kingdom of God, and by so doing they have enrolled themselves as
servants of Christ, and are pledged to do His will. For be it never forgotten, the two
must go together--namely, salvation and service. When in the sixteenth century
Martin Luther blew the reveille of the Reformation, the slumbering Churches were
roused and rallied by the call; and breaking off the fetters of delusion and
superstition which had previously bound them, they joyously inscribed on their
banner Salvation by faith. And for three centuries that blessed truth has been
floating before the eyes of reformed Europe. But Truth though it is, it is not the
whole truth. The time has more than come for the uplifting of another banner with
an inscription completing and explaining the first, by declaring that Faith without
works is dead. Soul-saving faith makes soul-saving men. I do not think that any
man is ever saved except by the direct or indirect intervention of some other man.
Christ alone can call the Lazarus forth, but there is a stone to be rolled away before,
and there are wrappings to be removed after the miracle is wrought. And hence God
is but working out His own economy in demanding that every member of His
kingdom shall be a servant and a worker. Through all time the test of saintship is
service. But this is not all. The Divine claim is not exhausted by the mere demand for
work. It is declared again and again that no service is acceptable unless it be
rendered with the whole heart. Partial, perfunctory, half-hearted service He sternly
rejects; and upon those who mock Him by offering it He pours His righteous wrath.
What think you is the greatest of all the obstacles which impede the progress of the
kingdom of Christ? It is the negligence or laziness of its members. To be an idler in
the world is bad enough, but to be an idler in the Church is ten thousand times
worse. It is an act of impious and audacious hypocrisy, and he who is guilty of it
stands before God and man self-branded as an impostor. We often Bear and speak
of Church work, but if we would speak correctly that phrase must be discarded.
There is no such thing as Church work. The work in question is Gods work, and as
such if for no other reason claims our best energies. If any of us were
commissioned to do work for the king would we not tax our powers to the very
uttermost in order to present it as perfect as possible? Much more should we do so
when the commission comes from the Court of heaven. The Kings business
requireth haste, and all who are engaged in it must acquit themselves as servants of
the Most High God. Dull sloth must be shaken off, and with hearts aglow with zeal
and eyes aflame with earnestness we must give ourselves to the task committed to
our care. Remember also the intrinsic importance of the work itself. Have you ever
been present at a critical surgical operation? What earnestness, what concentrated
attention, what careful precautions against the dreaded possibility! How is all this
tension of faculties brought about? It is created by the importance of the work in
hand. It is a case of life or death, in which negligence would mean murder. Ay! and
when the Christian worker is alive to his duty, and all that it involves, negligence is
impossible. It is fraught with possibilities which cannot be told. Its issues belong not
to time but eternity. Look around you and see how active and earnest are the forces
arrayed against us. From centre to circumference the kingdom of darkness thrills
and throbs with earnestness. Every subject is a soldier, and being s soldier he fights.
Every subject is a servant, and being a servant he serves. There is no dilly-dallying or
make-believe in the enemys camp. Then why should there be any in ours? Has the
Cross no longer its power? Has the sacred passion exhausted its inspirations? Does
the love of Christ no longer constrain and the Holy Ghost no longer energise?
(Joseph Muir.)

Half-and-half religion
If you are not to make religion the principal thing in your lives, dont go in for it. It
is better, and much easier, to go in for it entirely, than half and half--merely flirting
with it. It was the saying of a shrewd thinker: If it is worth while being a Christian
at all, it is better to he a downright Christian

JER 48:11-12
Moab hath been at ease from him youth, and he hath settled on his lees.

The shrill trumpet of admonition

For a considerable season the country of Moab had been free from the inroads of
war and the terrors of pestilence. The nation had, therefore, become so conceitedly
secure, that the lord said, We have heard the pride of Moab (he is exceeding
proud), his loftiness, and his arrogancy, and his pride, and the haughtiness of his
heart. The people became vain, hectoring, and boastful, and mocked at their
afflicted neighbours the Israelites, manifesting ungenerous joy in their sorrows. For
was not Israel a derision unto thee? was he found among thieves? for since thou
spakest of him, thou skippedst for joy. From this pride sprang luxury and all those
other vices which find a convenient lair in the repose of unbroken prosperity. The
warriors of Moab said, We are mighty and strong men for the war; as vainglorious
sinners, they defied all law and power; trusting in Chemosh, they despised Jehovah,
and magnified themselves against the Lord. The prophet compares that country to
wine which has been allowed to stand unstirred and unmoved: it settles on its lees,
grows strong, retains its aroma, and gathers daffy fresh body and spirit. But, saith
he, the day shall come when God shall shake this undisturbed liquor, when He shall
send wandering bands of Chaldeans that shall waste the country, so that the bottles
shall be broken and the vessels shall be emptied, and the proud prosperity of Moab
shall end in utter desolation. The fact that continued prosperity breeds carnal
security, is not only proved by the instance of Moab, but is lamentably confirmed in
the history of others.

I. I shall first speak to the unconverted, the godless, the prayerless, the Christless.
1. The bold offenders who are at ease in open sin. They began life with iniquity,
and they have made terrible progress in it. They go from iniquity to iniquity,
as the vulture from carcass to carcass; they labour in the way of evil, as men
dig for hid treasure; And they say, How doth God know? and is there
knowledge in the Most High? And if He doth know, say they, what care
we? Who is Jehovah, that we should obey Him? Who is the Almighty, that we
should tremble at His word? Yet, Oh, ye haughty ones, take heed, for
Pharaoh, who was your prototype in the olden days, found the way of pride
to be hard at the end.
2. A far more common form of that carelessness which is so destructive, is that
of men who give themselves wholly up to the worlds business. Such men, for
instance, as one whom Christ called Fool. Gain is the worlds summum
bonum, the chief of all mortal good, the main chance, the prime object, the
barometer of success in life, the one thing needful, the hearts delight. And
yet, Oh, worldlings, who succeed in getting gain, and are esteemed to be
shrewd and prudent, Jesus Christ calls you fools, and He is no thrower about
 of hard terms where they are not deserved. Thou fool, said He, and why!
Because the mans soul would be required of him; and then whose would
those things be which he had gathered together?
3. A third case is more common still, the man who forgets God and lives in
slothful ease. It is not enough to abstain from outward sin, and so to be
negatively moral; unless you bring forth fruits unto righteousness, you have
not the life of God in you; and however much you may be at ease, there shall
come a rough awakening to your slumbers, and the shrill sound of the
archangels trumpet shall be to you no other than the blast of the trumpet of
condemnation, because ye took your ease when ye should have served your
God.
4. There are many in the professing Christian Church Who are in me same state
as Moab. They have the virgins lamp, but they have no oil in the vessel with
their lamps; and yet so comfortable are these professors, that they slumber
and sleep. Remember, you may think yourself a believer, and everybody else
may think so too, and you may fail to find out your error until it is too late to
rectify it; you may persevere for years in the way which seemeth right unto a
man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Be ye not, Oh, ye professors,
like Moab, that had settled upon his lees!
5. Equally true is this of the mass of moral men who are destitute of faith in
Jesus. I have no doubt but what it will be all right with me at last. I pay my
neighbours their own; I give a guinea to a hospital, when they ask me for it; I
am a first-rate tradesman. Of course, I have sown a few wild oats, and I still
indulge a little; but who does not? Who dares deny that I am a good-hearted
fellow? Do you envy him? You may sooner envy the dead in their graves
because they suffer no pain.

II. We speak to THE BELIEVER. A Christian man finds himself for a long time
without any remarkable trouble: his children are spared to him, his home is happy,
his business extremely prosperous--he has, in fact, all that heart can wish; when he
looks round about him he can say with David, The lines are fallen unto me in
pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. Now, the danger is that he should
think too highly of these secondary things, and should say to himself, My mountain
standeth firm, I shall never be moved. He has not been poured from vessel to
vessel; he has not been sternly tried by Providence, or sorely tempted by the devil;
he has not been led to question his own conversion, he has fallen into a profound
calm, a deep dead peace, a horrible lethargy, and his inmost heart has lost all
spiritual energy. The great disease of England is consumption, but I suppose it
would be difficult to describe the causes and workings of consumption and decline.
The same kind of disease is common among Christians. It is not that many
Christians fall into outward sin, and so on, but throughout our Churches we have
scores who are in a spiritual consumption--their powers are all feeble and decaying.
The rapid results of this consumption are just these: a man in such a state soon gives
up communion with God; it is not quite gone at first, but it is suspended. His walk
with God is broken and occasional. His prayers very soon suffer. By degrees, his
conversation is not what it used to be. He was once very earnest for Christ, and
would introduce religious topics in all companies. He has become discreet now, and
holds his tongue. He is quite ready to gossip about the price of wheat, and how the
markets are, and the state of politics, and whether you have been to see the Sultan;
but he has no words for Jesus Christ, the King in His beauty. Spiritual topics have
departed from his general conversation. And now, strange to say, the minister does
not preach as he used to do: at least, the back-slider says so. The reason why I think
he is mistaken, is, that the Word of God itself is not so sweet to him as it once was;
and surely the Bible cannot have altered! After a while the professor slackens a good
deal in his liberality; he does not think the cause of God is worth the expense that he
used to spend upon it; and as to his own personal efforts to win souls, he does not
give up his Sunday-school class, nor his street preaching, nor distributing of tracts,
perhaps, but he does all mechanically, it is a mere routine. He might just as well be
an automaton, and be wound up, only the fault is, that he is not wound up, and he
does not do his work as he should do; or, if he does it outwardly, there is none of the
life of God in what he does. Very much of this sluggishness is brought on by long-
continued respite from trouble. It were better to be in perpetual storms, and to be
driven to-and-fro in the whirlwind, and to cling to God, than to founder at sea in the
most peaceful and halcyon days. The great secret danger coming out of all this is,
that when a man reaches the state of carnal security, he is ready for any evil. We
have heard of two negroes who were accustomed to go into the bush to pray, and
each of them had trodden a little path in the grass. Presently one of them grew cold,
and was soon found in open sin; his black brother warned him that he knew it would
come to that, because the grass grew on the path that led to the place of prayer. Ah!
we do not know to what we may descend when we begin to go down hill; down,
down, down, is easy and pleasant to the flesh, but if we knew where it would end, we
should pray God that we might sooner die than live to plunge into the terrors of that
descent. I must pass on to observe Gods cure for this malady. His usual way is by
pouring our settled wine from vessel to vessel. If we cannot bear prosperity, the Lord
will not continue it to us. We may pamper our children and spoil them; but the
Divine Father will not. Staying for a while in the valley of Aosta, in Northern Italy,
we found the air to be heavy, close, and humid with pestilential exhalations. We
were oppressed and feverish--ones life did not seem worth a pin. We could not
breathe freely, our lungs had a sense of having a hundred atmospheres piled upon
them. Presently, at midday, there came a thunder-clap, attended by big drops of rain
and a stiff gale of wind, which grew into a perfect tornado, tearing down the trees;
then followed what the poet calls sonorous hail, and then again the lightning flash,
and the thunder peal on peal echoing along the Alps. But how delightful was the
effect, how we all went out upon the verandah to look at the lightning, and enjoy the
music of the thunder! How cool the air and bracing! How delightful to walk out in
the cool evening after the storm! Then you could breathe and feel a joy in life. Full
often it is thus with the Christian after trouble. What ought we to do if we are
prospering? We should remember that prevention is better than cure, and if God is
prospering us, the way to prevent lethargy is--be very grateful for the prosperity
which you are enjoying; do not pray for trouble--you will have it quickly enough
without asking for it; be grateful for your prosperity, but make use of it. Do all you
possibly can for God while He prospers you in business; try to live very close to Him.
(C. H. Spurgeon.)

Ease injurious to Christian character

I have somewhere read the following incident in the life of a distinguished
botanist. Being exiled from his native land, he obtained employment as an under-
gardener in the service of a nobleman. While he was in this situation, his master
received a valuable plant, the nature and habits of which were unknown to him. It
was given to the gardener to be taken care of; and he, fancying it to be a tropical
production, put it into the hothouse (for it was winter), and dealt with it as with the
others under the glass. But it began to wither away and decay. And the strange
under-gardener asked permission to examine it. As soon as he looked at it he said,
This is an Arctic plant; you are killing it by the tropical heat into which you have
introduced it. So he took it outside, and exposed it to the frost, and, to the dismay
of the head-gardener, heaped pieces of ice around the flower-pot; but the result
vindicated his wisdom, for straightway it began to recover, and was soon as strong
as ever. Now, such a plant is Christian character. It is not difficulty that is dangerous
to it, but ease. Put it into a hothouse, separate it from the world, surround it with
luxury, hedge it in from every opposition, and you take the surest means of killing it.
(W. M. Taylor, D. D.)

Emptied from vessel to vessel.

The blessing of disturbance

The illustration is taken from the manner in which wine is prepared. The juice of
the grape, at first thick and impure, is allowed to ferment. Then it is left for a time
undisturbed, until a sediment, here called lees, is precipitated. After that it is
drawn off into another vessel so carefully that all the matter so precipitated is left
behind, and this emptying of it from vessel to vessel is repeated again and again,
until the offensive odour that came at first from the must is gone, and it becomes
clear and beautiful. Now, by the analogy of this process, familiar even to the
common people of a vine-growing country, the prophet accounts for the character
and condition of Moab as a nation. In the providence of God nothing had come to
unsettle that people. No external enemy had attacked them. No great national
disaster had ever fallen on them. We have here explained to us the reason why we
are, as we phrase it, so frequently upset in life. We complain that we are never
allowed to become settled. Ever, as we think we have reached some place of rest,
there comes a new upheaval to shake us up and out, so that we cry, Is there to be no
end of these changes? As well talk of a ship as settled in the midst of the ever-
restless, ever-changeful ocean, as talk of a man being settled in life. But, in the light
of this verse, such repeated disturbance is recognised as a blessing.

I. What there is in these emptyings that fits them to promote our spiritual
advancement.
1. Such dispensations have in them an influence which is well calculated to
reveal us to ourselves. Sudden emergency is a sure opener of a mans eyes to
his own defects. He may contrive to get on, in seasons of prosperity and
outward calm, without becoming conscious of the weak points of his
character; but let him be thrown, all at once, upon his own resources by the
coming upon him of some crushing calamity, and he will then find out
whether he has that within him that can stand the strain that has been put
upon him. It was a shrewd remark of Andrew Fuller, that a man has only as
much religion as he can command in the day of trial; and if he have no
religion at all, his trouble will make that manifest to him. Just as the strain of
the storm tells where the ship is weakest, and stirs up the mariner to have it
strengthened there, so the pressure of trial reveals the defects of character
 which still adhere to the Christian. One affliction may disclose an infirmity of
temper; another may discover a weakness of faith; a third may make it
evident that the power of some old habit is not yet entirely broken; and thus,
from this constant revelation to him of the evils that still remain in him, he is
led, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, to the attainment of a higher
measure of holiness than other-wise he could have reached.
2. The frequent unsettlements which come upon us in Gods providence have a
tendency to shake us out of ourselves. We find that where we thought
ourselves wise we have been supremely foolish. Where we imagined that we
had taken all possible contingencies into the account, we discover that we
had left no place for God. So our most matured schemes have been abortive,
our most cherished hopes have been blasted; yea, just when we conceived
that now at length we had reached our ultimatum, and were beginning to
congratulate ourselves on the prospect of repose, there came a sudden
reverse, which emptied us out again, and we were compelled to begin anew.
Thus we are brought to distrust ourselves. We find that it will not do to
lean always to our own understanding. By many bitter failures we are
made to acknowledge that it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps,
and then by the Spirit of God we are led up to confidence in Jehovah. We
have heard enough of the success of the millionaire; let us hear more now of
the success of the unsuccessful--yea, of the success of soul that sometimes
comes through the ruin of earthly fortune and the blighting of our fondest
plans. Character is nobler than riches or position, and the growth of that in
holiness and stability ought to be the highest aim, as it will be the noblest
achievement of life.
3. These frequent unsettlements have a tendency to keep us from being wedded
to the world, or from thinking of rooting ourselves permanently here. Some
years ago, while rambling with a friend in the neighbourhood of
Windermere, we came upon a house surrounded by the most beautiful
shrubs I ever saw, and I was naturally led to make some inquiry concerning
them. My companion informed me that, by a judicious system of
transplanting, constantly pursued, the proprietor was able to bring them to
the highest perfection. I thought at once of the manner in which God, by
continuous transplanting, keeps His people fresh and beautiful, and prevents
them from becoming too closely attached to the world. To be weaned from
earth is one of the means of making us seek our spiritual food from heaven;
and the trials of earth, transplanting us from place to place and from plan to
plan, tend to prepare us for the great transplanting which is to take us from
this world altogether, and root us in the garden of the Lord above.

II. The particular qualities of character which providential unsettlements are

most calculated to foster.
1. Purity of motive and conduct; and where shall we find a better illustration of
that than in the history of Jacob? He began life as a supplanter. He out-
bargained Esau. He imposed on Isaac. He out-generaled Laban. We cannot
admire him, and we are not drawn to him then. But when he lay on his
death-bed, no characteristics strike us more than his honesty in dealing with
his sons, and his sincerity in dealing with God. And how was that
transformation wrought? By the Spirit of God, you answer, and you answer
 well; but I would supplement your statement by putting it thus, By the
Spirit of God, through and in connection with the frequent unsettlements to
which he was subjected.
2. They tend to foster strength, either for endurance or for action. Take for
example, here, the case of Abraham. He was tried in Canaan and in Egypt; he
was tested by the long delay in the fulfilment of the promise in regard to
Isaac, and by the domestic discord that arose concerning Ishmael; and his
wrestlings with these afflictions developed in him, by the grace of God, that
spiritual might in which he conquered on the mount of the Lord, when he
earned for himself the title of the father of the faithful.
3. The recurrence of these emptying processes deepens the sympathy and
widens the charity of the Christian. Indeed hazard the assertion that no man
can be called complete in character who has not been subjected to them. It is
in this very relation that our Lord Himself is said to have been made perfect
through suffering, and each of us has doubtless had an experience of his
own which enables him to understand what seems at first so strange.
Experience is thus the mother of sympathy and charity. The older a Christian
grows he learns to feel for others more, and to condemn them less, and he is
a true son of consolation only in the proportion in which be is able to
comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith he himself
is comforted of God. What I have been saying, then, all tends toward these
two propositions, namely, that unbroken prosperity would be a curse to a
man, and not a blessing; and that providential unsettlements, when rightly
interpreted and improved, are really favours, though they do come draped in
sadness. (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)

The discipline of sorrow

I trust it is the wish of each of us that Gods will be done in us and about us: I trust
it is our daily prayer, not so much that God would give us what we wish, as that He
would teach us, simply and completely, to submit our will to His, and that He would
give us grace and strength to bear whatever He may send. Let us seek that the
utterance of our hearts may be that of the blind Galileo; who said, It has pleased
God that it should be so; and it must please me too. And yet it is natural to us to
wish that it might please God to lead us by as easy and pleasant a way as may be:
that it might please God to appoint us as peaceful and happy a life as possible, and
to send us just as little evil and sorrow as may suffice to work upon us the
wholesome results of evil and sorrow. God has made us so, that we wish for what is
pleasant, and shrink from what is painful. But it does not follow that the thing we
like best is the best thing for us. And the text tells us that a life of unbroken ease, a
life in which all goes well with us, is a most perilous thing. The kingdom of Moab
had enjoyed long tranquillity, though there were troublesome neighbours near, and
though it was a state of no great power: it had pleased God to order it so. Moab had
been at ease from his youth. Then comes the comparison to wine: Moab had not
been subjected to captivity, nor to other changes and troubles which are to a nation
what pouring from one vessel to another is to wine: thus he had remained standing
upon the lees, losing no part of his original strength and flavour. The suggestion is,
that Moab was not good to start with: and he had not been tried with processes
which might indeed have been painful, but in which he would have got rid of a good
deal of the evil that was in him at the first. Moab had been secure in prosperity: and
so he had remained the same as at the beginning,--all his bad qualities being only
confirmed by time and use. Now the great lesson from all this is, that there is
spiritual danger in the quiet lot, and in the quiet heart: that it is not Gods purpose
that those He loves should enjoy entire worldly tranquillity; that there is something
good for you and me, in care, unrest, disquiet, sorrow, bereavement,
disappointment, perplexity--in all that breaks up that perilous calm, in which we
grow too well satisfied with this world, and in which we feel ourselves too little
dependent on our Saviour and our Comforter; and in which we come too much to
feel as if things went on in their own way, forgetting that God directs them all; and
in which we fail to realise it, that the one thing needful is something quite different
from worldly enjoyment or worldly gain. So you see, how in love and mercy, and
tender consideration for our best good, our Father sends us trouble. Philosophers
vex and bewilder themselves in trying to explain how there is such a thing as evil in
this world: we do not pretend to understand that, but one thing we do know
perfectly, we know why evil and sorrow have been sent into our own lot and heart.
They have come to make sure that we shall not settle on our lees: they have come
to keep this world from engrossing our affection: they have come to wean us from
this world by making us feel its bitterness: they have come to teach us the grand, all-
comprehending lesson, that if we want what will satisfy our souls, we must go to
Christ and find it there. Yes, it is not good for us in this world to be evenly at peace:
and thus sorrow is Gods discipline, and disappointment, and bereavement,--in
short, everything that is painful and disquieting,--all being sanctified by the Holy
Spirit of God. And here is a truth we cannot remember too seriously. In all our
troubles we cannot too earnestly and constantly pray for the presence and influence
of the Holy Ghost. For sorrow does not necessarily sanctify; it is just as likely to
sour, if left to its natural tendencies. You who have known many trials: you who
have watched by the dying bed, and bent over the grave: you who set your heart on
things which God said were never to be: you whose sensitive nature makes the little
worries of daffy life sit very heavily on you, and whose quick heart and fancy eat the
enjoyment out of your life by suggesting a hundred anxieties and fears: let me ask,
Have all these things been sanctified to wean you from this world, and make you feel
that your portion must be in Christ and seek it there: or do you still cling to the
earth, and refuse to profit by your Heavenly Fathers teaching through all these trials
and cares? Every grief that these hearts have ever known was a sharp lesson given by
the best Teacher: and was meant to show us that this world will not do; and that if
we want peace and rest for our souls, we must look for them in our Saviour. Now, do
you accept that lesson heartily? (A. K. H. Boyd, D. D.)

Spiritual dislodgments
Observe--
1. How God manages, on a large scale, in the common matters of life, to keep us
in a process of change, and prevent our lapsing into a state of security such
as we desire. The very scheme of life appears to be itself a grand decanting
process, where change follows change, and all are emptied from vessel to
vessel. Here and there a man, like Moab, stands upon his lees, and
commonly with the same effect. Fire, flood, famine, sickness in all forms and
guises, wait upon us, seen or unseen, and we run the gauntlet through them,
calling it life. And the design appears to be to turn us hither and thither,
allowing us no chance to stagnate m any sort of benefit or security. Even the
 most successful, who seem, in one view, to go straight on to their mark, get
on after all, rather by a dexterous and continual shifting, so as to keep their
balance and exactly meet the changing conditions that befall them. Nor is
there anything to sentimentalise over in this ever-shifting, overturning
process, which must be encountered in all the works of life; no place for
sighing--vanity of vanities. There is no vanity in it, more than in the mill that
winnows and separates the grain.
2. That the radical evil of human character, as being under sin, consists in a
determination to have our own way, which determination must be somehow
reduced and extirpated. Hence the necessity that our experience be so
appointed as to shako us loose continually from our purpose, or from all
security and rest in it. The coarse and bitter flavour of our self-will is reduced
in this manner, and gradually fined away. If we could stand on our lees, in
continual peace and serenity, if success were made secure, subject to no
change or surprise, what, on the other hand, should we do more certainly
than stay by our evil mind, and take it as a matter of course that our will is to
be done; the very thing above all others of which we most need to be cured. It
would not even do for us to be uniformly successful in our best meant and
holiest works, our prayers, our acts of sacrifice, our sacred enjoyments; for
we should very soon fall back into the subtle power of our self-will, and begin
to imagine, in our vanity, that we are doing something ourselves.
3. That our evils are generally hidden from us till they are discovered to us by
some kind of trial or adversity. What good man ever fell into a time of deep
chastening who did not find some cunning infatuation by which he was
holden broken up, and some new discovery made of himself? The veils of
pride are rent, the rock of self-opinion is shattered, and he is reduced to a
point of gentleness and tenderness that allows him to suffer a true conviction
concerning what was hidden from his sight. Nor is anything so effectual in
this way as to meet some great overthrow that interrupts the whole course of
life; all the better if it dislodges him even in his Christian works and
appointments. What was I doing, he now asks, that I must needs be thrown
out of my holiest engagements? for what fault was I brought under this
discipline?
4. That we are prepared in this manner for the gracious and refining work of the
Spirit in us. Under some great calamity or sorrow, the loss of a child, the
visitations of bodily pain, a failure in business, the slanders of an enemy, a
persecution for the truth or for righteousness sake, how tender and open to
God does the soul become!
5. Too great quiet and security, long continued, are likely to allow the reaction or
the recovered power of our old sins, and must not therefore be suffered.
Suppose a man is converted as a politician--there is nothing wrong certainly
in being a politician--but how subtle is the power of those old habits and
affinities in which he lived, and how likely are they, if he goes straight on by a
course of prosperous ambition, to be finally corrupted by their subtle
reaction. When he is defeated, therefore, a little further on, by untoward
combinations, and thrown out of all hope in this direction, let him not think
it hard that he is less successful now in the way of Christ, than he was before
in the way of his natural ambition. God understands him, and is leading him
off, not unlikely, to some other engagement, that He may get him clear of the
 sediment on which he stands. In the same way, doubtless, it is that another is
driven out of his business by a failure, another out of his family expectations
by death and bereavement, another out of his very industry and his living by
a loss of health, another out of prayers and expectations that were rooted in
presumption, another out of works of beneficence that associated pride and
vanity, another out of the ministry of Christ, where, by self-indulgence, or in
some other way, his natural infirmities were rather increased than corrected.
There is no engagement, however sacred, from which God will not
sometimes separate us, that He may clear us of our sediment and the
reactions of our hidden evils.
Application--
1. It brings a lesson of admonition to the class of worldly men who are
continually prospering in the things of this life. Because they have no
changes, therefore they fear not God. I commend it to your deepest and
most thoughtful attention.
2. Others, again, have been visited by many and great adversities, emptied about
from vessel to vessel all their lives long, still wondering what it means, while
still they adhere to their sins. There is, alas! no harder kind of life than this, a
life of continual discipline that really teaches nothing. Is it so with you, or is
it not? There is no class of beings more to be pitied than defeated men, who
have gotten nothing out of their defeat but that dry sorrow of the world
which makes it only more barren, and therefore more insupportable.
3. It is necessary, in the review of this subject, to remind any genuine Christian
what benefits he ought to receive in the trials and changes through which he
is called to pass. Receive them meekly, rather, and bow down to them gladly.
Bid them welcome when they come, and, if they come not, ask for them; lift
up your cry unto God, and beseech Him that by any means He will correct
you, and purify you, and separate you to Himself. (H. Bushnell, D. D.)

Alternations in religious experience

Transitions from elevation to depression of soul, from joy and peace in
believing, to spiritual anxiety, arc beneficial as disturbing perilous security, as
leading to such critical scrutiny of conduct and of the motives which underlie it, as
reveals shortcomings which there would be no effort to detect were spiritual
enjoyment to continue unbroken, In such ease of soul the feeling of security--though
not, perhaps, finding audible expression in the words, I shall never be moved,
Thou, Lord, of Thy goodness, hast made my hill so strong, might find in them a
fitting description. Then, a season comes when God, for a time, hides His face and
causes trouble, when the chastened soul is taught humility, and mercifully roused
from a dangerous state of over-confidence. To be left, Moab-like, at ease, so as
never to be subject to apprehensions and doubts, would indeed be detrimental to the
health of the soul, and therefore, by wisely contrived changes, alternations
experienced in that life which is hid with Christ in God, the Christian is
experimentally taught that salvation is not promised to the experience of feelings,
however ardent, but to patient continuance in well-doing, to endurance unto the
end, to gradual progress in conformity to the will of Him who has made obedience
to His commandments the test of the genuineness of professed discipleship. In the
way by which heaven is to be reached, there are salutary changes from one kind to
another of spiritual experience, and by their means invaluable lessons are conveyed
to the soul. If there be a tendency to become less vigilant, to restrain prayer before
God, to grow remiss in religious exercises, public and private, there is a change to
the experience of some humiliating conviction. If, on the other hand, there be a
tendency to spiritual dejection, which if too long dominant, would have the effect of
paralysing effort, there is a change to an experience animating and consolatory.
Whether God manifests His power in the soul by gladdening it with tokens of His
favour, or depresses it with a painful sense of their withdrawal, He is, all the while,
educating it for immortality. But further. For all who carefully observe it there is
spiritual teaching in what the Church terms, in one of her comprehensive prayers,
the sundry and manifold changes of the world. Evidences of mutability and
uncertainty in the world external to us, are set before us in order that we may be
disciplined for that life immortal, which is promised to those who walk by faith.
The present state is designed to be one of pupilage for a higher and a nobler, and no
sadder aspect of it can be imagined than when it is viewed as a season of opportunity
wasted, a life in which nothing has been learned which is of profit to the
imperishable soul. Of momentous import, therefore, is the consideration, whether
you be really advantaged by the teaching of those mutabilities. The manner in which
prosperity and adversity are borne, the effect which these opposite experiences
produce upon character, the spirit in which benefits upon the one hand, and trials
upon the other, are received--it is to that you must look if you be desirous of arriving
at a reliable conclusion as to whether or not you be spiritually disciplined under
Gods providential dispensations. May the mutable nature of all sublunary things be
so impressed upon you, as an influential conviction, that the result may be the sure
fixing of your hearts where true joys are to be found. (C. E. Tisdall, D. D.)

Divine plan in changes

Why these constant removals from town to town; from church to church; from
situation to situation? Why this perpetual change and revolution in our plans? Why
this incessant going into captivity to irksome and trying circumstances? All this is
part of Gods manufacture of the wine of life. We must be emptied from vessel to
vessel, else we should settle on our lees, and become thick and raw and unpalatable,
when the next change comes in your life, do not fear it. The blessed God will see to it
that no drop of the precious fluid shall be spilt on the ground. With the tenderest
care He conducts the whole operation. Perhaps there is a counterpart to this
incessant change from place to place in the perpetual flux of our emotions. We never
feel the same for long together. We are constantly being emptied from one blessed
frame into another, not quite so joyous or peaceful. We have to hold the most
heavenly emotions with a light hand, not knowing how soon they may have passed.
And it is well. Otherwise we should never lose the taste of our proud self-
complacency. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

JER 48:17
How is the strong staff broken.

The strong staff and the beautiful rod

 I. The purposes of our Heavenly Father in great bereavements.
1. To teach us that we should not misplace our trust.
2. To convince us of our sins and to sever us from them.
3. To teach us His own independence of the instruments He employs.
4. To remind us of the sovereignty of God.
5. To exhibit His wise and watchful providence.

II. The duties to which we are, and such scenes, specially called.
1. We are to exercise submission.
2. That we should profit by the example of those who have died in the Lord.
3. That we should cease from man and put our trust in God. (W. R. Williams.)

JER 48:25
The horn of Moab is cut off.

The history of Moab

The first charge brought against Moab is self-confidence, self-trust, self-
sufficiency (Jer 48:7). This makes us contemporaries of the Moabites. We thought
they were an ancient people, but behold how human they are, how English, how like
ourselves and our children! They were so pleased with the stone wall they had put
up; they measured it, and admired it, and said that it would save them from the high
wind and the mighty storm. It was enough--high enough, broad enough,
impenetrable, invincible. Now that is the kind of reasoning which God will not allow
in human life. He demands that human life be lived in Himself, and not in things
that our own hands have made. We are to be taught distinctly that we do not live in
ourselves; that in ourselves we have actually no life; that we have nothing that we
have not received, and in that spirit alone we are to hold life and to live. It would
seem to be easy to put our whole trust in the living God, and yet it is the most
difficult of all lessons. We will persist, even in opposition to many theories of our
own to the contrary, that we are self-contained, self-consisting, and self-managing;
and herein arises Gods perpetual controversy with mankind. There is, too, so much
to favour the temptation. It looks as if we could do most things; that as we have so
much we might easily have more. God says to us in every days providence, You are
here for a purpose; you are here for a little time; you now but begin to be; every
lesson you must learn, and every commandment you must keep. It is against that
arrangement that we chafe, just as the little child chafes against parental authority
and loving restraint. From the history of Moab we see that even blessings may be
perverted, and sacred privileges may be turned into occasions of self-destruction
(Jer 48:11). Too much ease, too little upset, too little anxiety, too little trouble will
kill any soul. To come into a business made to your hands, to have a fortune left you,
and to have everything prearranged, is to be exposed to very peculiar and urgent
temptation. Thank God for the rough places in your lives. They are unpleasant, but
they are disciplinary. They are like steep hills, but remember that great temples and
blessed sanctuaries stand at the top of them. When discipline is not endured
gradually it is brought to bear upon the life as an overwhelming judgment. This is
the burden of the text. Two classes of persons should consider this. First, those who
have daily discipline; they should say, Better have discipline a little at, a time, as we
are able to bear it. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. No chastening for the
present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the
peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. These daily
chafings and frettings are nard to bear, these daily disappointments are sharp
thorns thrust into the very eyes; yet who knows what the judgment would be were it
all to come at once? I will rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him: no temptation
has happened unto me but such as is common to men; by and by the explanation
will come, and then I shall be able to say, He hath done all things well. Then the
lesson should be well considered by those who seem to escape discipline of God. The
volcano is a long time in gathering all its fiery energy, but the outburst is
momentary, and who can measure the destruction which follows? Christ may well
say, What I say unto one, I say unto all, Watch,--even those who have apparently
least necessity to watch, should not relax their vigils for a moment. Let him that
thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall See how frightful m the humiliation to
which God can bring a man or a people. Look at the picture of Moab--horn cut off,
the arm broken, the man drunk but not with wine, and reeling in helplessness, the
proud one wallowing in his vomit and laughed to derision! We cannot, however, rest
here: for the mercy of the Lord endureth for ever. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
The destruction, therefore, was not arbitrary, but moral, being based upon an
assigned reason. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a
fall. We should say, therefore, that this verse was the concluding verse in the whole
history of Moab. What can there be after destruction? With men this is impossible,
but with God all things are possible. The chapter does not end with the forty-second
verse, but with the forty-seventh, and this is how it reads, Yet will I bring again,
&c. One would fain construe these words into a hopeful omen. Out of what
extremities cannot God deliver mankind? Let the most desponding rekindle their
hope, and the most distant prodigal hear his fathers voice. Who can set bounds to
the mercy of God? Yet must there be no trifling, even with a Gospel of hope. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

JER 48:28
Dwell in the rock, and be like the dove.

Dove and rock

I. God shows much compassion not only to friends but to foes.

1. It is for Moab--guilty, apostate, persecuting Moab--that God expresses all this
compassionate concern.
2. The New Testament is filled with warnings, invitations, and promises,
addressed to those who are farthest off from God, intermingled with signal
instances of the conversion of hardened transgressors.
 II. GOD WOULD HAVE US FORSAKE FALSE REFUGES AND AVAIL OURSELVES OF THE
TRUE. The wild doves and pigeons of the East delight in cool and inaccessible places.
They build their nests in cliffs and caverns, overhanging fearful precipices, where
man cannot tread. Learn the importance of shunning false confidences, and of
resting our hope of salvation where alone it can be safe. God would have human
weakness rely on almighty strength; human ignorance on almighty wisdom; human
sinfulness on almighty mercy. The finite needs the Infinite; the sinner, the Saviour.

III. Contemptuous neglect of warnings and mercies aggravates final

consequences. This was the case with Moab.
1. We may not presume on Gods mercy and forbearance. The longer the
judgment delays, the heavier its weight of woe.
2. Despair is to be banished. The atonement is all-sufficient.
3. Delay must be avoided. Gods voice is always To-day; Satans. To-morrow.
4, We must not be satisfied with our own safety, but aim at leading others to
flee as doves to the Rock. (Homiletic Magazine.)

JER 48:36
Because the riches that he hath gotten are perished.

Riches are ever liable to perish

Prosperity is not to be deemed the greatest security. The lofty unbending cedar is
more exposed to the injurious blast than the lowly shrub. The little pinnace rides
safely along the shore, while the gallant ship advancing is wrecked. Those sheep
which have the most wool are generally the soonest fleeced. Poverty is its own
defence against robbery. Who would snake those trees upon which there is no fruit?
(T. Secker.).

JEREMIAH 49

JER 49:8
Dwell deep, O inhabitants of Dedan.

Dwell deep, O Dedan

We do not quite know who these inhabitants of Dedan were, but in all probability
they were some Arabian tribe or tribes. The text intends one of two things--either to
inform these inhabitants of Dedan, that however deep in the cavernous rocks they
should hide themselves, they would certainly be destroyed; or else it was a gracious
warning to remove from Edom, strike their tents, and retreat into the depths of the
wilderness, and so escape from the invaders.
 I. Let us take it SARCASTICALLY. It is as though the prophet said to these Edomites,
and those that dwelt with them, You think you never can be destroyed, for your city
is situated in a rocky defile, where a handful of men can hold the pass. You suppose
that the mightiest armies will fail to conquer you, and therefore you are very proud;
but your pride is vain. Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine
heart, O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that holdest the height of the
hill: though thou shouldest, make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee
down from thence, saith the Lord. That word has been terribly fulfilled, for the
ancient rock-city stands as a wonder to all travellers, and when they ride through it,
which is not often, for it is with great difficulty that you reach the place at all, they
find the city standing, but the houses desolate, and without inhabitants. Edom is a
perpetual desolation, because of her sins:
1. From the text I hear a cry, like the stern voice of Elias, to every profane stoner
who thinks that he will ultimately escape the wrath of God. Thou mayest
dwell deep, O transgressor, but God shall find thee out. Thou sayest, How
shall He reach me? The hand of death has only to be stretched out, and thou
art HIS captive at once: and a little thing will do it--the wind has but to pass
over thee, and thou art gone. A drop of blood may go the wrong way, a valve
may refuse to open, a vessel may burst, a band may snap, and there thou
liest, beneath Gods avenging hand, like a stag smitten by the hunter. Thou
art dust, and a breath wilt scatter thee to the four winds. Thy spirit will be
equally unable to escape from God. When it leaves this body, whither will it
fly?
2. The same solemn warning may be applied to those who are self-righteous,
and who think that they are forming a hiding-place for themselves You think
that you will save yourselves by your works Ah! labour mightily; for hard
must be your toil if you think to finish a righteousness of your own. In the
very fire must you labour. You would make a dwelling for yourself as secure
as the Rock of Ages? You had need build anxiously. I do not wonder that you
are ill at ease. I wonder you have any peace, for the labours which you
propose are more stupendous than those of Hercules! You would work
miracles without the God of miracles! Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!
3. The same text, in the same way, might be applied to those who are hypocrites,
and are practising secret sins while they yet wear the name of Christ, and are
numbered amongst His people. Where are the deep places which can afford
refuge to religious pretenders? Where shall liars conceal themselves? O
hypocrite! it may be you have planned your sin so cleverly that the wife of
your bosom does not know it: your scheme is so admirably cunning that you
carry two faces, and yet no Christian sees other than that Christian mask of
yours. Ah, sir! but you are a greater fool than I take you for, if you think you
can deceive your God. Cast off your double-mindedness. Cease to do evil,
learn to do well, for it is time to seek the Lord, and may God grant you His
effectual grace that you may do so at once, ere He condemn you to the lowest
hell.

II. But now we will use the text INSTRUCTIVELY, in which view, the first and
natural sense would be, that the prophet warns the tribe of Dedan, who had come to
live among the Edomites, to go away from them, and dwell in the depths of the
wilderness; so that when the destroyer came, they might not participate in Edoms
doom. It was the warning voice of mercy, separating its chosen from among the
multitude of the condemned.
1. The people of God, like the tribes of Dedan, to some extent, dwell in Edom.
Your business, your duty, is to come out from among them. Be ye separate,
and touch not the unclean thing. Better go to heaven alone, than to hell in
company. Better be true to God, with Abdiel, faithful among the faithless
found, than win the applause of the crowd by great liberality and equal
inconsistency. More important still, however, is the separation of every
Christian from worldly habits, customs, and ways. Wherever you are, dear
friend, though you must be in the world, take care that you be not of it. Dwelt
deep in the solitudes where Jesus dwelt--in the lonely holiness which was
fostered on the cold mountains side, and then shone resplendent amid
temptation and persecution! Commit yourself unto no man; call no man
master; lean on no arm of flesh; walk before the Lord in the land of the
living, and so dwell deep, as did your Lord.
2. My earnest desire is that every saved soul among you may dwell deep, that is
to say, that none of you may be superficial Christians, but that; you may be
deep believers, well rooted plants of grace, thorough, downright, out-and-out
Christians--that you may not only dwell in the Rock of Ages, but dwell deep
in it. To this let me call your attention.
(1) It is highly important, beloved, that every one of us should have a deep
sense of sin, and a profound horror of it. Oh, to loathe iniquity and see
with self-abhorrence its heinous character; for so shall we prize the
salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love which thought it, the blood
which bought it, and the grace which wrought it out!
(2) Should your convictions of sin be already deep, then seek to dwell deep
as to your faith in Jesus Christ. The nearer to Jesus the more perfect our
peace. The innermost place of the sanctuary is the most Divine.
(3) So would I have you dwell deep an the matter of Christian study. An
instructed Christian is a more useful vessel of honour for the Master,
than an ignorant believer.
(4) Above all things, and beyond all things, would I earnestly impress upon
my beloved friends the need of deep living unto God. There is such a
thing as flimsy living, in which you pray, and pray,--yes, but it is a
superficial, routine exercise. Those who live only upon outward
ordinances, and do not practise private devotion, and are not abundantly
with God in secret communion--these do not dwell deep. Get to the roots
of things. The gold mines of Scripture are not in the top soil, you must
open a shaft; the precious diamonds of experience are not picked up in
the roadway, their secret places are far down. Get down into the vitality,
the solidity, the veracity, the divinity of the Word of God, and seek to
possess with it all the inward work of the blessed Spirit.
3. If any inquire what are our reasons for bringing forward at this time such an
exhortation as this, I will briefly answer them.
(1) It is well for us to dwell deep, because trials will surely come.
(2) Again, there is a necessity that you should dwell deep, for in these days
many errors have gone abroad in the world, and many teachers of heresy
and infidelity; and if you do not dwell deep, they will shake you terribly.
 (3) Dwell deep, for there are seasons coming when all your grace will be
wanted. I have never heard of a man coming to mischief through having
too much grace. Presumption brings a thousand evils, but holy
carefulness brings very few, if any.
(4) Dwell deep, because those who live near to God, and are substantial in
godliness, are the happiest of people. The top of the cup of religion may
be bitter, but it grows sweeter the deeper down you drink.
(5) While this deep living gives a man more happiness, it also endows him
with more strength.
(6) Dwell deep, for you will glorify God most. The nearer you get to the sun,
the brighter you will be. The nearer you live to Christ, the more like Him
you will be. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Dwell deep

I. DWELL DEEP IN THE PEACE OF GOD. Gods peace is so deep and blessed that it
cannot be fathomed or explained; the fugitive into its sacred secrets cannot be
followed or dragged forth to perish by the merciless pack of the wolves of care. Men
of the world cannot understand that mystery of peace; but the believer knows the
way into it, and makes it his hiding-place and pavilion.

II. DWELL DEEP IN COMMUNION WITH GOD. Get away from the rush and strife
around, and go alone into the clear, still depths of His nature. The Rhone loses all its
silt in the deep, clear waters of Genevas lake. A few hasty words of prayer will not
avail for this. A days climb is often necessary before one can reach the heart of the
mountains.

III. DWELL DEEP IN STILLNESS OF SOUL. Get within. God awaits thee there. Centre
thyself. When the world is full of alarm and harassments, study to be quiet. The
souls health cannot be maintained apart from the observance of times of waiting on
God in solitude. The great importance of perseverance in the exercise of prayer and
inward retirement may be sufficiently learnt, says one, next to the experience of it,
merely from the tempters artifices and endeavours to allure us from it, and make us
neglect it. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

Deep dwellers
The plants which grow in the Alps are, as a rule, firmly and largely rooted. An
authority on this topic says: The roots of some plants enter so far into the gritty soil
as to defy the tourist to bring them out, while others simply search farther into the
heart of the flaky rock, so that they are safer from any want of moisture than if in the
best and richest soil. So in many lives, the very strength and beauty of Christian
character are a proof that the roots of the soul have struck deep into the everlasting
truth and love, the granite truths of the Divine Being and attributes. Dwell deep! O
Dedan! (H. O. Mackey.)
 JER 49:11
Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows
trust in Me.

The compassion and beneficence of the Deity

No subject is more open to general observation, or more confirmed by manifold
experience, than the goodness of God. In Scripture it is most frequently presented to
us in the light of compassion to the distresses of mankind (Psa 102:17; Psa 10:17; Psa
58:5; Psa 69:33; Psa 146:7; Psa 22:24, &c.).

I. The discoveries of Divine compassion were purposely intended to furnish to us

particular ground for trust in God amid all the vicissitudes of human life.
Compassion is a principle which we all feel and know. We know that it is the
strongest of all benevolent instincts in our nature, and that it tends directly to
interest us in behalf of those who need our aid. We are taught to believe that a
similar attribute belongs to the Divine nature; in order that, from that species of
goodness which we are best acquainted with, and which we can most rely upon, we
may be trained both to love our Almighty Benefactor, and, as long as we are in the
practice of our duty, to trust to His protection amid every distress. Compassion to
the unfortunate, as it is exerted among men, is indeed accompanied with certain
disturbed and painful feelings, arising from sympathy with those whom we pity. But
every such feeling we must remove from our thoughts when we ascribe an affection
of this nature to the Deity. His compassion is such a regard as suits the perfection of
the great Governor of the universe, whose benignity, undisturbed by any violent
emotion, ever maintains the same tranquil tenor, like the unruffled and
uninterrupted serenity of the highest heavens.

II. Such discoveries of the Divine nature were designed, not only to administer
encouragement and consolation, but also to exhibit the pattern of that disposition
which we are bound, in our measure, to imitate and follow. That hardness of heart
which renders men insensible to the distresses of their brethren, that insolence of
prosperity which inspires them with contempt of those who are fallen below them,
are always represented in Scripture as dispositions most opposite to the nature of
God, and most hateful in His sight. In order to make this appear in the strongest
light, He has turned His goodness chiefly into the channel of compassionate regard
to those whom the selfish and proud despise (Psa 12:5; Psa 10:17-18).

III. In the course of human life innumerable occasions present themselves for all
the exercises of that humanity and benignity to which we are so powerfully
prompted. The diversities of rank among men, the changes of fortune to which all, in
every rank, are liable, the necessities of the poor, the wants of helpless youth, the
infirmities of declining age, are always giving opportunities for the display of
humane affections. (Hugh Blair, D. D.)

The God of orphans and widows

The Rev. J. Brown of Haddington, said that his epitaph might appropriately be:
Here lies one of the cares of providence, who early wanted both father and mother,
and yet never missed them.

JER 49:16
Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine heart
On the deceitfulness of the heart, in the abuse of prosperity
The words afford us the following doctrine, That worldly prosperity is often
abused by the heart, as the occasion of self-deceit; or, that the heart often discovers
its deceit in the abuse of prosperity. All that is intended here is to illustrate the
actions of this corrupt principle in abusing prosperity.
1. By ingratitude.
(1) Sinners receive all Gods mercies with an unthankful heart. They sit down
to their table and rise from it, they eat and drink like the brutes that
perish; without considering, that whether they eat or drink, or
whatsoever they do, they should do all to the glory of God. Many are the
spiritual mercies which the unregenerate receive from God. He gives
them His Word and ordinances, wherein the Bread of Life is exhibited.
He warns them by His servants. He strives with them by His Spirit. They
reject and despise the heavenly manna. Their souls loathe this light food.
(2) Ingratitude is a sin eminently chargeable even against the children of
God. When they are anxious for any mercy, they resolve, and perhaps
solemnly vow, that if God will be pleased to bestow it, they will ever
retain a grateful sense of His kindness. He condescends to grant their
request. But often they remember not the multitude of His mercies, but
provoke Him, like His ancient people, at the sea, even at the Red Sea.
This conduct towards our gracious Benefactor is productive of bitter
consequences. Our ingratitude for mercies received often provokes Him
to deny us others which He would otherwise bestow, sometimes to recall
those already given, and frequently, to blast them in the enjoyment.
2. By disposing us to make a God of our mercies. The deceitfulness of the heart,
so violent is its opposition to the living God, works by contraries, and often
by extremes. If it do not tempt us to despise His mercies altogether, it will
excite us to put them out of their proper place. By either of these methods,
although directly opposite, it gains its wicked purpose, in making us forget
the God of our mercy. He will suffer no rival in thy heart, O Christian, for it
all belongs to Him; and when thy love to worldly comforts ceases to be
secondary and subordinate, it is an encroachment on His prerogative.
Therefore must the usurper of the throne of God be cast down, that in all
things He may have the pre-eminence. When precious comforts are thus
converted into severe crosses, how great is the trial! There is a double
bitterness attending it; not only that of the distress presently felt, but the
painful recollection of the happiness formerly enjoyed.
3. By consuming Divine mercies on lust. The wicked ask that they may consume
it on their lusts. They neither desire mercies, nor improve those which are
bestowed, for the glory of God; but only as making provision for their
inordinate or unlawful affections.
 4. By ascribing their prosperity to some other cause than God. Even the Lords
people, from the prevalence of deceit, are in great danger of ascribing their
mercies to some other cause than God, or to something besides Him. They
will not wholly deny the praise to the God of their salvation; but they do not
ascribe it entirely to Him. When they receive signal mercies from Him, they
are apt to imagine that these are in some degree deserved by their holiness
and integrity of conversation; that He could not justly deny them such tokens
of His favour, when they are so faithful and diligent in His service.
5. By denying God the use of those mercies which He hath Himself bestowed.
When, in the course of His providence, He confers on one a greater portion
of common blessings than on another; it is for this end, that he may use
them for His glory, and in the manner of laying them out, return them to the
Lord. No talent is to be laid up in a napkin. According to the measure of
temporal benefits received from God, we are stewards for Him.
6. By unsatisfied desires and immoderate longings for a greater degree of
temporal prosperity. When the heart hath tasted of mercies of this nature, it
is not satisfied; it craves more. If its desires be fulfilled, instead of being
content with these, it flatters itself, that if such another mercy were
bestowed, it would ask nothing further. But this only argues its deceit; for
even though this be granted, it is still as importunate as ever. The more it
receives, its desires are enlivened and enlarged the more.
7. By hardening itself under prosperity. No mercy whatsoever can leave us as it
finds us. It must either prove a blessing or a curse. It will either have a
mollifying, or a hardening influence on our hearts. (J. Jamieson, M. A.)
Deceitfulness of pride
How nimbly does that little lark mount up, singing towards heaven in a right line,
whereas the hawk, which is stronger of body and swifter of wing, towers up by many
gradual compasses to its highest pitch. That bulk of body and length of wing hinder
a direct ascent, and require the help both of air and scope to advance his flight;
while the small bird cuts the air without resistance, and needs no outward
furtherance of her motion. It is no otherwise with the souls of men. Some are
hindered by those powers which would seem helps to their soaring: great wit, deep
judgment, quick apprehension, send about men, with no small labour, for the
recovery of their own incumbrance, while the good affections of plain and simple
souls raise them up immediately to the fruition of God. Why should we be proud of
that which may slacken our way to glory? (Bishop Hall.)

JER 49:23
There is sorrow (as) on the sea; it cannot be quiet.

Life on the ocean

That which was true of the cities spoken of in our text, is also true, though in a
different sense, of every voyager on the sea of life. There is sorrow (as) on the sea.

I. SORROW AS ON THE SEA IS DIVINELY PREDICTED. Voyagers you all must be. Out on
that wide mysterious ocean which is swept by storms untold, and which teems with
dangers innumerable, you must sail. Many of you axe as yet but as landsmen lying in
the docks. You are admiring your vessel, and putting on nautical airs, and
wondering when you will be freed from the trammels of the shore. Some of you are
just dropping down the stream, your breasts big with hope, and your imagination
painting glowing pictures of the ocean life beyond. Mid the songs of the sailors, and
the music of the passengers, bright visions are rising of sunny seas and blue skies, of
mirth and boundless happiness. With all my heart I wish you God-speed. I would
not unnecessarily becloud that fair prospect. May the sunbeams which begild the
waves around you follow you abundantly. And yet, though at the risk of being
charged with unkindness, I must warn you that there is sorrow on the sea. I would
not, I could not, prevent your sailing; but I must remind you of that which should
not be always forgotten, that in lifes voyage troubles will come.

II. Sorrow as on the sea is universally experienced.

1. From the mutability of life. I have no wish to play the misanthrope, to paint
you a leaden landscape under a lowering sky, where no break of sunshine
ever comes to chase the shadows from an ebon sea. There is sunshine!
Though all life has its clouds, life is not all sorrow. But while lifes joys may
be many and real, it will have its sorrows by reason of its changes. To-day the
sea may he calm, and the sky may be without a cloud, but even while we
speak the glass is falling, and the calm sea will soon be lashed into foaming
fury, and the cloudless sky will soon be overcast with messengers of coming
woe.
2. From the uncertainties of life. Which way to steer--what to do--whether to
enter into this speculation or to avoid that transaction--how to meet this
engagement, or how to be relieved of that responsibility--often drives men to
their wits end. Business goes wrong, markets are unsteady, panics are
abroad, and fogs and thick darkness so enshroud the mercantile world, that
with dangers and uncertainty everywhere around, the perplexed tradesmen
often just throws up the helm in despair, and allows the vessel to drift
whithersoever the current will take her. And in his spiritual voyage the
Christian is not always free from similar sorrow. With the Psalmist, we have
sometimes to lament that we see not our signs.
3. The disappointments of life.
(1) Think of lifes friendships! Where we anticipated most consolation, there,
in the day of our need, we were most bitterly deceived.
(2) Look at lifes prospects! You remember how hard you toiled to secure
that position which you thought would consummate your joys, and be the
very climax of your every earthly ambition. You remember how bright
your prospects seemed to be. You know that towards the end everything
was so apparently propitious that you never for a moment entertained a
doubt of success. But you were disappointed l

III. Sorrow as on the sea may be greatly mitigated.

1. A good ship. Let a sailor be persuaded of the soundness of the ship in which
he sails, and it may blow big guns--he is comparatively at ease. We want
similar faith in the grand old Gospel ship. We want the unswerving
 confidence which will inspire us ever to say, I am not ashamed of the Gospel
of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation. Classed A1 for ever in the
heavenly register, this everlasting Gospel can never fail. In this good ship
millions have reached the desired haven in peace; on her deck millions are
sailing thither now; and there is room for millions yet unborn.
2. A reliable chart. Without this a man may well be anxious. By what chart are
you steering? Is it the Bible, or is it the Age of Reason? Blessed be God, we
know whom and we know what we believe.
3. Sufficient provision. Lacking provision, what can the sailor do? There is often
such sorrow on the sea. Want often stares men in the face when they are
far from port, and when they can by no possible means obtain supplies. This
can never happen on board the ship of the Gospel. This vessel is stored
abundantly with the choicest provisions of free eternal grace. (W. H.
Burton.)

The sea, a parable of human life

The ocean is, and always will be, so long as man keeps the faculty of imagination,
a mournfully suggestive parable of human life. The restlessness of the sea, its
constant alternations of storm and calm, its treachery, for ever deceiving us by false
appearances, the atmosphere of mystery that broods over it, all these contribute to
make it the natural symbol of mans condition here in this world. Take only one of
those characteristics--mysteriousness. David had been visited by this thought also.
Thy judgments, he says, while pondering the strange confusion of good and evil in
the world, are like the great deep. The sea does suggest, with wonderful power, the
mysteriousness of Gods providence in the affairs of men. Thy way is in the sea, and
Thy path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known. The human mind is
by nature prone to the misgiving that fate rather than providence orders the
procession of our life. Events, so the temptation whispers, fall out according to an
iron law of necessity. There is no loving Father who notes the sparrows fall, and
gives His children their daily bread; neither is there any blessed consummation, any
final victory of the good over the evil towards which history may be supposed to
move. These hopes are delusive; they rest on no foundation. The only thing of which
we are certain is that effect follows upon cause in uniform succession, any given
human life being as powerless to quicken, or retard, or alter the movement of this
endless chain, as if it were only a tiny bubble molten in the fibre of the iron of one
single link. This is what we understand by such words as destiny, fate.
necessity, and this is the idea which the sea, looked at as a parable, most easily
suggests. You sit upon some rocky promontory and watch the incoming tide. You
note how wave after wave dashes itself against the hard face of the cliff, and perishes
in the act. You observe that every now and then a larger wave comes in, and seems
to make a braver effort; but that also, like its predecessor, falls back and is gone.
Meanwhile the general level of the water rises and rises, until a predetermined point
is reached, and then, as gradually, the tide recedes, sure to return again as soon as a
few hours have past, and to make its mark a little higher, or a little lower, according
to rules which the astronomers wrote out long ago, which you might have found all
calculated for you in their books before you started on the walk. Surely, if there be
anywhere in nature a vivid emblem of the idea of destiny, it is here. And, if anything
were needed to heighten the impression which the eye has already carried to the
mind, the ear might find it in the monotonous, melancholy music of the breaking
waves, a sound which possibly suggested to the mourner among the prophets his
pathetic cry, There is sorrow on the sea. What is the relief for a mind oppressed,
weighted down with thoughts like this? The sea is His, and He made it. Have faith
in God, said our Lord Jesus Christ to His disciples, when they found themselves in
perplexity. Have faith in God. He who made the sea is greater than the sea. He who
ordained the strangely tangled scheme of providence, is greater than His scheme.
He who is responsible for the mystery of human life, holds the key of that mystery
in. His hands. Do you ask for proof of this? There is no proof. If there were proof,
Christ need not have said, Have faith in God. Where knowledge leaves off, there
faith begins. At the outer boundary of demonstration, belief lifts up her voice and
sings. Do you say, Convince me that the idea of destiny is false, and that the idea of
providence is true? No, I cannot convince, I can only, by Gods help, persuade you;
and yet, when once persuaded, you will be as certain as if you had been convinced;
for what a man believes with all his heart, he holds as firmly as he does that which
he knows with all his mind. We know, says St. Paul, grandly asserting his faith in a
doctrine the opposite of destiny, that all things work together for good to them that
love God. How did he know this? Had it been proved to him by strict processes of
reasoning in which his keen intellect had been able to detect no flaw? Was that the
ground of the confidence with which he spoke? Far from it. The foundation of his
certainty was what he elsewhere calls the assurance of faith. And who is the
teacher of this glad faith? To whom shall we go that we may learn to believe that
God is love? I know not, if not to Him who, standing once upon the deck of a
tempest-tossed ship, rebuked the wind, and said unto this same sea, Peace, be still.
Did not He, the Redeemer, come into this world, and take our nature upon Him, and
suffer death upon the Cross, for the very purpose of freeing men from the bondage
of their fears, for the very purpose of breaking up this evil dream of destiny and
enfranchising us with the liberty of the sons of God? Has He not made for us, as for
Israel of old, a pathway through the dreaded sea, and having overcome the
sharpness of death, has He not opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers? Well
may He ask, Where is your faith? One who has done so much for us has at least the
right to expect that we shall trust Him; having at so great a cost purchased us this
freedom, He has at least the right to expect that we shall be thankful for it, and use it
as His gift. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.)

JER 49:30-31
Flee, get you far off, dwell deep, O ye inhabitants of Hazor, saith the Lord.

Dangers to the Church

What is called Underground Jerusalem is largely the space from which the
stones were taken for the building of Solomons temple. That space, according to
Josephus, was afterwards honeycombed with passages, canals, and secret galleries,
not for sanitary purposes, but as places of refuge for women and children in times of
war. These passages were all connected with the forts and towers of the city, and
were a secret means of escape when the city was besieged. When Jerusalem was
surrounded by the Romans under Titus large numbers of the Jews fled for refuge to
these underground hiding-places. Before the Romans knew of these hiding-places,
they were often astonished, and sometimes startled, by seeing persons rising as from
the ground and making their escape by the towers, when at length they entered the
city, and had passed from Moriah to Mount Zion, they thought that their work of
destruction was ended; but they only then learned that thousands of the Jews were
living beneath the ground. It is alleged that more than a hundred battles were fought
underneath the city, and that more than two thousand dead bodies were taken out of
the tunnels and secret chambers of what is now called Underground Jerusalem
when the prophet enjoined the inhabitants of Hazor to flee, and dwell deep, he may
have had some such invisible cities of refuge in view. But even in such hiding-places
they were only comparatively safe. Their enemies often sought them, and found
them, and put them to death.

I. One of the dangers to which the Church is exposed in modern times is

SHALLOWNESS OF THOUGHT. Many seem to be satisfied with as little of Christianity as
possible. Shallowness of thought means want of heart, want of understanding, want
of principle, moral purpose, and power. The Church can outlive pagan conspiracies,
tyrannical laws, and cruel persecutions; but she cannot outlive thoughtlessness.
Dwell deep may be regarded as synonymous with Solomons injunction, With all
thy getting, get understanding. It means that we should get beneath the surface and
find out the true meaning of things. We are to know things not as they may have
been perverted, or as they seem, but as they are who that is wise would estimate the
value of a chronometer by its cases, or of a picture by its frame, or of a book by its
binding? We would sooner expect a man to tell us all about the growth and
development of a tree without reference to sunshine and showers, or the soil in
which the tree was planted and in which it grew, than we should expect him to
understand all about salvation without any reference to sin, or all about God without
any reference to Jesus Christ. Things can only be known thoroughly and
satisfactorily as they are studied in their proper connections. Take the letters of the
most precious word you know, and transpose them, and they cease to convey
thought to your thought. Separate the Old Testament from the New, or the first
Adam, in his federal relationships, from the second Adam, and you will fail to
understand one of the deepest doctrines of the Bible. But unite these as Paul does in
his Epistle to the Romans, and you have the key to understand much of the great
mystery of godliness.

II. Another source of danger to the Church in these days IS SUPERFICIALITY OF

CHARACTER. In the course of our voyage to America, some years ago, the motion of
the ship was on some days very disagreeable to the passengers. She pitched and
lurched and rolled Among the waves so constantly as to render it impossible for us
to rest or be at peace in any position. The sea on the surface being comparatively
calm, some of us wondered why the vessel was so unsteady, and on making inquiry
were informed that it was owing to her light cargo. The ship had no grip of the
water, and the water had no grip of her, and hence her unsteady movement. Men of
superficial character are somewhat like this ship, not very steady. Superficial
Christians remind you of those shopkeepers who make the most of their limited
stock by putting it all or nearly all in the windows. In all substantial buildings there
is much invisible mason work. The foundation of every palatial edifice is not only
deep and solid, but it has been laid with a view to sustain the structure that rests
upon it. It is also well known that there is a fair proportion between the roots of a
tree in the ground and its height and breadth above it. It is even so with respect to
human character. Those who grow up to Christ in all things cannot be strangers
either to the depths from which the Psalmist cried, Out of the depths have I cried
unto Thee, O Lord! or to the secret place of the Most High, when the soul resides
under the shadow of the Almighty.

III. Another source of danger to the Church in modem times is her apparent
ACQUIESCENCE IN PIOUS FRAUDS. The greatest obstacle, says Archbishop Whately,
to the following of truth is the tendency to look in the first instance to the
expedient. Pious frauds, he says, fall naturally into two classes--positive and
negative: the one refers to the introduction and propagation of what is false; the
other refers to the toleration of it. A plant may be in a garden from two causes,
either from being planted designedly or being found there and left there. In either
case some degree of approbation is implied. He who propagates a delusion, and he
who connives at it when already existing--both alike tamper with truth. (J. K.
Campbell, D. D.)

JEREMIAH 50

JER 50:4-5
They shall ask the way to Zion, with their faces thitherward.

Travelling Zionward
To return to ones land of nativity after a long absence is one of the most pleasant
experiences of human life. We are all pilgrims and strangers in this land. We have
wandered from our Fathers home. Let us follow the example of these two tribes,
who were now united and returning to their own land.

I. Consider the first act of this liberated people. THEY ASKED THE WAY TO ZION.
This was wise of them, for many try to go there without knowing the way. They did
not inquire through mere curiosity, but with a determination to put their knowledge
to practical use. There is not a ransomed soul around the throne to-day but who has
asked this question.

II. The second act of Israel and Judah after they received their answer was to
TURN THEIR FACES THITHERWARD. Their faces are Zionward now. They had been
travelling in a wrong direction, and so long as this was the case it would be
impossible for them to reach their destination. Satan is always trying to persuade
Christians to take a slidetrack, or a side-view, and turn their backs on Zion, but so
long as they keep their faces toward the city of God they are invulnerable.

III. After turning their faces toward Zion they moved on. How? WEEPING AND
REJOICING. Weeping now and rejoicing then. Here again the life of the Christian is
typified. The Christian often weeps as he marches on, but will rejoice when he
obtains the crown of life at the close of the day.
 IV. THEY DECIDED TO BIND THEMSELVES IN AN EVERLASTING COVENANT UNTO THE
LORD, having one purpose, one object, one desire in life--a perpetual covenant unto
the Lord. There is no coercion in this covenant, because they said to each other,
Come, and let us join ourselves unto the Lord. The word come is one of the gems
that shine in the Word of God. Not do or die, but come and live. It is like the flower
that blooms in the desert, or the evening that comes after the hot and weary day.

V. Some reasons why we should join ourselves unto the Lord in a perpetual
covenant.
1. Because the sinner separated from the Lord misses the end of his creation.
2. Because of the everlasting relationship into which you enter.
3. Time develops strength, and the longer you put off the harder it becomes to
break the chains that bind you.
4. The pleasures and benefits of a life with Christ infinitely outweigh the brief
pleasures of sin. (M. C. Cameron, B. D.)

Mourners, inquirers, covenanters

The previous part of this chapter declares the overthrow of Israels cruel
oppressor. Babylon is taken, Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken in pieces. The
Assyrian and Babylonian power had been the great tyrant of the ages, and the Lord
had employed it for the chastening of His people, until at last Israel and Judah had
been carried away captive to the banks of the Euphrates, and the land of their
fathers knew them no more. When, therefore, the Lord deals with Babylon in a way
of vengeance it is that He may deliver His own people. See how the two things are
joined together in the eighteenth and nineteenth verses. When Pharaoh is drowned,
Israel is saved; when Sihon and Og are slain, the Lords mercy to His people is seen
to endure for ever. To-day the power of the adversary is broken, and we may flee out
of the Babylon of sin. A greater than Cyrus has opened the two-leaved gates, and
broken the bars of iron in sunder, and proclaimed liberty to the captives. We may
now return to our God and freely enjoy the holy and happy associations which
belong to the city of our God. Every one who is really seeking the Lord desires to be
sure that he is seeking aright; he is not willing to take anything for granted, since his
soul is of too much value to be left at hazard. He inquires, Are my feelings like those
of the truly penitent? Am I believing as those do who are justified by faith? Am I
seeking the Lord in a manner which will be pleasing to Him? They have so long
been as lost sheep, going from mountain to hill, that they have forgotten their
resting-places, therefore in their confusion they are afraid of going wrong again, and
so they inquire with eager anxiety. Perhaps we may show them from this Scripture
how others sought and how others found, and this may be a guide and a comfort to
them; for albeit there are differences of operation, and all do not come to Christ with
equal terrors, or with equal joys, yet there is a likeness in all the pilgrims to the holy
city.

I. To begin at the beginning, the Lords restored ones during the processes of
grace were first of all MOURNERS.
1. Oh, after all your sins I will not believe that you are truly coming to God if
there is not about you a great sorrow for sin and a lamenting after the Lord.
 Some seekers are made to drink of this bitter cup very deeply; their sense of
sin is terrible, even to anguish and agony. I know that there are others who
do not taste this bitterness to the same degree; but it is in their cup, for all
that. The clear shining in their case so soon follows the rain that they
scarcely know that there has been a shower of grief. Surely, in their case the
bitterness is passed; yet is it truly there, only the other ingredient of intense
delight in Gods mercy swallows up all its sharpness. Oh, you cannot imagine
the Jews returning from captivity without bewailing the sins which drove
them into the place of their exile. How could they be restored to God if they
did not lament their former wicked estrangement? While the heart feels no
compunction concerning its wanderings, no mourning over its guilt, no grief
at having grieved the Lord, there can be no acceptance with God. There must
be a shower in the day of mercy: not always a long driving rain causing a
flood, but the soft drops must fall in every case. There must be tenderness
toward God if we expect reconciliation with God.
2. Observe that this mourning in the case of Israel and Judah was so strong that
it mastered other feelings. Between Judah and Israel there was an old feud.
Yet now that they return unto the Lord, we read, The children of Israel shall
come, they and the children of Judah together. Oh, happy union in a
common search for God! One of the first results of holy sorrow for sin is to
cast out of our heart all forms of enmity and strife with our fellow-men.
When we are reconciled to God we are reconciled to men. A penitent sense of
our own provocations of God will prevent our being provoked with men. As
Aarons rod swallowed up all other rods, so a sincere sorrow for sin will
remove all readiness to take offence against our fellow-sinners.
3. Keeping close to the text, we notice again that the exiles on their return were
mourning while marching. Observe the words, going and weeping. A true
heart that is coming to God takes the road by Weeping-Cross: it feels its sin,
its guilt, its undesert, and it therefore mourns. The closet is sought out and
prayer is offered; but in the supplication there is a doves note, a moaning as
of one sorrowing for love.
4. Turning the text round, we read not only of going and weeping. but also of
weeping and going. The holy grief here intended does not lead to sitting still,
for it is added they shall go. That word weeping is sandwiched in between
two goings going and weeping; they shall go and seek the Lord. To sit down
and say, I will sorrow for my sin, but never seek a Saviour, is an impenitent
pretence of repentance, a barren sorrow which brings forth no cleansing of
the life, and no diligent search after the Lord. The way to repent is with your
eye upon the sacrifice, viewing the flowing of the sin-atoning blood, marking
every precious drop, gazing into the Redeemers wounds, and believing in
the love which in death opened up its depths unsearchable. All the while we
must be saying, My God, my God, I groan within myself that such a sacrifice
should have been required by my atrocious transgressions against Thee.
5. We must not pass over that last word, They shall go and seek the Lord their
God. This shall be a guide to you as to whether your present state of feeling
is leading you aright. What is it you are seeking? I am seeking, says one, I
am seeking peace. May you soon obtain it, and may it be real peace; but I
am not sure of you. I am seeking, says another, the pardon of sin. Again, I
pray that you may find it; but I am not sure of you. If another shall reply, I
 am seeking the Lord; for I desire above all things to have Him for a friend,
though to Him I have been an enemy; then I have good hope of him. Here is
a little child, picked up from the gutter, diseased and filthy, unclad, unfed;
and if you ask me to make out a catalogue of what the child wants you must
give me a sheet of foolscap paper to write it all down, and then I fear I shall
leave out many things. I will tell you in one word what that poor infant
requires--it wants its mother. If it gets its mother it has all it needs. So to tell
what a poor sinner wants might be a long task; but when you say that he
wants his Heavenly Father you have said it all. Oh, souls, you are seeking
aright if you are seeking your God. Nothing short of this will suffice.

II. Secondly, these mourners became INQUIRERS. They shall ask the way to Zion
with their faces thitherward. They knew within a little the quarter in which Zion
lay, and they looked that way; but they did not know all about the road: how should
they?
1. The saving point about them was that they were not ashamed to confess their
ignorance. Minds that the Lord has touched are never boastful of their
wisdom. There are many persons in the world who would be converted if
they could but consent to be taught by Gods Word and Spirit; hut they are
such wise people, they know too much to enter the school of grace.
2. It is clear from their asking their way that these inquirers were teachable.
They shall ask the way to Zion: they shall therefore be conscious of
ignorance, and they shall be willing to be taught; these are good
characteristics, such as God accepts.
3. More than this, they will be anxious although they are right. They shall ask
the way to Zion, with their faces thitherward. They are travelling in the right
direction, and yet they ask the way. He that has never raised a question
about his condition before God had better raise it at once. The fullest
assurance of faith we can ever attain will never excuse us from the duty of
self-examination.
4. At the same time, note concerning those that are coming to the Lord and His
people, that they are questioning, but they are still resolved. They ask how
they can be right with God, not as a matter of curiosity, but because they
mean to be at peace with Him: by Gods grace nothing shall turn them aside
from their God and His temple, and hence their anxiety to be surely right.
True penitents will have Christ or die.
5. Though they ask the way, we may remark further that they know whither they
are going. They ask their way, not to somewhere or other, but to Zion; not to
some imaginary blissful shore that may be or may not be, but they seek Gods
own dwelling-place, Gods own palace, Gods own sacrifice. They ask boldly
too, for they are not ashamed to be found inquiring; and when they are
informed, their faces are already that way, and therefore they have nothing
to do but to Go straight on. May God grant us myriads of such inquirers!

III. These inquirers become COVENANTERS, for they said one to another, Come,
and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be
forgotten. Oh, that word covenant! I can never pronounce it without joy in my
heart. It is to me a mine of comfort, a mint of delight, a mass of joy. The doctrine of
the covenant is a kind of Shibboleth by which we may know the man of God from
the false prophet. Let the people of God take no delight in the man who does not
delight in the covenant of grace.
1. These inquirers become covenanters, for we read that they seek to be joined
unto the Lord. Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord. Is not this the
one thing you long for, that you may be so at peace with God through Jesus
Christ that you may be joined with Him? You are a right-hearted seeker, in
fact, you have found the Lord already, or else you would not find it in your
heart to use such an expression as seeking to be joined unto the Lord.
2. Next, notice for how long a time this covenant is to be made. Let us join
ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant. In our English army of late
they have enlisted short time men. A good brother came to join the Church
last week who is in the Reserve, and I said to him, You are not coming to
unite with us for two sixes, the first six with the colours, and the other six as
a reserve man,--you have come, I hope, to fight under the colours as long as
life lasts. Ay, sir, he said, I give myself up to the Lord for ever. No
salvation is possible except that which saves the soul for ever. A real man of
God has his religion interwoven into the warp and woof of his being; he
could not be other than he is whatever his circumstances might be. The
covenant of life requires a life-long covenant. We do not take grace upon a
terminable lease; it is an entailed inheritance, an immortal, eternal
possession.
3. Note, further, that this joining to God these covenanters intended to carry out
in a most solemn way. Let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual--
agreement? or promise? No. Covenant is the word. It is a profitable thing
for the soul to covenant with God. In the ordinance of baptism we have the
best visible setting forth of that covenant. Circumcision set forth the taking
away of the filth of the flesh; but baptism sets forth the death and burial of
the flesh itself; we see in it the emblem of our death and burial with our
Lord. The believer thereby says, Now I am come to an end of my old life, for
I am dead and buried, and he becomes henceforth as one who has risen with
Christ, to walk in newness of life.
4. Those who came mourning and inquiring, when they became covenanters, felt
that they had a nature very apt to forgetfulness of good things, and so a part
of what they desired in their covenanting with God was a perpetual
covenant that shall not be forgotten. God will never forget, yet may you
pray, Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom. The fear is
lest you should forget. What is your view of that possibility? Would it not be
terrible? (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Marks of genuine repentance

I. It is said, THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL SHALL COME, THEY AND THE CHILDREN ON
JUDAH TOGETHER. In other words, these two people, who, though members of the
same family, had so long lived in a state of the most deadly hatred and hostility,
when touched by a feeling of genuine contrition, shall come together; shall
amalgamate; shall forget their former subjects of contention, and approach in one
body the throne of love and compassion And such is the constant effect of genuine
religion. Vice, by increasing our selfishness, by sharpening the natural irritability of
the temper, by filling us with a feverish anxiety about the objects of time and sense,
separateth even chief friends. In like manner, a merely speculative and ceremonial
religion rarely fails to disunite its followers. But on the contrary, serious, heartfelt,
spiritual scriptural religion binds and consolidates. Never, till the temper of real
contrition, with all its train of accompanying graces, enthrone itself in the mind;
never, till real Christianity take the place of that which is nominal; never, till we love
God better than we love ourselves; never, till we choose rather to sacrifice our
interest and indulgences, than to disturb the peace of the Church, and rend the
seamless garment of our Redeemer.

II. It is here said of the people of Israel and Judah, that THEY SHALL COME
WEEPING. As the tenderest parent sees with joy the tear of penitence steal over the
cheek of his guilty child; as no pang is deeper than that inflicted by the discovery
that a state of separation from himself costs the child of his bosom neither fear nor
anguish; thus our Father, which is in heaven, expects in us, the prodigal children of
His family, sorrow and anguish of soul, till our reconciliation with Himself is
accomplished. But how is it possible to reconcile with language such as this, the
conception, so prevalent in the world, that the proper object of life is amusement,
and our reasonable and legitimate temper of mind thoughtlessness and a spirit of
almost ceaseless dissipation? It is indeed true, that the temper of mind becoming
the man who is reconciled to God is peace, and cheerfulness, and joy:--Rejoice in
the Lord; and again I say, rejoice. But peace of mind before reconciliation--peace,
when the Lord has a controversy with us--peace, this is not the peace sanctioned
by Scripture, but a state of repose leading to almost inevitable destruction. The true
penitent is there described as going and weeping. It is not, indeed, my intention to
affirm that tears are the necessary, or the only sufficient, expression of grief for sin.
Many a sad heart would delight to weep, but cannot.

III. These returning penitents are described as SEEKING THE LORD THEIR GOD.
Here is one of the grand distinctions between true and false repentance. That sorrow
of the world which worketh death, ordinarily evaporates in a few unmeaning
words or tears. The real penitent, on the contrary, is not merely startled by his
danger; he detests his offence. His soul longs for emancipation from its corruptions,
and for a full and free entrance into the presence of the Lord.

IV. It is said of the returning penitents in the text, THEY SHALL ASK THE WAY TO
ZION. It is something in religion to have discovered that we are out of the way. The
next mark of genuine repentance is a lively, persevering anxiety to be put into the
way. But this anxiety will not discover itself in blind and random efforts to search
out the path by our unassisted powers; but in humbly and earnestly availing
ourselves of every appointed channel by which safe and sure intelligence on this all-
important subject may be conveyed to the soul. The penitents in the text ask their
way. Distrusting a heart which has often misled them, they go for instruction to the
servants of the Lord, and especially to Him who loves to go before his sheep, and
lead them to the pastures of their proper happiness. And, observe, the place which
they are said to seek is Zion,--he city of their solemnities; the holy city; the city in
which dwelleth the Great King; where His temple arises; where, having laid aside
the thunders of His just indignation, He sits between the cherubim, to dispense
mercy and love to His guilty creatures. The real penitent never stops till he reaches
the city of God. And however bright the sunshine, and clear the fountains, and
extensive the prospects, which cheer him on the journey; and however wise and
strong and compassionate the Guide who goes with him, and delights to succour, to
defend, and to bless him, he neither puts off his armour nor rests from his labour till
he sits down in eternal tranquillity in the paradise of God.

V. It is said of these penitents in the text, they ask their way to Zion WITH THEIR
FACES THITHERWARD. In other words, they are really bent on discovering the city
which they profess to seek. Their eye is upon its towers; and their hearts are
honestly impelling them in the right line of direction. Their inquiry has no alliance
with the empty curiosity of the man who has no intention of adopting the advice
which he solicits, and follows one path when his guide directs him to another. But,
hearing a voice behind them, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, they implicitly
follow the leadings of providence and the suggestions of the Spirit.

VI. The individuals in the text are described as saying, COME, AND LET US JOIN
OURSELVES TO THE LORD IN A PERPETUAL COVENANT THAT SHALL NOT BE FORGOTTEN.
Such is uniformly the desire of the true penitent. Are we not the sworn enemies of
sin, the world, and the devil? And how have we fulfilled our engagements to God?
Will any single man venture to lay his hand on his heart and say, I have fulfilled
them as I ought? And, if not, what is our duty to-day? Is it not to say, as in the text,
Come, and let us join ourselves, &c.? (J. W. Cunningham, M. A.)

Young Christians congratulated, encouraged, and exhorted to

trust in God

I. JEHOVAH, AS A RECONCILED GOD IN CHRIST JESUS, IS THE OBJECT OF THEIR

INQUIRY. God and the light of His reconciled countenance, in opposition to the
delights of sense, the gains of merchandise, the discoveries of science, and the
felicities of friendship. It is the Divine favour they seek supremely, though not
exclusively; for no one enjoys, with a keener relish, the productions of nature and
the bounties of providence, than a true believer.

II. It is usual with inquirers to associate with those who are like-minded with
themselves.

III. THIS INQUIRY AFTER GOD AND HAPPINESS IS FREQUENTLY ACCOMPANIED WITH
TEARS. They shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and
weeping. They weep over the times of their former ignorance. To how little
purpose have we hitherto lived, will they say; our lives have been little better than
a complete blank. And now that we have at length awaked to some sense of our
danger, and desire for spiritual blessings, how little do we know of God and of
ourselves, of sin and the method of salvation! They weep over their numerous and
aggravated transgressions. And they will weep frequently at such a time because of
strong temptations, from the great enemy of souls. What a mercy is it when we are
disposed to weep for sin! Many weep for pain of body, or because of the
disappointments they have met with in business, but never grieve on account of
their offences before God. They lament the difficulties of the times, but heave not a
sigh over the hardness of their hearts

IV. Mount Zion is the place to which they will repair for instruction and comfort.

V. Devout and sincere inquirers will gladly avail themselves of the direction and
counsel of christian ministers, and of other pilgrims, who have made some advances
in the way to the celestial city.

VI. Young converts, having found god, to their unspeakable satisfaction, will do
well to join themselves to the lord, in a perpetual covenant that shall not be
forgotten They must do this, by pleading and laying hold for themselves on the
blessings of the covenant of grace;--by publicly professing faith in the Redeemers
name; for having first given themselves to the Lord, they should give themselves up
to the Church, according to the will of God. (Essex Remembrancer.)

God proper object of human pursuit

I. God should be our SUPREME object of pursuit. Gods will is in everything; we

should find it out, and act accordingly.

II. The supreme pursuit of God requires EARNEST ENDEAVOUR. What of that? We
should see to it that in everything we do and attend to, thought should apprehend,
feeling embrace, will regard, and aim terminate in, God.

III. This seeking of God should be CONTINUOUS. For what reason? The mind is
susceptible of indefinite enlargement in acquaintance with God. Religion admits of
eternal progress.

IV. The constant, earnest, seeking of God is, in this world, ever more DIFFICULT,
and sometimes GRIEVOUS. Why? Because of past neglect and failure; and because of
existing contrary influences, agencies, attractions, and allurements.

V. The SINCERE, INTELLIGENT pursuit of God will issue in a SATISFYING conviction

of the RIGHTNESS AND BLESSEDNESS of subordinating everything to entire,
unswerving, ever advancing allegiance to God in creation, providence, and
redemption.

VI. True seekers of God, HELP AND URGE one another to ABIDE with God in truth,
and love, and deed. (W. J. Stuart.)

The Israelites returning from Babylon

I. The state of the Jews in Babylon.

1. The captive Israelites were obviously in a degraded state. And what is the state
of man, but a state of degradation? He boasts of the dignity of his nature, but
an angel might weep over its baseness. He has brought himself almost to a
 level with the brutes that perish.
2. The condition of the Jews in their captivity was as wretched as it was
degrading. We too arc a suffering people. Once indeed the world was a
paradise, but sin has entered it, withered its beauty, and robbed it of its
happiness.
3. Our state, like that of the captive Jews, is also a guilty state. It was sin which
caused them to be delivered into the hands of their enemies; and it is sin
which has made us base and wretched. Our first father transgressed and
died; but the vengeance which followed his transgression, deterred not his
children from treading in his steps. To say nothing of the follies of our
childhood and the sins of our youth, how many iniquities have we willingly
and daringly committed since we attained the age of manhood!
4. The enslaved Jews were in a helpless state, or in one that appeared helpless.
And what power have we to rescue ourselves from that state of guilt and
wretchedness into which we are fallen? The law we have violated, denounces
misery on our heads, a misery as great and lasting as our guilt; and who can
resist its authority or repeal its curse?

II. The deliverance of the Israelites.

1. It was effected for them by the power of another. Cyrus was a type of Christ,
the great spiritual Deliverer; and if we are ever brought out of our spiritual
bondage, we must be content to owe our liberty to Him alone. He beheld
them in thraldom to sin and Satan, and trembling under the power and fear
of death; He came and overthrew their enemies, and burst their bonds. He
made an end of sin; He destroyed death; He bruised Satan underneath their
feet. Their degradation too was not overlooked by Him. They were in exile,
and they were wretched there; but He raised them up from their low estate,
and recovered for them the blessedness they had lost. He is now employed in
restoring them to their forfeited inheritance.
2. The deliverance of the Israelites was also openly proclaimed and freely
offered. To this proclamation St. Paul alludes in Rom 10:1-21., and speaks of
it as a representation of the preaching of the Gospel to the enslaved nations
of the earth.

III. The feelings with which this journey was commenced.

1. As we behold the Israelites leaving in a body the land of the Chaldaeans, the
first circumstance which arrests our attention is their penitence. But why do
they weep? The mercy they have received has softened their hearts. It has
shown them the tenderness of their heavenly Father. This godly sorrow is, in
every instance, one of the first fruits of genuine religion. By nature our hearts
are hard, so hard that the most awful judgments can make no abiding
impression on them; but when we are roused out of our spiritual unconcern
by the Spirit of God, and begin to look with the eye of faith on the great
Saviour of sinners, a train of new and deep emotions is excited within us.
2. Notice also in these liberated Jews, their, anxiety lest they should mistake the
way that is to lead them to Jerusalem. They shall ask the way to Zion. And
is not this anxiety, this spirit of inquiry, found in all who have fixed their
heart on heaven? There was a time when they were destitute of all care on
 this subject. They thought themselves sufficiently acquainted with the way to
God. They deemed it broad and plain, and looked on him as an enthusiast
who bid them ask what they must do to be saved. But now all this self-
confidence and imaginary security are come to an end. They know too that
mistakes in this matter are not trifling errors; that there is but one way in
which they can obtain the salvation they need, and that to seek it in any other
way is to be for ever undone.
3. We may notice also the decision of these returning captives, the earnestness
and resolution with which they seek the Lord. And no man ever arrived at
the heavenly Zion without possessing such a mind as this. (C. Bradley, M.
A.)

Gods deliverance of us from spiritual bondage

I. God, before He sees fit to loose the spiritual bonds of those whom He intends to
deliver, is first pleased to bring them to feel their chains, and to mourn over their
distance from Zion.

II. UNDER THIS PAINFUL CONCERN OF MIND, THEY SHALL ANXIOUSLY INQUIRE AFTER
THE MEANS OF RECOVERY. They shall go and seek the Lord their God. The poor
captives are here represented--weeping. Though depressed with their perfect
thraldom, though weeping, they go; they sit not down in despondency. They set their
faces towards Zion; and let them but find the Lord their God, let them but perceive
His gracious intentions towards them, and they can wait His time and way of a full
and final deliverance, and commit everything else to Him.

III. ANIMATED BY THIS HOPE, THEY SHALL VIGOROUSLY PRESS TOWARDS ZION; they
shall ask the way with their faces thitherward. In the ordinary affairs of life, when
men have a particular object in view in which they are deeply interested, and that
hope or object is merely probable, they exert every nerve; they toil by day and wake
by night; they encounter dangers with resolution, and suffer hardships without
complaint. And is it possible to believe that temporal considerations, which can fall
under no certain calculation as to She certainty of acquiring them, should engage
our affections, and employ all our active powers; and that considerations of
infinitely greater moment confessedly, and certain as to their attainment and
duration, should have less influence, or no influence at all, upon us? It is impossible;
the idea is absurd. What mighty effects, then, it may be asked, will the Christians
hope produce? They are, no doubt, various in degrees, and correspond to that hope
as it is more or less vigorous; but they are the same in kind; and they may in general
fall under one view,--a change of the objects of his affections and pursuits. The
bonds in which he was held formerly by his passions and sensual appetites, restrain
him no longer; he is no longer under their tyranny and blind impulse. He feels
himself overawed by a superior authority; and he perceives objects presented to him
which he had formerly viewed with indifference, or had been wholly unnoticed by
him, which by a new energy seize his soul,--captivate his affections, and fix his
choice. Again, animated by this hope of salvation, the soul rises superior to the
world; and feels a Divine elevation that cannot stoop to it, when courted by its most
flattering forms, as its ultimate object. This hope of salvation inspires the soul with a
Divine zeal, a holy impatience after further attainments. The higher this hope rises,
the more it enlarges the heart.

IV. IN ORDER TO CONFIRM AND STRENGTHEN THEIR RESOLUTIONS, THEY WILL BIND
THEMSELVES BY A SOLEMN DEED AND COVENANT. Come, let us join ourselves to the
Lord in a perpetual covenant, that shall not be forgotten. A personal covenant with
God is inseparable from genuine closet-devotion Every prayer, every pious purpose,
every devout meditation, is virtually a covenant with the Lord. And there may be
certain occasions wherein devout souls may see cause to be more explicit to express
at large their sense of Divine things, their present feelings, their past experiences,
and to commit to writing their solemn purposes and engagements, and, to impress
the whole the stronger upon their minds,--to append their names. But this I only
mention, the words leading me to speak, not of a personal or closet transaction, but
of a public bond of union, the common act of a religions society. Single resolutions
slip easily out of the mind, and lose their hold of us; but in a public transaction,
where the great God is supposed to stand on the one part, and His poor dependent
creatures on the other, there is something so awful and solemn, as must leave upon
a mind, not wholly hardened and insensible, some suitable impressions; especially
where the transaction is accompanied and confirmed by sensible and expressive
symbols. (Thomas Gordon.)

A test for true seekers

By nature all are captives under the power of Satan, sin, and death. Now, just as
Israel found comfort and hope, and had an expectation of getting back to the
promised land, when the might of Babylon was broken, so there is comfort for every
sinner who desires to escape from the power of sin and Satan, in this great fact, that
Christ has broken the power of the old dragon. He has snapped in sunder the iron
yokes that His redeemed might go free. Thus Babylons destruction is Israels
salvation. Notice, next, these words in verse 4: In those days, and in that time, saith
the Lord, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah
together,--from which I gather that, when mens hearts are set upon seeking the
Lord, it is wonderful how neigh-hourly they become. Attend to this hint, then, you
who are seeking the Saviour. You are encouraged by the fact that the power of Satan
is broken, take care that you make up all quarrels, and put an end to all envyings
and disputes, for thus you will be helped in seeking the Lord. Notice, next, that the
right way for a sinner to return is, first to seek the Lord, and then to seek Zion,--that
is, the Church, or heaven, whichever you understand Zion to be. They shall go, and
seek the Lord their God; and then follows our text, They shall ask the way to Zion.
Another remark arising out of the context is this, that many who seek the Lord seek
Him weeping: The children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah
together, going and weeping. Notice that combination, going and weeping. Some
are weeping, but never going; and some are going, but never weeping; it is a blessed
thing when we have the two together,--practically drawing near to God, and
passively feeling deep sorrow for sin. There are two kinds of tears, and I think that
they who truly seek the Lord shed both of them; the one is a tear of sorrow because
of sin, the other is a tear of joy because of pardon.

I. There are SOME PERSONS WHO NEITHER ASK THE WAY TO ZION NOR SET THEIR
FACES THITHERWARD. Their relationship to Christ is that of utter indifference. They
regard eternal things as though they were mere trifles, and they look upon temporal
things as though, these, were all-important. They call this minding the main
chance, and looking after the principal thing; but as to their souls and God, and
heaven, and eternity, they are utterly indifferent. Let ms think of what it is to which
they are indifferent. They are utterly indifferent to God. You know how many there
are who live as if there were no God at all. This is a terrible thing, because God will
require all this at their hands. It is no slight thing to be utterly indifferent to Christ,
to Him who loved mankind so much that He could not abide in heaven, and let them
perish, but must needs come here and be a lowly, suffering, despised, crucified man,
that He might redeem men Yet, after all that He has done, which must have
astonished the angels in heaven, and which ravishes the heart of every gracious man
on earth, these people do not care. They are utterly indifferent also with regard to
themselves. They expect to have troubles in this life; but as to that which comforts
many of us under these troubles, they do not wish to know about it. They see many
of Gods people calm and quiet under pain and bereavement and sorrow, and they
are sometimes curious to know what the secret is; yet their curiosity is not strong
enough to stir them out of indifference. Often, when a man is indifferent about
Divine things, it is because he vainly imagines that he is wise. I do not think that you
and I ought to meddle with everything; there are some things we may as well let
drift, but this will never do about God and eternity. I may be indifferent to God, but
He is not indifferent to me. I may forget Him, but He has not forgotten what I do,
and think, and say. Another thought that ought to come home to many is that this
indifference is so foolish. When a man is indifferent to his own happiness, then he is
a fool. If a man were miserably poor, although he might be rich, but he was
indifferent about it, yea would think him insane. Now, there is no joy like the joy of
salvation in Christ; there is no bliss under heaven that can parallel the bliss of the
man who has committed himself into Christs hands, and is resting calmly in Him;
yet these indifferent people do not care about it.

II. There is another set of people WHO ASK THE WAY TO ZION WITH THEIR FACES
TURNED AWAY FROM IT. It is a very strange thine that any should say, Tell us the way
to heaven, and yet, when we have told them, that they should set off walking the
other way. Go due east, you say; but they go due west directly. Now what can be
the reason for that? A man is secretly a drunkard, or he is unchaste, or a woman is
living in secret sin, yet always found listening to the Gospel. Why is this? Do you
wish to increase your own condemnation? Do you? I cannot think that it is so. I hope
that you do not come in order that you may hear of things to quarrel with and
quibble over. I remember one, who was afterwards an eminent saint, who first went
to hear Mr. Whitefield, because he was a great mimic, that he might take him off,
and he afterwards went to the club which they called the Hell Fire Club to spend
the evening. Now, my mates, said he, I am going to give you a sermon that I heard
Mr. Whitefield preach yesterday; and the man repeated the sermon, but he himself
was converted while he preached it, and so were several of his mates who had met
for blasphemy. So, come, even if you do come for such an evil purpose as that. Still,
it is a sorrowful business that there should be men who ask the way to Zion, and
turn their faces in the opposite direction.

III. There is a third class of people WHO ASK THE WAY TO ZION, BUT TURN NOT
THEIR FACES. What is the meaning of their conduct? Is it an idle curiosity? Do they
want to understand theology as others wish to understand astronomy or botany?
That is almost like drinking wine out of the sacred vessels, as Belshazzar did; and
you know how that night he was slain. Why do such people ask about salvation? Do
they dream that mere knowledge will save them? You may get a clear head, but if
you have not a clean heart, it will not avail you at the last. Peradventure, however,
some of those who are seeking their way to Zion, but have not set their faces that
way, are asking with a view to quiet their consciences. It makes them feel better to
hear a sermon. Oh, you are strange people! There is a man who is very hungry; does
it make him feel that his appetite is appeased when he smells the dinner, when he
sees the plates arranged upon the table, and hears the clatter of the knives? Is it that
you are trying to store up some little knowledge to use by and by? Are you asking the
way to Zion that you may run in it when it becomes convenient to you? Ah, sir! are
you making a convenience of God? Do you intend to make Him stand by while you
attend to more important things?

IV. There is a fourth set of people who HAVE THEIR FACES THITHERWARD, BUT THEY
DO NOT ASK THE WAY. Do they fancy that there are many ways? How many roads are
there to heaven? This Book declares that there is only one. Do you ask, Where are
we to enquire? Well, first of all, inquire of the Book. When you have inquired of the
Book, then go on your knees, and inquire of the blessed Spirit who inspired the
Book. If you cannot understand the Bible, ask the Author of it to explain it to you.
He giveth wisdom, therefore ask the Holy Spirit for guidance. Ask the Lord Jesus
Christ to manifest Himself unto you as He does not unto the world, and to lead you
in His way. I may also say, but quite secondarily, inquire of His servants. And I may
also add that you will do well to ask about the way from many of Gods people.
Although they do not preach, they will be glad to tell you what they do know, and
many godly men and women can explain to you just what you want to know.

V. Those are the best inquirers WHO TURN THEIR PACES TOWARD ZION, AND YET ARE
WILLING TO ASK THE WAY. Is that your condition, dear friend? Well, then, let me say
two or three things for your encouragement, and the first is, Thank God that your
face is thitherward, and that you are asking the way. Set a high value on this little
grace, for it is no small thing, after all; and, as you think of it, bless God for it.
Remember, next, that you must act as far as you know how to act. If the Lord has
shown you the right pathway, go in that pathway. Perhaps you say, There are many
difficulties there. Never mind the difficulties; cross each bridge as you come to it.
Oh, but there are some things that I do not understand! No doubt there are; and
there are many things that I do not understand; and there are some things that I do
not particularly want to comprehend. If I understand what really concerns my
eternal welfare, and the good of my fellow-men, and the glory of God, it is enough
for me. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The way to Zion

Like these Israelites--we have been going from mountain to hill, that is, from
one form of idol-worship to another, till we have forgotten our resting-place. There
is but one resting-place for the creature, and that is the love of God revealed in Jesus
Christ, apprehended by the soul, fled to, clung to, trusted to. But we thought we
could find another rest, some enjoyment, some indulgence, some pursuit, some
ambition, some affection, some passion, something which would be all our own,
something that would fill the empty chamber, mind, heart, soul, and make us
independent of all and everyone except itself. From mountain to hill we ran or we
wandered; the last new idol reigned for its hour; then another showed itself in the
horizon, and we thought that surely will be the real rest, the true home of this
footsore, this wind-lashed and storm-tossed being. They have gone from mountain
to hill, they have forgotten their resting-place. Well, then, inquiry must be the dawn
of hope. We must ask the way.

I. THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL IN THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY. The very face
of the inquirer shines. That kindling of the eye as a man listens--the man who has a
thirst for knowledge--the man whose soul is set on finding its way into some new
region of science, or into some new joy, is a touching sight to the looked-on, and it is
an inspiring influence to the teacher who feels that he has a message. It is very
delightful, indeed, to feel that inquiry is abroad. But of all inquiries the way to Zion
is first and foremost. It lies at the root, I believe, of all this questioning. Whatever
form inquiry takes this is its meaning. Even intellectual inquiry is often either the
escape from, or is a substitute for, this. Some men say, and some men encourage the
saying, Religion is all doubtful, let me enjoy myself in the study of the certain;
revelation may be insoluble, let me interrogate nature, whose very mysteries are
substantial. The way to Zion, such men say, has no signposts and no landmarks; I
cannot guess in such matters, of doubt I am impatient; God in nature shall be my
God; if there be a hereafter we will study it when we can know. And then others
have no idea of any method of knowing save what they call intellectual. It is not that
they profess indifference to revelation; on the contrary, they would rather call
themselves inquirers into its documents and into its pretensions; they treat it just as
they treat a science or a philosophy--dissect, discuss, dispute over it, and lecture
upon it with all the freedom and with far more than all the positiveness which they
would think becoming if the matter in hand were either geology or botany, either the
telescope or the microscope. If anyone were to say, Are you aware that religion is
the knowledge of a person, and that you may just as well expect to become
acquainted with your friend by arithmetic or algebra, as hope to learn the way to
Zion by processes of pure intellect, they would turn round and accuse you of
wanting to throw in an element of romance or feeling, and so to disturb every
calculation and invalidate every result. And yet, can any word be truer than this, that
they who would inquire into the truth of revelation must inquire with the whole
man? Intellect is one part of the man--by all means bring intellect with you--but
there are other parts as distinctive, as characteristic, and far more vital. If God has
spoken, be quite sure He has spoken to all parts of us, and to the sum of all--the
willing, acting, feeling, Judging, reflecting, resolving, loving, and living man. Many
answers might be given, all true, and all hopeful, to this question as to the way to
Zion. We will suggest one. The latest chapters of the Bible tell us one or two things
like this--that the glory of God enlightens that world, that the Lamb (our Lord
Jesus Christ) is the Light thereof; again, that the Lord God Almighty and the
Lamb are the temple of it; and, once again, that the throne of God and of the Lamb
shall be in it, that His servants shall serve Him, that they shall see His face, that
they shall, as it were, have His name in their foreheads. The desire of every soul
surely must be to endeavour to anticipate that kind of life, to live now in the life of
God, to see Him now by faith, to follow Him now whithersoever, by His prophets, by
His Word, by His Spirit, by the example of Christ, He leads. This surely must be
something of the way to Zion.

II. THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY MUST BE ALSO A SPIRIT OF RESOLUTION AND

DETERMINATION. For there is an inquiry about the way which is all speculation. We
can fancy some of those captives in Babylon busying themselves with conjecture as
to the shortest and best way home. They sit there with a map on their knees, and
discuss the Lebanon route, and the desert route, with great eagerness, with much
ingenuity, with many arguments both ways, yet without an idea but that they
themselves will have to end, their days as they began them, in exile. There is an
asking of the way to God s Zion which is of this character. This is the case of all who
can discourse about the scheme of salvation, argue for it, quarrel for it, condemn
and execute for it, yet forbear altogether the weeping, which this passage tells us
of, for their own sins; the going, which this passage tells us of, in the path of duty;
the seeking, which this passage tells us of, as always preliminary to the finding.
Their faces are not thitherward, whatever be the talk or the profession. Let each
inquiry be a determination. If we hear in a sermon, if we read in the Bible, that
without holiness no man can see the Lord, then let us instantly say to ourselves,
What is that sin which is hindering holiness in me at this moment? and let the day
not end without a struggle against it, without some special indulgence foregone in
the might of prayer, some trial made of Gods promise, that whensoever we call
upon Him an enemy shall be put to flight. If we hear that watching and praying can
alone guard us against temptation, then let us instantly wake up the drowsy powers
of earnestness and devotion, keep our loins girt, and our lamp burning, lest,
perhaps, after much serving, we be found without the one thing needful; lest Satan,
watching his moment, get an advantage; lest Christ, coming suddenly, find us
sleeping. (Dean Vaughan.)

Seeking after finding

The singularity of the passage lies in the face of the inquirer being towards Zion,
whilst he is yet forced to ask what road he ought to take. They shall ask, &c. They
are in the right road, or at least are advancing in the right direction; but,
nevertheless, whether through ignorance, or through fear of even the possibility of
mistake, they continually make inquiries as to the path to be followed. We think that
this circumstances indicates such honesty of purpose in the inquirer, such vigilance,
such circumspection, such anxiety to be right, and such dread of being wrong, as
should distinguish every Christian, though too often we look for them in vain. And,
at the same time, we evidently learn that persons are not always fair judges of their
spiritual condition; they may be asking the way like those who are in ignorance and
darkness, and all the while their faces may be towards Zion. Let us consider first the
case of those who, though going right, suppose themselves going wrong; and
secondly, that of those who believe themselves right, but yet desire further
assurance; for of both classes it may equally be said, They ask the way, &c. Now it
is the object of such parables as that of the tares and the wheat, or that of the net
which gathered of all kinds, to teach us that there is to be a mixture in the visible
Church, and that it is not mens business to attempt a separation. We are all too
much disposed to exercise a spirit of judgment, to pronounce opinions on the
condition of our fellow-men, whether the living or the dead, just as though we had
access to Gods Book, and could infallibly read its registered decisions. But there is
everything in the Bible to warn us against this spirit of judgment, and to urge us, on
the contrary, to a spirit of charity. A very comforting remembrance it is, that we are
not to stand or fall by human decision, that our portion for eternity is not to be
settled by what men think of us here. But not only are men likely to deliver a false
judgment upon others, and therefore bound to confine their chief scrutiny to
themselves, it is further very possible that they may form a wrong opinion of their
own spiritual state, not only, as you all know, in concluding themselves safe whilst in
danger, but, as is perhaps less suspected, in concluding themselves in danger whilst
safe. They are downcast because faith seems weak, or elated because it seems
strong; whereas it is not faith which is to save them, but Christ; and whilst faith,
whether in itself or its evidences, may change from day to day, Christ changes not,
but is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. And we always think it safe to tell
those who are spiritually depressed, that their very depression is no mean argument
of their safety; for so unnatural is it to man to feel anxious for his soul, that,
wheresoever there is the anxiety, we recognise a higher agency, even a Divine, as
having wrought to excite the solicitude. And over and above these cases of
depression, in which one cause or another weaves darkness round a man, so that,
whilst his face is towards Zion, he cannot perceive that he is on the road to the
heavenly city, we nothing doubt that there are many instances of parties who have
begun in true religion, and nevertheless think that the first step has not been taken.
It is not always, nay, it is not, we believe, often, that conversion is suddenly effected,
nor through some special instrumentality which fixes, as it were, the date of the
change. In the majority of cases, the change, we are inclined to believe, is gradual,
imperceptibly effected, so that, although the man becomes at length conscious of a
great moral alteration, he cannot tell you when it commenced, nor by what steps it
went on. Regarding conversion as a gradual work, a work in which one soweth and
another reapeth, we do not look on those who are evidently confirmed believers, as
the only travellers towards the celestial city: we rejoice in thinking that there are
numbers in whom the moral change is not yet distinctly marked, but who are
nevertheless in the act of passing the strait gate. But let us pass on to the case of
men, in regard of whom there can be no doubt that they have made a beginning, and
let us see what our text may indicate as to these more advanced characters. Let it
first be observed, that a Christian should never be too confident; that he should
never take for granted, as a point on which there could not be doubt, that he is
indeed a new creature, and on the high road to the kingdom. Do you find an
increasing delight in secret prayer? does sin seem to you more and more odious? are
you more and more penetrated by the exceeding great love of God in giving His Son
to die for your sakes? is holiness becoming your happiness, duty your privilege, and
heaven the very home of your affections? These, and the like questions are those
which you should be frequently proposing to yourselves. On the answer to these, an
answer given as in the sight of a heart-searching God, should rest your answer to the
most momentous of all questions, Are we on the way to Zion? And if the answer to
this last question can only be come at through the answer to a series of inquiries,
each of which may be said to need, from its very nature, the being dally proposed, it
necessarily follows that you ought to be imitating the children of Judah and Israel,
asking as to the road to Zion, however you may hope that your faces are already
thitherward. Can this be the way to Zion in which I am? Ask the dead, who have
reached that heavenly city: with one voice they will tell you, that, if it be the right
way, it is a way of self-denial, leading you through mortified lusts, and over
subjugated affections; and then judge ye whether or not it be such a way in which
you are found. Ask the living, of whom you have best cause to believe that they are
heirs of the kingdom: they will assure you that the way is one of faith and obedience,
every step of which is an advance in the knowledge of your own depraved hearts,
and in the sense of the worth and sufficiency of Christ; and then judge ye whether or
not this can be the way in which you are walking. Ask the Bible, on whose pages the
Holy Spirit hath mapped out the path, and it will tell you that the way is a narrow
way, which will not admit of your encumbering yourselves with perishable things,
but which can be traversed only by those who lay aside every weight; all then judge
ye whether ye have obtained the description of a path which ye yourselves are
pursuing. And ask ye, yet further, of God. By diligent and fervent prayer make
inquiry of God as to the road which conducts to the place where He dwells. And the
answer to this inquiry, an answer, which, if there be sincerity in the inquirer, shall
certainly not be withheld, will expose to you the deceitfulness of all hope of reaching
Zion which is not founded on the appropriation of the merits of the Redeemer, the
reality of that appropriation being proved by the produced fruits of righteousness;
and then determine whether such answer ought to leave you assured that you are
not self-deceived, when concluding yourselves in the heavenward path. We do not
wish you to be always uncertain as to whether or not your faces are turned towards
Zion; hut we wish you to understand that their being so turned is a reason in favour
of, not a reason against, your frequently inquiring the heavenly path. It is not
sufficient that they be turned; the great matter is, that they be kept turned; and
whilst such is your nature, that, without constant vigilance, the direction may be
gradually changed, and yet appear to you the same--even as the eyes of a well-drawn
portrait follow you as you move, and so might persuade you that you had not moved
at all--it is evidently bound on you, by your regard for your safety, that you be always
ascertaining the landmarks, in place of judging by your apparent position. Is my life
the life of a believer in Christ? is faith producing piety, humility, charity, patience?
What is this mountain before me? is it on the map? what is this valley which I have
to cross, this stream which I have to ford? are they what I was to meet with, or do
they show that I have wandered? And here the road divides--which turn am I to
take? what is to decide me in this perplexity? Let me be firm on one point--that it is
the direction of the road, not its quality, by which I will be determined. The road
which leads to heaven, that is my road, be it, or be it not, strewed with the rocks, and
swept by the torrents. Other paths may look more inviting: but I have nothing to do
except with their termination: if they conduct not to Zion, I would not venture to
follow them even a solitary step, though they might lead me to riches, or honours, or
pleasures. This it is to imitate the emancipated Jews. But there is yet more to be
gathered from this description, when considered as that of a believer in Christ. We
will now suppose him certified as to the direction in which he is proceeding, certified
that his face is towards Zion, and nevertheless busying himself with inquiries as to
the way. And what would this mark? Christianity is that in which no man can be too
advanced to study the alphabet. The simple and fundamental doctrines of our holy
religion,--the doctrines of human corruption, of the renewing power of Gods Spirit,
of the incarnation of the Eternal Word, and of the atonement effected by a
Mediator,--these, which may be said to show the way to Zion, present continually
new material for the contemplation and instruction of the Christian. There is a sense
in which- there is no getting beyond the very alphabet of Christianity; that alphabet
will always be beyond us; any one of its letters being as a mighty hieroglyphic which
the prayerful student may partially decipher, but the most accomplished scholar
never thoroughly expound. By this, then, amongst other tests, let those who think
themselves advanced in Christianity try their spiritual condition. What ear have they
for simple truths simply delivered? In their private studies, what pleasure have they
in meditating the first principles of the Gospel? do they find those first principles
inexhausted, inexhaustible? or is it always to deeper doctrines that they turn, as
though it were only when quite out of their depth, that they gain a resting-place for
the soul? But there is yet one more particular on which we wish to insist. We would
direct your attention to what we may call the honesty of purpose displayed by the
Jews, and hold it up for imitation to all who profess to be seeking the kingdom of
God. The Jew had his face turned towards Zion, whilst he was inquiring the road: if
he did not know the precise path, he knew the direction in which the city lay; and he
was looking in the direction, when he asked what way he should take. We have a
right to require and expect a similar conduct from all those who ask of us the way to
heaven. There is such a thing as asking the way to Zion with the face towards
Babylon; and if there be this dissimulation--for no milder word will express the
precise truth--in vain will the preacher point out the road, and urge the traveller to
decision and dispatch. We would have you distinctly understand that there is a
certain part which the unconverted man has to perform if he hope for conversion;
and that whilst this is undone, he has no right to look for the visitations of grace. It
may not be in his power to find for himself the pathway of life; still less to take a step
on that pathway when found. But he may ascertain the direction in which Zion lies,
and he may be looking in that direction, if not advancing. It is quite idle to say that
he knows not the direction: he knows it to be the exact opposite to that in which he
naturally looks; to turn his eyes from the world is, as he must be thoroughly aware,
to turn them towards Zion. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

Question and attitude

Inquiry and attitude should correspond. You should look as if you meant your
questions. Do not let us have any discrepancy in the man himself; no asking of
questions about one way whilst we are looking over the shoulder towards another.
Do not mock kind heaven. Thitherward: literally, hitherward. Jeremiah is writing
in Judah, and he says the time will come when the returning ones will face this way;
and they will he asking from step to step, Which is the road to Zion? Sometimes we
look our prayers; sometimes we are on the right road and do not know it. Questions
about a certain kind of knowledge seem to be born in every soul; love for certain
kinds of intelligence is inborn. Here is a little creature three years old who cannot be
kept away from the piano. He will be there when you are not looking; he will rise
early in the morning and grope his way towards the musical instrument. Why this,
thou little Mozart? I cannot help it. Would it not be more in your way, poor little
child, to have hoop, or humming-top, or bagfuls of marbles? He does not answer in
words, but he goes back to the piano as if he had left it in some other world and was
delighted to find it again; it talks to him, and he talks to it, and if you will allow the
little soul to tarry there he wants no other heaven just now. Others are fond of
language or science or history; there is a predestination that settles us if we will
listen to it. The Lord has not turned any one of us into a pathless world. He says to
every traveller, I want you to go down this road; do not turn to the right or the left;
you must be trained in the way you should go, the predestined, foreordained road;
you will find walking smooth down there, but if you get upon any other path your
feet will be pricked with sharp thorns. When the soul is really alive with
interrogation it will know how to put its own questions, and it will give the Church
no rest until those questions have been answered substantially. If the Church cannot
answer the great questions of the soul, then it is no Church, though its spire be high
as heaven. Nor must we think that only the nominally great can answer the souls
questions. Sometimes a little child might guide a king. What are the great questions
that men should ask? Men must answer that inquiry themselves. Why be so anxious
about details and trivialities and frivolities? Why hold the letter in your hand and
ask a score of questions about the sealing of it? You are not going to be saved by the
seal; break it, open the letter, read it. If you are really in earnest, if your souls be
aflame with Divine sincerity, you will know what questions are important and what
are trivial There shall come a time when the only questions worth asking will be
religious questions. Where is Zion? Where is God? What is truth? Where is peace?
What do all your inquiries amount to when set side by side with the possibility (let
us use no firmer term at this moment) of knowing and realising the spiritual and the
Divine? Now suppose you know all about the strata, how they were built, and how
they were piled, and how their were coloured, and can trace every line, and
discourse with eloquence upon every lamination,--now how do you feel after all
that? Are you at peace? are you at rest? I see your fingers going out after other
worlds to clutch them because you have exhausted the little volume of the earth. But
the universe is just as little to God as the earth is to you and the universe. There is
nothing great beside God--that is, in comparison with Him, in relation to Him. We
must prove the reality of our sincerity by the set and stress of our lives. Observe,
these people do,, not only ask a question, they discover a disposition, they represent
an attitude. They shall ask their way to Zion with their faces thitherward They lose
no time in asking questions; they ask them as they go. Is this the road? we know it
is: and the answer is, Yes, go on; fair Zion, beautiful as heavens morning, stands
yonder, with doors thrown back to give you welcome and hospitality. It is well thus
to be doing two things at once, to be gathering information and to be realising it, to
be asking questions and to be losing no time in progress. Here we have no mere
speculation, no mere intellectual entertainment; here we have nothing but dead
earnestness, the tongue asking the question which the face represents in action.
How is it with us? We can show where we would be if we could. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Zionwards
Why ask the way to Zion when going thither? A certain inconsistency strikes us
between the right movement of the foot and the confessed uncertainty o| the mind.
But second thoughts show us how real is the harmony between the Zionward
question and the Zionward move.
1. Is it not an experimental fact that men are often moving Zionward, whilst
mentally they do not know the way? The mind of an awakening man reveals
a strange commingling of truth and error, of knowledge and ignorance.
There are many things he does not know--as to the nature and the law of
God, as to the exact manner of life He would have us lead, as to the spirit and
the employ of that new kingdom which Christ Jesus has set up--he has ever
need to ask the way. On the other hand, there are some things be does
know. He at least knows in what directions the road to Zion does not lie. In
Bunyans great allegory Christians first idea of heavenwardness was to turn
from the City of Destruction. He did not know where the Celestial City was;
but he knew it could not lie anywhere near that seat of Satan. The kingdom
of God must be opposite to the realm of the devil. So his first step was a step
away from that repulsive spot. When soon after his feet sank in the Slough of
 Despond you remember he struggled to get out on the side farthest from his
own home. The true inquirer reasons in the same way. Zion must be
otherwhere than in the world--its way must somehow lead away from it.
Now, this is, of course, only negative knowledge; but it is positive advantage.
It is only half-knowledge; but it means half-salvation The first real stride
towards heaven is the souls break with the world. The man who has got so
far is really on the path to Zion. What is this type of man? Where do we find
this class? They are men whoso way of life is out of the common run. You do
not find them in the circles of frivolity or where the crowd is densest. They
are men who have cast off from them that spell named Fashion, who have
sought out for themselves the true standards of righteousness, who are daily
preferring principle to gain and an easy conscience to a famous reputation
You will find these men in the house of God as often as is possible. They are
good listeners--devout, intelligent, teachable, ever willing to know the truth
that they may do it. These are the people whose faces are Zionward, though
they themselves are not yet there; nor do they even know with certainty its
way. And these are the men who also ask. How do they so? Is not their
very posture an inquiry? Is not their separation from the City of Destruction-
-their exodus from Satans Egypt--is not that a token that they desire a better
portion? The life shows the heart. The posture indicates the will. The step
denotes the aim. And it is often this which in the long-run decides the
question of salvation. It is the lie of the heart, more than the achievement of
the life, which approves a man to God. It is the direction of his face and not
the extent of his progress which fits a man for Zions citizenship. For, indeed,
it is these first motions which are the most difficult to make and the most
cardinal. To go with the crowd is the easiest of all motions; to go against the
stream is the hardest of all. The further inquiry of the awakened soul is
usually in the line of its rudimental notion--its further steps in the direction
of its first movement. For the Spirit of the Lord is in that souls uprising. It is
the invisible hand of the Almighty which thrusts him from the doomed spot.
It is the Saviours voice which he hears calling, Escape for thy life.
2. I have known another class of men who ask the way to Zion with their faces
turned the other way. The inquiry of these is by the lip; the posture of their
heart is towards the world. Some of them are consciously insincere. They are
wanting in even pious motive. They may be outwardly righteous; but it is
with a righteousness which they have learned in worldly schools. They pass
for men of purity but their purity is the price they pay for social esteem.
Their honesty is only their policy. Their action is Zionwards, their words are
in heavens language; but their hearts direction is towards the world. There
are some who maintain this inconsistency with a measure of pious motive.
The things of their religion are really religious things. They use the means of
grace as means to grace. They recognise the ways of truth and virtue as
things of heaven, and they approve and love them all as such. They want to
be Christians and to go to glory. They set their feet in the acknowledged ways
of righteousness. They ask the way to Zion with all ingenuousness and
without conscious reserve. And so far as the indicated path is a course of
outer goodness and general integrity they willingly pursue it. But all the
while their face and their heart are worldwards, not Zionwards. It is about
the world that their affections cluster. It is the world in which they inwardly
 believe. They have no objection to piety plus worldliness, but they do not
want a piety which is the negation of worldliness and the substitute for
worldliness. What is their success? It is plainly a difficult thing to walk the
opposite way to that in which you look. You see children sometimes doing
that in the streets, but with many a bump and many a tumble. And quite as
small success attends the experiment in spiritual things. Here and there a
man may perform, for a time, the risky feat. For a while he may maintain the
form of godliness and get credit for the reality of it. Neither the onlooking
world, nor the man himself, knows how truly his heart is with the creature,
rather than with God. He is called a seeker after Zion; but none but the All
Knowing knows how completely his whole cast of thought belies that quest.
But inconsistencies nearly always come into the light. It is seldom that the
heart and the practice can be long disjoined. The foot and the eye generally
agree. Only the eye leads the foot, and not the foot the eye. Where the heart
goes the conduct will eventually follow. A man with his heart in the world
usually comes out poorly even as a formal saint. Generally the man who is
content to be half a Christian ends in not being one at all. Whatever we do
our heart must be disposed aright. There is verily no hope of heaven and God
apart from a Zionward gaze: that is sure to make our feet move Zionwards.
3. To the most sincere and whole-hearted there is need to ask the way. Gods
Spirit in mans heart never supersedes Gods Spirit in His Word. Gods Spirit
in His Word seldom supersedes Gods Spirit in His Church. The truth of
heaven does not flow automatically into the human mind when once that
mind has seen the light. The way of God is never revealed to those who do
not search. Answers to our hearts most urgent problems do not come
without asking. When we are but walking some common road upon some
ordinary errand, we do not like uncertainty. We want to be sure that we are
going right. We question many passing travellers rather than go astray, and
we check one guides advice against anothers. It is vastly more important
that we keep the right way in our Zion-quest. The issues of this journey
surpass in moment every other, and whatever the pains we have to take, and
however reiterated the inquiries we make, we must be quite sure. Happily
there is assurance for us, if we will have it. There is truth and light in
abundance for ready minds and docile hearts. It is stored in the Sacred Book,
in the ministry of the Church, and in the experience of the faithful. The man
who seeks the guidance of the Spirit through these means will not seek in
vain. Those who go where the light beams are sure to get some of it into their
souls. They who follow Christ shall not walk in darkness; they shall have the
light of life, guiding them to the realm of perfect light and life eternal. (J. J.
Ingram.)

Faces thitherward
With their faces thitherward, those words seem to me to convey a special
message to us, to prescribe to us a certain attitude, to suggest to us what is possible
in a day like our own. For there are so many matters in which we find ourselves in
captivity. We are forced to acquiesce in evil conditions which long years have left as
our inheritance. Ancient ideals have broken up in Church and State, old homes lie
waste and desolate, and from them we have wandered far. They are but as lost
dreams. Gods purpose was once in them, but sin was strong and stubborn, and it
was fruitless work for Him to repeat forgivenesses which never availed, and to
prolong His mercy. And at last the Word of God was given to let the judgments fall,
and things were allowed to take their course. Gods earlier purpose was suspended
and broken off, and the story of man and the story of Christs Church takes on a new
development; it passes over into strange and troubled situations, and the Divine will
sanctions the change, and admits of trouble. God sets to work under the conditions
of the exile in captivity. Not that the sacred purpose is abandoned, but that God
proposes now to reach its fulfilment by the road of surrender, by the way of
captivity, through the discipline of defeat. Just as in the Gospel the blindness of the
man who was sightless from his birth, though in itself a curse due to some original
sin, was, as it were, cut off by the action of God from its connection with sin, and
there accepted as a pitiful fact, and was turned into a new call upon the goodness of
God, and became the motive for a fresh exhibition of His compassion, and an
exhibition that opened out unsuspected depths of glory in the love of God for
sorrowful man, so even the miserable plight of a divided Christendom gives us a
deeper insight into the immeasurable patience, tolerance and burden and pity of the
Divine heart than we ever could have guessed before our misery evoked it. We might
have thought that His wrath would have been so hot against the Church which was
divided against itself that He would have abandoned it to its proper penalty. But no,
though a father and mother may forsake, though a woman might forsake her
sucking child, yet will He never forsake us. He will follow us down wherever we are
into our Babylons; He will put to profit disastrous situations. Babylon is but an
interval and a discipline. Our Christendom must be again united, a prayer of Christ
for its unity is still within it and behind it. That prayer for ever lives as a witness to
the mind of God and to the end for which He is ever working. We may never forget
it, we may never consider it to be the abandoned ideal. Whatever God works in us
during the dismal course is still so done as to lead back the formative purpose which
created the Church to be one Godhead. Though we cannot see how it would be
possible, and though we can know nothing positive and practical towards its
realisation, though we are hedged in by harsh, unyielding circumstances, and
though it is our plain duty to learn all that God has to teach us through that harsh
circumstance in which He has placed us, yet still the prophets voice cries to us to
remember, even in impossible things, to look in the direction of the unforgotten
vision, to turn our faces thitherward. Turn our faces thitherward! We cannot see our
Zion; it is far, far away. We cannot hope to distinguish with our eyes the whole
Church of earth become again what Christ meant it to be. Alas! we die in exile from
our home. We shall lay our bones in Babylon. East and west and north and south we
shall see only divided brothers until our eyes close in death. But before we die, the
prophet says, we can at least turn those eyes thitherward. Towards the direction in
which peace lies we can ever send out hearts of prayer and longings. Not always
shall Christian hate Christian, not always shall altar be divided from altar, not for
ever shall east, west, and north be sundered from the south. Once again we shall all
understand one anothers speech, and a new Pentecost will blot out the light of
Babel. What it will be like, that recovered unity, we cannot guess; it will be in some
form new and strange, as was the recovered life of Israel round the rebuilt Zion.
How utterly unlike was unity and the dispersion after the captivity to the earlier
unity of the compact kingdom. That walled little kingdom would never come back
again, but the larger spiritual union that held the dispersion together round
Jerusalem was far more intense and real than was the superficial coherence of the
twelve tribes and the one kingdom. We cannot forecast the changed conditions
under which the Church will find herself once more at one. But still through faith, in
spite of the darkness, we can look out for the dawn of a new day, we can watch the
visions for ever shining, we can snatch at all that makes in that way; we can hope
and believe against facts, and hope against hope, and never fail to be found praying
for the peace of Jerusalem, with our faces at least turned thitherward. With our
faces turned thitherward! Is not that the word by which those who held fast, who
perhaps for no fault of their own that they could detect, find themselves caught in
the wilderness of doubt? Doubt! It has come upon them like an enemy in the night,
it has laid siege, it has encompassed them about within and without. As we have
each of us so often to feel the pressure of the worlds vast sorrows, so we may have
the full pressure of the worlds doubt, not, indeed, that we can enter into the cloud
with a light heart, wilfully and carelessly, merely to follow the fashion. But if the
doubt be real, it can only be dealt with by facing it and probing it to the end. It then
passes the first stage of depression and anxiety and loss and damage. While the trial
continues that must be, it must be miserable to be robbed of your gladness, to be
blind to the vision, to feel far from home, to find no longer joy m going up to the
temple of Zion with the multitudes on the holy day, to wander as a lonely shepherd
amongst the hills, to have nothing you can follow, no kindly light about your feet.
But though this trouble be allowed to fall, you have still one duty, to remember Zion,
to ask the way thither, and to turn your face thitherward. Believe me, God has not
forgotten or deserted you because He has led you down to Babylon, and given you
over to the Chaldees. You will come out of it a far stronger man than you went in, if
only you will trust with all the might of your soul that it is He who has led you to
suffer this deprivation, that there is no care for the pain that you have but to be
faithful to the purpose which for the time denies you the sight of your Jerusalem,
and that there is a real effectual will still at work for you and upon you even where
God most surely hides it from your eyes, and always you must be saying this is not
the end. Death, doubt, cannot be the final stage of the soul, doubt--though it seems
so drearily long while it lasts--can only be a period, an interval, for a time, a time,
and half a time. Hold to that, poor blind heart; be not afraid. There shall yet come
the day when the Lord will turn again the captivity of Zion; then it will all be like a
dream; then will your mouth be filled with laughter, your tongue with joy. (Canon
Scott Holland.)

Asking the way

Our human nature is like a ruined temple in which the echo of old hymns and
prayers still lingers and where a spectral Levite walks and murmurs of a lost glory.
Hence our longing to return. All souls in their lowest depths are troubled to know
the way of everlasting life. This universal consensus of aspiration led Plato to speak
of the wings of our pre-existent state. The world is full of men and women who as
Jesus passes by are half moved to throw themselves before Him as the young ruler
did, crying, What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? It is our vocation, as
ministers of the Gospel, to point out the way to Zion. A grave responsibility rests
upon us. Not long ago a signalman swung a white lantern as the railroad train swept
by. On it went with impetuous speed until, on a sudden, there came a shock like a
thunderbolt, and the train plunged down an embankment. The cars were piled one
upon another, and oh, the shrieking and praying then! Who shall depict the anguish
of that scene t Its record will be told on grave-stones and in the sable garments of
the mourners who go about the streets. It was all because of the mistaken signal
Who is sufficient to stand in this sacred place and direct souls into the way of
spiritual life? No one of us could dare do this thing were it not that we have a sure
oracle. At the outset we are admonished in these Scriptures that there is only one
way to Zion. It used to be a proverb, All roads lead to Rome. In the centre of the
Forum was a golden mile-stone, Milliarium Aureum, whereat all thoroughfares
converge. If a traveller even in a distant province should ask, Which way to Rome?
the answer would be, Keep on and you will reach the golden mile-stone. There are
those who seem to think that all ways, in like manner, lead to heavens gate. If you
are only sincere, keep on and you will get there. But alas, the Scriptures speak with a
different voice. There is a way which seemeth right to a man, but the end thereof is
death. All roads lead out into the wilderness save one, and that is the Kings
highway, whereof the prophets slake. A highway shall be there, and a way, and it
shall be called the way of holiness.

I. THE KINGS HIGHWAY LEADS DOWN THROUGH THE VALLEY OF BOCHIM, THE PLACE
OF TEARS. Repentance is prerequisite to an entrance into life. To repent is to make a
frank acknowledgment of sin and to forsake it. Is there aught unreasonable in this?
If I have wronged a fellow-man do I not count it a point of honour to make amends
to him? Shall we not observe as high a rule of honour and manliness in our attitude
to God as we do in our human relationships?

II. THE KINGS HIGHWAY RUNS OVER THE HILL OF ATONEMENT. It is the royal way of
the Cross. The law speaks on Calvary. It says to the sinner, The soul that sinneth it
shall die. Nor is it possible to exaggerate the dreadfulness of that death. The Lord
spoke of it under the figure of fire and the undying worm To Christ also the law
speaks, Thou mayest expiate the sinners guilt. The sword awakes against the
Shepherd. The only-begotten Son of God, assuming our place before the law, is
wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. He dies that we may
live. But between the sinner with the death sentence resting upon him and Christ
suspended upon the shameful Cross there is a mighty chasm. How can the innocent
suffer for the guilty! and what avails it for the sinner that Jesus dies ? Over that
chasm faith springs a mighty arch. By Divine appointment the exercise of faith on
the part of the sinner is made the sole condition of salvation- He that believeth on
the Son hath everlasting life.

III. THE KINGS HIGHWAY RUNS THENCEFORTH ACROSS THE OPEN COUNTRY TO
HEAVENS GATE. With the heart man believeth unto righteousness and with the lips
confession is made unto salvation. If I have found a Saviour, and the joy of the great
discovery has come into my heart, I cannot but sing my hosannas. The power of
godliness is like ointment in the hand, which ever bewrayeth itself. (D. J. Burrell, D.
D.)

The way to Zion to be inquired after

I was coming to Larne from Carrickfergus in a gig. Taking for granted that I knew
the road well enough, I drove right on, passing many people going to market. After a
while I began to doubt whether I was right, and meeting a gentleman on horseback,
I said to him, How far is it to Larne? This is not the way, said he. You are two
miles past where you should have turned to the left up the hill Come back with me
and I will show you the right way. Then striking his forehead with his hand he said,
You could fool, why didnt you inquire in time? So you go on from day to day,
thinking you are going right to heaven; but you are in the wrong way. The great God
has told you the right way in His blessed Bible. The priest says you mustnt read it;
but if you don t inquire, youll find youre wrong as I did. (W. Arthurs Life of Gideon
Ouseley.)

Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant

that shall not be forgotten.--
The redeemed sinner joining himself in a covenant with God
In our intercourse with the world, we seldom hear such language as this from
others, or utter it ourselves. But a kinder invitation could not possibly be addressed
to us; nor could we offer to those whom we love more friendly advice.

I. Why the Lord condescends to enter into a covenant with His redeemed people.
1. He has thus pledged Himself to His people to show how greatly He honours
them.
2. This gracious God has entered into a covenant with His people, that He may
bind them more closely to Himself.
3. But the chief reason why it has pleased God to enter into a covenant with His
servants, is this--to show them the sureness of His mercy, the certainty of
their receiving pardon, grace, and salvation at His hands.

II. What is implied in their availing themselves of His condescension, and joining
themselves to Him in a covenant.
1. The spiritual union spoken of implies a renunciation of every covenant which
is opposed to this covenant with God.
2. But before we can enter into covenant with God, we must proceed a step
farther, and accede to the terms of His covenant. Now these terms are so
simple, that a child may comprehend them; and so gracious, that they fill the
minds of angels with wonder; but because they are opposed to the
imaginations of our depraved hearts, thousands daily reject them, yea, perish
rather than accept them. He that believeth shall be saved. It asks of us no
merit; it demands of the penitent sinner no righteousness. It tells him to cast
away all dependence upon everything that he can feel, or suffer, or do; and
upon this one condition, that he heartily believes and embraces the promises
of the Gospel, it assures him that all the blessings of the everlasting covenant
are his.
3. And what follows? Is the believing sinner henceforth at liberty to live as he
will? to be disobedient and lawless? No; the man who joins himself in a
covenant to his redeeming Lord, gives himself up entirely and for ever to His
service. (C. Bradley, M. A.)

Entering into covenant with God

I. What we are to understand by this union to God.

1. It must include a renunciation of all created dependencies, and of everything
 that stands in competition with God. We are not in danger, like Israel of old,
of worshipping the hosts of heaven. The world attracts the eye and engages
the heart. Its riches and honours have a charm, in which those of heaven are
forgotten. Forbidden pleasures make their court in such address, that
numbers are devoted to them; and some are idols to themselves, and place a
dangerous dependence there.
2. A deliberate and cordial choice of God as our God.
3. A solemn surrender of ourselves, and an entire devotedness to Him.
4. A resolution to abide by the choice and surrender described, and to act as
becoming those who stand in a covenant relation to God.

II. Such considerations as prove it to be the duty and interest of us all to join
ourselves to the Lord in this covenant, and never forget it.
1. God has an absolute right and title to us.
2. There is everything in God that can lay claim to our supreme regards, and
invite an union to Himself. All the lustre of the heavens, all the beauty and
grandeur in the material world, and all the excellence to be found amidst the
various orders of beings in the intelligent creation, is, as it were, but a ray
from God, and is lost in the excellence and glory of the Divine nature.
3. Joining ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant, will insure our safety,
our honour, and out, truest happiness in the present life.
4. Joining ourselves to the Lord, will issue in a blissful union to Him for ever.
Improvement--
1. Let us examine ourselves on the subject of this discourse.
2. Let those who have not joined themselves to the Lord be prevailed on to do it
immediately.
3. Let those who are joined to the Lord in this covenant, rejoice in it, often renew
it, and make it their principal concern through life, to walk worthy of it.
4. We should call on each other, and on all to whom we are related, in the
language of the text. Come, let us join ourselves, &c. Friendship cannot
express itself better, than by well-judged attempts to engage the hearts of its
objects for God, and to maintain and strengthen their attachment to Him.
This is serving the best interests of others: it is gratitude to Him who has
made us to differ; and carrying on, in our humble sphere, that grand design
in which heaven is engaged. (N. Hill.)

The solemn engagement

I. The nature of the transaction.

1. What it is not.
(1) An engagement of the nature of a covenant of works, in which we
propose to obey the law of God as the condition of our acceptance in His
sight.
(2) An engagement in which we promise to love God and serve Him as a
compensation for blessings already received.
 (3) An engagement to believe and repent, in order to obtain salvation
through Christ.
2. What it is.
(1) In joining ourselves to the Lord, we take Him as our God and portion in
Christ Jesus. This is just, in other words, to acquiesce in His purpose of
mercy as it is revealed and offered to us in the promise.
(2) Devoting ourselves to the service of God, as a willing and obedient
people.
(a) A voluntary surrender.
(b) Universal, without exception or reserve.
(c) Renouncing every other object, in so far as an attachment to it
interferes with the love and duty we owe to God.
(d) This surrender is for ever. Perpetual.

II. What respects this is the duty of those who profess to be, like the Israelites,
penitents returning unto the Lord.
1. To join themselves unto the Lord in a perpetual covenant is a duty He requires
of every returning penitent. It makes a part of what is required in the very
first of the ten commandments. For what is the covenant we have now
described but an acknowledging, worshipping, and glorifying the Lord as our
God in Christ Jesus?
2. God not only requires, but the great things He has done for them give Him a
right to expect that they should join themselves to Him in a perpetual
covenant.
3. The advantage to be derived from such a connection, points it out as our duty
to join ourselves unto the Lord. Since they are dependent upon Him for
every blessing, the regard they owe to their own interest renders it necessary.

III. ENCOURAGEMENT TO THE PERFORMANCE OF THIS DUTY. The obligations of

authority, gratitude, and interest, unite in calling us to this exercise; why, then,
should we hesitate a moment about taking a decided part?
1. The privileges you think it would be presumptuous to claim, God Himself
freely offers. I will, says He, be your God.
2. The fear that He will reject you is no just cause why you should not now join
yourselves unto the Lord. In devoting yourselves unto Him, you are only
obeying His commandment; and surely you have no cause to fear that He
will reject the service He Himself requires.
3. The fear of departing again from Him is no just cause why you should not now
join yourselves unto the Lord, since He Himself hath undertaken to preserve
you from falling, and to keep you by His almighty power through faith unto
complete salvation. Even now He is opening up all the stores of His fulness
to supply your need, and enable you to fulfil every engagement into which,
by His grace, you are disposed to enter. (G. Campbell.)

National covenanting a national privilege

It is when Israel and Judah--the ten and two tribes--are brought to seek the Lord
their God, and, ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, that they say one to
another, Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that
shall not be forgotten.

I. The parties who engage in covenanting.

1. God. It is to God the people propose to join themselves. It is not, however,
God absolutely considered, but a three-one God in Christ,--God, as the
Creator of the ends of the earth, as having all persons and all events entirely
under His control, as the Father of lights, the Father of mercies, the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all comfort, that in Christ is reconsiling
sinners to Himself, and saying to them, I will make a covenant with you;--it
is to this God that the people seek to stand in the covenant relation. How
great the condescension of the three-one God--who is so high in rank, so
great in wealth, in love, in wisdom, in power, in goodness--to enter into
covenant with the poor worms of His footstool, and enable them to say of
Him, My Beloved is mine, and I am His; He feedeth among the lilies.
2. Man. It is with men, and not with angels, that God condescends to enter into
covenant. The proposal, however, to engage in covenanting, and the
disposition to comply with that proposal on the part d man, must come from
the Lord. For it is not until God takes hold of sinners in the covenant of grace
that they cheerfully give themselves to God in a covenant of duty. The
surrender they then make of themselves to God is a complete or entire
surrender--a surrender, not in one, but in all the relations of life. Those,
therefore, that give themselves to God in a covenant of duty, as individuals,
must esteem it a privilege to be permitted to give themselves to God, in the
same covenant, as families, as Churches, as nations. It is national
covenanting that is referred to in our text. It is Israel and Judah, or the
kingdoms of the ten and two tribes, that propose to join themselves in
covenant to the Lord.

II. THE WARRANT FOR COVENANTING. Clearly it is our first duty in considering
national covenanting to ask, Have men any warrant from Scripture for claiming in
their national, or in any other relation in life, to be the bride--with all the rights and
privileges of the bride--of the Lord of the universe? Undoubtedly they have. The
scriptural warrant for nations, as such, giving themselves in covenant to God, is of
the clearest and most encouraging description. There is the great fact that God
Himself proposed and entered into covenant with Israel as a nation at Sinai. But the
warrant arising from the covenanting at Sinai is confirmed--
1. By many scriptural examples, as the covenanting in the days of Asa, when all
Judah rejoiced at the oath; and the Lord was found of them, and gave them
rest round about; in the days of Nehemiah, when the nobles of the people
made a sure covenant, and our princes, Levites, and priests seal unto it.
2. By many prophecies and promises, a few of which only we can quote in your
hearing. There are, for instance (Isa 19:18-21; Isa 44:3-5; Isa 45:23). And
how can the kingdoms of this world become Christs kingdom, but by
swearing allegiance, or giving themselves in covenant to Him? May the time
soon come when Israel and Judah, when Great Britain and Ireland, when all
the nations of the earth shall say one to another, Come, let us join ourselves
to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten.
 III. THE NATURE OF COVENANTING. What is a covenant! A covenant is a bargain or
marriage. And a marriage is the union between two parties, or the declaring of them
formally to be one. The marriage is based on mutual consent. And such, in its
essence, is covenanting. It is the Lord formally giving Himself to His people, or
saying of them, It is My people; and the people formally giving themselves to God, or
saying of Him, The Lord is our God.
1. That in national covenanting there is, on the part of the covenanters, a formal
and solemn acceptance of a three-one God in Christ as their God. As God
takes hold of, and gives Himself to His people, in the covenant of grace, so
there must be a faiths approbation of that covenant, or a formal and solemn
acceptance of a three-one God in Christ as their God, of God the Father as
their Father, of God the Son as their Saviour, of God the Holy Ghost as their
Sanctifier, Comforter, Friend, in their covenant of duty. Such acceptance of
God is included in the covenanting at Sinai. In entering into their covenant
with God, the Israelites, in the most solemn manner, accepted of the Lord as
the God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage, and in the most solemn manner declared that they received Him
both as their Sovereign and covenant God, as the Lord, and as the thy
God. It is included in the covenanting specified in Zec 13:9. And such
acceptance of God must be included in all the covenanting that is acceptable
to Him in all ages. For unless men are enabled cordially to receive a three,
one God as revealed in Christ, He will not and cannot say of them, It is My
people, nor enable them to say of Him, The Lord is my God. Some say that in
thus accepting of a three-one God in Christ, covenanters do nothing more
than genuine saints do, when they are enabled to accept of, and close with,
Christ as their only and all-sufficient Saviour. In one sense this is true. But,
at conversion, we accept of, and close with, Christ in our individual, whereas,
in national covenanting, we accept of and close with Him in our corporate
and national capacity. True. But, when you have been enabled to accept of
and close with Him in your individual, why seek to accept of and close with
Him in your national capacity? Why not be satisfied with the acceptance of
Him you have already been enabled to make? Because, by doing so, we
would neglect a plainly commanded duty, and deprive ourselves of a highly
distinguished privilege. Every genuine Israelite that covenanted at Sinai, and
in the plains of Moab, had already, as an individual, accepted of and closed
with the Lord as his God. But, so far was God from being satisfied with this,
that He asked the Israelites not merely in their individual, but in their public
and corporate capacity, to accept of and close with Him anew. Accordingly,
in De 26:17-19, Moses says to the Israelites, who had, in their national
capacity, given themselves in covenant to God Thou hast avouched the
Lord this day to be thy God.. . . And the Lord hath avouched thee this day
to be His peculiar people, as He hath spoken. In other words, the Lord
declared that, through national covenanting, the Israelites enjoyed a national
exaltation, praise, honour, and blessing, that could not otherwise have been
obtained. How clear is it, therefore, that national covenanting is the true
foundation of great and permanent national blessings.
2. In national covenanting there must be, on the part of the covenanters, a
formal and cheerful surrender of themselves to God in a covenant of duty. In
 national covenanting, as in marriage, there must be a mutual surrender. God
must cheerfully give Himself to the nation in the covenant of grace, and the
nation must, by faith, as cheerfully and in a constitutional manner give itself
to God in a covenant of duty. What we have already said shows that there can
be no doubt as to the cheerfulness with which God gave Himself to Israel,
and promises to give Himself in covenant to Christian nations in all ages. But
whilst God cheerfully gave Himself, as the covenant God, to Israel, He was
careful to see that, by faith, Israel formally and cheerfully gave himself, as a
covenant people, to Him. In Ex 19:3; Ex 19:8, we are told that Moses went
up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus
shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, If ye will obey My voice indeed, and
keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all
people: for all the earth is Mine. And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of
priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto
the children of Israel. And Moses came, and called for the elders of the
people, and laid before their faces all these words which the Lord
commanded him. And all the people answered together, and said, All that
the Lord hath spoken we will do. And Moses returned the words of the
people unto the Lord. With this full consent on the part of the people the
Lord was not yet satisfied. Accordingly, in Jer 24:3, we read: And Moses
came and told the people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments;
and all the people answered with one voice and said, All the words which the
Lord hath said will we do. In Jer 24:7 we read again--And he (Moses) took
the Book of the Covenant and read in the audience of the people: and they
said, All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient. After the
covenant had been read for the third time, and the people had for the third
time given their consent to marry the Lord on the terms proposed, it is
added, And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said,
Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you
concerning all these words. How clearly do these facts show that it was with
a full knowledge of what they were doing, and with the full consent of all the
people, that the Israelites gave themselves in covenant to God at Sinai.
(Original Secession Magazine)

JER 50:6
My people have forgotten their resting-place.

Cannot you rest?

God has made Himself the resting-place for the human soul; and unless we fix our
heart upon Him we may rest, but it is only for a time. The rest which God provides
for us is a rest which satisfies us, and it is a rest which we can always have, a rest
which remaineth, and which cannot be taken away from the people of God.
1. Many people are weary and very far from restful on account of business cares.
You see continually in the newspapers that not only are there many
bankruptcies and liquidations, and such like unpleasant occurrences, but the
market reports tell us that trade is very unprofitable. Whatever happens,
 make the best of it. Dont wear away your soul in mourning and repining as if
your soul were chained to a perpetually revolving grindstone. Look to the
bright side of things. Do the best you can, and do not fear the worst is sure to
happen. Remember that God still lives and cares for you. Trust in the Lord
and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. It
is a severe trial of faith in God when death removes the bread-winner from a
family. Ah: at such a time of bereavement there is no consolation excepting
from trust in Gods providential care. He is the Father of the fatherless and
the Friend of the widow. Likewise, many a Christian man is ready to say in
the desolateness of his sorrow, I have to tread my path alone! He does not
say that God is dead, but be acts as if he thought so. To doubt the
superintending care and consolation of God is practical atheism. When we
are in trouble, that is the very time we ought to cast all our care upon Him,
for He careth for us.
2. Then, some may be much troubled because of something going wrong in your
family. You may have an undutiful and wicked son or daughter. A man said
to me some time ago, My heart is almost broken! I asked, What is the
matter? He answered, My son--has become an infidel! I would rather have
given my life! Is there no resting-place in such a time of trouble? Yes; there
is. Take up your Bible again, and read what God did for Davids sake, how
the children of David and their descendants were blest and kept from great
evil for My Servant Davids sake. The prayer of faith shall save the soul.
3. Some of the sharpest troubles experienced in this troublesome world come
from misplaced or unrequited affection--what Shakespeare calls in his
forcible way the pangs of despised love. Our only course in this, as in every
other heartbreaking matter, is to take it to the Lord in prayer, trusting in
Him, and leaving in His care all the responsibility of ones life.
4. It may be that your trouble is a sinful disposition. You feel that you cannot
help yourself. But God can give you relief and rest if you trust in Him. As
Jesus restored to health the man who was sick of the palsy, so God can
restore your soul by heavenly grace. Lastly, I wished to give you an assurance
of rest in Gods paradise. (W. Birch.)

The souls resting-place

I. The human soul needs a resting-place.

1. This is true of the soul in innocence. As a creature he could not but be
dependent. Without unquestioning trust in God, safety and happiness were
impossible to man even before the fall.
2. How much more true is this since man has become a sinner. His nature is
utterly weary. The cares and anxieties of life are wearing away his strength,
and there is nothing binding him to earth but the fear of death The past is
guilty, the future is hopeless, and so the present is restless.

II. Jesus Christ is the resting-place the soul needs.

1. In Christ we have full redemption. No anodynes of earth can give the soul the
rest that the blood of Christ can.
 2. In Him we also have regeneration. If any man be in Christ, he is a new
creature. A new centre has been given to his heart, a new aim to his life, a
new joy to his experience.
3. He gives repose to the intellect. Christ is the truth, and through confidence
all mysteries are accepted as unquestioningly as a child accepts the
statement of its parent. Jesus Christ alone brings to the soul the element of
certainty, and, worn out by vain flights, it folds its weary wings and rests
with quiet thankfulness on this tree of knowledge, which is also the tree of
life.
4. He also gives repose to the affections of the soul. Earthly objects prove
disappointing or fall away from us, or are torn from us and leave the soul all
palpitating with agony, but no power can separate from the love of God in
Christ Jesus.

III. THIS RESTING-PLACE OF THE SOUL IS SOMETIMES FORGOTTEN EVEN BY THOSE

WHO HAVE KNOWN AND ENJOYED IT. A Christian may frequently have his peace in
Christ disturbed. At moments he may be walking through darkness. Job was a true
man of God even when he was crying out, Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!
True, a Christian is not justified in being in this distressed state of mind. He ought to
know better, &c.
1. When he falls into perplexity, doubting whether he is forgiven or not.
2. When he depends upon merely human and earthly resources.
3. When he loses his confidence in the midst of affliction. (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)

JER 50:17-20
Israel is a scattered sheep.

I. View Gods people, the spiritual Israel, as scattered sheep (Jer 50:17).
1. They were sheep going astray. Scattered over the world.
2. Marked, noted, contemplated by the Divine eye, the Divine foreknowledge,
the Divine purpose.
3. Found in different regions of the earth, yet advancing to one heavenly home--
the better country.

II. View the people of the Most High, the spiritual Israel, as a forgiven people (Jer
50:20).
1. Divine forgiveness.
2. A forgiveness dependent upon a Divine redemption.
3. A forgiveness is righteousness.
4. A complete forgiveness.
5. A forgiveness, and more than forgiveness. Inseparable from justification,
acceptance in a righteousness of God, unto all and upon all them that
believe.
 6. A forgiveness never separate from sanctification.

III. View the chosen of the Most High, the spiritual Israel, as assailed and
persecuted by lion-like foes (Jer 50:17).
1. They who are effectually called, and set apart for God, are exposed at once to
special enmities. All the enemies of Gospel truth, holiness, spirituality,
godliness are their enemies.
2. The enemies of the spiritual Israel are formidable, but vincible.
3. The days of open persecution have emphatically illustrated the ferocity of
anti-Christian persecution.
4. The foes of the spiritual Israel are vanquished foes. Christ hath already
overcome them. They have all been vanquished in principle.
5. The spiritual Israel hath mighty resources engaged, mighty friendship and
support pledged on its behalf. In Isa 31:1-9. Jehovah compares Himself to a
lion in the succour and defence of His Zion (Isa 31:4).

IV. View the spiritual Israel as a reserved inheritance for Christ (verse 20).
1. Purchased and redeemed in order to be reserved.
2. Effectually called and regenerated in order to be reserved.
3. Separated from the world in order to be reserved.
4. Reserved, that the Saviour may take delight in them.
5. Reserved, as the gift of the Father to the Son.
6. Reserved to be witnesses for God and His Christ.
7. Reserved as first-fruits to God and to the Lamb.
8. Reserved to inherit exceeding riches of grace, and ultimate riches of glory.

V. View the people of the Most High, the spiritual Israel, as feeding in the
pastures of grace under the Great Shepherd of the sheep (verse 19).
1. The Shepherd of this fold is mightier than all the devouring lions that can
threaten His redeemed. He can curb them at His pleasure. The Shepherd of
this fold is wiser than all the opponents of His Church. Neither might nor
craft can defeat the purposes of His grace. (D. R. Morris.)

The iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none.--
Sin completely removed

I. Sin is completely removed, in that the guilt of it is all forgiven, and the
punishment due to it entirely remitted.

II. Sin is completely removed, in that the sinner is perfectly restored to the love
and favour of God.

III. Sin is completely removed, in that the pardoned sinner obtains a blessed
restoration of character, state, and hope.
 IV. The way in which so complete a pardon and restoration of guilty sinners is
effected.

V. This complete forgiveness of sin is alone worthy of God, and sufficient for man.

VI. This complete forgiveness is necessary for us all, and ought to be most
earnestly sought by us all. (Essex Remembrancer.)

JER 50:34
Their Redeemer is strong, the Lord of hosts is His name.

The kinsman Redeemer

Among the remarkable provisions of the Mosaic law there were some very
peculiar ones affecting the next-of-kin. The nearest living blood-relation to a man
had certain obligations and offices to discharge, under certain contingencies, in
respect of which he received a special name; which is sometimes translated in the
Old Testament Redeemer and sometimes Avenger of blood. What the
etymological signification of the word may be is, perhaps, somewhat doubtful. It is
taken by some authorities to come from a word meaning to set free?

I. THE QUALIFICATIONS AND OFFICES OF THE KINSMAN-REDEEMER. The

qualifications may be all summed up in one--that he must be the nearest living
blood relation of the person whose God he was. He might be brother, or less nearly
connected, hut this was essential, that of all living men, he was the most closely
connected. That qualification has to be kept well in mind when thinking of the
transference of the office to God in His relation to Israel, and through Israel, to us.
Such being his qualification, what were his duties? Mainly three. The first was
connected with property. One great purpose steadily kept in view in all the Mosaic
land laws was the prevention of the alienation of the land from its original holders,
and its accumulation in a few hands. The obligation on the next-of-kin to buy back
alienated property was quite as much imposed on him for the sake of the family, as
of the individual. The second of his duties was to buy back a member of his family
fallen into slavery. (Lev 25:39). The last of the offices of the kinsman-redeemer was
that of avenging the blood of a murdered relative. The law of blood-feud among the
Hebrews was all in the direction Of restricting the wild justice of revenge, and of
entrusting it to certain chosen persons out of the kindred, of the murdered man. The
savage vendetta was too deeply engrained in the national habit to be done away with
altogether. All that was for the time possible was to check and systematise it, and
this was done by the institution in question, which did not so much put the sword
into the hand of the next-of-kin as strike it out of the hand of all the rest of the clan.

II. THE GRAND MYSTERIOUS TRANSFERENCE OF THIS OFFICE TO JEHOVAH. This

singular institution was gradually discerned to be charged with lofty meaning and to
be capable of being turned into a dim shadowing of something greater than itself.
You will find that God begins to be spoken of in the later portions of Scripture as the
Kinsman-Redeemer. I reckon eighteen instances, of which thirteen are in the second
half of Isaiah. The reference is no doubt mainly to the great deliverance from
captivity in Egypt and Babylon, but the thought sweeps a much wider circle and goes
much deeper down than these historical facts. There was in it some dim thought that
though God was separated from them by all the distance between finitude and
infinitude yet they were nearer to Him than to anybody else; that the nearest living
relation that these poor persecuted Jews had was the Lord of hosts, beneath whose
wings they might come to trust. Therefore does the prophet kindle into rapture and
triumphant confidence as he thinks that the Lord of hosts, mighty, unspeakable,
high above our thoughts, our words, or our praise, is Israels Kinsman, and,
therefore, their Redeemer. How profound a consciousness that man was made in the
image of God, and that, in spite of all the gulf between finite and infinite, and the yet
deeper gulf between sinful man and righteous God. He was closer to a poor
struggling soul than even the dearest were, must have been at all events dawning on
the prophet who dared to think of the Holy One in the Heavens as Israels Kinsman.

III. WE HAVE THE PERFECT FULFILMENT OF THIS DIVINE OFFICE BY THE MAN CHRIST
JESUS. He is nearer to each of us than our dearest are. He loves us with the love of
kindred, and can fill our hearts and wills, and help our weakness in better, more
inward ways than all sympathy and love of human hearts can do. Between the atoms
of the densest of material bodies there is an interspace of air, as is shown by the fact
that everything is compressible if you can find the force sufficient to compress it.
That is to say, no particle touches another in the material universe. And so in the
spiritual region there is an awful film of separation between each of us and all
others, however closely we may be united. We each live on our own little island in
the deep with echoing straits between us thrown. The solemn consciousness of
personality, of responsibility unshared by any, of a separate destiny parting us from
our dearest. Arms may be twined, but they must be unlinked some day, and each in
turn face the awful solitude of death, as each has really faced that scarcely less awful
solitude of life alone. But he that is joined to the Lord is one flesh, and our
kinsman, Christ, will come so near to us, that we shall be in Him, and He in us, one
spirit and one life. He is our nearest relation, nearer than husband, wife, parent,
brother, sister, or friend. He is nearer to you than your very selves. He is your better
self. This is His qualification for His office. Because He is mans kinsman, He buys
back His enslaved brethren. The bondage from which one of his brethren might
redeem the Israelite was a voluntary bondage into which he had sold himself.
And such is our slavery. None can rob us of our freedom but ourselves. The world
and the flesh and the devil cannot put their chains on us unless our own will hold
out our hands for the manacles. And, alas! it is often an unsuspected slavery How
sayest thou ye shall be made free? We were never m bondage to any man, boasted
the angry disputants with Christ. And if they had lifted up their-eyes they might
have seen from the Temple courts in which they stood, the citadel full of Roman
soldiers, and perhaps the golden eagles gleaming in the sunshine on the loftiest
battlements. Some of us are just as foolish, and try as desperately to annihilate facts
by ignoring them, and to make ourselves free by passionately denying that we are
slaves. But he that committeth sin is the slave of sin. Did you ever try to kill a bad
habit, a vice! Did you find it easy work? Was it not your master? You thought it was
a chain no stronger than a spiders web that was round your wrist till you tried to
break it; and then you found it a chain of adamant. Many men who boast themselves
free are tied and bound with the cords of their sins. Dreaming of freedom, you have
sold yourself, and that for nought. Is that not true, tragically true? What have you
made out of sin? Is the game worth the candle? Will it continue to be so?--And ye
shall be redeemed without money, for Jesus Christ laid down His life for you and
me, that by His death we might receive forgiveness and deliverance from-the power
of sin. And so your Kinsman, nearer to you than all else, has bought you back. (A.
Maclaren, D. D.)

Another pleads for us

Says Charles Garrett: During the cotton famine I went to many a man m need
and said: Why dont you go to the committee and get what you require? And the
reply was, I cant, I have never asked for help in my life If I were to try to speak for
myself I should be choked. I cant do it; Ill starve first. And I have said, I dont want
you to speak.
I only want you to come. I will do all the talking, and at the appointed time he has
come, and I have said, This is the person of whom I spoke, and they at once
relieved him..

JEREMIAH 51

JER 51:5
For Israel hath not been forsaken, nor Judah of his God.

Israel and Judah not forsaken

You would think, according to the teaching of some, that Christ s members kept
lopping off something like the limbs of lobsters, and that new ones were constantly
growing. There is nothing in Scripture to warrant such a notion as that. You
remember Mr. Bunyans parable of a child who is in a room, and a stranger comes
in, and says, Come hither, child, I will cut off thy finger. No, says the child. Yes,
but I will; I will take off your little finger. Here is a knife, I will cut off your little
finger. No, again says the child, and begins to cry. Oh, but, says the stranger,
that is a poor little finger that you have. I will cut it off and I will buy you a gold
finger, such a brave gold finger. I will put it on your hand instead of your little
finger. Oh, says the child, but it would not be my finger; I cannot lose my little
finger. Whereupon Mr. Bunyan says, If Christ could have better people than those
He has, He would not make the change, for, saith He, they are not My people; they
are not a part of My own living self. So the Lord Jesus would not change you for a
golden saint, for one much better than you axe. That new finger would not be what
the Father gave him, nor what He bought with His precious blood. Thou shalt not
be forgotten of Me, means that God will never cease to love His servants. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Gods people not forgotten or forsaken

Before the siege of Paris Gustave Dore had nearly finished one of his greatest
paintings, one of the finest pictures which has ever been produced. Having to fly
from the city, on a sudden, as the Germans were coming up, he hid his picture in a
cellar, down under a heap of rubbish. When the siege was over, Dore came back to
Paris, and of course when he returned he had forgotten all about his picture, had he
not? Not he; he had taken too much trouble with it to forget it. He knew the value of
it, and he knew where he had put it. He did not have to go up and down the house
and say to the people, Do you know where my picture is? No! he never forgot
where he had himself put it, so he found it where it was hidden, brought it out to the
light of day, and finished it. Now, in a far higher sense than that, God will have
respect unto the works of His own hands. The very bodies of the saints, though they
were hidden away for a while in the rubbish of the earth, He will fetch out, and He
will complete the works of grace which He has begun upon each one of them. The
Lord hath formed us to be His servants, we shall not be forgotten of Him. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

JER 51:6
Flee out of the midst of Babylon.

Fleeing from the city of destruction

And now the trembling pilgrim, with fixed resolution, having a glimpse of the light
and a definite direction, begins to run; it is unutterable relief to his perplexities to
run towards Christ, though as yet he sees Him not. But now the world clamours
after him, yea, the dearest ones in it try to stop him, but the fire in his conscience is
stronger than they; he stops his ears and runs without looking behind, and stays not
in all the plain, but runs as swiftly as his burden will let him, crying, Life, life,
eternal life! (Lectures on Pilgrims Progress, G. H. Cheever.)

JER 51:15
He hath made the earth by His power, He hath established the world by His
wisdom.

The being of God proved from the frame of the world

The attentive observation of this world, or visible frame, is not only a worthy
employment of our thoughts, but even a considerable duty not to be neglected by us.
For it is that which affords most cogent and satisfactory arguments to convince us
of, and to confirm us in, the belief of that truth which is the foundation of all religion
and piety, the being of one God, incomprehensibly excellent in all perfections, the
maker and upholder of all things; it also serves to beget in our minds affections
toward God, suitable to those notions; a reverent adoration of His unsearchable
wisdom; an awful dread of His powerful majesty; a grateful love of His gracious
benignity and goodness.
1. View we first, singly, those things which are most familiar and obvious to our
senses. First, those plants we every day do see, smell, and taste: Have not
that number, that figure, that order, that temperament, that whole
 contexture of parts we discern in them, a manifest relation to those
operations they perform? Whence, then, I inquire, could that fitness
proceed? from chance, or casual motions of matter? But is it not repugnant
to the name and nature of chance, that anything regular or constant should
arise from it? Are not confusion, disparity, deformity, unaccountable change
and variety, the proper issues of chance? It is not, therefore, reasonable to
ascribe those things to chance: to what then? will you say, to necessity? If
you do, you only alter the phrase; for necessary causality is but another name
for chance; they both are but several terms denoting blindness and
unadvisedness in action; both must imply a fortuitous determination of
causes, acting without design or rule. These effects must therefore, I say,
proceed from wisdom, and that no mean one, but such as greatly surpasses
our comprehension, joined with a power equally great: for to digest bodies so
very many, so very fine and subtile, so divers in motion and tendency, that
they shall never hinder or disturb one another, but always conspire to the
same design, is a performance exceedingly beyond our capacity to reach how
it could be contrived or accomplished; all the endeavours of our deepest skill
and most laborious industry cannot arrive to the producing of any work not
extremely inferior to any of these, not in comparison very simple and base;
neither can our wits serve to devise, nor our sense to direct, nor our hand to
execute any work, in any degree like to those. And ii we have reason to
acknowledge so much wisdom and power discovered in one plant, and the
same consequently multiplied in so many thousands of divers kinds; how
much more may we discern them in any one animal, in all of them? Who
shaped and tempered those hidden subtile springs of life, sense, imagination,
memory, passion; who impressed on them a motion so regular and so
durable, which through so many years, among so many adverse
contingencies assailing it, is yet so steadily maintained? Thus doth
commonsense from these sort of beings, whereof there be innumerable
exposed daily to our observation, even singly considered, deduce the
existence of a wisdom, power, and goodness unconceivably great; and there
are probably divers others (stones, metals, minerals, &c.) no less obvious,
even here on the earth, our place of dwelling, which, were our senses able to
discern their constitution and texture, would afford matter of the same
acknowledgment.
2. But if, passing from such particulars, we observe the relation of several kinds
of things each to other, we shall find more reason to be convinced concerning
the same excellent perfections farther extending themselves. Is there not, for
instance, a palpable relation between the frame, the temper, the natural
inclinations or instincts of each animal, and its element or natural place and
abode; wherein it can only live, finding therein its food, its harbour, its
refuge? Is not to each faculty within an object without prepared, exactly
correspondent thereto; which were it wanting, the faculty would become vain
and useless, yea sometime harmful and destructive; as reciprocally the object
would import little or nothing, if such a faculty were not provided and suited
thereto? As for example, what would an eye signify, if there were not light
prepared to render things visible thereto? and how much less considerable
than it is would the goodly light itself be, were all things in nature blind, and
uncapable to discern thereby? What would the ear serve for, if the air were
 not suitably disposed in a due consistency, and capable of moderate
undulations distinguishable there-by? The like we might with the same
reason inquire concerning the other senses and faculties, vital or animal, and
their respective objects, which we may observe with admirable congruity
respecting each other. So many, so plain, so exactly congruous are the
relations of things here about us each to other; which surely could not
otherwise come than from one admirable wisdom and power conspiring thus
to adapt and connect them together; as also from an equal goodness,
declared in all these things being squared so fitly for mutual benefit and
convenience. Well, then, is it to a fortuitous necessity (or a necessary chance)
that we owe all these choice accommodations and pre-eminences of nature?
must we bless and worship fortune for all this? did she so especially love us,
and tender our good? was she so indulgent toward us, so provident for us in
so many things, in everything; making us the scope of all her workings and
motions here about us? Oh, brutish degeneracy! Are we not, not only
wretchedly blind and stupid, if we are not able to discern so clear beams of
wisdom shining through so many perspicuous correspondences; if we cannot
trace the Divine power by footsteps so express and remarkable; if we cannot
read so legible characters of transcendent goodness; but extremely unworthy
and ungrateful, if we are not ready to acknowledge, and with hearty
thankfulness to celebrate all these excellent perfections, by which all these
things have been so ordered, as to conspire and co-operate for our benefit?
3. Yea, all of them join together in one universal consort, with one harmonious
voice, to proclaim one and the same wisdom to have designed, one and the
same power to have produced, one and the same goodness to have set both
wisdom and power on work in designing and in producing their being; in
preserving and governing it: for this whole system of things what is it, but
one goodly body, as it were, compacted of several members and organs; so
aptly compacted together, that each confers its being and its operation to the
grace and ornament, to the strength and stability of the whole; one soul (of
Divine providence) enlivening in a manner, and actuating it all? We may
perhaps not discern the use of each part, or the tendency of each particular
effect; but of many they are so plain and palpable, that reason obliges us to
suppose the like of the rest. Even as a person whom we observe frequently to
act with great consideration and prudence when at other times we cannot
penetrate the drift of his proceedings, we must yet imagine that he hath
some latent reason, some reach of policy, that we are not aware of; or, as in
an engine consisting of many parts, curiously combined, whereof we do
perceive the general use, and apprehend how divers parts thereof conduce
thereto, reason prompts us (although we neither see them all, nor can
comprehend the immediate serviceableness of some) to think they are all in
some way or other subservient to the artists design: such an agent is God,
the wisdom of whose proceedings being in so many instances notorious, we
ought to suppose it answerable in the rest; such an engine is this world, of
which we may easily enough discern the general end, and how many of its
parts do conduce thereto; and cannot therefore in reason but suppose the
rest in their kind alike congruous, and conducible to the same purpose. If the
nature of any cause be discoverable by its effects; if from any work we may
infer the workmans ability; if in any case the results of wisdom are
 distinguishable from the consequences of chance, we have reason to believe
that the Architect of this magnificent and beautiful frame was one
incomprehensibly wise, powerful, and good Being; so that they are
inexcusable, who from hence do not know God; or knowing Him do not
render unto Him His due glory and service. (Isaac Barrow, D. D.)

JER 51:27
Thus saith the Lord: Set ye up a standard in the land.

The standard of the Cross, a rallying-point for the people

Set ye up a standard, plain, obvious to be seen; a standard, high, on a mountain
top, so as to be a rallying-point for the people in the battle of the Lord. A message,
this, to fire the hearts of men, to steep them to the full in the sense of life s
solemnity. The appeal of the prophet had reference, in the first instance, to the
assault of the Persian armies upon the fortress city of Babylon. Cyrus was employed
(to use the language of the prophet elsewhere) as the very battle-axe of God; who
was to do Gods work in delivering the Jews from their captivity, and rebuilding for
their use His Temple at Jerusalem. It is the commission of the Lord God to His
Church in every age; to lift up the ensign of the Cross, the banner of Christian
conflict, the talisman of victory, the rallying-point of all true hearts in the battle of
the Lord, against the power of evil that is abroad in our midst. If there is one lesson
more emphatically taught than any other by the facts of our present-day experience,
it is the lesson that in Christianity alone lies, after all, the true and ultimate hope of
the world; that the standard of the Gospel is the only true measure of our social
reforms and of our personal or political ideals.
1. There is a power in our midst to-day--a power so imperious that a man may
well be excused for holding it to be well-nigh irresistible--the power of public
opinion. Are we not apt to forget that this potent engine of our modern life is
one whose motive force may, and should be, in a Christian country, spent
always in the cause of God, and of His Christ? It is an engine which, if it be
informed by hearts aglow with the Spirit of Christ, and guided by hands that
are exercised in deeds of truth and love, may well work miracles before our
eyes. Then, may not our Church expect of all her sons that each one of them
should realise his personal responsibility in this respect?
2. What a motto is this for our national and imperial politics! What a
programme is here set forth for any Government, under whatever
accidents of political party! Set ye up a standard in the land; a standard of
righteousness and of good faith in matters of international law, or the
observance of international treaties.
3. May not this be taken, again, as a potent watchword at our parliamentary
elections? Can we not, each one of us, deal at any rate with our own vote as
with a serious trust? Can we not raise over our polling-booths a standard of
principle rather than party? Can we not muster courage to demand fair play
for all; to denounce the use of unworthy weapons in the process of
electioneering--the weapons of declamation and mob-flattery, of slander and
personal abuse, of mere brute force, obstruction, and of secret bribery,
 boycotting, or cowardly intimidation? Set up a standard in the land. What
nobler principle for our legislation itself? A standard of mercy and
unselfishness, of wise and intelligent sympathy in dealing with the needs of
the many; a standard of absolute impartiality, strict and entire justice, in
legislating for the uneducated and the helpless classes of our population.
4. So, too, with respect to other matters of less distinctly political interest. There
is room, surely, for a higher standard in questions of pressing social gravity,
such as, for example, the subject of national education. Here, at any rate, the
Church is pre-eminently bound to hold aloft the ideal of that which alone is
worthy of the name of education. Or, turning again to such facts as are
revealed by our criminal statistics, in view of the open sore of our national
intemperance; or of the not less terrible though secret cancer of our national
impurity, can we not, as carrying the Cross of our dear Lords self-denial on
our foreheads, can we not do something towards setting up a standard in our
homes, in our streets, in our business, and in our amusements,--a standard
of sobriety and of purity?
5. So, again, in our very amusements. It rests with you, of the English Church
laity, to set up a standard in the land. It is for you, who are the patrons of
the English stage, to pronounce with no faltering accent that the drama--
whether grave or gay--no more necessitates the stimulus of an immoral plot,
or the adjuncts of a vicious art, than the pen of a Macaulay, a Tennyson, or a
Browning, need defile itself with the innuendoes of a Wycherley or the
coarseness of a Congreve.
6. And once again, in reference to those forum of sin to which as a great
commercial people we arc especially prone. Have we not enough knowledge
of a sound political economy to see that all the remedies which Parliament
can propose will never touch the root of the evil we deplore? that what is
wanted is not so much the mere readjustment of taxation, still less the
forcible redistribution of our wealth, as the introduction of a higher standard
into our commercial transactions; the standard of a fairer co-operation
between the capitalist and the workman--of a more just and upright dealing
between tradesman and customer--of a closer sympathy between master and
servant, between producer and consumer: a standard of hard, but not
slavish, honest, and conscientious work--a standard of fair working hours
and fair working profits; a standard of just prices and honest weights and
measures; a standard of thrift and temperance and industry, that will
condemn idleness and dishonesty in the workman, the producer, but which
will not excuse indolence and selfishness and unbridled luxury in the
consumer; a standard which denounces all trade adulterations, all lying
labels, all imitation brands, all false advertisements, and other similar forms
of commercial ostentation and inequity; a standard, moreover, which
declares such sins to be as sinful among the warehouses of the city as in the
village shop, and pronounces the vices of the west to be at least as criminal as
the crimes of the east. Lift up your hearts, then, comrades in the sacred
battlefield of right and wrong! Look to that warrior Christ who leads us on.
(H. B. Ottley, M. A.)
 JER 51:1
Let Jerusalem come into your mind.

Sacred memories
The captives in Babylon are charged to remember Jerusalem, because the temple
of their God was there; to keep them from settling down in Babylon.

I. THERE IS A JERUSALEM HERE BELOW WHICH SHOULD COME INTO OUR MIND. The
Church of the living God is our holy city, the city of the Great King, and we should
have it in mind--
1. To unite with its citizens. Join with them in open profession of faith in Christ,
in Christian love and mutual help, in holy service, worship, communion, &c.
2. To pray for its prosperity. Our window, like that of Daniel, should be opened
towards Jerusalem.
3. To labour for its advancement. Remember it in the allotment of money, use of
time, employment of talents, exercise of influence, &c.
4. To prefer its privileges above earthly gain. Consider these privileges in our
choice of our residence, occupation, &c.
5. To act consistently with her holy character. Gods people must not degrade
His name and cause by living in sin.
6. To lament its declensions and transgressions (Luk 19:41; Php 3:18).

II. There is a Jerusalem above which should come into our mind.
1. Let the believers thoughts often go thither, for Jesus is there, our departed
brethren are there, our own home is there, and thither our hopes and desires
should always tend. It should be upon our minds--
(1) In our earthly enjoyments, lest we grow worldly.
(2) In our dally trials, lest we grow despondent.
(3) In our associations, lest we idolise present friendships.
(4) In our bereavements, lest we grieve inordinately.
(5) In old age, that we may be on the watch for the home-going.
(6) In death, that visions of glory may brighten our last hours.
(7) In all seasons, that our conversation may be in heaven.
2. Let the unconverted permit such thoughts to come into their mind, for they
may well inquire of themselves thus--
(1) What if I never enter heaven?
(2) Shall I never meet my godly relatives again?
(3) Where then must I go?
(4) Can I hope that my present life will lead me to heaven?
(5) Why am I not taking the right path?
(6) Unbelievers perish: why am I one of them? Do I wish to perish?
(7) How can I hope to enter heaven if I do not so much as think about it, or
 the Lord who reigns in it? (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Longing for heaven

It may be a sin to long for death, but I am sure it is no sin to long for heaven.
(Matthew Henry, D. D.)

Blessed are the home-sick, for they shall come at last to the Fathers house.
(Heinrich Stillings.)

Heaven neglected
John Eliot was once on a visit to a merchant, and finding him in his counting-
house, where he saw books of business on the table, and all his books of devotion on
the shelf, he said to him, Sir, here is earth on the table, and heaven on the shelf.
Pray dont think so much of the table as altogether to forget the shelf. (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Jerusalem to be enshrined in memory and heart

But these captive Jews were not to be despairing Jews. In seventy years their
captivity was to end. Meantime, as a resource against discouragement, against the
infecting Babylonian evil with which they were to be surrounded, Jeremiah
commands these Israelites, And let Jerusalem come into your minds. Think of
what she has been; think of what restored Jerusalem is to be; remember that you are
really citizens, not of this Babylon, but of Gods Jerusalem; and as citizens of this
Jerusalem, even though you be in Babylon, endure, hope, live. Everywhere in
Scripture the earthly Jerusalem is the symbol of the heavenly. We have right to
generalise. From the fact that whatever God says is to be in this world comes to be,
we have reason to believe that whatever God says concerning the other world
certainly is. When the Scriptures tell me that the earthly Jerusalem points to a
heavenly Jerusalem, because I find God s Word so true about everything in this
world, I have right to believe it true about things in that; I have right to believe that
there is a heavenly Jerusalem. So let the heavenly Jerusalem come into your minds.
1. Let Jerusalem come into your mind when it seems to you as though life were
not worth the living. There is a better life beyond, for which this is
preparation.
2. Let Jerusalem come into your mind when you seem to yourself specially
baffled.
3. Let Jerusalem come into your mind when the fight with sin is sore and weary.
4. Let Jerusalem come into your mind when death seems complete victor. This
is the greatest of questions for each one of us, Have we any title in that
Jerusalem? Can we let it come into our minds as our own? (Homiletic
Review.)

Quickened memories for Gods house and worship

Jerusalem should come into our mind so that we should prefer its privileges to
earthly gain. Whenever we are about to make a settlement in any place, and have the
choice of residence left to ourselves, the first matter we have to consider is the
religions advantages and disadvantages. I admire the action of that Jew who, when
he was about to select a city in which he would pursue his business, asked his friend
the rabbi, Is there a synagogue in such and such a place? The rabbi replied, No.
So the Jew said, Then I will not go to live there, for I will not settle in any place,
where there is no synagogue, for I must gather with my people for the worship of
God. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The first place in our thought to be given to Christs Church

The Church of God should come into our minds as spontaneously as the
recollection of our wife or mother. When we look at a map of any country, we should
think of how the cause of God prospers in that region. If we make a profit in
business, one of our first thoughts should be, Now I can do something more for the
work of the Lord. When the newspaper is read, it should be in relation to the
progress of the kingdom of God. This one thing should tinge all other things with its
own colour, and draw all other thoughts into its net. The cause of Christ should be
an all-absorbing maelstrom, into which all our thoughts and pursuits should be
drawn. A man of one idea aces thy universe by the light of it, and he who loves the
Church of God with all his heart will do the same. How can we say, Lord, remember
me, to Christ in heaven, if we do not remember His Church on earth?
Looking heavenward
These words were addressed to the exiled Jews in Babylon, in view of their
enfranchisement, and their return to their own country. A four months journey lay
before them, a road infested by savage men and marked by many discomforts had to
be trodden, and hence this counsel was given to hearten and comfort the pilgrims.
Let the dear place shine before your eyes, let its spell be upon your hearts, and this
will relieve the tedium of the journey, make you brave to face the foe, keep you from
fainting, and secure the success of your journey. The text is relevant to all times, and
especially if we think of the heavenly instead of the earthly Jerusalem. Jesus was
always reminding His hearers of the upper universe. Paul admonishes us to Seek
those things which are above. And again and again we are reminded of our fugitive
life in this world--we are strangers, sojourners, pilgrims, and are urged to look
upward. In recent years there have been those who have disparaged everything in
the nature of other-worldliness. I think it was George Eliot who set this modern
fashion of condemning attention to the celestial world, but her life was a sad,
suggestive commentary on her loss of faith. But George Eliot has had not a few
followers in her anti-heavenly propaganda. Rationalists, Agnostics, and Socialists
have vetoed the other-worldly life. There was little need for this adjuration. Heaven
is one of the most neglected subjects in present-day preaching. The Sunday is not
more restful and healing because given up to the consideration of secular subjects;
character is not more refined, ethereal, and blessed because men look down instead
of up; the world is not richer but poorer for ignoring the Ideal, the Mystical, the
Transcendental, the Divine. The grandest souls of the past--noble-tempered, fine-
charactered men and women of majestic mien--are thus described: They looked for
a city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. There are three or
four reasons why we should earnestly cultivate this other-worldly disposition.

I. IT IS NECESSARY FOR OUR SALVATION. The Christian life is one of perpetual peril.
We are menaced from every quarter. The microbe is ever on our track, and we need
to be on our guard to ward off our foes. But the perils of our body are as nothing
compared with our soul-perils. Our danger arises from this present evil world. It is
always near us, appealing to us, setting its snares, offering us its bewildering and
beguiling baits. It comes, too, in such subtle forms, in the form of a fair-faced friend;
it can make use of such attractive things, and sometimes souls are ensnared before
they are aware of it. Think of a man living daily in some social circles with their
artificialities, their unrealities, white lies, lamentable hypocrisies; or in the world of
politics with its understandings, trickeries, untruths; or in the world of business
with its corners, monopolies, injustices, sharp practice! What does it mean? Full
often the dulling of the mind, the paralysis of the conscience, ay, it means the heart
loses its freshness, and the life its whiteness. And, mark you, it is not that one need
voluntarily yield himself up to these blighting phenomena not to resist is to suffer.
Then, what can be done to break the spell of this present world, and ensure our
salvation? Let Jerusalem come into your mind, suffer the better world to
overshadow the worse world, get into Gods own climate, cultivate the heavenly
vision. Fetch heavens light down to earth. Fetch the fresh air of the eternal hills
down to this stifling, stagnant scene. Fetch the music of heaven down to this
terrestrial sphere. The better saves from the worse. Its glory will be glory no longer,
its unreality will be sighted, and he will be saved. It is the far-off look that is needed,
a vision of the eternal things which is our salvation. Sir Redvers Bullet has told us
that in the late war the Boers fought better than our own soldiers, because they had
better eyesight, and could see much farther, and no doubt the reason why many
Christians are overtaken by spiritual calamities is because they cannot see afar off,
they do not lift up their eyes on high. Let us accustom our eyes to see the glories of
the New Jerusalem.

II. IT IS NECESSARY FOR OUR AMPLIFICATION. Familiarity with the world does not
broaden men, but narrows them. Born a man and died a grocer, says the epitaph,
and the shrinkage of a soul is one of the painfullest features of life. Many people feel
they are sadly caged up, with no poetry, romance, interests, change in their lives.
Well, what are we to do? How to make life broader? Thank God, we have an answer-
-annex heaven. Reinforce, says one, this world with the world which is to come.
What do they do in an inland state that is surrounded by other countries, and
cramped in on every side? They fight to get down to the sea. Give a country only a
few miles, and it is satisfied. Why? Because it will build a harbour there, and it will
make ships there, and the enterprising spirits of the nation will man the ships, and
the ships will go to the ends of the earth, carrying out such poor things as they have
to send, but bringing home untold treasures. That single harbour holds the whole
earth in its grasp. It is even so in our spiritual life. When I am linked with the skies,
when I do commerce with heaven my life cannot be petty, narrow, insignificant. I
am not lost in my trade, business, profession, nor does my soul undergo any
shrinkage. Nay, I do my buying and selling, my getting and spending, in the eyes of
heaven. A literary lady who went to consult an oculist about her eyes was told that
her eye-weariness and brain-jadedness would pass away if she would now and then
pause from her work, and sight the glorious hills in the distance, and she found it so.
Is not this what we sorely need to save our life from getting cramped by what is
sordid and petty--pauses to look away from lifes manifold engagements to the
bright-topped hills of immortality? It is ours, like the apostle at Patmos, to see the
fair city of our King, to fraternise with the denizens of the skies, to consort with God
Himself, and to do this is to find the grandest emancipation.

III. IT IS NECESSARY TO OUR CONSOLATION. He was a wise professor who used to

say to his students when going to preach, Never fail in any service to have at least a
word of comfort. There is a sore, ii not a broken, heart in every religious assembly.
Existence were a poor mockery if this world were all. To how many life is just one
long bitter struggle. Think of those, the bruised and broken, who are on their back
all their days; think of those who, through no fault of their own, are face to face with
poverty most of their time; think of those who have been overtaken by a black
bereavement with tragic suddenness; think of these who are left orphans when
young, and are at the mercy of an unfeeling world; think of those who have secret
trials--trials of which they never whisper even to their dearest friends; think of those
who, in trying to live the Christian life, are sorely, buffeted! Where is the
compensation? This: Let Jerusalem come into your mind. Think of it as the place
where all lifes wrongs will be ended, where the weary-footed will lay aside their
sandals, and the weary-hearted will find sweet rest, where the homeless will find a
home, where the broken circles will be re-formed, and where the miseries of a
lifetime will be forgotten in the first moment of hallowed bliss.

IV. IT IS NECESSARY TO OUR INSPIRATION. One of our primary needs is inspiration,

we so soon begin to flag and lose heart. It is needful for the maintenance of our
ideals, for the shaping of a holy character, to keep us steadfast in the midst of strife
and sorrow. It is painful to note how that when men forget the heavenward look,
they drift from the golden life, part with their noble dreams, sink beneath their
troubles, and fall into bondage to a sensuous life. There are wrecks on all sides of us-
-Demases who have loved this present world. We surmount the flesh by ascending
with Christ to the realm of the spirit. In those who are occupied with Christ and His
kingdom, who set their mind on the things above where Christ is, carnal passions
cease to be nourished, the former channels of thought and desire are left bare and
dry, the mans soul is caught by a keener excitement and a mightier current, he is
drawn into the orbit of the Sun of Righteousness. He is absorbed in the great and
entrancing things of God, and the old frivolities can no longer divert him. The same
is true of every other phase of our earth-life. This was the temper of Moses, and it
heartened him for the most prodigious tasks. He looked for the recompense of the
reward. This was the temper of the old-world pilgrims, they desired a better
country, that is a heavenly. The saints of God, the men for whom duty, religion,
faith, love, character, possess their full meaning, are known by this far-away look,
this detachment of spirit. At the bottom of their souls is a Divine home-sickness for
the Eternal--and this made them spiritual stalwarts. This, also, was the temper of
Jesus. Never for a moment did He forget the Father, the will, the home, the
friendship and fellowship of the Father, I speak unto you the things that I have seen
with the Father. I go to My Father. And a share of His glory He assured to all His
faithful followers. I have read somewhere of a bewildered party on a mountain.
Pressing on in the blinding snow, the track lost and the cold increasing, one of them
at last in sneer fatigue sank flown to die. His friends coaxed him, urged him,
expostulated with him so as to get him forward, but all to no purpose. But some one
took from his pocket a picture of wife and children, and showed it to him. That was
enough; what coaxing and threats failed to effect was done in an instant by that
vision of the far-off home. He at once threw off the death-drowse that was so surely
embracing him, and rousing himself with the new power that came from that vision,
he pushed forward with his friends to a place of safety. And our Divine Leader, when
we are flagging and wearying, gives us pictures of the heavenly home to hearten us.
(J. Pearce.)

JEREMIAH 52

JER 52:11
He put out the eyes of Zedekiah.

Zedekiah the prisoner

Here is no mystery. A wicked man, unfaithful to a very sacred trust, ending his
days in darkness and a prison (Psa 37:35). The son of the good Josiah, whose name
suggests thoughts of early piety and godly patriotism, degenerate, idolatrous, and in
the end eyeless and captive, pining away years of monotonous misery in a
Babylonish dungeon--it is all according to that law which God has stamped on the
world, Your sin will find you out. It has been said of him that he was a man not so
much bad at heart as weak in will. He was one of those unfortunate characters, it
has been said, frequent in history, like our own Charles I. and Louis XVI. of France,
who find themselves at the head of affairs during a great crisis, without having the
strength of character to enable them to do what they know to be right, and whose
infirmity becomes moral guilt. That he was weak in will and purpose we see in the
manner in which he surrendered Jeremiah to the princes who sought his life (Jer
38:3). But he was bad at heart likewise. His heart was not right towards the Lord
God of his father--self and the world and idols were the objects of his affection, and
after them he would go. Warning succeeded warning in vain. For eleven years the
struggle lasted between this wicked prince and the voice which came to him from
the God of heaven. And the Jerusalem of his day may be described as the Sodom of
an earlier day--
Long warned, long spared, till her whole heart was foul,
And fiery vengeance on its clouds came nigh.
Vengeance came in another form than that in which it fell on those cities over
whose ashes the waves of the Dead Sea now roll, and yet scarcely less terrible. The
Babylonian siege lasted sixteen months (53:4), and the miseries of Jerusalem were
only less than those endured in the siege by the Roman Titus, seven centuries after.
The calamities which befell the royal family are recorded with an undisguised
bluntness (verses8-11). What a catalogue of horrors! But all in keeping with the
character of the people. They had been described to the very life at an earlier stage of
the ministry of Jeremiah (Jer 6:22-23). This witness is true. The very stones, stones
carved with their own hands, have been disinterred from the grave of ages, to bear
testimony to the truth of the histories and prophecies of the Bible. Instead of being
ashamed of the barbarities in which they indulged, the Assyrians (and in this we
need make no distinction between the Assyrians and the Chaldeans) gloried in them,
and employed the arts of sculpture and painting to perpetuate the memory of their
cruel deeds. On the relics of their civilisation, now exhibited in our own museums
and places of public resort, we find cities which have surrendered represented as
given up to indiscriminate slaughter and the flames. The kings themselves took part
in perpetrating the cruelties which are brought to light by recently discovered
sculptures. On one of these sculptures a king is represented as thrusting out the eyes
of a kneeling captive with his own spear, and holding with his own hand the cord
which is inserted into the lips and nostrils of this and two other prisoners. The spirit
which possessed the Assyrians and Babylonians may be traced through later ages in
the same lands. One of the best of the Roman emperors, Valerian, was taken
prisoner in battle in the third century by a Persian king, who detained him in
hopeless bondage, and paraded him in chains, invested with the imperial purple, as
a constant spectacle of fallen greatness, to the multitude. Whenever the proud
conqueror mounted his horse, he placed his foot upon the neck of the Roman
emperor Nor was this all for when Valerian sank under the weight of his shame and
grief, his corpse was flayed, and the skin, stuffed with straw, was preserved for ages
in the most celebrated temple of Persia. Would that such things as these could he
told only of Eastern lands! But Western story is full of them likewise. The conflicts of
the Moors and so-called Christians in Spain, from the eighth century, the age of
Moorish conquest, to the sixteenth, the age of their final expulsion from Europe,
contains histories of cruelty, perhaps, to be rivalled nowhere else--cruelty in which
the so-called Christian luxuriated as much as his Moslem enemy. This spirit attained
its highest point of intensity and barbarity in the same land in the Inquisition,
strangely called the Holy Office, by which sheer torture was invoked to root out
Judaism, and every form and shade of Christianity except that of the Roman
Church. The appliances of rude barbarians, like American Indians, and of civilised
barbarians, like Assyrians and Chaldeans, are not to compare with the appliances
which the Inquisition perfected through its ages of murder. But to return to the
Babylonish cruelties on the person and family of the Hebrew king. The King of
Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. How many or how old they were,
we are not told. The father being now only two-and-thirty years old, his sons must
have been boys. And ungodly as the father was, there is no sign in his life of any
want of natural affection, while there is sign of his sensibility to the sufferings of
others. To put his sons to death before his eyes was an act of wanton cruelty,
designed to give him the utmost possible pain. Then were put to death the princes of
Judah, who must now recall with bitterness, if not with repentance, their long and
obstinate resistance to the Divine counsels, and their own hard-hearted attempt on
the life of the prophet Jeremiah. His sons dead, and the princes dead, the king
himself must now submit to the cruel sentence of his conqueror--a sentence more
barbarous than death itself. His eyes were put out. The process is revealed to us in a
bas-relief, to which I have already referred, in which the conquering king is digging
out the eyes of the conquered king with a spear. The King of Babylon may have done
this with his own hands to the King of Judah, or by the hands of another. In either
ease the conquered had no alternative but to submit. And thus blinded he is carried
to the prison on the banks of the Euphrates in which he must end his days. Two
predictions were thus fulfilled--one by Jer 32:5, addressed to the king m person, and
one by Eze 12:13, who was with the captives which had been carried to Babylon
some years before. The Word of the Lord was not broken. The King of Judah saw the
King of Babylons eyes with his eyes, but it was the last vision which his eyes saw.
The city of Babylon he saw not, though he was doomed to be imprisoned in it and to
die there. When Zedekiah reached Babylon, there was already a King of Judah
imprisoned there. His nephew, the son of his elder brother Jehoiakim, had been
dethroned, as we have seen, after a brief reign of three months and ten days, and
had been carried into exile with many of his princes and subjects (Jer 29:1-32.).
That he was still alive when his uncle and successor, blind and childless, arrived in
the city of their enemy, we know--for the last sentences of the Book of Jeremiah tell
us what befell him many years later. One wonders whether the two dethroned Kings
of Judah, uncle and nephew, ever met in the land of their imprisonment, and had
opportunity of talking over the events which had involved them in so great a
disaster. If they had, did they curse the God of their fathers, or did they learn, as
some of these fathers had done in the day of their adversity, to humble themselves
and seek forgiveness? Their great predecessor, Solomon, in dedicating the temple
which Babylon had now ]aid waste, had prayed (1Ki 8:46-50). Imagine Jehoiakim
reading these words out of the book of the law to his blind uncle Zedekiah. Imagine
them recalling the history of the great-grandfather of the elder of them--how
Manasseh had done evil exceedingly; how the King of Assyria had bound him with
fetters and carried him to Babylon; and how, when he was in affliction, he besought
the Lord (2Ch 33:12). Thus encouraged to repent and seek forgiveness, the royal
prisoners may have bent the knee together before the throne of the heavenly grace,
and pied the promises which had been given so often to the penitent. And if they
presented thus the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart in their prison-house, we
know that mercy was not withheld. We find one little word which encourages hope.
There shall he be till I visit him, saith the Lord (32:5). God visits men with
judgment; but this He had done to Zedekiah before he reached his prison in
Babylon. God visits men with favour, with compassion, with restoring mercy: was it
thus He said He should visit Zedekiah in Babylon I doubt not that the words until I
visit him were meant to be indefinite and obscure, but were meant at the same time
to give assurance to the king that in Babylon he should not be beyond the reach of
God, whether for good or evil. Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God
afar off? Can any hide in secret places, that I shall not see him, saith the Lord? (Jer
23:23-24.) Jehovah was a God at hand in Jerusalem, but equally a God in Babylon
afar off. The throne of Judah was exposed to His eye, but equally so the most secret
place in the Babylonish prison. And God would visit Zedekiah in his exile and
prison. This assurance might be a terror or a joy. If the king hoped that, being in
Babylon, he was now away from the presence of Jehovah and under the rule of other
gods, and had nothing more to fear, let him know that Jehovah should visit him
even there. If he feared that, being in Babylon, he should be beyond the reach of the
mercy of the God of his fathers, let him know, to his hearts joy, that Jehovah should
visit him even in that far-off land. (J. Kennedy, D. D.)

JER 52:31-34
Lifted up the head of Jehoiachin.

Jehoiachins change of fortune

What changes may occur in life: who can tell what we may come to? After thirty-
seven years there arose a king who took a fancy to Jehoiachin, and made quite a
favourite of him in the court. Good fortune is often tardy in coming to men; we are
impatient, we want to be taken out of prison to-day, and set among kings at once,
and to have all our desires gratified fully, and especially at once. See what has
befallen Jehoiachin. For the first time for seven-and-thirty years the man of
authority has spoken kindly to him. Kind words have different values at different
times; sometimes a kind word would be a fortune--if not a fortune in the hand, a
fortune in the way of stimulating imagination, comforting disconsolateness, and so
pointing to the sky that we could see only its real blue beauties, its glints of light, its
hints of coming day. When we have an abundant table, what do we care for an
offered crust? that crust may be regarded by our sated appetite as an insult: but
when the table is bare, and hunger is gnawing, and thirst is consuming, what then is
a crust of bread, or a draught of water? More men hunger for kind words than for
bread. There is a hunger of the heart. Here is an office we can all exercise. Where we
cannot give much that is described as substantial we can speak kindly, we can look
benignantly, we can conduct ourselves as if we would relieve the burden if we could:
thus life would be multiplied, brightened, sweetened, a great comforting sense of
Divine nearness would fall upon our whole consciousness, and we should enter into
the possession and the mystery of heavenly peace. See what fortune has befallen
Jehoiachin! After thirty-seven years he is recognised as king and gentleman and
friend, and has kind words spoken to him in a kind of domestic music. Was not all
this worth living for? What have we been doing in thus dwelling upon the good
fortune of Jehoiachin? We have been playing the fool. We have been reckoning up
social precedences, better clothes, and abundance of food; and we have been adding
up how much the man must have worn and eaten and drunken within the twenty-
four hours, and all the while the king looking at him benignantly, speaking to him as
an equal, dealing out to him kind words,--the whole constituting an ineffable insult.
Yet how prone we are to add up circumstances, and to speak of social relations as if
they constituted the sum-total of life. Now look at realities. Jehoiachin was in his
heart a bad man. That is written upon the face of the history of the kings of Judah,
and not a single word is said about his change of heart; and bad men cannot have
good fortune. He has been taken out of prison in the narrow sense of the term, his
head has been lifted up, a place of precedence has been accorded him at the royal
table, and his bread and water have been made sure for the rest of his days: what a
delightful situation! No. Jehoiachin at his best was only a decorated captive; he was
still in Babylon. That is the sting. Not what have we, but where are we, is heavens
piercing inquiry. Not how great the barns; state the height, the width, the depth, the
cubic measure of the barns; but, What wheat have we in the heart, what bread in the
soul, what love-wine for the spirits drinking? (J. Parker, D. D.)

A captors magnanimity and generous dealing

At the battle of Poitiers the Black Prince defeats and captures the French King
John II. That night the Prince of Wales (the Black Prince) made a supper in his
lodging for the French king and to the great lords that were prisoners. And always
the prince served before the king, as humbly as he could, and would not sit at the
kings board, for any desire that the king could make, and exhorted him not to be of
heavy cheer, for that King Edward, his father, should bear him all honour and amity,
and accord with him so reasonably that they should be friends ever after.. . . This
scene, so gracefully performed by him who, a few hours before, was courageous and
cruel as a lion, was in perfect accordance with the system of chivalry. (Knights
England.)
 And spake kindly unto him.--
Kindness
To be kind is to be disposed to do good to others, and to make them happy; and
kindness is that temper or disposition which delights in contributing to the
happiness of others.

I. Much depends on OUR SPIRIT AND DISPOSITION--well-nigh everything; for a

kindly spirit or disposition will always be finding ways of showing itself.

II. BE KIND IN YOUR THOUGHTS ONE TO ANOTHER. To have pure streams you must
have a pure fountain; and if we think unkindly of people, we shall not be likely to
speak or act kindly towards them. Some people rob their own hearts of peace and
sweetness, and destroy in themselves all nobility of character, because they have got
into the sad, sinful habit of always looking for the faults and failings of others, and
attributing to them wrong motives.

III. BE KIND IN YOUR SPEECH ONE TO ANOTHER. Words are little things and soon
spoken, but they carry much with them. They have power to give great joy or bitter
sorrow; they may nestle in the heart a very benediction, cherished to the dying day
as an inspiration to all that is good; or they may rankle in the breast, fostering a
bitterness which goes down to the grave. Kind words can never die.

IV. DO KIND ACTS ONE TO ANOTHER. Every day brings opportunities. Keep a look-
out for them. (R. M. Spoor.)

Every day a portion.

The daily portion

If the King of Babylon did thus for a captive king, his prisoner, will your Heavenly
Father do less for you? He created you to need the daily portion, and cannot be
oblivious of His own constitution of your nature. You wind up your watch each day,
because you know that otherwise it will stop; and God win not be less thoughtful of
your constant need of reinforcement. His faithfulness guarantees that there always
will be the portion of good for the body; always the portion of love and light for the
soul; always the portion of Holy Spirit quickening ,for the spirit. It is easier to die
once than to live always. It is not easy to meets the continual demand of recurrent
duty; not easy to live a full and strong life, that never dips below the horizon, or
sinks in the fountain-basin. But it is possible, when the soul has learnt to leave all
care with God, waiting on Him for the supply of all its needs, and esteeming that He
is the only really satisfactory portion we need. Neither prison walls, nor locks, nor
the cruelty of man, said some imprisoned suffering soul, can obstruct the issues of
the Lords love nor the manifestation of His presence, which is our joy and comfort,
and carries us above all sufferings, and makes days and hours and years pleasant to
us; which pass away as a moment, because of the enjoyment of seeing Him with
whom a thousand years is but as one day. Those who can trust God in these
directions are not only abundantly satisfied of His great goodness, but are able to
send portions to others. Like the disciples, they share out their slender supplies and
get twelve baskets full in return. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

All the days of his life.--

A good income for life
This paragraph describes the providential dealings of the Lord with Jehoiachin by
the instrumentality of Evil-merodach, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, who was then
King of Babylon; yet the successive items of those dealings are so expressive that
they seem almost to force themselves upon the mind in a spiritual form, and
therefore I shall accommodate those items to spiritual things.

I. THE DEALINGS OF THE LORD AS HERE SET BEFORE US, with Jehoiachin, king, as he
should have been, of Judah, but for thirty-seven years a captive. Now, however, the
time came for him to be released. First, then, Evil-merodach, King of Babylon,
lifted up the head of Jehoiachin, that is, gave him a hope of deliverance, This is the
first item. Now it is sin which hath brought us down, and when a sinner is made
acquainted with his state as a sinner, he feels then that his heart and soul are bowed
down, and he can in no wise lift up himself. Faith brings in the Redeemer in His
perfection; there is an end to our sin and our folly; by faith in Him we may lift up
our heads and meet the smiles of heaven; we shall meet, by faith in Him, the
approbation of heaven, the light of Jehovahs countenance; we shall thus meet our
great Creator as our covenant God, dwelling between the cherubim, and He will
shine forth. Here, then, we may say with David, Thou art my glory, and the lifter up
of mine head. If, then, we would lift up our heads, it must be by Jesus Christ; that
is, by His wisdom, not by our own; except that our wisdom consisteth in the feeling
our foolishness, and receiving the Lord Jesus Christ as that way in which we may
rise, and do at times rise as eagles; run, and are not weary; walk, and shall not faint.
Second, he brought him forth out of prison. Here we have another Gospel blessing to
go with us all the days of our life. Jesus Christ came into the prison of our law
responsibility; He became a debtor to do the whole law; and He hath preceptively,
actively, and passively magnified the law. He has gone to the end of our law
responsibility, and has suffered all that sin has entailed. He has done a great deal
more spiritually than Evil-merodach, King of Babylon, did literally. He brought forth
Jehoiachin out of prison, but our Jesus Christ has destroyed our prison; there is no
prison left. The Son of God has made you free; let us stand fast in the liberty
wherewith Christ hath made us free, and that all the days of our lives. So, then, He
lifts up our heads, and we are free. The next thing the king did was a very wonderful
thing, an extraordinary, out-of-the-way, uncommon thing--an unheard-of, an
unseen thing almost. And what was that? Why, spake kindly unto him all the days
of his life. So our God. He spake kindly unto us when He called us by His grace, and
He has spoken kindly unto us ever since, and He will speak kindly unto us all the
days of our life; and there will be no danger afterwards, because no manner of cause
win exist after the end of this life for there to be anything but kindness. The law of
kindness is the mightiest power in existence; it will do what nothing else can. But,
fourth, Jehoiachin s throne was set above the throne of the kings that were with
him in Babylon. How expressive is this! The Christian has a higher throne than the
highest men in this world. Then, fifth, he changed his prison garments. So the Lord
has promised to give His people the oil of joy for mourning; the garment of praise
for the spirit of heaviness. But in the last place--and all these things put together
seem to amount to perfection itself--he did continually eat bread before the king all
the days of his life. So we are brought before God and into the presence of God, and
as long as Jesus Christ remains in the presence of God, so long shall His people
remain. Jehoiachin was associated in eating with the king; that is to say, he partook
of the same food, or he delighted in the same things, the same provisions, the same
pleasant fruits. Now the things the people of God live upon are the testimonies of
the Gospel in Christ.

II. THE DURATION OF THESE BLESSINGS. First, then, his head was lifted up all the
days of his life. Look at it, Christian, what a good life you have before you! You have
the Holy Spirit to keep you believing in Jesus Christ; the day will never come when
you shall not lift up your head to God. You have before you Jesus Christ, the lifter up
of your head; the day will never come when He will cease to love you. Having loved
His own, He loved them unto the end. You have God the Father, with whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning. Ah, then, let me say, if circumstances of
affliction or adversity should be such that you can lift up your head nowhere else you
can lift up your head there; there is a God that will sustain, that will bear, that will
carry to old age, to hoar hairs, and will deliver. And so he was brought out of prison;
and we are made free all the days of our life. There never will be when we shall not
have liberty in Christ; there never will be when we are not free there. There we may
lift up our heads, because the Saviour has put down into eternal silence everything
that is against us. And the king spake kindly unto him all the days of his life.
Circumstances are like the clouds--not in one shape, nor in one form, nor one
height, nor one colour, nor one position, for a day, or half a day, or half an hour
sometimes; but the glorious truths of the Gospel--His kindness--still the same. And
he set his throne above the kings of Babylon all the days of his life. I want a religion
that places my foot upon the lion, upon the adder, upon the young lion, upon the
dragon, and enables me to trample the whole under foot. Here, then, is a God that
lifts up your head for life, that sets you free for life, speaks kindly to you all the days
of your life, will keep you enthroned all the days of your life; you shall reign like a
king, and your throne unshaken stands; you shall wear the royal robe all the days of
your life, and be sustained all the days of your life. What more can you want?

III. SEVERAL SCRIPTURES BY WHICH THESE THINGS ARE VERY STRIKINGLY AND
BEAUTIFULLY EXEMPLIFIED. I will notice three different Scriptures where we have the
words of our text named, All the days of his life. David upon this subject saith,
Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. What goodness and
mercy? First, pastoral goodness and mercy. He maketh me to lie down, not in dry,
but in green pastures, new covenant promises; He leadeth me beside the still
waters, the deep mysteries of His wondrous kingdom; pastoral kindness, and
restorative and directive goodness and mercy. He restoreth my soul. I am sick,
wretched, and miserable; He restores me to health; cast down, weary, everything
against me; He restores me again. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness,
paths of faith, righteousness of faith; for His names sake; directive and restorative
goodness and mercy. Also accompaniment goodness and mercy. Yea, though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me. And then comes provisional goodness and
mercy; Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou
anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall
follow me all the days of my life. Go from the 23rd to the 27th Psalm. One thing
have I desired of the Lord; that will I seek after. To be so good and pious that all
the world should admire you? No, that is self-righteousness, no, that I may dwell in
the house of the Lord all the days of my life. Well, what are you going to do? To
behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple. For in the time of
trouble He shall hide me in His pavilion; His royal pavilion, the place of His royal
authority; and if I have God on my side in His sovereign authority, who can be
against me? In the secret of His tabernacle shall He hide me; where the mercy-seat
is, that is where I like to be, He shall set me upon a rock. And what then? Now shall
mine head be lifted up above wine enemies round about me; therefore I will offer in
His tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the Lord.
One more Scripture upon this subject. Zacharias, in the 1st of Luke, saith, That we
might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days
of our life. Here carefully note how Zacharias comes into possession of that
holiness and that righteousness by which he knew he should serve the Lord
acceptably all the days of his life. He saith, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for He
hath visited and redeemed His people, and bath raised up an horn of salvation.
Oh, then, if you are going to get this holiness by faith in Christs eternal
redemption, I will come with you. As He spake by the mouth of His holy prophets,
which have been since the world began. So here is redemption, and here is salvation.
Well, that redemption brings holiness, and brings in everlasting righteousness.
Salvation brings holiness, and brings in everlasting righteousness. To perform the
mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember His holy covenant; the oath which
He aware to our father Abraham, saying, In thee and in thy seed, Christ Jesus,
shall all the families of the earth be blessed. So, then, Zacharias got this holiness
and righteousness by faith in the redemption, salvation, mercy, and covenant of
Christ, and the oath of God. Now, in conclusion, if you lose sight of all the rest, do
pay attention to the spirit in which Zacharias desired all the days of his life to serve
God. I do not think there is any Scripture more expressive of the feeling of the right-
minded than that there given. That He would grant unto us, &c. How different this
from the spirit in which people suppose that they do God a great favour, and that
they merit great things at His hands, by a little formal service! But Zacharias looked
at being admitted into the faith, the service of faith, the service of that faith that
receives Christ as the end of sin, and thereby you serve God in Christ as your
sanctification and your justification--Zacharias looked upon that as a Divine grant;
that He would grant unto us to serve Him in holiness and in righteousness all the
days of our life. (Jas Wells.)

LAMENTATIONS

INTRODUCTION TO LAMENTATIONS

THE TITLE OF THE BOOK

We are so familiar with the title which implies Jeremiahs authorship that it would
surprise most readers of the English Bible to learn that, as the Book stands in the
Hebrew text, it is absolutely anonymous. Its only title there is, as with Genesis and
Exodus, the opening word of the Book (Echah). (Dean Plumptre.)

The title in the versions is taken from the general nature of the contents; thus the
LXX called these poems , Threni, i.e. Dirges, and the Syr. and Vulg.,
Lamentations. In the Hebrew Bible the Lamentations are arranged among the
Cethubim, or holy writings, because of the nature of their contents: the
Lamentations as being lyrical poetry are classed not with prophecies, but with the
Psalms and Proverbs. This classification is probably later than the translation of the
LXX, who have appended the Lamentations to Jeremiahs prophecy, inserting
between them the apocryphal book of Baruch, and in fast counting the three as only
one book. (Dean Payne Smith.)

The fuller title, Lamentations of Jeremiah, is found in the Syriac and in some
MSS. of the LXX, but is not so old as the shorter form. (Chamberss Encyclopedia.)

THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE BOOK

The tradition which attributes the authorship to Jeremiah can be traced to a note
prefixed to the LXX translation [and it same to pus, after Israel was led into
captivity, and Jerusalem laid waste, that Jeremiah eat weeping, and lamented with
this lamentation over Jerusalem, and said . . . ]. Perhaps, indeed, this tradition is
already implied in 2Ch 35:25, in which ease the supposed reference to Josiah must
be sought in Lam 4:20. The internal evidence is rather against the attribution of the
Book of Lamentations to the prophet. Nagelsbach, following Ewald, has shown how
completely different is its style from that of Jeremiah; some of the indications that
were at one time supposed to make for his authorship disappear on closer
examination, and the anticipated restoration of Israel is somewhat dissimilar in the
two works. (Chamberss Encyclopaedia.)

It is admitted generally that the elegies must have been written by one or more
persons in or near the times in which Jeremiah lived. The situation is indicated, e.g.,
in Lam 2:9; Lam 4:20; the city in ruins and the king in captivity; and the whole
burden of the Book is the outpouring of grief under a crushing present calamity. The
ninth of Ab is a dark day in the Jewish calendar; and no book in the Old Testament
Canon exhibits more pathetically than this the patriotic attachment of the race to
their city and land, and the intense emotion which was excited by the ruin that came
upon the people through their unfaithfulness. (James Robertson, D. D.)

THE FORM AND CONTENTS OF THE BOOK

The Book consists of five elegies or lamentations, each occupying a chapter, and
all referring to one subject, the destruction of Jerusalem, which it dwells upon and
presents from different sides.
1. The lament or elegy was a well-known form of composition (see Am 5:1-2;
 Isa 14:4-21; 2Sa 1:17-27; 2Sa 3:33-34; Jer 9:10; Jer 9:17-21; Eze 26:17-18,
and observe the frequency and impressiveness of the How!)
2. The different aspects of the great common theme are in a manner indicated in
the opening verse of each chapter, thus: (Lam 1:1) How doth the city sit
solitary!--the desolation of Jerusalem; (Lam 2:1) How hath the Lord
covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in His anger!--the cause of the
calamity, Gods anger (Lam 3:1) I am the man that hath seen affliction by
the rod of His wrath--the nation personified takes the affliction to heart;
(Lam 4:1) How is the gold become dim!--contrast between the present and
the past; (Lam 5:1) Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us,--the
nations appeal to the nations God.
3. The literary form of these five elegies has been artistically constructed. It will
be observed that each of the chapters, except 3, consists of twenty-two
verses, and that chap. 3 contains three times twenty-two, or sixty-six verses.
Now, there are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet; and all the
chapters, except the last, are alphabetical--i.e., the verses are made to begin
in succession with the successive letters, one verse being given to each letter
in chaps, 1, 2, and 4., and three successive verses to one letter in chap.
3. Chap. 5, though not alphabetical, is made to consist of twenty-two verses. The
length of the line and of the verse (what in an English poem we should call
the metre) varies also in the different chapters, as may be perceived in the
arrangement of the R.V. (James Robertson, D. D.)

Our estimate of the excellence of the poems thus written will depend on our
insight into the working of strong emotions on the poetic temperament, on our
power of throwing ourselves into mental sympathy with such a one as Jeremiah. A
superficial and pedantic criticism finds it easy to look down on the alphabetic
structure as indicating a genius of an inferior order, and the taste of a degenerate
age (so De Wette, Comment. uber die Psalm., p. 56, and even Ewald, Poet. Buch., 1.
p. 140), or to show condescendingly that they are not without a certain in degree of
merit in their way (De Wette, as above). A wider induction from the literature of all
nations and ages leads, however, to a different conclusion. The man in whom the
poetic gift is found fears, it would seem, to trust himself to an unregulated freedom.
He accepts the discipline of a self-imposed law just in proportion to the vehemence
of his emotions. The metrical systems of Greek and Latin poetry, with all their
endless complications, hexameters, elegiacs, lyrics, the alliterative verse of Anglo-
Saxon writers, the rhymes of medieval Latin and of modem European poetry in
general, the rigid structure of the sonnet, as seen in the great Italian poets and their
imitators, the terza rima of the Divina Commedia, and the yet more artificial
structure of the canzoni and ballate of Dante, the stanzas of the Faerie Queen, are
all instances of the working of the same general law of which we find a
representative example in the Lamentations. There are, of course, instances enough
in all literature of the form without the spirit, but enough has been said to show that
the choice of an artificial method of versification such as this does not necessarily
imply anything weak or artificial in the genius of the writer. In the absence of rhyme
and of definite metrical laws in Hebrew poetry it was natural that it should be
chosen as supplying at once the restraint and the support which the prophet needed.
The alphabetic structure had also another advantage as a guide to memory. If, as
seems probable, the Lamentations were intended to be sung, as in fact they were
sung by those who mourned then, or in later times, for the destruction of Jerusalem,
then it is obvious that the task of the learner would be much, easier with this
mnemonic help than without it. (Dean Plumptre.)

THE UNITY OF THE BOOK

While there is comparative agreement amongst modern critics that Jeremiah is
not the author, there has been much diversity of opinion as to the number of authors
whose work is to be traced in the Book. W.R. Smith argued strongly that the Book is
a unity, but the prevailing tendency at present is decidedly adverse to this opinion. It
is pretty generally agreed that at least chap. 3 is by a different and later hand than
the rest. (J. A. Selbie, M. A.)

Liturgical use
The Book of Lamentations has always been much used in liturgical services as
giving the spiritual aspect of sorrow. It is recited in the Jewish synagogues on the
9th of Ab, the day on which the temple was destroyed. In the Church of England the
whole of chap. 3 and portions of chaps, 1, 2, and 4 are read in Holy Week. For this
choice two chief reasons may be given: the first, that in the wasted city and homeless
wanderings of the chosen people we see an image of the desolation and ruin of the
soul cast away because of sin from Gods presence into the outer darkness; the
second and chief, because the mournful words of the prophet set Him before us who
has borne the chastisement due to human sin, and of whom we think instinctively as
we pronounce the words of Lam 1:12. (Dean Payne Smith)

LAMENTATIONS 1

LAM 1:1
That was fall of people!
Reverses of fortune
The picture in this verse is strong by contrasts: solitary, and full of people; a
widow, once a queen great among the nations; a princess receiving homage, now
stooping in the act of paying tribute to a higher power. No nest is built so high that
Gods lightning may not strike it. To human vision, it certainly does appear
impossible that certain estates can ever be turned to desolation; the owners are so
full of health and high spirits, and they apparently have so much reason to
congratulate themselves upon the exercise of their own sagacity and strength, that it
would really appear as if no bolt could shatter the castle of their greatness. Yet that
castle we have teen torn down, until there was not one stone left upon another. We
are only strong in proportion as we spend our strength for others, and only rich in
proportion as we invest our gold in the cause of human beneficence. The ruins of
history ought to be monitors and guides to those who take a large view of human
life. Is not the whole of human history a succession of ruins? Where is Greece?
Rome? proud Babylon? the Seven Churches of Asia? We do not despair when we
look at the ruins which strew antiquity; we rather reason that certain institutions
have served their day, and what was good in them has been transferred into
surviving activities. In the text, however, we have no question of ruin that comes by
the mere lapse of time. Such ruin as is here depicted expresses a great moral
catastrophe. Judah did not go into captivity because of her excellency or
faithfulness; she was driven into servitude because of her disobedience to her Lord.
What was true of Judah will be true of every man amongst us. No man can sin, and
prosper. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Changes in the outward estate of the Church

1. God often alters the outward estate of His Church in this world.
(1) That He may daily declare Himself the disposer and governor of all
things.
(2) To take from us all occasions of promising ourselves any certainty here.
Therefore let us prepare ourselves to all conditions (Php 4:11-12); settle
our affections on heaven and the things that lead thereto.
2. It is our duty to strive with ourselves to be affected with the miseries of Gods
people (2Ch 11:28-29). For we are fellow members of one body, whereof
Christ is the Head (1Co 12:25-26).
(1) This reproves those who seek only their own good.
(2) It teaches us to put on tender compassion and labour to profit the whole
Church and every member thereof.
3. God sometimes giveth His Church an outward estate that flourisheth both in
wealth and peace.
(1) That He may give His peoples taste even of all kinds of earthly blessings
(De 28:2; Psa 84:11).
(2) That they may have all opportunity to serve Him, and every kind of
encouragement thereto.
4. The outward flourishing state of Gods Church lasts not always, but is often
changed into affliction and adversity.
5. God often changes the condition of His servants in this life from one extreme
to another. Joseph; Job; Israel
(1) That His mighty power may appear to all
(2) That we may learn to ascribe all to Him.
6. It is a great blessing of God for a nation to be populous (Gen 12:2).
7. God often makes His people in their prosperity most admired of all.
(1) That He may show Him, self to love His servants.
(2) That the godly may know that godliness is not without reward.
(3) That the wicked may have all excuse taken from them, in that they are
not allured by such notable spectacles of Gods love to them that fear
Him.
8. God often humbles His servants under all His foes and their adversaries,
because of their disobedience to His word (De 28:36).
 (1) This shows us how great Gods anger is for sin.
(2) This teaches us not to measure the favour of God towards ourselves or
others by the blessings or adversities of this life. (J. Udall.)

How is she become as a widow!--

Desolation
It would not be just to read into the image of widowhood ideas collected from
utterances of the prophets about the wedded union of Israel and her Lord; we have
no hint of anything of the sort here. Apparently the image is selected in order to
express the more vividly the utter lonesomeness of the city. It is clear that the
attribute solitary has no bearing on the external relations of Jerusalem--her
isolation among the Syrian hills, or the desertion of her allies, mentioned a little
later (Lam 1:2); it points to a more ghostly solitude, streets without traffic,
tenantless houses. The widow is solitary because she has been robbed of her
children. And in this, her desolation, she sits. The attitude, so simple and natural
and easy under ordinary circumstances, here suggests a settled continuance of
wretchedness; it is helpless and hopeless. The first wild agony of the severance of the
closest natural ties has passed, and with it the stimulus of conflict; now there has
supervened the dull monotony of despair. It is a fearful thing simply to sit in sorrow.
The mourner sits in the night, while the world around lies in the peace of sleep.
The darkness has fallen, yet she does not stir, for day and night are alike to her--
both dark. In this dread night of misery her one occupation is weeping. The mourner
knows how the hidden fountains of tears which have been sealed to the world for the
day will break out in the silent solitude of night; then the bravest will wet his couch
with his tears. The forlorn woman weepeth sore; to use the expressive Hebraism,
weeping she weepeth. Her tears are on her cheeks; they are continually flowing;
she has no thought of drying them; there is no One else to wipe them away. This is
not the frantic torrent of youthful tears, soon to be forgotten in sudden sunshine,
like a spring shower; it is the dreary winter rain, falling more silently, but from
leaden clouds that never break. The woe of Jerusalem is intensified by reason of its
contrast with the previous splendour of the proud city. This thought of a tremendous
fall gives the greatest force to the portrait. It is Rembrandtesque; the black shadows
on the foreground are the deeper because they stand sharply out against the brilliant
radiance that streams in from the sunset of the past. The pitiableness of the
comfortless present lies in this, that there had been lovers whose consolations would
now have been a solace; the bitterness of the enmity now experienced is its having
been distilled from the dregs of poisoned friendship. Against the protests of her
faithful prophets Jerusalem had courted alliance with her heathen neighbours only
to be cruelly deserted in her hour of need. It is the old story of friendship with the
world, keenly accentuated in the life of Israel because this favoured people had
already seen glimpses of a rich, rare privilege, the friendship of heaven. This is the
irony of the situation; it is the tragic irony of all Hebrew history. (W. F. Adeney, M.
A.)

LAM 1:2
She weepeth sore in the night.
Lonely sorrow
1. According to the measure of Gods correcting hand upon us, must our grief be.
(1) Because God is sure to be (at the least) so angry as His rods are heavy.
(2) Our sins do cause Him to afflict us, which we must repent of according to
the measure of Gods anger against them appearing by His smiting of us.
This reproves them that remain unrepentant, when the correcting hand
of God is upon them. It teaches us to increase in sorrow and lamentation,
seeing the trouble of the Church in general, and our own crosses in
particular are daily increased.
2. Weeping for sin and its punishment is such a sign of true repentance as we
must labour to show forth, especially in time of calamity.
(1) Because the heart appeareth then to be truly affected when it breaketh
into tears.
(2) The godly have always been brought thereunto (Joe 2:12). This reproves
our corruption, that can easily be brought to weep for a worldly loss, but
hardly for our sins. We must labour against this with all diligence,
carefully using all the means of grace.
3. It is a grievous plague to lack comforts in affliction; the contrary whereof is a
great blessing.
(1) Because the comfortable words and deeds of others will mitigate the
sense of the misery.
(2) It adds to the grief to be left alone in it.
4. It is an intolerable grief to have friends become foes.
(1) Because we put great trust in our friends, and promise ourselves much
assistance by them.
(2). They having been most inward with us, may do us more harm than
those whom we have always esteemed enemies. Let us take heed with
what men we make friendship. Let us not be dismayed though our
friends become our foes, seeing it hath been often the lot of the godly, but
seek to God the more earnestly for His assistance.
5. God often leaveth His people destitute of all outward help and comfort, to
teach us to rest upon Him alone at whose disposition all things are, and not
upon any outward thing, seem it never so glorious to our outward eyes. (J.
Udall.)

All her friends have dealt treacherously with her.

Adversity the test of friendship

We do not know our friends until we are in some extremity. Fair-weather friends
are not to be implicitly trusted. You cannot know a man until you have had occasion
to test him by some practical sacrifice; until you have opposed a man you do not
know what his temper is; until you have disappointed a man you cannot tell the
extent of his good nature; until you have seen a man in trial you know nothing
whatever of his grace or his virtue. Many persons shine the more brightly because of
the surrounding darkness; they have no genius for conversation, they cannot display
themselves in public, they are but poorly feathered and coloured, so that they have
nothing to attract and gratify the attention of curiosity: but how full of life they are
when their friends are in trouble, how constant in watchfulness, how liberal in
contribution, how patient under exasperation! These are the men to trust! As we
should never see the stars but for the darkness, so we never should see real
friendship but for our affliction and sorrow. (J. Parker, D. D.)

LAM 1:3
Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction.

Afflictive dispensations
1. The outward things of this life are the soonest lost; and being enjoyed, the
most uncertain.
(1) They are most subject to all kinds of enemies.
(2) God knoweth that we may best want them.
Learn to make least account of them, as things without which we may be perfectly
happy. Endeavour most of all to obtain the true knowledge and fear of God, which is
the treasure laid up in heaven (Mat 6:19-20).
2. It is natural for a man to seek to better his outward estate, and his duty to
seek far and near for the freedom and rest of conscience (2Ch 11:13-17).
3. It is better to live anywhere than in our own country where our governors
seek to oppress us, for their hatred being assisted with their might will never
let us live in any tolerable peace.
4. Of two evils, we may and ought to choose the less, to avoid the greater.
5. It is grievous and dangerous to dwell among the ungodly.
(1) They can administer no true comfort unto us.
(2) They are strong to draw us to evil.
6. When God means to punish, He stirs up means; but when He means it not,
the means shall not prosper.
7. There is no place or means to escape Gods hand, when He means to punish.
8. There is no kind of people so generally and so evil entreated in their adversity
as the godly.
9. This people seemeth to be utterly overthrown for ever, and yet they returned
unto their land and became a commonwealth again. So is it often with the
Church of God (Psa 139:1, etc.). This teaches us--
(1) Never to despair, though our calamities be never so many and grievous.
(2) That there is no assured safety, but in the true fear of God. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:4
 The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feasts.

The decay of religion mournful

1. The overthrow of the commonwealth bringeth with it the overthrow of the
Churchs outward peace.
2. When the things that God hath given us here are not applied to the appointed
use, we have just cause to mourn, seeing our sins have caused the let thereof
(De 28:15-68; Isa 13:19, etc.).
3. The earth and earthly things do often admonish men of their sins, either by
denying that comfort which naturally they bring with them (Lev 18:25), or
bringing grief or punishment with them (Mic 2:10).
(1) God hath made all His creatures as written books, wherein man may read
his sins.
(2) That man may have no show of excuse left him at that great day of
account.
4. All Gods creatures mourn when God is disobeyed, and rejoice when He is
obeyed by His people.
5. The service of God is not tied to any place, but upon condition of their
obedience that dwell therein (Jer 26:4).
6. It is a great grief to Gods ministers to be deprived of their ministry or to see it
unprofitable to the Church.
(1) God is greatly dishonoured thereby.
(2) It giveth occasion of interrupting all good things among the people, and
matter of all kinds of sin.
7. The ministers must be guides to the people, to lead them to mourning (when
there is cause), as also to all other duties.
8. They that seem most exempt from it must mourn at the decay of religion.
(1) This reproves them that lay not to heart the distress of Gods people for
the truth, thinking it sufficient that themselves live in safety.
(2) It teaches us to strive to be grieved when we hear of the decay of true
religion in any place, though it be safe where we are.
9. The greatest loss that can befall Gods people is the loss of the exercise of the
Word and Sacraments. Because God hath appointed them to be the means of
begetting and confirming faith in us. (J. Udall.)

All her gates are desolate.

Religious desolation
A pathetic picture indeed is this, that the feast is spread and no man comes to the
banqueting table; every gate is open in token of welcome and hospitality, yet no
wandering soul asks for admittance; the priests once so noble in the service of song,
the virgins once so beautiful as images of innocence, now stand with hands thrown
down, with eyes full of tears, with hearts sighing in expressive silence their
bitterness and disappointment. All this can God do even to His chosen place, and to
altars on which He has written His name. Officialism is no guarantee of spiritual
perpetuity. Pomp and ceremony, with all their mechanical and external decorations
and attractions, are no pledge of the presence of the Spirit of the Living God. The
sanctuary is nothing but for the Lords presence. Eloquent preaching is but eloquent
noise if the Spirit of the Lord be not in it, giving it intellectual value, spiritual
dignity, and practical usefulness. Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith
the Lord; because men have forgotten this doctrine, they have trusted to themselves
and have seen their hopes perishing in complete and bitter disappointment. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

LAM 1:5
Her adversaries are the chief, her enemies prosper.

The adversaries of the good

1. The cause apparent of all the miseries of Gods people is the prospering and
prevailing of their enemies.
2. It often comes to pass that the wicked prosper in all things of this life, and the
godly contrary (Psa 73:4; Job 21:7).
(1) God will, by giving them prosperity, make the wicked without excuse.
(2) The godly being assured of Gods favour and yet pinched, they may the
more earnestly bend their affections to the inheritance which is prepared
for them.
3. It is the natural disposition of the wicked towards the godly to oppress them
in action and hate them in affliction.
4. The wicked never prevail against the godly, further than the Lord giveth
strength unto them (Job 1:11-12; 1Ki 22:22; Mat 8:31-32). This teaches us--
(1) To he more patient towards the instruments, and not to be as the dog
that snatcheth at the stone cast at him, not regarding the thrower.
(2) To seek the cause of our afflictions in ourselves, for else the just Judge of
the world would not correct us.
5. All our afflictions come from the Lord, who is the chief worker thereof.
6. It is the sin of the godly that causeth the Lord to lay all their troubles upon
them (Dan 9:6; Neh 1:6).
7. When God withdraweth His strength from His servants, they fall into many
grievous sins, one after another.
8. When God meaneth to punish man, He will not spare to deprive him of that
which is more dear unto him.
9. The wicked bear such malice unto the truth that when they get the advantage
they spate neither age nor sex, thinking to root out the godly from under
heaven. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:6
 And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed.

Departing glory
1. The Church of God doth esteem the exercises of religion e most excellent and
glorious thing that can be had in this life.
(1) They are notable signs of Gods favour and presence.
(2) There is more true comfort in them than in the whole world besides.
2. The weakening of the rulers is the height of misery upon the rest of the
members of that body.
3. That people hath a heavy judgment upon them whose guides are destitute and
deprived of necessary courage.
4. They that have the greatest outward privilege do often come the soonest into
distress when God punisheth for sin (Am 6:7). (J. Udall.)

Sin ruinous and destructive

We do our utmost to protect great buildings from fire and tempest, and yet all the
time those buildings are liable to another peril not less severe--the subtle decay of
the very framework of the structure itself. The tissue of the wood silently and
mysteriously deteriorates, and calamity as dire as a conflagration is precipitated.
The whole of the magnificent roofing of the church of St. Paul in Rome had to be
taken out at enormous expense because of the dry rot. Scientific men, by
microscopic and chemical methods, have investigated the causes of this premature
decay, and after patient search they have discovered not only the fungi which
destroy the wood tissue, but also the spore that acts as the seed of the fungus. So this
obscure, malign vegetation goes on in the heart of the wood, destroying the glory
and strength of minister and palace. Character is liable to a similar danger. All evils
do not come from the outside. Some of the worst possibilities of loss, weakness, and
ruin emerge from within; the destroying agents work obscurely and stealthily, and
are almost unsuspected until they nave wrought fatal mischief.

LAM 1:7
Jerusalem remembered in the days of her affliction, and of her miseries, all her
pleasant things.

The action of the memory in pain

I. IT GENERALLY REFERS TO THE PLEASANT THINGS OF THE PAST. This it does by a

necessary law of its nature--the law of contrast. All men must meet with trials
sooner or later--physical, social, moral, etc. Now in the painful memory reverts to
the pleasant. It is ever so. Men under the infirmities of age revert to the bright joys
of youth hood; the rich man who has sunk into bankruptcy reverts to the days when
he had more than heart could wish; souls in perdition recall the sunny day of grace.

II. Its reference to the pleasant things of the past ALWAYS INTENSIFIES THE
SUFFERINGS OF THE SUFFERER. There are two things that tend to this:
(1) The consciousness that the pleasant things are irrevocably lost:
Innocency of childhood, glowing hopes of youth, pleasures of mature
manhood, sacred impressions made upon the young heart by books,
sermons, and parental piety,--these can never be regained.
(2) The consciousness that the pleasant things have been morally abused.
This makes the action of memory m hell so overwhelmingly painful.
Son, remember, etc. Memory involves receptivity--retention--
reproduction (Homilist.)

The memory of pleasant things in the time of trial:--

1. In the time of affliction we do better consider of the blessings that our
prosperity yielded unto us, than when we enjoyed them.
2. The time of adversity is fit, wherein we may best recount the prosperity that
in former times we have enjoyed.
3. God often maketh an men adversaries to His children, that they may learn to
rest on Him alone.
4. The enemies of religion do inquire into the decay of Gods Church, and rejoice
at it.
5. It is a certain note of an enemy to religion, to mock and deride the exercises of
the same. (J. Udall.)

The mockery of bad men

What would the nightingale care if the toad despised her singing! She would still
sing on, and leave the cold toad to his dank shadows. And what care I for the sneers
of men who grovel upon earth? I will sing on in the ear and bosom of God. (H. W.
Beecher.)

LAM 1:8-11
Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed.

The captivity of Judah

The emphatic word is therefore. It rings with sad and solemn cadence through
the most mournful of all the books of the Bible. It is the epitaph of the nation to
which once the conquest of the world was possible, but whose persistent resistance
to the will of God secured at last its complete destruction The processes by which it
ruined itself are those by which individuals are destroyed. This therefore is the
monumental inscription over a dead nation, which may serve as a warning and
guide to every living soul.

I. The sins which brought about the downfall of Judah.

1. Unbelief. They refused to see God, and they gradually lost the power to see
Him. When they found that their kings could not be trusted, could not take
care of them they trusted, not to God, but to other nations. One day they
 were vassals of the king of Egypt; the next, of the king of Babylon Nothing
but trust in God can make men free. As soon as we begin to doubt HIS word,
and trust in human opinions, we expose ourselves to become the prey of
untrustworthy powers. No confidence in our own learning or judgment, no
trust in the boastful words of others, can ever take the place of confidence in
the simple Word of God, and leave us sound and safe.
2. Pride. They could not accept Gods way. They could not wait for other nations
to be uplifted and join them. They chose to join other nations. Doubtless they
said it would more quickly bring the world to God; that to be singular would
only repel men, and make God repulsive to them. They preferred their way to
the way of God, ostensibly because They thought their way was wiser, really
because they could not bear to lose esteem in the eyes of tree world Gods
way is the same now. He still calls disciples a peculiar people. He still says,
Come ye out from among them and be ye separate. He still finds only
occasionally a hearty response. But to these who do respond with willing
love, what wonderful rewards He gives!
3. Sensuality. Outward contamination soon resulted in inward corruption. Vice
belongs with separation from God, and association with the world. In time it
will as surely follow as it is sure that man is made subject to temptation.
4. Idolatry. When men or nations become polluted, they seek to make religion
justify their wickedness. Often the most self-indulgent are those most
devoted to their ideas of religion. They make their gods responsible for their
sins, and therefore treat them with greatest care.

II. The consequences of Judahs sins.

1. Blindness. They could not see the ruin they were approaching. When we cease
to lay bare our sins and call them by their real names, we cease to feel them.
We enter into moral darkness. The light of the world shines as before, but
there is nothing in us which answers to that light. All knowledge of what we
ought to do rests on some knowledge of what God is and does. We speak of
seeing God, and though He is not visible to the bodily eye, there is no other
description which expresses our perception of His character and presence
surrounding us in all our ways. Men have eyes which behold Him; eyes
which He Himself has opened to that light which is not the light of the sun,
but which is the light of the celestial city. But when men turn away from that
light, His character becomes to them distorted and unreal.
2. Untrustworthiness. When they became false to God they became false to all
trusts. They substituted forms for righteousness, and increased them in
proportion as they lost the spirit of truth.
3. Misery. The consequences of sin were seen too late. They were not foreseen.
Lessons--
1. The captivity of Judah was the fault of her religious men. Beware of seeking to
justify what your conscience condemns by appeals to God in prayer, or by
observing forms of worship.
2. Outward reformation but slightly arrests the progress of destruction. We
cannot hope for much from the reform which aims only at self-protection. It
is not deep, honest, hearty, unless we choose to renounce sins because we
 hate sin, and follow God because we love His ways.
3. Sin destroys the choicest qualities of human character.
4. The one thing necessary is to keep the eye on God. (A. E. Dunning.)

Sins dire consequence

Sin produceth all temporal evil. Jerusalem hath grievously sinned, therefore she is
removed. It is the Trojan horse; it hath sword and famine and pestilence within it.
(T. Watson.)

Sin the cause of affliction

1. Their sins the cause of their afflictions being again mentioned unto them,
teacheth this doctrine: that it is necessary whensoever we are afflicted, to
recount often our sins to have procured the same to fall upon us.
(1) We are naturally unwilling to blame ourselves for anything, and ready to
impute the cause of any evil to others.
(2) If we rightly charge ourselves and our sins, we shall be the better
prepared thereby to true repentance and right humiliation.
2. It is peculiar to the godly to impute the cause of all their miseries unto their
own sins. The wicked either lay the cause upon other things, or extenuate
their fault, blaming God for rigour; or else break out into raging impatience
or blasphemy.
3. It is our sin that depriveth us of any good thing we have heretofore enjoyed.
4. When we truly fear and serve the Lord, He honoureth us in the sight of men
(1Sa 2:30).
(1) That it may appear that godliness is not without her reward even in this
life.
(2) To give a taste unto the godly here, of that honour which they shall
hereafter enjoy without measure or end.
5. It is our sin that maketh us odious and contemptible amongst men.
6. The estimation that the godly have among worldlings is only whilst they are in
outward prosperity.
7. The wicked, that have no knowledge or consciousness of their own faults, can
see the offences of the godly, and upbraid them with them.
8. There is nothing that maketh men so filthily naked as sin.
9. The godly do take to heart with earnest affection the crosses that the Lord
layeth upon them.
10. The godly are sometimes brought into so hard estate as that they are in
mens judgment utterly deprived of all the signs of Gods favour. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:9
She remembereth not her last end: therefore she came down wonderfully.
The wicked surprised by their own destruction
There are certain great principles in the Divine administration, the operation of
which gives a degree of uniformity to the Divine proceedings. For instance, it is the
manner of our God to visit with signal destruction those who have proudly set at
naught His authority in a course of prosperous wickedness. Such was His treatment
of Jerusalem. So it has been with individuals. Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, etc.
Destruction came upon them, not only in a terrible form, but at an hour when they
did not expect it. The same thing will hold true, in a greater or less degree, of all
sinners, as it respects their final doom; while it will be especially true of those who
have sinned against great light, and with a high hand. The destruction which will
overtake sinners at last will be to them a matter of awful surprise. It will be at once
unexpectedly dreadful, and dreadfully unexpected.

I. GODS WRATH AGAINST THE WICKED IS CONSTANTLY ACCUMULATING. If the first sin
you ever committed provoked God, do you think that the second provoked Him less;
and that as He saw you become accustomed to sin, He came to think as little of it as
yourself, and has not even charged your sin against you? Do you not remember that
the Bible speaks of the sinner treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath?

II. The destruction which will come upon sinners will be to them a matter of
fearful surprise, inasmuch as in the present life Gods wrath, for the most part,
seems to slumber; at least they perceive no direct expression of it. It is true, indeed,
that God is giving them warnings enough, both in His Word and providence; and if
they did not close their ears against them, they could not fail to be alarmed; and they
will never be able, in the day of their calamity, to charge God with having concealed
from them their danger. Nevertheless, He treats them here as probationers for
eternity; He sets life and death before them, but He does not unsheath His sword,
and point it at the sinners heart. He does not find that the elements are armed for
his destruction. The thundercloud rises, and rolls, and looks terrific, as if it were
borne along by an avenging hand, but the lightning that blazes from it passes him by
unhurt. In short, not one of the vials of Gods wrath can be said to be open upon
him. There is nothing which he interprets as an indication of anything dreadful in
the future. Now, must not all this be a preparation for a fearful surprise at last?

III. Not only have the wicked, during the present life, received no signal
expressions of Divine vengeance, but they have been constantly receiving
expressions of the Divine goodness; and this is another circumstance which will
serve to increase the surprise that will be occasioned by their destruction. What a
fearful transition will it be from this world, in which there are so many blessings, to
a world in which existence itself becomes a curse! Oh, will not the sinner feel that he
has come down wonderfully?

IV. God sometimes not only gives to the wicked a common share of temporal
blessings, but distinguishes them by worldly prosperity; hence another reason of the
surprise which they will experience at last. Think of the rich, and the great, and the
noble of this world, who have been accustomed to receive a homage which has
sometimes fallen little short of idolatry, finding themselves in the prison of despair,
with no sound but the sound of their own wailing--with no society but the society of
the reprobate! Have not these persons come down wonderfully?
 V. The destruction which will finally overtake the wicked will be to them a matter
of great surprise, inasmuch as they will, in some way or other, have made confident
calculation foe escaping it. It will be found, no doubt, that many of them had
flattered themselves with the hope that the doctrine of future punishment might
turn out to be false; and some will have been left through their own perverseness to
believe the lie, that the good and the bad will at last be equally happy. There will be
others who will have wrought themselves into a conviction that destruction might be
averted by some easier means than those which the Gospel prescribes, and may have
chosen to trust to the orthodoxy of their creed, or the kindness of their temper, or
the morality of their life. There will be others who will have intended ultimately to
escape destruction by becoming true Christians, but who were looking out for some
more convenient season. One thing will be certain in respect to all,--they will have
intended to come out well at last. Not an individual among all the sufferers in hell
but will have expected finally to be saved. Lessons.

1. How blinding is the influence of depravity.

2. It is a most awful calamity to relapse into a habit of carelessness after being
awakened.
3. There is no class of men so much to be pitied as those who are perhaps most
frequently the objects of envy, and none whose condition is so much to be
envied as those whose circumstances are often looked upon as the most
undesirable.
4. Who of you will turn a deaf ear to the warning which this subject suggests, to
flee from the wrath to come? (W. B. Sprague, D. D.)

Sin unremembered
1. They that be hardened in sin by despising destruction, do grow to forget those
things which continual experience and the light of reason daily call to
remembrance.
(1) The daily custom of things, without grace to esteem them aright,
breedeth contempt of them in our corrupt nature.
(2) Satan blindeth the children of disobedience, lest they should rightly
regard good things and profit by them.
2. The forgetfulness of the reward of sin throweth men headlong into iniquity;
but the remembrance of it stayeth us from many evils (Am 6:3; Psa 16:8). (J.
Udall.)

Forgetfulness of the end

I. Why is man so forgetful of his end?

(1) Not because he can have any doubt as to the importance of it.
(2) Not because he lacks reminders of the sad event.
(3) Not because he has the slightest hope of avoiding it. Why then?
1. His instinctive repugnance to it.
2. The difficulty of realising it.
 3. The commonness of the occurrence of the event.
4. The prevalent expectation of long life.
5. The secular engrossments of life.
6. The systematic efforts to render man oblivious of the subject.

II. Why should man remember his end?

1. That we may duly estimate our sinful condition.
2. To moderate our attachments to this passing life.
3. To stimulate us to a right preparation for the event.
4. To enable us to welcome the event when it comes. (Homilist.)

The end in view should control conduct

If the lazy student would only bring clearly before his mind the examination room,
and the unanswerable paper, and the bitter mortification when the pass list comes
out and his name is not there, he would not trifle and dawdle and seek all manner of
diversions as he does, but he would bind himself to his desk and his task. If the
young man that begins to tamper with purity, and in the midst of the temptations of
a great city to gratify the lust of the eye and the lust of the flesh, because he is away
from the shelter of his fathers house, and the rebuke of his mothers purity, could
see, as the older of us have seen, men with their bones full of the iniquity of their
youth, or drifted away from their home to die down in the country like a rat in a
hole, do you think the temptations of the streets and low places of amusement would
not be stripped of their fascination? If the man beginning to drink was to say to
himself, What am I to do in the end when the craving becomes physical, and
volition is suspended, and anything is sacrificed in order to still the domineering
devil within, do you think he would begin? I do not believe that all sin comes from
ignorance, but sure I am that if the sinful man saw what the end is, he would, in nine
cases out of ten, be held back. What will you do in the end? Use that question, dear
friends, as the Ithuriel spear which will touch the squatting tempter at your ear, and
there will start up, in its own shape, the fiend. (A. Maclaren.)

O Lord, behold my affliction.--

Refuge in distress
1. The only refuge in distress is to fly to the Lord by faithful and fervent prayer.
(1) He it is that smiteth, and none else can heal.
(2) He hath promised to hear and deliver us, calling upon Him in the day of
our troubles (Psa 50:15).
2. This prayer being made by the prophet in the name of the people, teacheth us:
it is a great blessing of God to that people that hath a minister who is both
able and willing not only to teach them the truth, but also to be their mouth
to direct them.
3. God so pitieth His people that the view of their miseries moveth Him to help
them, even when all men are against them.
(1) He loveth them with an everlasting love.
(2) He will not suffer them to be trodden down of their enemies for ever. (J.
 Udall.)

LAM 1:10
The adversary hath spread out his hand upon all her pleasant things.

Spoliation
1. The wicked are usually merciless towards the godly, spoiling them and theirs
in most cruel manner, if the Lord restrain them not (Psa 53:4; Psa 137:7).
2. The outward things of this world are uncertain, and made subject to the
violence of the wicked.
(1) Learn not to desire the things of this life too much.
(2) Learn, when God guideth them unto us, to employ them aright.
3. The outward things and means of Gods service are often made a prey to the
enemies; especially upon our abusing of them (Jer 7:13; Luk 19:44).
4. The injuries that the wicked do unto the godly in their sight, are more
grievous unto them than those that they do only hear of.
5. The wicked make havoc of and scorn all the exercises of religion.
6. The outward ordinances of God are of reverent account to them that fear His
name.
7. Those that be open wicked ones are not (without their open repentance) to be
admitted to the holy exercises of religion. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:11
All her people sigh, they seek bread.

Grief at losses

I. It is awful for the godly to be grieved with and take to heart their worldly losses-
-
(1) Because the things of this life are Gods blessings.
(2) They are necessary to support us here, and (being well used) to make us
the fitter to serve Him.
2. For the preservation of the life, we must be willing to forego the dearest of
these outward blessings.
(1) Because life is the most precious of all earthly things, they being given for
the use of it, and not it for them.
(2) God hath given greater charge to preserve it than them.
3. In all our miseries we must seek relief only at Gods hands.
(1) He hath so commanded (Psa 50:15, etc.).
 (2) All power to help is in His hands alone (2Ch 20:6).
4. No extremity can drive the godly from trusting in God, and praying to Him
(Job 13:15; Psa 44:17). (J. Udall)

They have given their pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul.--
Surrender of luxuries for necessaries
Our forefathers gave five marks or more for a good book; a load of hay for a few
chapters of St. James or of St. Paul, in English, saith Mr. Foxe. The Queen of Castile
sold her jewels to furnish Columbus for his discovering voyage to the West Indies,
when he had showed his maps, though our Henry VII, loath to part with money,
slighted his offers, and thereby the gold mines were found and gained to the Spanish
crown. Let no man think much to part with his pleasant things for his precious soul,
or to sacrifice all that he hath to the service of his life, which, next to his soul, should
be most dear to him. Our ancestors in Queen Marys days were glad to eat the bread
of their souls in peril of their lives. (J. Trapp.)

LAM 1:12-22
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

Zions appeal
1. The whole passage evidently expresses a deep yearning for sympathy. Mere
strangers, roving Bedouin, any people who may chance to be passing by
Jerusalem, are implored to behold her incomparable woes. The wounded
animal creeps into a corner to suffer and die in secret, perhaps on account of
the habit of herds, in tormenting a suffering mate. But among mankind the
instinct of a sufferer is to crave sympathy, from a friend, if possible; but if
such be not available, then even from a stranger. This sympathy, if it is real,
would help if it could; and under all circumstances it is the reality of the
sympathy that is most prized, not its issues. It should be remembered,
further, that the first condition of active aid is a genuine sense of
compassion, which can only be awakened by means of knowledge and the
impressions which a contemplation of suffering produce. Evil is wrought not
only from want of thought, but also from lack of knowledge; and good-doing
is withheld for the same reason. Therefore the first requisite is to arrest
attention. We are responsible for our ignorance and its consequences
wherever the opportunity of knowledge is within our reach.
2. The appeal to all who pass by is most familiar to us in its later association
with our Lords sufferings on the Cross. But this is not in any sense a
Messianic passage; it is confined in its purpose to the miseries of Jerusalem.
Of course there can be no objection to illustrating the grief and pain of the
Man of Sorrows by using the classic language of an ancient lament if we note
that this is only an illustration.
3. In order to impress the magnitude of her miseries on the minds of the
strangers whose attention she would arrest, the city, now personified as a
suppliant, describes her dreadful condition in a series of brief, pointed
 metaphors. Thus the imagination is excited; and the imagination is one of
the roads to the heart. Let us look at the various images under which the
distress of Jerusalem is here presented.
(1) It is like a fire in the bones (Lam 1:13). It burns, consumes, pains with
intolerable torment; it is no skin-deep trouble, it penetrates to the very
marrow.
(2) It is like a net (Lam 1:13). We see a wild creature caught in the bush, or
perhaps a fugitive arrested in his flight and flung down by hidden snares
at his feet. Here is the shock of surprise, the humiliation of deceit, the
vexation of being thwarted. The result is a baffled, bewildered, helpless
condition.
(3) It is like faintness. The desolate sufferer is ill. It is bad enough to have to
bear calamities in the strength of health. Jerusalem is made sick and kept
faint all the day--with a faintness that is not a momentary collapse, but
a continuous condition of failure.
(4) It is like a yoke (Lam 1:14) which is wreathed upon the neck--fixed on, as
with twisted withes. The poet is here more definite. The yoke is made out
of the transgressions of Jerusalem. As there is nothing so invigorating as
the assurance that one is suffering for a righteous cause, so there is
nothing so wretchedly depressing as the consciousness of guilt.
(5) It is like a winepress (Lam 1:15). Wine is to be made, but the grapes
crushed to produce it are the people who were accustomed to feast and
drink of the fruits of Gods bounty in the happy days of their prosperity.
So the mighty men are set at nought, their prowess counting as nothing
against the brutal rush of the enemy; and the young men are crushed,
their spirit and vigour failing them in the great destruction.
4. The most terrible trait in these pictures, one that is common to all of them, is
the Divine origin of the troubles. Yet there is no complaint of barbarity, no
idea that the Judge of all the earth is not doing right. The miserable city does
not bring any railing accusation against her Lord; she takes all the blame
upon herself. The grief is all the greater because there is no thought of
rebellion. The daring doubts that struggle into expression in Job never
obtrude themselves here to check the even flow of tears. The melancholy is
profound, but comparatively calm, since it does not once give place to anger.
It is natural that the succession of images of misery conceived in this spirit
should be followed by a burst of tears. Zion weeps because the comforter
who should refresh her soul is far away, and she is left utterly desolate (verse
16).
5. Here the supposed utterance of Jerusalem is broken for the poet to insert a
description of the suppliant making her piteous appeal (verse 17). He shows
us Zion spreading out her hands, that is to say, in the well-known attitude of
prayer. She is comfortless, oppressed by her neighbours in accordance with
the will of her God, and treated as an unclean thing; she who had despised
the idolatrous Gentiles in her pride of superior sanctity has now become foul
and despicable in their eyes!
6. After the poets brief interjection describing the suppliant, the personified city
continues her plaintive appeal, but with a considerable enlargement of its
scope. She makes the most distinct acknowledgment of the two vital
 elements of the case--Gods righteousness and her own rebellion (verse 18).
These carry us beneath the visible scenes of trouble so graphically illustrated
earlier, and fix our attention on deep seated principles. Although it cannot be
said that all trouble is the direct punishment of sin, and although it is
manifestly insincere to make confession of guilt one does not inwardly
admit, to be firmly settled in the conviction that God is right in what He does
even when it all looks most wrong, that if there is a fault it must be on mans
side, is to have reached the centre of truth.
7. Enlarging the area of her appeal, no longer content to snatch at the casual pity
of individual travellers on the road, Jerusalem now calls upon all the
peoples--i.e., all neighbouring tribes--to hear the tale of her woes (verse
18). The appeal to the nations contains three particulars. It deplores the
captivity of the virgins and young men; the treachery of allies--lovers who
have been called upon for assistance, but in vain; and the awful fact that men
of such consequence as the elders and priests, the very aristocracy of
Jerusalem, had died of starvation after an ineffectual search for food--a lurid
picture of the horrors of the siege (verses 18, 19).
8. In drawing to a close the appeal goes further, and, rising altogether above
man, seeks the attention of God (verses 20-22). This is an utterance of faith
where faith is tried to the uttermost. It is distinctly recognised that the
calamities bewailed have been sent by God; and yet the stricken city turns to
God for consolation. Not only is there no complaint against the justice of His
acts; in spite of them all, He is still regarded as the greatest Friend and
Helper of the victims of His wrath. This apparently paradoxical position
issues in what might otherwise be a contradiction of thought. The ruin of
Jerusalem is attributed to the righteous judgment of God, against which no
shadow of complaint is raised; and yet God is asked to pour vengeance on
the heads of the human agents of His wrath! The vengeance here sought for
cannot be brought into line with Christian principles; but the poet had never
heard the Sermon on the Mount. It would not have occurred to him that the
spirit of revenge was not right, any more than it occurred to the writers of
maledictory Psalms. There is one more point in this final appeal to God
which should be noticed, because it is very characteristic of the elegy
throughout. Zion bewails her friendless condition, declaring, there is none
to comfort me. This is the fifth reference to the absence of a comforter (see
1:2, 9, 16, 17, 21). The idea may be merely introduced in order to accentuate
the description of utter desolation. And yet when we compare the several
allusions to it, the conclusion seems to be forced upon us that the poet has a
more specific intention. Our thoughts instinctively turn to the Paraclete of St.
Johns Gospel. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

A Jeremiad

I. AN EARNEST EXPOSTULATION. If there is anything in all the world that ought to

interest a man, it is the death of Christ. Yet do I find men, learned men, spending
year after year in sorting out butterflies, beetles, and gnats, or in making out the
various orders of shells, or in digging into the earth and seeking to discover what
strange creatures once floundered through the boundless mire, or swam in the vast
seas. I find men occupied with things of no sort of practical moment, yet the story of
God Himself is thought to be too small a trifle for intelligent minds to dwell upon it.
O reason! where art thou gone? O judgment! whither art thou fled? It is strange that
even the sufferings of Christ should not attract the attention of men, for generally, if
we hear any sad story of the misfortunes of our fellow creatures, we are interested.
How is it earth does not stretch out her hands and say, Come and tell us of the God
that loved us, and came down to our low estate, and suffered for us men and for our
salvation? It ought to interest us, if nothing more. Is it nothing to you, all ye that
pass by? And should it not be more than interesting? Should it not excite our
admiration? You cannot read of a man sacrificing himself for the good of his fellow
creatures without feeling at once that you wish you had known that fine fellow, and
you feel instinctively that you would do anything in the world to serve him if he still
lives, or to help relatives left behind if he has died in a brave attempt. Is it nothing to
you that Jesus should die for men? If I had no share in His blood, I think I should
love Him. The life of Christ enchants me; the death of Christ binds me to His Cross.
Even were I never washed in His blood, and were myself cast away into hell, if that
were possible, I still feel I must admire Him for His love to others. Yea, and I must
adore Him, too, for His Godlike character, His superhuman love in suffering for the
sons of men. But why, why is it that such a Christ, so lovely and so admirable, is
forgotten by the most of mankind, and it is nothing to them?

II. A SOLEMN QUESTION. The Lord Jesus Christ may be represented here as
bidding men see if there be any sorrow like unto His sorrow, which is done unto
Him.
1. Truly the sufferings of Jesus were altogether unique; they stand alone. History
or poetry can find no parallel. King of kings and Lord of lords was He, and
the government was upon His shoulders, and His name was called
Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the
Prince of Peace. All the hallelujahs of eternity rolled up at HIS august feet.
But He was despised and rejected of men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted
with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised and
we esteemed Him not. Never one so falsely accused. Oh! was ever grief like
His! exonerated yet condemned! adjudged to be without fault, yet delivered
up to His direst foes! treated as a felon, put to death as a traitor; immolated
on a gibbet which bore triple testimony to His innocence by its inscription.
With none to pity, no one to administer comfort, forsaken utterly, our
Saviour died, with accessories of sorrow that were to be found in no other
decease than that which was accomplished at Jerusalem. Still, the singularity
of His death lies in another respect.
2. There was never sorrow like unto the sorrow which was done unto Christ,
because all His sorrow was borne for others. His Godhead gave Him an
infinite capacity, and infused a boundless degree of compensation into all the
pangs He bore. You have no more idea of what Christ suffered in His soul
than you have, when you take up in a shell a drop of sea-water, power to
guess from that the area of the entire boundless, bottomless ocean. What
Christ suffered is utterly inconceivable. Was ever grief like Thine? Needless
question; needless question; all but shameful question; for were all griefs
that ever were felt condensed into one, they were no more worthy to be
compared therewith than the glowworms tiny lamp with the ever-blazing
 sun. If Christ be thus alone in suffering, what then?
3. Why, let Him stand alone in our love. High, high, set up Christ high in your
heart. Love Him; you cannot match His love to you; seek at least to let your
little stream run side by side of the mighty river. If Christ be thus alone in
suffering, let us seek to make Him, if we can, alone in our service. I wish we
had more Marys who would break the alabaster box of precious ointment
upon His dear head. Oh! for a little extravagance of love, a little fanaticism of
affection for Him, for He deserves ten thousand times more than the most
enthusiastic devotees ever dream of rendering.
4. If He be thus so far beyond all others in His sorrow, let Him also be first and
foremost in our praise. If ye have poetic minds, weave no garlands except for
His dear brow. If ye be men of eloquence, speak no glowing periods except to
His honour. If ye be men of wit and scholarship, oh seek to lay your classic
attainments at the foot of His Cross! Come hither with all your talents, and
yield them to Him who bought you with His blood. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Is it nothing to you?
The crucified Christ is still amongst us. We may even now by faith behold the
Lamb of God in the very act of sacrificing Himself for the sin of the world. There are
many who do not pass by the Cross on which He hangs. Come joy or sorrow, come
honour or disgrace, whether others join you or whether you should be alone, in life
and in death, you are resolved in penitential love and joyful obedience to dwell
beneath the shadow of the Cross of Christ. But there are others who pass by. There
are scorners and scoffers now, as in the times of old. All who live profligate and
wicked lives; all who deliberately indulge in fleshly lusts; the licentious, the
intemperate, the covetous, the proud, the revengeful; all who cherish some secret sin
and will not give it up; all such pass by; for the sight of the great Example of self-
sacrifice so condemns those who are resolved on a life of self-indulgence, and the
sufferings He endured to save from sin so reproach those who determine to commit
sin, that they cannot find any pleasure in their wickedness except as they banish
Him from their thoughts; and so they pass by. It is possible that none of you may
be fairly classed either with scorners or profligates. But nevertheless you may pass
by Christ. Here are some in holiday attire, tripping and dancing along. Listening to
the syren voice of pleasure, they wander off, some in one direction, some in another,
in quest of new delights and fresh excitements. They often come within reach of the
Cross, but they do not even see it, or they look at it so listlessly that it produces no
effect. Others rush past, eager to grasp the phantom forms which beckon them
onward and still fly before them. Here comes one bending beneath a heavy load
which eagerly he increases, as ever and anon he picks up some shining bit of earth
and adds it to his store. Stooping down and gazing intently on the ground, he does
not see the Cross. Miserable man! Eager to multiply riches which increase your cares
and which you must soon lose, you neglect the only true, the imperishable treasure,
and pass by! Now approach a sorrowful company, in dark attire, their cheeks
bedewed with tears, their heads bowed down with grief. Oh, why do you not look up
to that great Example of suffering, that Brother in adversity? You are passing by
Him who is able to remove at once the heaviest portion of your burden, and by His
sympathy to wipe your tears and heal your wounds! Others approach who have often
been here before. They stopped at first, and admired, and went on; but now the
Cross is too familiar to attract their notice. Here come others apparently determined
to remain. They are much interested in the Cross. One sits down to sketch it.
Another examines the wood of which it is made. A third measures its height and
thickness. It is possible to be profound theologians and eloquent preachers, and yet
pass by Christ. Others approach who are too intent in contemplating themselves to
consider the crucified One. Not confessing themselves to be sinners, they pass by the
Saviour, as having no need of Him. At length others come who resolve not to pass
by. They are arrested by the sight of that patient sufferer; they wonder, they admire,
they regret their former ignorance and folly, they will amend their lives, they will
abandon their sins, they will remain beside the Cross; but it shall be--tomorrow!
And so they also pass by! In order to pass by Christ it is not necessary to insult. Ye
who have never yet really mourned for sin and forsaken it; who are not earnestly
seeking Christ and relying on Him as your only Saviour; who do not imitate His
example and obey His commands; ye who are not, for His sake, crucifying the flesh,
dying with Christ to sin, that you may live with Christ in holiness; whatever your
external behaviour, in heart you are amongst those to whom Jesus appeals, Is it
nothing to you all ye that pass by? Do not say it is nothing to you because you are
not included in the favoured few for whom Christ died. He is the propitiation for
the sins of the whole world, and therefore for yours! You helped to fasten Christ to
the Cross. Every sin was a blow of the hammer to drive in the nails. Is this nothing to
you? On the Cross God proclaims that He is ready to pardon you and receive you
home as His child; and that for this He gave Jesus to die for you. Is this nothing to
you? Will you refuse to give heed to the earnest appeal of Him who beseeches you to
be saved? What is anything to you if not Christ? If you heard a cry of Fire, you
might selfishly say, It is nothing to me. But suppose it was your own house in
flames? Sinner! it is your own soul which is in jeopardy, and it is for you that Jesus
dies. (Newman Hall, D. D.)

The appeal of the Saviours sorrows

There is a most striking and close parallel between the sufferings of Jerusalem
here impersonated as crying, Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? and those
endured by our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
1. The city that was in ruins, was, of all earths cities, the one most intimately
associated with God. The suffering Saviour was the only begotten Son of
God; He alone, of all living beings, could say, I and the Father are one.
2. The misery of Jerusalem consisted largely in the wrongs and insults of foes.
Is this the city that men call the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole
earth? And as His enemies passed by the suffering Saviour on Calvary, they
wagged their heads, and said, He saved others, etc.
3. The misfortunes of Jerusalem were greatly aggravated, because her friends
dealt treacherously with her, and became her enemies. The suffering Saviour
was betrayed by one disciple, denied by another, and at last they all forsook
Him and fled.
4. In her sorrows, Jerusalem cried unto God who had left her, and delivered her
into the hand of her enemies, The suffering Saviour too appealed to God in
the profoundly awful cry, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?
5. Jerusalem was enduring the greatest misfortunes that history records of any
city in any war. The suffering Saviour bore agony that no other being could
endure. Every man has to bear his own burden, but the Lord laid on Him
 the iniquity of us all.

I. Those who sorrow claim our special attention.

1. Because by sorrow sympathy is excited. Even those men who are most
depraved are quickened to sympathise by any suffering that is placed before
them in the peculiar phase they can understand. The best men will be
quickened to sympathise with it in whatever form it appears. Christ was. No
sort of sorrow was beneath His compassion, nor beyond the limits of HIS
sympathy.
2. Because sorrow will generally teach us some lesson. The asking of Why this
sorrow? How can it be destroyed? will often lead to the discovery of the
profoundest and most necessary truths. Parents endure sorrow and suffering
that their sons may learn lessons; neighbours, that their neighbours; nations,
that surrounding nations may. But if the son will thoughtlessly pass by the
sorrow of his parent; or the neighbour will pass by that of the neighbour;
or the nation will pass by that of the nation--the son, the neighbour, the
nation, must sorrow for themselves.

II. Of all who ever have sorrowed, Jesus Christ preeminently claims our
attention.
1. He sorrowed more intensely than all others. He held Himself back from no
grief, shrank from no abyss, refused no cross. Others have crowned
themselves with royalty. He put the crown of sorrows upon HIS own brow.
The solitariness of the Saviours sufferings, moreover, gives Him
preeminence in grief. Others have known the creeping shadows of loneliness;
He its midnight.
2. As a sorrower, He taught infinitely more important lessons than all others.
(1) The evil of sire If sin could cause that sorrow in a holy Being, what will it
cause in us?
(2) Gods hatred of sin. He loved His Son, and yet He thus gave Him to
bruising and to death for us.
(3) Gods love for man, and way of saving him. Comprehend Gods mercy, by
comprehending Christs agony. (A. R. Thomas.)

The sufferings of Christ demand the attention of all

I. Let us, first, inquire into THE TRUE MEANING OF THESE WORDS; and, in order to
that, examine the connection in which they stand. Jerusalem is here represented as
speaking, in the character of a female person, and that of a widow, bitterly
lamenting her desolate condition, and calling for compassion. Whether any sorrow
was like unto her sorrow at this period, we cannot determine, nor is this material. It
was, undoubtedly, very great; and it was not unnatural for them to suppose it
peculiar and unexampled. This is a common ease, both with bodies of people and
individuals. Persons, when exercised with heavy and complicated afflictions, are
very apt to suppose no sufferings equal to their own, and no sorrow like theirs. It is
also very common and very natural for persons under heavy afflictions to feel it as a
high aggravation that they have none to sympathise with them under their troubles,
or to show any disposition to afford them relief.
1. This is a very grievous and pitiable condition for any to be in.
2. To exercise sympathy towards the afflicted is what may most reasonably be
expected, and the neglect of it is highly culpable.

II. How applicable the description in the text is to the Lord Jesus Christ.

III. There are many who may be said to pass by with unconcern, as if all this was
nothing to them and they had no concern in it.
1. What think yon of the great number of those who are called by the name of
Christ, who never set themselves seriously to contemplate His sufferings:
who never, or but seldom, attend the preaching of Christ crucified; or who,
though they may sometimes hear the doctrine of the Cross, never bestow a
serious thought about the ends and designs of the Saviours sufferings, or the
concern which they themselves have in them?
2. And what shall we say of those persons, who even profess faith in Christ and
love to His name, and attend the ordinary worship of His house with
apparent decency, who yet neglect to fulfil His dying command to
commemorate His sufferings and death in that peculiar ordinance, in which
we have a visible representation of them, designed to perpetuate the memory
of them in the world, and affect the heart with a sense of His love. (S.
Palmer.)

Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow.

Searchings of heart
The greatest natures are capable of the greatest sorrow. It is utterly inconceivable
to man of how much sorrow a nature like that of Jesus is capable. What sorrow
would be ours if, for a single day, we were endowed with a power of vision which
enabled us to see underneath all the coverings of life, into the heart of things; if all
persons were laid bare to us, and we saw the stern reality below the veneer and
polish and dress and shows of things! Let us not forget that the sufferings of our
Lord historically recorded, are but part of His sufferings. The apostle speaks of
filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ. There are sorrows for the
Son of Man still, for He has identified Himself with us, and become one with us.
Does not His Church cause Him sorrow? Is it not like raw material, so very hard to
His hand as to be almost incapable of being moulded into any shape or form of
beauty? Does He not sorrow over our ignorance? Our mental dulness? Our pride of
knowledge which is often worse than ignorance? Our unloveliness of spirit and
unlovableness? Our hard thoughts of others? Do not these things cause Him
sorrow? Again, our want of patience in doing His work? Our expecting to reap on
the very day we sow? Does not our Lord sorrow over our legalism--that old Jewish
spirit of slavishness to mere forms and customs which are of human device--the
letter which killeth; the rigidity which knows not how to bend or adapt itself to
weakness and feebleness and infirmity? Must He not sorrow over our sectarianisms-
-our thinking more of mere sectional names than of the real unity which underlies
all these? Yea, sometimes, must not our very prayers be a source of sorrow to Him?
Yes, truly, our Lord may well say, as He looks into the hearts of the members of His
professing Church, Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow.
When, in a court of justice, a mans own witnesses seem to damage his cause, the
ease is indeed painful And yet, our Lords deepest, profoundest, tenderest sorrow
does not arise from any inconsistencies, or defects, or blunders, or ignorances, or
wilfulnesses which He sees among those who believe in Him, trust Him and look to
Him, many of whom do their feeble, blundering best, to serve Him. For, every man
who names the name of Christ, and departs from iniquity, honours Christ. His chief
sorrow is not over His Church, with all its multiplied inconsistencies, ignorances,
and wilfulnesses, but over others; over you young man, to whom He has given a
godly father and mother, who daily pray for you, though you hear it not, who love
you with a love that, as far as a finite thing can represent an infinite thing, is like the
love of God. Over you also, fathers and mothers, men and women bearing the holiest
names that this world knows; into whose arms a gift has been placed than which this
earth can furnish none so marvellous or wonderful--have you appreciated that gift at
its true value? Have you realised that the flesh was only a platform for an immortal
spirit to stand upon! Must there not be sorrow in the heart of Christ as He sees
fathers and mothers treating children as though they were mere animal forms, or, at
the most, mere children of this world, to be trained for this world, everything
nurtured in them except that which is highest, that which is distinctive, that which
makes them men? When our Lord looks from the height of His infinite knowledge
upon the world of fathers and mothers, and sees how, by their example, they are
bending their childrens souls away from Him, how often must His feeling be like to
that expressed in these words, Is any sorrow like unto My sorrow? Does not this
line of reflection touch every one of us? What sorrow greater than that of being
perpetually misunderstood? And who knows this sorrow as the Son of God knows it?
Have we not misunderstood Him most egregiously? Have we not thought of Him as
the condemner? Yet is He the Saviour. Have we not resisted the Holy Spirits
movements in our souls? Have we not almost forced ourselves into darkness? And
all this has been so much of sorrow poured into the lot of the Son of Man. Yet still
He broods over us, with a love that many waters cannot quench. (R. Thomas.)

Everyone disposed to think his afflictions peculiarly severe

I. The afflicted are very apt to imagine that God afflicts them too severely.
1. There are many degrees and shades of difference in those evils which may be
properly called afflictions. But those who suffer lighter troubles are very apt
to let their imagination have its free scope, which can easily magnify light
afflictions into great and heavy ones. So that mankind commonly afflict
themselves more than God afflicts them.
2. There is another way, by which the afflicted are apt to magnify their
afflictions. They compare their present afflictions, not only with their past
prosperity, but with the afflictions of others; which leads them to imagine
that their afflictions are not only great, but singular, and such as nobody else
has suffered; at least, to such a great degree.

II. This is a great and unhappy mistake.

1. None that are afflicted ever know that God lays His hand heavier upon them
than upon others. Mankind are extremely apt to judge erroneously,
 concerning the nature and weight of their own afflictions, and the nature and
weight of the afflictions which others around them suffer. They have a high
estimation of the good which they see others enjoy, but a low estimation of
the evil they suffer. And, on the other hand, they cherish a low idea of their
own prosperity, and a high idea of their own adversity.
2. The afflicted never have any reason to imagine that God afflicts them too
severely, because He never afflicts them more than they know they deserve.
Every person has sinned and come short of the glory of God. Every sin
deserves punishment; and it belongs to God to inflict any punishment that
sin deserves.
3. The afflicted have no reason to think that God afflicts them too severely,
because He never afflicts them more than they need to be afflicted. God
afflicts some to draw forth the corruption of their hearts, and make them
sensible that they are under the entire dominion of a carnal mind, which is
opposed to His character, His law, His government, and the Gospel of His
grace, and of course exposed not only to His present, but His future and
everlasting displeasure. This is suited to alarm their fears, and excite them to
flee from the wrath to come. God afflicts others to try their hearts, and draw
forth their right affections, and give them sensible evidence of their having
the spirit of adoption, and belonging to the number of His family and
friends, and thereby removing their past painful doubts and fears. And He
afflicts others, to give them an opportunity to display the beauties of
holiness, by patience, submission, and cordial obedience in the darkest and
most trying seasons.
4. The afflicted have no reason to think that God afflicts them too severely,
because He never afflicts them any more than His glory requires Him to
afflict them.
Improvement--
1. It is very unwise, as well as criminal, for the afflicted to brood over and
aggravate the greatness of their affliction.
2. If the afflicted have no reason to think hard of God, or indulge the feeling that
He corrects them too severely, then as long as they do indulge such a thought
and feeling, they can receive no benefit from the afflictions they suffer.
3. If the afflicted have no reason to think that God afflicts them too severely,
then they always have reason to submit to Him under His correcting hand.
4. It appears from what has been said, that men may derive more benefit from
great than from light afflictions. They are suited to make deeper and better
impressions on the mind.
5. It is as easy to submit to heavy as to light afflictions. As there are greater and
stronger reasons to submit to heavy than to lighter evils, so these reasons
render it mere easy to submit to heavy than light afflictions.
6. If men are apt to think that God afflicts them too severely, then their
afflictions give them the best opportunity to know their own hearts. (N.
Emmons, D. D.)

Instructive sorrows
1. The godly in all their afflictions must look unto the Lord the striker, and not
 respect the rod wherewith He smiteth.
2. Corrections laid upon others ought not to be neglected, but duly considered
of, as the rest of Gods works.
(1) God often smiteth some to instruct others thereby.
(2) We being of one mould should take to heart the condition one of
another.
3. Man is not to be proud though God do many things by him and for him that
seem both strange and commendable.
4. The wicked have no cause to rejoice when they prevail against the godly,
though they do so usually.
(1) They are but the Lords rods, who (without repentance) shall be cast into
the fire.
(2) They do not, as they imagine, overthrow the godly and establish
themselves, but the clean contrary.
5. The godly endure more trouble in this world, both inwardly and outwardly,
than any other.
(1) God loveth us, and would wean us from delighting in this world.
(2) Our nature is so perverse that it will not he framed to any spiritual things
without many and grievous corrections.
(3) Satan and the world do hate us, and labour continually for our
destruction.
6. It is a usual thing with us, to think our own troubles more heavy and
intolerable than any others suffer.
(1) We feel all the smart of our own, and do only afar off behold that which
others bear.
(2) We are more discontented with our own crosses than we should, which
maketh us bear them the more impatiently, and think them the more
intolerable.
7. The afflictions that God layeth upon His servants are and ought to be grievous
unto them for the present time (Heb 12:11).
(1) We justly have deserved them through our sins.
(2) We must be led by them to repentance, or we abuse them.
8. Though our sins do always deserve it, and our foes do daily desire, yet can no
punishment befall the godly till God see it meet to lay it upon them.
9. The anger of God is hot against sin, even in His dearest servants.
(1) He is most righteous, and cannot bear with any evil.
(2) It tendeth to His great dishonour.
10. God doth not always afflict His servants, but at such special times as He
seeth it meetest for them. (J. Udall.)

Good Friday

I. Some of the particulars in which our Saviours sufferings were above those of all
others.
 1. He endured bodily torture the most severe.
2. Jesus suffered still deeper sorrows of the soul. All that pierces our hearts with
sorrow was heaped on Christ. What so grievous as the treachery of a friend?
And Judas, His own familiar friend, betrayed Him. What so bitter as to be
forsaken? Yet all His disciples forsook Him and fled. Mockery and scorn and
reviling are more cruel than the pains of the body; and He suffered them all,
though He had done no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth. Often
man has much to soothe his dying moments; the eye of love watches by his
pillow, and the hand of affection tries to lighten his pains. But this was
denied to Jesus. When He died, malice and hatred were by, to pour fresh
bitterness into His cup of death.
3. But will not God support Him? will not His Heavenly Fathers presence and
consolation supply the place of all others? No: Christ is in the sinners stead;
He is made sin for us, and His Fathers countenance is turned away.

II. HOW ARE WE TO THINK OF WHAT CHRIST HAS DONE AND SUFFERED? Why are we
come together on this day, if it concerns us not? This day is our day of redemption.
Hope, this day, has risen to a lost and sinful world. The things we hear and read of
today are no vain story of years gone by: they are our very life. You who are passing
by, as it were, in the carelessness and thoughtlessness of youth, young men and
young women! you are called today to think of Jesus Christ. He speaks to you, and
says, Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which I have borne
for you. It is for your redemption. He will count all His sorrows as lightly borne, if
you will let Him save your souls alive. Go to Him now in the first and best of your
days. Give them to God, and not to sin; and so will He be with you in all your
journey through this evil world, so shall you enjoy true peace of conscience. You who
are passing by in manhood! to you also Jesus speaks. What are His sorrows to you?
Do you find time and leisure to think of Him amidst the business, the labour, the
burdens of life? Do you know anything of the power of His Cross? Has it led you to
hate sin? Are you become new creatures in Christ Jesus? Do you pray for His Spirit
to lead and sanctify you? You who are old, on the brink of the grave and of eternity!
have you ever listened to the Saviours call? Have you believed upon His name? How
has your faith been shown? Has it appeared in a life devoted to His service, or have
your years been spent in deadness to God? You who are living in the practice and
love of any known sin, in profaneness, in the lusts of the flesh, in general
carelessness about religion, trample not under your feet the precious blood as on
this day shed. Oh, may you seek Him while He may be found, and call upon Him
while He is near. Christian! is the death of Christ nothing to you? Nay; it is all in all.
It is your hope, your life, the source of pardon and of peace. What is the voice that
speaks to you from the Cross of Christ? It bids you die wholly unto sin, rise more
truly unto righteousness. (E. Blencowe, M. A.)

Sorrow seen in its true light

Everybody is so sorry for me except myself! These are the words of Frances
Ridley Havergal, that sweet singing spirit who dragged about through many years a
weary, fragile, pain-ridden body. Everybody poured their sympathy upon her, and
yet she half resented it. What is the secret of her triumph? She gives it us in one of
the letters she wrote to her friends: I see my pain in the light of Calvary.
Everything depends upon the light in which we view things. There are objects in the
material world which, seen in certain lights, are visions of glory. Deprived of that
revealing light, they are grey and commonplace. The Screes at Wastwater, looked at
in dull light, are only vast slopes of common pebble and common clay, but when the
sunlight falls upon them they shine resplendent with the varied colours of a pigeons
neck. We must set our things in the right light. Frances Havergal set her pain in the
light of Calvary, and so could almost welcome it. I remember another of her phrases,
in which she said she never understood the meaning of the apostles words, In His
own body, until she was in great pain herself, and then it seemed as though a new
page of her Masters love had been unfolded to her. Bring your common drudgery,
your dull duties, your oommonplace tasks, your heavy, sullen griefs, into the light of
the Saviour s sacrifice, and they will glow and burn with new and unexpected glory.
In Thy light shall we see light. (Hartley Aspen.)

Our sorrows rightly estimated

Wilt we see in the water seemeth greater than at is, so is the waters Marah. All our
sufferings, saith Luther, are but chips of His Cross, not worthy to ye names in the
same day. (J. Trapp.)

On the Passion of our Saviour

I. The greatness of our Saviours sufferings.

II. The interest that we have in our Saviours sufferings.

1. We were the occasion of them.
2. Their benefits redound unto us (Col 1:14; Heb 10:19-20; Rom 3:15; Heb
10:20).

III. THE REGARD AND CONSIDERATION WE SHOULD BESTOW ON THEM. Fix the eyes
of your mind, and call up your most serious attention; reach hither the hand of your
faith, and thrust it into your Saviours side; put your fingers into the print of the
nails; lay to heart all the passages of His lamentable story; and this cannot but melt
your heart, unless it be harder than the rocks, and dealer than the bodies in the
graves. (H. Scougal, M. A.)

LAM 1:13
From above hath He sent fire into my bones.

Penetrating sorrows
1. This often mention of Gods hand teacheth this doctrine: When God punisheth
us by the hands of the wicked, we are hardly brought to ascribe it to Him
alone; and they from thinking that their own hand and power hath done it.
2. When God layeth afflictions upon us, they ransack the most secret parts that
are in us.
 3. God often bringeth His servants to the greatest misery that can be sustained
by man.
4. God doth govern, and that in special manner, the particular course of all those
afflictions which He layeth upon His people.
5. We can no more wind ourselves out of those afflictions that God layeth upon
us, than the entangled soul can escape the net that compasseth him.
6. Nothing can go forward, or come to any good issue, but that only which the
Lord furthereth.
7. It is God that giveth friends, health, etc.; and taketh all away at His pleasure.
8. According to the measure and continuance of Gods afflicting hand upon us,
so must the measure and continuance of our sorrows be. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:14
The yoke of my transgressions is bound by His hand.

A guilty conscience

I. Its sense of OPPRESSION. It feels itself under a yoke. It is heavy iron a crushing
yoke is sin It is on the neck, there is no breaking away from it.

II. Its sense of DEGRADATION. It feels itself held m a miserable vassalage, carnally
sold under sin.

III. Its sense of RETRIBUTION. It feels that the heavy, degrading yoke is bound by
His hand, the hand of justice: that his transgression is like a chain wreathed by
retributive law upon the neck. The guilty conscience awakened feels that God is in
all its sufferings, that there is justice in all. (Homilist.)

The misery of sin

1. The sins of Gods people are the heaviest burden they can possibly bear in this
life.
(1) They make a separation between God and them.
(2) They give Satan matter to tyrannise over them.
(3) They do, after a sort, possess the soul with the very torments of hell.
2. When God meaneth to punish us for our sins, He calleth them all to
remembrance.
(1) That His justice may find just matter why to smite us.
(2) That He may lay His corrections upon us according as He shall see meet,
by viewing the quality of our sins and obstinacy therein, or proudness to
repentance.
3. When God meaneth to correct, He will so do it as it cannot be escaped.
4. God giveth strength and courage to men, and taketh it away at His pleasure
 (De 28:7; De 28:25).
5. The issue of battle is in the hand of God alone (Psa 44:3).
6. God often delivereth His servants into the hands of the ungodly.
(1) To exercise them, and bring them to repentance, or to perfect His power
in their weakness.
(2) To give the wicked occasion to show forth their cruel disposition.
7. God sometimes afflicteth His people so grievously that their state seemeth
desperate and irrecoverable in the judgment of flesh and blood.
(1) That He may show His mighty power in restoring them.
(2) That all means being taken away, they may learn to look up to heaven
and rest upon Him only. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:15-17
The Lord hath trodden under foot all my mighty men.

Supreme penalties
1. When God meaneth to afflict us, He will spoil us of all our helps wherein we
may have any confidence.
2. God can as easily destroy in a fenced city as in a battle.
3. It is God that ruleth even the wicked, and setteth them on work against His
servants.
4. Men can no more escape Gods hand in punishing them, than the grapes can
fly from the treader of the winepress.
5. The niceness of those that have lived daintily (the virgin) is no reason to free
them, but rather a provocation to bring afflictions upon them.
(1) The pampering of ourselves is none of the ends for which God bestoweth
His blessings upon us.
(2) Such coy niceness as many be of is seldom without special sins that are
incident to that condition, which God will not let pass unpunished.
6. Except the children forsake their sins, they shall not be spared for the
godliness of their parents. (J. Udall.)

For these things I weep.

Grief in view of punishment

1. It is not only lawful, but also necessary, for the godly to be so greatly grieved,
when God punisheth them for their sins, as may draw them into extreme
weeping.
2. No adversity hath warrant to grieve us so much as the punishment of God
upon us for our sins (Luk 23:28).
3. There is none so stout, or hardhearted, but afflictions will bring him down.
 4. It is a grievous plague to be deprived of comforters in affliction; the contrary
whereof is an exceeding blessing.
5. It is the duty of everyone to comfort and relieve others that be in distress.
(1) God hath so commanded (Gal 6:2).
(2) We are members one of another (1Co 12:27).
(3) We may have the like need ourselves another time.
6. The Church, as also the commonwealth, is to declare herself a kind mother to
everyone that is trained up therein, and to have compassion of their miseries,
helping them to the uttermost.
7. It is the property of carnal friends to be friendly only whilst prosperity is upon
us; but if our adversaries prevail against us, they are gone. (J. Udall.)

Zion spreadeth forth her hands.--

The appeal for help
1. It is a necessary duty in Gods people to seek out all good means of their
release from troubles.
2. God often frustrateth the lawful endeavours of His children of that good issue
which is expected, and yet liketh well that they should use means to bring the
same to pass.
3. The wicked have no power against Gods people, but that which is given them
from the Lord.
4. Gods people are more grievously afflicted and reproached in the world than
any else, and the godliest most of all. (J. Udall.)

LAM 1:18
The Lord is righteous; for I have rebelled.

A right view of punishment

When we see God in our punishments, we begin to take a right view of them;
when they are nothing to us but self-humiliations or signs of contempt, they
embitter us and harden our hearts; but when we see God at work in the very
desolation of our fortunes, we axe sure that He has a reason for thus scourging us,
and that if we accept the penalty, and bow down before His majesty, we shall be
lifted up by His mighty hand. Zion says that the Lord hath made her strength to fail,
the Lord hath trodden under foot all her mighty men, the Lord hath trodden the
virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a winepress. But Zion does not accept these
results with a hard heart; no: rather she says, For these things I weep, etc.
Whatever brings us to this softness of heart is a helper to the soul in all upward and
Divine directions. Zion confesses the righteousness of the Lord. In proportion as we
can recognise the justice of our punishment, may we bear that punishment with
some dignity. It has been pointed out that with this beginning of conversion the
name of the Lord, or Jehovah, reappears. The people whom God has punished on
account of their sins have, in the result, been enabled to recognise the justice of their
punishment. Of this we have an example in the Book of Nehemiah (Neh 9:33-34). In
the case of the Captivity, we see the extreme rigour of the law in the expression, My
virgins and my young men, etc.: the most honoured and the most beautiful have
perished of hunger, as it were, in the open streets. How impartial and tremendous
are the judgments of God! May not virgins be spared? May not His priests be
exempted from the operation of the law of judgment? Will not an official robe
protect a soul against the lightning of Divine wrath? All history answers No; all
experience testifies to the contrary, and thereby re-establishes and infinitely
confirms our confidence in the living God. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The equity of punishment acknowledged

1. Gods people do acknowledge His justice in all His works, yea, even in His
punishments laid upon them.
(1) His Word and Spirit hath reformed their judgments, teaching them how
to think of His holy majesty in all things.
(2) The consciousness of their own sins causeth them to justify the Lord, and
to accuse themselves.
2. It is the duty of Gods children to seek the cause of all their evils in
themselves.
(1) God is righteous, and layeth nothing upon them but what they justly
deserve.
(2) They know their own manifold sins, and their exceeding weakness in
well-doing, which they cannot see in any others.
3. Though God punish us oft for other causes, yet the matter that He worketh
upon is our sins.
4. We must not lessen our sins, but account them most heinous in our own eyes.
5. It is our duty (especially in religion) neither to go further nor to come shorter
than Gods revealed will; but attend unto it as the servants eye doth unto his
masters hand (Psa 123:2).
6. It is rebellion against the Lord Himself to be disobedient unto the voice of His
ministers teaching His truth (Luk 10:16).
7. We are constrained in our adversity to acknowledge Gods hand in those
things which in our prosperity we neglected.
8. When Gods people are punished, they are not ashamed but willing to tell all
men of it, and to declare their sins to be the cause of it.
(1) Above all things they desire to have the Lord justified in all mens
judgments.
(2) They desire that their own example may teach others to serve God better.
9. The manifesting of our punishments unto the world as from Gods hand
because of our sins can neither dishonour the Lord nor harden others in
their wickedness, but is a just occasion of the contrary. (J. Udall.)

Acknowledging the righteousness of Gods judgments

The cure token of Judahs and Israels repentance shall be when, accepting the
punishment of their iniquity as their just due, they shall justify God. It is the most
hopeful sign in any sinner, when the Holy Spirit applying inwardly the lesson taught
by outward distresses, teaches him to cry, The Lord is righteous; for I have rebelled
against His commandments. (A. R. Fausset, M. A.)

LAM 1:19-22
I called for my lovers, but they deceived me.

Deceitful helpers
1. It is an increase of sorrow to be disappointed of their help by whom we looked
to be delivered out of our troubles.
2. God often maketh our friends, that love us unfeignedly, utterly unable to do
us any good in our distress.
3. The misery of that people must needs be great, whose rulers can neither hold
themselves nor others.
4. Gods plagues do often overtake the great ones, as well as others.
5. Gods people may come to the extremest beggary that can be in this life.
(1) Outward things are no part of their felicity, which is purchased for them
by Christ Jesus.
(2) God will now and then show Himself the preserver of His people, when
all means do fail. (J. Udall.)

Behold, O Lord; for I am in distress.--

Prayer in distress
1. We must not give over, but continue in prayer, though we be not heard in that
we entreat for. God hath commanded us to pray without ceasing, and set no
time when we shall be heard.
2. God seeth all things; but we must with lamentation lay open our miseries
before Him.
(1) Mercy is denied to them that hide their sins.
(2) Forgiveness is granted upon a free confession.
3. We then pray most earnestly when we feet most sensibly the burden of that
we would be rid of, and the want of that we would have.
4. There is no rest or quietness within us, when God presseth us with the weight
of our own sins.
5. The godly do always, in the due consideration of their sins, aggravate them
against themselves in greatest measure.
(1) They see best into their own offences.
(2) They measure them by the heavy anger of God, deserved by the same
(Luk 18:13).
6. The things that are ordained for our greatest good in this life, do turn to our
greatest harm when our sins provoke Gods anger to break forth against us.
(J. Udall.)
 There is none to comfort me.

Comfortless
1. It is the duty of all men to comfort the afflicted, and not to add to their
miseries (Mat 25:40; Jam 1:27; 1Co 12:26; Heb 13:3).
(1) We owe this duty one to another.
(2) No misery can befall another, but when God will it may light upon
ourselves.
2. It is the property of the wicked to rejoice at the miseries of the godly, with
whom they should mourn (Psa 69:12; Psa 137:3; Jdg 16:25).
(1) They are affected as their father the devil, who rejoiceth in nothing but
the calamity of mankind.
(2) Their hatred maketh them glad when any evil lighteth on the righteous.
3. We are the fittest scholars to learn Gods Word and make right use of it, when
afflictions are upon us.
(1) In prosperity we forget God and ourselves also.
(2) We are in our corrupt nature as naughty children that will not learn
except they be well whipped.
(3) In afflictions we can more easily consider of our estate, both present,
past, and to come.
4. Every tittle of Gods Word shall be accomplished in due season (Mat 5:18).
5. Though the troubles of the righteous be many, yet arc not the elect to be
discerned from the reprobate by affliction.
6. It greatly easeth the godly in their afflictions to consider that their foes shall
be destroyed (Rev 18:20).
7. The punishments that Gods people sustain in this life are sure tokens that the
wicked shall be plagued, howsoever they escape for a time. (J. Udall.)

Thou wilt bring the day that Thou hast called.--

The day that right all wrongs
In that day--
1. God shall no longer be shut out of His own world.
2. Christ shall no longer be denied and blasphemed.
3. Evil shall no longer prevail.
4. Error shall give place to truth.
5. The saints shall no longer be maligned. (H. Bonar, D. D.)

LAMENTATIONS 2

LAM 2:1-9
 How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in ms anger.

Chastisements
1. It is our duty to strive with ourselves to be affected with the miseries of Gods
people.
2. The chastisements and corrections that God layeth upon His Church are most
wonderful.
(1) The Lord will in His own servants declare His anger against sin.
(2) He seeth afflictions the best means to frame them to His obedience.
(3) His ways are beyond the reach of flesh and blood.
3. God spareth not to smite His dearest children when they sin against Him.
(1) That He may declare Himself an adversary to sin in all men without
partiality.
(2) That He may reduce His servants from running on headlong to hell with
the wicked.
4. The higher God advanceth any, the greater is their punishment in the day of
their visitation for their sins.
(1) To whom much is given, of them must much be required.
(2) According to the privileges abused, so is the sin of those that have them
greater and more in number.
5. The most beautiful thing in this world is base in respect of the majesty and
glory of the Lord.
6. Gods anger against sin moveth Him to destroy the things that He
commanded for His own service, when they are abused by men. (J. Udall.)

The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob.

Spoiled habitations
1. It is the hand of God that taketh away the flourishing estate of a kingdom
(Dan 4:29).
2. As God is full of mercy in His long-suffering, so is His anger unappeasable
when it breaketh out against the sons of men for their sins (Jer 4:4).
3. God depriveth us of a great blessing when He taketh from us our dwelling
places.
4. There is no assurance of worldly possessions and peace, but in the favour of
God.
5. God overthroweth the greatest strength that man can erect, even at His
pleasure.
6. It is a mark of Gods wrath, to be deprived of strength, courage, or any other
necessary gift, when we stand in need of them.
7. It is the sin of the Church that causeth the Lord to spoil the same of any
blessing that she hath heretofore enjoyed.
8. These being taken away in Gods anger, teacheth us that it is the good blessing
of God to have a kingdom, to have strongholds, munitions, etc., for a defence
 against their enemies.
9. The more God honoureth us with His blessings, the greater shall be our
dishonour if we abuse them, when He entereth into judgment with us for
the same. (J. Udall.)

He hath cut off in His fierce anger all the horn of Israel.--
Strength despoiled
1. Strength and honour are in the Lords disposition, to be given, continued, or
taken away at His pleasure.
2. When Gods favour is towards us, it is our shield against our enemies; but
when He meaneth to punish us, He leaveth us unto ourselves.
3. Though Gods justice be severe against sin in all men, yet is it most manifest
in His Church, having sinned against Him.
(1) All mens eyes are most upon Gods Church.
(2) God doth declare Himself more in and for His Church than the world
besides. (J. Udall.)

LAM 2:4-5
He hath bent His bow like an enemy.

God as an enemy
If God is tormenting His people in fierce anger, it must be because He is their
enemy--so the sad-hearted patriot reasons. First, we have the earthly side of the
process. The daughter of Zion is covered with a cloud--a metaphor more striking in
the brilliant East than in our habitually sombre climate. There it would suggest
unwonted gloom--the loss of the customary light of heaven, rare distress, and
excessive melancholy. But there is more than gloom. A mere cloud may lift, and
discover everything unaltered by the passing shadow. The distress that has fallen on
Jerusalem is not thus superficial and transient. She herself has suffered a fatal fall.
The Language is now varied; instead of the daughter of Zion we have the beauty
of Israel. The use of the larger title, Israel, is not a little significant. It shows that
the elegist is alive to the idea of the fundamental unity of his race, a unity which
could not be destroyed by centuries of intertribal warfare. It has been suggested with
probability that by the expression the beauty of Israel the elegist intended to
indicate the temple. This magnificent pile of buildings, crowning one of the hills of
Jerusalem, and shining with gold in barbaric splendour, was the central object of
beauty among all the people who revered the worship it enshrined. Its situation
would naturally suggest the language here employed. Still keeping in mind the
temple, the poet tells us that God has forgotten His footstool. He seems to be
thinking of the mercy seat over the ark, the spot at which God was thought to show
Himself propitious to Israel on the great day of atonement, and which was looked
upon as the very centre of the Divine presence. No miracle intervenes to punish the
heathen for their sacrilege. Yes, surely God must have forgotten His footstool! So it
seems to the sorrowful Jew, perplexed at the impunity with which this crime has
been committed. But the mischief is not confined to the central shrine. It has
extended to remote country regions and simple rustic folk. The shepherds hut has
shared the fate of the temple of the Lord. All the habitations of Jacob--a phrase
which in the original points to country cottages--have been swallowed up. The
holiest is not spared on account of its sanctity, neither is the lowliest on account of
its obscurity. The calamity extends to all districts, to all things, to all classes. If the
shepherds cot is contrasted with the temple and the ark because of its simplicity,
the fortress may be contrasted with this defenceless hut because of its strength. Yet
even the strongholds have been thrown down. More than this, the action of the
Jews army has been paralysed by the God who had been its strength and support in
the glorious olden time. It is as though the right hand of the warrior had been seized
from behind and drawn back at the moment when it was raised to strike a blow for
deliverance. The consequence is that the flower of the army, all that were pleasant
to the eye, are slain. Israel herself is swallowed up, while her palaces and fortresses
are demolished. The climax of this mystery of Divine destruction is reached when
God destroys His own temple. The elegist returns to the dreadful subject as though
fascinated by the terror of it. According to the strict translation of the original, God
is mid to have violently taken away His tabernacle as a garden. At the siege of a
city the fruit gardens that encircle it are the first victims of the destroyers axe. Lying
out beyond the walls they are entirely unprotected, while the impediments they offer
to the movements of troops and instruments of war induce the commander to order
their early demolition. Thus Titus had the trees cleared from the Mount of Olives, so
that one of the first incidents in the Roman siege of Jerusalem must have been the
destruction of the Garden of Gethsemane. Now the poet compares the ease with
which the great, massive temple--itself a powerful fortress, and enclosed within the
city wails--was demolished, with the simple process of scouring the outlying
gardens. The deeper thought that God rejects His sanctuary because His people have
first rejected Him is not brought forward just now. Yet this solution of the mystery is
prepared by a contemplation of the utter failure of the old ritual of atonement.
Evidently that is not always effective, for here it has broken down entirely; then can
it ever be inherently efficacious? It cannot be enough to trust to a sanctuary and
ceremonies which God Himself destroys. The first thing to be noticed in this
unhestitating ascription to God of positive enmity is the striking evidence it contains
of faith in the Divine power, presence, and activity. The victorious army of the
Babylonians filled the field as completely in the old time as that of the Germans in
the modern event. Yet the poet simply ignores its existence. He passes it with
sublime indifference, his mind filled with the thought of the unseen Power behind.
He knows that the action of the true God is supreme in everything that happens,
whether the event be favourable or unfavourable to His people. Perhaps it is only
owing to the dreary materialism of current thought that we should be less likely to
discover an indication of the enmity of God in some huge national calamity. Still,
although this idea of the elegist is a fruit of his unshaken faith in the universal sway
of God, it startles and shocks us, and we shrink from it almost as though it contained
some blasphemous suggestion. Is the elegist only expressing his own feelings? Have
we a right to affirm that there can be no objective truth in the awful idea of the
enmity of God? In the first place, we have no warrant for asserting that God will
never act in direct and intentional opposition to any of His creatures. There is one
obvious occasion when He certainly does this. The man who resists the laws of
nature finds those laws working against him. The laws of nature are, as Kingsley
said, but the ways of God. If they are opposing a man, God is opposing that man. But
God does not confine His action to the realm of physical processes. His providence
works through the whole course of events in the worlds history. What we see
evidently operating in nature we may infer to be equally active in less visible regions.
Then, if we believe in a God who rules and works in the world, we cannot suppose
that His activity is confined to aiding what is good. It is unreasonable to imagine
that He stands aside in passive negligence of evil. And if He concerns Himself to
thwart evil, what is this but manifesting Himself as the enemy of the evil-doer? It
may be contended, on the other side, that there is a world of difference between
antagonistic actions and unfriendly feelings, and that the former by no means imply
the latter. Still, for the time being, the opposition is a reality, and a reality which to
all intents and purposes is one of enmity, since it resists, frustrates, hurts. Nor is this
all. We have no reason to deny that God can have real anger. We must believe that
Jesus Christ was as truly revealing the Father when He was moved with indignation
as when He was moved with compassion. His mission was a war against all evil, and
therefore, though not waged with carnal weapons, a war against evil men. The
Jewish authorities were perfectly right in perceiving this fact. They persecuted Him
as their enemy; and He was their enemy. This statement is no contradiction to the
gracious truth that He desired to save all men, and therefore even these men. If
Gods enmity to any soul were eternal, it would conflict with His love. But if He is at
the present time actively opposing a man, and if He is doing this in anger, in the
wrath of righteousness against sin, it is only quibbling with words to deny that for
the time being He is a very real enemy to that man. (W. P. Adeney, M. A.)

The Divine anger

1. Where God is angry, there is nothing to be looked for but destruction and ill
success in all things.
2. God punisheth sin in His children in this world as severely as ii they were
reprobates.
(1) To declare that He is not partial, but hateth sin in those whom He most
of all loveth.
(2) That it may appear what great wrath remaineth for the ungodly (1Pe
4:17).
3. Though God show all outward signs of enmity against His Church, yet is His
love everlasting thereunto.
4. Gods anger is never in vain, but effecteth punishment upon them with whom
He is angry.
5. God regardeth not the most precious things that are amongst the sons of men,
in respect of declaring His justice against sin. (J. Udall.)

The Lord was as an enemy.

Divine displeasure

I. This oft repeating of one thing teacheth that it is hard to persuade Gods people
rightly to judge of and he afflicted with the afflictions that are upon them.
(1) The ways of God are high beyond the reach of the sons of men.
 (2) We axe naturally of a blind and dull disposition, with much ado brought
unto any good thing.
2. God hath no need of any people, but all have need of Him.
3. God will increase His plagues upon His children, where sin without
repentance is increased.
4. God giveth many causes of sorrow when He punisheth His people.
(1) He giveth a token that He is displeased, which is cause of greatest grief
unto His children.
(2) His punishments do usually cross our affections in the things that they
are much set upon.
(a) Labour with ourselves that we may be affected with the crosses that
are upon us.
(b) Seek to Him alone for succour in the time of our sorrow. (J. Udall.)

LAM 2:6-9
He hath violently taken away His tabernacle.

Divine destruction
Jehovah is here represented as throwing down His own temple, as treating it as if
it were a temporary shelter, as disregarding all its glory, and merely throwing it from
Him as men might tear down and east away a shed from an orchard, a garden, or a
field. Who can set a measure to the wrath of God? Continually does the Lord assert
that He will have nothing to do with mere form or ceremony, with mere locality or
consecration; He will only accept living obedience, living faithfulness, living
sacrifice. He will have no mercy upon polluted temples and polluted altars; nor will
His own Book be spared ii men have used it as an idol: He will destroy and utterly
drive away everything that once was sacred if it has been perverted to unholy
purposes. Let not men say that they will be safe in Gods temple from Gods wrath,
because when law has been violated there is no sanctuary where God will regard
man as safe from the visitation of His penal sword. How living and real does all this
make the providence of heaven! How near does this bring God to our daily life and
conduct! (J. Parker, D. D.)

God destroying His own ordinances

1. It is the Lord alone that giveth safety unto His Church, or layeth His people
open to spoilers (Isa 5:5-6; Psa 80:12-13).
2. No place on earth hath any holiness in it, or promise of a continuance, further
than it is holily used.
3. God is angry with His own ordinances, and layeth a curse upon them, for the
sins of those that abuse them (Psa 74:5-7; Isa 1:13; Isa 6:10).
4. The Church of God on earth is not always visible and apparent to the eyes of
men (Rev 12:14).
5. When God will afflict a people, He will spoil them of the means of their peace
 and comfort (Isa 3:1-5).
6. It is a grievous plague of God for a people to be spoiled of their rulers; and to
enjoy them is a great blessing.
7. It is the heaviest judgment that Gods Church can have falling upon her in this
life, to be deprived of that holy ministry which should build her up in true
religion (Psa 74:9; Mic 2:6). (J. Udall.)

The Lord hath cast off His altar.

Altars destroyed
1. It is the duty of Gods people to labour their affections, that they may be
rightly touched with the loss of the outward exercises of religion.
2. When God is angry with His people, He will take from them the outward signs
of His favour.
3. When Gods people grow obstinate in their sins, He spoileth them of all those
things wherein they trust.
4. when the Church is spoiled, the commonwealth cannot go free.
5. The wicked could never prevail against the godly, but that God giveth them
into their hands.
6. God giveth the wicked (for the sins of His people) occasion to blaspheme His
name and to deride His holy ordinances. (J. Udall.)

The Lord hath purposed to destroy the wall . . . of Zion.--

Privileges no protection
1. No privilege can free the impenitent sinners from the plague that God
meaneth to bring upon them, though they persuade themselves otherwise
(Jer 7:4).
2. The ruins of kingdoms and strong cities come to pass only by the immutable
decree of God; and not by fortune, mans power, or any other thing (Dan
4:22; 1Sa 15:26; 1Sa 15:28).
3. The Lord doth both decree HIS judgments and also determine the measure of
them (Dan 4:29).
4. The dumb and senseless creatures do mourn according to their kind when we
are punished in them for our sins (Rom 8:22).
5. The sin of men bringeth strongest things to nothing when God calleth them to
an account (Isa 13:19-20).
6. Gods hand prevaileth as easily against the strongest and most as the weakest
and fewest. (J. Udall.)

Her gates are sunk into the ground.--

Gates sunk
1. When God punisheth His people, He will especially destroy those things
wherein they put most confidence.
2. When God meaneth thoroughly to afflict a people, He will spoil them of the
 means of their peace and comfort.
3. When God by punishments showeth His anger against a people, He especially
plagueth their princes and rulers,
4. It is a grievous punishment unto the godly to live with or to serve them that
are wicked (Psa 120:4-5).
5. It is a fearful judgment to have the ministry of the Word that heretofore we
enjoyed, taken away from us (Psa 74:9; Mar 6:10-11). (J. Udall.)

The desolations of Zion

I. THE PRESENT DESOLATE AND MISERABLE STATE OF THE HEBREW NATION. No

people, since the creation, are in so anomalous a state as the Jews--without a
country or a city, a temple or a service, a priest or a sacrifice, worthy of the name.
Enter a Jewish synagogue, and you will see Ichabod is written on its walls--the
glory has departed: it is no longer the house of God or of prayer, but a house of
merchandise, if not worse.

II. FOR SUCH STUPENDOUS EVILS IS THERE NOT A CAUSE? If the heinousness of sin
he in proportion to the favours which the sinner has received, or to the light against
which it has been committed, no ingratitude seems to be so great as that of the
Jewish nation.

III. THE ONLY REMEDY. God, by the prophet Hosea, after charging Israel with
complicated guilt, gives a gleam of hope and a ray of mercy. O Israel, thou hast
destroyed thyself; but in Me is thy help. This is the burden of my message today,
that with God there is mercy, yea, plenteous redemption; and that, though others
can neither profit nor deliver, He can and shall redeem Israel from all his sins.

IV. ANSWER OBJECTIONS. One says, This is not the time. But who, I ask, is Gods
time keeper? Times and events are in Gods hands; and it is neither in our power,
nor would it be for our good, to know them. Who, then, can say what is not, when he
confessedly knows not what is the time? Again I ask, For what is it not the time?
For reaping?--for triumph? We never led you to expect it was; but, for breaking up
the ground it is always opportune. Again, we shall probably never live to see any
fruits of our labours. This we cannot know for certain; and if we could, it is as
selfish and ungenerous, as it is unwise, to use such an argument. We may set up the
hoard, or erect the scaffolding, or lay the foundation: another generation may carry
up the walls; and a third may put the finishing stroke with shoutings, songs, and
triumphs. After all, says another, you will do no real good you may make
hypocrites of your converts, and those only of the poorest, but you will not make
Christians: the prejudices of the Jew are too deeply rooted to be removed by a tract,
or even by the New Testament; your labour will therefore be in vain. Formidable as
this objection is, it is as flimsy as it is false. We make Christians! We make no such
pretensions: it is not in us: this is Gods work--His high and exclusive prerogative.
Believers are Gods husbandry, and Gods building. Is anything too hard for the
Lord? is a key which will open any lock which unbelief shall place in its way. One
class of objectors, of all others the most to be lamented and feared, is that who say,
respecting the Jews, Let them alone: do not meddle with them: they will not attend
to your instructions, nor have they any wish to change their religion; besides, what
need? one religion is as good as another, if a man does but act up to that he has, and
does as well as he can! Bigotry and intolerance will do them more harm than good.
To this specious reasoning I reply, It is criminal indifference, and cruel inhumanity,
to let men live and die in sin. True charity will make an effort to save those it loves.
We know, from bitter experience, in our own cases, that, if left to themselves, the
Israelites will not attend to us but God, who commanded, has promised HIS blessing
on our labours. Sinners must not be left to themselves. (J. W. Niblock, D. D.)

Her prophets also find no vision from the Lord.--

Prophets without a vision
In deploring the losses suffered by the daughter of Zion, the elegist bewails the
failure of her prophets to obtain a vision from Jehovah. To understand the situation,
we must recollect the normal place of prophecy in the social life of Israel. The great
prophets whose names and works have come down to us in Scripture were always
rare and exceptional men--voices crying in the wilderness. Possibly they were not
more scarce at this time than at other periods. This was not an age like the time of
Samuels youth, barren of Divine voices. Yet the idea of the elegist is that the
prophets who might be still seen at the site of the city were deprived of visions.
These must have been the professional prophets, officials who had been trained in
music and dancing to appear as choristers on festive occasions, the equivalent of the
modern dervishes; but who were also sought after like the seer of Ramah, to whom
young Saul resorted for information about his fathers lost asses, as simple
soothsayers. Such assistance as these men were expected to give was no longer
forthcoming at the request of troubled souls. The low and sordid uses to which
everyday prophecy was degraded may incline us to conclude that the cessation of it
was no very great calamity, and perhaps to suspect that from first to last the whole
business was a mass of superstition affording large opportunities for charlatanry.
But it would be rash to adopt this extreme view without a fuller consideration of the
subject. The prophets were regarded as the media of communication between
heaven and earth. It was because of the low and narrow habits of the people that
their gifts were often put to low and narrow uses which savoured rather of
superstition than of devotion. The belief that God did not only reveal His will to
great persons and on momentous occasions, helped to make Israel a religions
nation. That there were humble gifts of prophecy within the reach of the many, and
that these gifts were for the helping of men and women in their simplest needs, was
one of the articles of the Hebrew faith. When we have succeeded in recovering this
Hebrew standpoint, we shall be prepared to recognise that there are worse
calamities than bad harvests and seasons of commercial depression; we shall be
brought to acknowledge that it is possible to be starved in the midst of plenty,
because the greatest abundance of such food as we have lacks the elements requisite
for our complete nourishment. As we look across the wide field of history, we must
perceive that there have been many dreary periods in which the prophets could find
no vision from the Lord. Now what is the explanation of these variations in the
distribution of the spirit of prophecy? Why is the fountain of inspiration an
intermittent spring, a Bethesda? We cannot trace its failure to any shortness of
supply, for this fountain is fed from the infinite ocean of the Divine life. Neither can
we attribute caprice to One whose wisdom is infinite, and whose will is constant. It
may be right to say that God withholds the vision, withholds it deliberately; but it
cannot be correct to assert that this fact is the final explanation of the whole matter.
God must be believed to have a reason, a good and sufficient reason, for whatever
He does. Can we guess what His reason may be in such a case as this? It may be
conjectured that it is necessary for the field to lie fallow for a season in order that it
may bring forth a better crop subsequently. Incessant cultivation would exhaust the
soil. The eye would be blinded if it had no rest from visions. Until we have obeyed
the light that has been given us, it is foolish to complain that we have not more light.
Even our present light will wane if it is not followed up in practice. But while such
considerations must be attended to, they do not end the controversy, and they
scarcely apply at all to the particular illustration of it that is now before us. There is
no danger of surfeit in a famine; and it is a famine of the word that we are now
confronted with. Moreover, the elegist supplies an explanation that sets all
conjectures at rest. The fault was in the prophets themselves. Addressing the
daughter of Zion, the poet says: Thy prophets have seen visions for thee. The
visions were suited to the people to whom they were declared--manufactured, shall
we say?--with the express purpose of pleasing them. Such a degradation of sacred
functions in gross unfaithfulness deserved punishment; and the most natural and
reasonable punishment was the withholding for the future of true visions from men
who in the past had forged false ones. There is nothing so blinding as the habit of
lying. People who do not speak truth ultimately prevent themselves from perceiving
truth, the false tongue leading the eye to see falsely. This is the curse and doom of all
insincerity. It is useless to inquire for the views of insincere persons; they can have
no distinct views, no certain convictions, because their mental vision is blurred by
their long-continued habit of confounding true and false. Then, if for once in their
lives such people may really desire to find a truth in order to assure themselves in
some great emergency, and therefore seek a vision of the Lord, they will have lost
the very faculty of receiving it. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

LAM 2:10
The elders . . . keep silence.

Overwhelming judgments
1. The wisest of Gods servants are at their wits end, or fall into despair, if they
be deprived of their hope, in the promise of Gods assistance (Psa 119:92).
2. Bodily exercises do profit to further lamentations in the day of heaviness, but
are no part of Gods service in themselves.
3. The extremity of Gods judgments do for the time overwhelm Gods dearest
children in the greatest measure of grief that can be in this life (Psa 6:3; Psa
22:1).
4. The most dainty ones are made to stoop when Gods hand is heavy upon them
for their sins. (J. Udall.)

LAM 2:11-13
 Mine eyes do fail with tears.

The miseries of the Church taken to heart

1. The true ministers of God do take the miseries of the Church to heart in the
greatest measure.
2. Our sorrow, humiliation, earnest prayer, and all other means of extraordinary
calling upon God, must increase in us, so long as Gods heavy hand is upon
us.
3. Hearty sorrow for spiritual miseries distempereth the whole body.
4. The sorrows of the soul will easily consume the body.
5. A lively member is grieved with the hurt of the body, or any member thereof.
6. The ministers of Christ should have a tender affection to the members of the
Church, as a man hath to his daughter.
7. There is no outward thing so much cause of sorrow, as the miseries laid upon
our children in our sight. (J. Udall.)

Compassion for sinners

It is the missionary with the fountain of pity that reaches the deepest place in the
natives heart. When Livingstone was found dead on his knees in the heart of Africa,
his head was resting over his open Bible, and his finger was pointing to the last
words he ever penned in his diary: Oh, God, when will the open sore of the world be
healed? That was the profound pity which commenced the redemptive work in
Africa, and which lives in emancipating influence today. (Hartley Aspen.)

They say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine?--

Great grief
1. It is the greatest grief that can be, to have them whom we would gladly
pleasure, seek that at our hands which we cannot help them unto.
2. When God would have us profit by any work of His, He will let us see the true
cause of it.
3. The grief that is seen with the eye is the heaviest unto us of all other things
that fall upon our friends.
4. When God meaneth to humble us, He will use most effectual means to bring it
to pass. (J. Udall.)

What thing shall I take to witness for thee?--

Plain ministries
Ministers must be studious in the Word, to find out everything that may fit the
Churchs present condition (Isa 50:4; Mat 13:52).
2. It is the greatest grief that can be, to fall into a trouble that hath not been laid
upon others before.
3. That minister loveth us best, that dealeth most plainly with us.
4. The visible state of the Church of God may come to be of a desperate
condition, every way vexed more and more. (J. Udall.)
 LAM 2:14
Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee.

Prophetic fidelity
The crying fault of the prophets is their reluctance to preach to people of their
sins. Their mission distinctly involves the duty of doing so. They should not shun to
declare the whole counsel of God. It is not within the province of the ambassador to
make selections from among the despatches with which he has been entrusted in
order to suit his own convenience. One of the gravest possible omissions is the
neglect to give due weight to the tragic fact of sin. All the great prophets have been
conspicuous for their fidelity to this painful and sometimes dangerous part of their
work. If we would call up a typical picture of a prophet in the discharge of his task,
we should present to our minds Elijah confronting Ahab, or John the Baptist before
Herod, or Savonarola accusing Lorenzo de Medici, or John Knox preaching at the
court of Mary Stuart. He is Isaiah declaring Gods abomination of sacrifices and
incense when these are offered by blood-stained hands, or Chrysostom seizing the
opportunity that followed the mutilation of the imperial statues at Antioch to preach
to the dissolute city on the need of repentance, or Latimer denouncing the sins of
London to the citizens assembled at Pauls Cross. The shallow optimism that
disregards the shadows of life is trebly faulty when it appears in the pulpit. It
falsifies facts in failing to take account of the stern realities of the evil side of them; it
misses the grand opportunity of rousing the consciences of men and women by
forcing them to attend to unwelcome truths, and thus encourages the heedlessness
with which people rush headlong to ruin; and at the same time it even renders the
declaration of the gracious truths of the Gospel, to which it devotes exclusive
attention, ineffectual, because redemption is meaningless to those who do not
recognise the present slavery and the future doom from which it brings deliverance.
(W. F. Adeney, W. A.)

False teachers
1. False teachers are as grievous a plague as can be laid upon a people. They
bring with them inevitable destruction (Mat 15:14).
2. They that refuse to receive the true ministers, God will give them over to be
seduced by false teachers and to believe lies (2Ch 36:15; Pro 1:24; 2Th 2:10-
12).
3. It is a certain note of a false prophet, to speak such things in the name of the
Lord as are untrue, or misalleged to please the carnal desires of the people
(Jer 14:13-15).
4. It is not sufficient for a true minister not to flatter; he must also discover the
peoples sins unto them (Eze 13:4; 1Ki 18:18; Mat 3:7; Luk 3:8; Mat 14:4).
5. The only way to avoid Gods plagues is gladly to suffer ourselves bitterly to be
reproved by Gods ministers.
6. The falsehood that is taught by false prophets, and believed by a seduced
people, is the cause of all Gods punishments that light upon them. (J.
 Udall.)

False spiritual guides lead to ruin

A short time back the papers told of a vessel that had a most unfortunate trip. The
captain became blind three days after leaving St. Pierre-Martinique and no one on
board was capable of navigating the ship. The mate did his best and after drifting
about for twenty-seven days came in sight of Newfoundland, where some fishermen
saw her signals of distress and piloted her into port. If a ship with a blind captain is
poorly off, what of a nation, a church, a village, where blind men are in charge: some
born blind and by nature unqualified: others blind through worldly interests and a
false learning! Blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall
fall into the ditch. (Footsteps of Truth.)

LAM 2:15
An that pass by clap their hands at thee.

Deriding the distressed

1. God is wont to whip His children for their sins, by the multitude of
unbelievers that hate the truth (Isa 10:5-6; Jer 25:9; Ex 1:13-14).
2. It is a property of a wicked heart, to insult over the distressed, whom we
should pity and relieve (Psa 35:15; Psa 79:4; 2Sa 16:7-8; Mat 27:39).
3. The wicked seeing the godly afflicted, take occasion thereby to blaspheme God
and His truth (Psa 74:10; Psa 74:18; 2Ki 18:30; 2Ki 18:35; 2Ki 19:12).
4. There only is true joy and excellency where Gods truth is rightly preached,
and His name called upon (Psa 50:2; Eze 47:8-9; Eze 47:12). (J. Udall.)

Exultation over the fallen

Men are always ready to remind the fallen of the days of prosperity. It is hard to
pass by a man who is thrown down without telling him what he might have been,
what he once was, and how foolishly he has acted in forsaking the way in which he
found prosperity and delight. We must expect this from all men. It is not in their
nature to heal our diseases, to comfort our sorrows, to sympathise with us in the
hour of desolation. The Psalmist complained, Thou makest us a by-word among the
heathen, a shaking of the head among the people. Wonderful things had been
spoken of Zion in the better days. In proportion to our exaltation is our down
throwing. Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, etc.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined. How great is His
goodness! and how great is His beauty! But all this will go for notching where there
has been moral apostasy, spiritual disobedience, or spiritual idolatry. Decoration is
vanity. All that men can do in the beautifying of their lives is as rottenness if the
heart itself be not in a healthy condition. Add to the bitterness of self-remorse the
triumphant exultation of enemies who pass by, and say whether any humiliation can
be deeper or more intolerable. Where, then, is hope to be found? In heaven. The
God whom we have offended must be the God who can forgive us. Do not let us seek
to placate our enemies, or turn their triumphing into felicitation: we have no
argument with them; not a word ought we to have to say to such mockers; we must
acquaint ourselves with God, and make ourselves at peace with heaven, and if a
mans ways please the Lord, the Lord will make that mans enemies to be at peace
with him. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The call to prayer

This is not the first occasion on which the elegist has shown his faith in the
efficacy of prayer. But hitherto he has only uttered brief exclamations in the middle
of his descriptive passages. Now he gives a solemn call to prayer, and follows this
with a deliberate full petition, addressed to God. This new and more elevated turn in
the elegy is itself suggestive. The transition from lamentation to prayer is always
good for the sufferer. The trouble that drives us to prayer is a blessing, because the
state of a praying soul is a blessed state. Like the muezzin on his minaret, the elegist
calls to prayer. But his exhortation is addressed to a strange object--to the wall of
the daughter of Zion. This wall is to let its tears flow like a river. Browning has an
exquisitely beautiful little poem apostrophising an old wall; but this is not done so as
to leave out of account the actual form and nature of his subject. Walls can not only
be beautiful and even sublime, as Mr. Ruskin has shewn in his Stones of Venice;
they may also wreath their severe outlines in a multitude of thrilling associations.
This is especially so when, as in the present instance, it is the wall of a city that we
are contemplating. Such a wall is eloquent in its wealth of associations, and there is
pathos in the thought of its mere age when this is considered in relation to the many
men and women and children who have rested beneath its shadow at noon, or
sheltered themselves behind its solid masonry amid the terrors of war. The walls
that encircle the ancient English city of Chester and keep alive memories of
medieval life, the bits of the old London wall that are left standing among the
warehouses and offices of the busy mart of modern commerce, even the remote wall
of China for quite different reasons, and many another famous wall, suggest to us
multitudinous reflections. But the walls of Jerusalem surpass them all in the pathos
of the memories that cling to their old grey stones. In personifying the wall of Zion,
however, the Hebrew poet does not indulge in reflections such as these, which are
more in harmony with the mild melancholy of Grays Elegy than with the sadder
mood of the mourning patriot. He names the wall to give unity and concreteness to
his appeal, and to clothe it in an atmosphere of poetic fancy. But his sober thought
in the background is directed towards the citizens whom that historic wall once
enclosed. Let us look at the appeal in detail. First the elegist encourages a free
outflow of grief, that tears should run like a river, literally, like a torrent--the
allusion being to one of those steep watercourses which, though dry in summer,
become rushing floods in the rainy season. This introduction shews that the call to
prayer is not intended in any sense as a rebuke for the natural expression of grief,
nor as a denial of its existence. The sufferers cannot say that the poet does not
sympathise with them. There may be a deeper reason for this encouragement of the
expression of grief as a preliminary to a call to prayer. The helplessness which it so
eloquently proclaims is just the condition in which the soul is most ready to cast
itself on the mercy of God. The first step towards deliverance will be to melt the
glacier. The soul must feel before it can pray. Therefore the tears are encouraged to
run like torrents, and the sufferer to give himself no respite, nor let the apple of his
eye cease from weeping. Next the poet exhorts the object of his sympathy--this
strange personification of the wall of the daughter of Zion, under the image of
which he is thinking of the Jews--to arise. The weeping is but a preliminary to more
promising acts. The sufferer must be roused if he is to be saved from the disease of
melancholia. He must be roused also if he would pray. True prayer is a strenuous
effort of the soul, requiring the most wakeful attention and taxing the utmost energy
of will. Therefore we must gird up our loins to pray just as we would to work, or run,
or fight. Now the awakened soul is urged to cry out in the night, and in the
beginning of the night watches--that is to say, not only at the commencement of the
night, for this would require no rousing, but at the beginning of each of the three
watches into which the Hebrews divided the hours of darkness--at sunset, at ten
oclock, and at two in the morning. The sufferer is to keep watch with prayer--
observing his vespers, his nocturns, and his matins, not of course to fulfil forms, but
because, since his grief is continuous, his prayer also must not cease. Proceeding
with our consideration of the details of this call to prayer, we come upon the
exhortation to pour out the heart like water before the face of the Lord. The image
here used is not without parallel in Scripture (see Psa 22:14). But the ideas are not
just the same in the two cases. While the Psalmist thinks of himself as crushed and
shattered, as though his very being were dissolved, the thought of the elegist has
more action about it, with a deliberate intention and object in view. His image
suggests complete openness before God. Nothing is to be withheld. The sufferer
should tell the whole tale of his grief to God, quite freely, without any reserve,
trusting absolutely to the Divine sympathy. The attitude of soul that is here
recommended is in itself the very essence of prayer. The devotions that consist in a
series of definite petitions are of secondary worth, and superficial in comparison
with this outpouring of the heart before God. To enter into relations of sympathy
and confidence with God is to pray in the truest, deepest way possible, or even
conceivable. Even in the extremity of need, perhaps the best thing we can do is to
spread out the whole case before God. It will certainly relieve our own minds to do
so, and everything will appear changed when viewed in the light of the Divine
presence. Perhaps we shall then cease to think ourselves aggrieved and wronged; for
what are our deserts before the holiness of God? Passion is allayed in the stillness of
the sanctuary, and the indignant protest dies upon our lips as we proceed to lay our
case before the eyes of the All-Seeing. We cannot be impatient any longer; He is so
patient with us, so fair, so kind, so good. Thus, when we cast our burden upon the
Lord, we may be surprised with the discovery that it is not so heavy as we supposed.
The secret of failure in prayer is not that we do not ask enough; it is that we do not
pour out our hearts before God, the restraint of confidence rising from fear or doubt
simply paralysing the energies of prayer. Jesus teaches us to pray not only because
He gives us a model prayer, but much more because He is in Himself so true and full
and winsome a revelation of God, that as we come to know and follow Him our lost
confidence in God is restored. Then the heart that knows its own bitterness, and that
shrinks from permitting the stranger even to meddle with its joy--how much more
then with its sorrow?--can pour itself out quite freely before God, for the simple
reason that He is no longer a stranger, but the one perfectly intimate and absolutely
trusted Friend. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

LAM 2:19
 Arise, cry out in the night.

Watchnight service
Methinks I might become a Jeremiah tonight, and weep as he, for surely the
Church at large is in almost as evil a condition. Oh, Zion, how hast thou been veiled
in a cloud, and how is thy honour trodden in the dust! Arise, ye sons of Zion, and
weep for your mother, yea, weep bitterly, for she hath given herself to other lovers,
and forsaken the Lord that bought her. We leave Zion, however, to speak to those
who need exhortation more than Zion does; to speak to those who are Zions
enemies, or followers of Zion, and yet not belonging to her ranks.
1. It is never too soon to pray. You are lying on your bed; the gracious Splint
whispers--Arise, and pray to God. Well, there is no reason why you should,
delay till the morning light; in the beginning of the watches pour out thine
heart like water before the face of the Lord. Need we remind, you that
delays are dangerous? Need we tell you that those are the workings of
Satan? For the Holy Ghost, when He strives with man, says, Today, if ye will
hear His voice, harden not your heart.
2. Again, it is not too late to cry to the Lord; for if the sun be set, and the watches
of the night have commenced their round, the mercy seat is open. There have
been some older than you can be; some as sinful and vile, and heinously
wicked, who have provoked God as much, who have shined against him as
frequently, and yet they have found pardon.
3. We cannot pray too vehemently, for the text says, Arise, cry out in the night.
God loves earnest prayers. He loves impetuous prayers--vehement prayers.
Arise, cry out in the night, and God will hear you, if you cry out with all
your souls, and pour out your hearts before Him.
4. We cannot pray too simply. Just hear how the Psalmist has it: Pour out your
hearts before Him. Not pour out your fine words, not pour out your
beautiful periods, but pour out your hearts. Pour out your heart like
water. How does water run out? The quickest way it can; thats all. It never
stops much about how it runs. That is the way the Lord loves to have it. Pour
out your heart like water; pour it out by confessing all your sins; pour it out
by begging the Lord to have mercy upon you for Christs sake; pour it out like
water. And when it is all poured out, He will come and fill it again with
wines on the lees, well refined. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Night cries
Pull the night bell. This is the inscription we often see written on the doorpost of
the shop in which medicines are sold. Some of us have had our experiences with
night bells when sudden illness has overtaken some member of our households, or
when sickness has rapidly grown worse. How have we hurried through the silent
streets, when only here and there a light glimmered from some chamber window!
How eagerly have we pulled the night bell at our physicians door, and then, with
prescription in hand, have sounded the alarm at the place where the remedy was to
be procured. Those of us who have had these lovely midnight walks, and have given
the summons for quick relief, know the meaning of that text, Arise, cry out in the
night. (T. L. Cuyler.)
 LAM 2:20
Behold, O Ford, and consider to whom Thou hast done this.

Fervent prayer
1. The only way of remedy in our greatest miseries is to call upon God in fervent
prayer.
(1) It declareth that we are humbled and our pride broken, in confessing no
power to be in ourselves, and seeking help elsewhere.
(2) He is of greatest power, and none else can help us.
(3) He will have all the glory of our deliverance (Psa 50:15).
2. By this vehement kind of speech we learn that in right prayer to God the
frame of our words must be according to our affection.
3. The chief reason to move the Lord to pity us is the remembrance of His
covenant of mercy in Christ.
4. Gods wrath overturneth the course of nature in those against whom it is bent.
5. There is sufficient cause and matter in all the infants of Gods people, why
God should in His justice destroy them (Psa 51:5).
6. Cruelty exercised by the hands of the wicked upon children and ministers is a
special means to move God to hear us when we pray for them.
7. There is no privilege of peace that can free us from punishment when we sin
against the Lord. (J. Udall.)

LAM 2:21
The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets.

Unburied
1. When God punisheth a people for sin, He spareth neither age nor sex.
2. It is a sign of Gods anger upon a people, when they want decent burial (Psa
79:3).
3. The wicked will do most barbarous things, when God bridleth them not.
4. As God is full of mercy in His longsuffering, so is His anger unappeasable
when it breaketh out. (J. Udall.)

LAM 2:22
Thou hast called . . . my terrors round about.
The wicked instruments of punishment
1. God raiseth up the wickedest, and employeth them to punish His own
servants when they sin (Isa 5:26; Isa 8:7).
2. None can escape Gods punishments, whom He meaneth to punish (Psa
139:7).
3. The children of impenitent sinners are often taken away, and prosper not to
their comfort. In Gods displeasure all things are accursed unto us (De
28:15). (J. Udall.)

The ministry of terror

At Dunkeld there is a high rock, forming a conspicuous feature in the landscape, It
is covered at the top with pine trees, which stand out like spears against the skyline,
and only here and there can you see the grey face of the rock itself, showing how
steep and dangerous it is. At one time the rock was perfectly bare; and one of the
Dukes of Athole, who had a perfect passion for planting trees everywhere, wished to
cover it like the other heights around with wood. But it was found impossible to
climb up to the crevices and ledges of the huge rock, in order to plant the young
trees. One day, Alexander Naismith, the father of the great engineer, paid a visit to
the dukes grounds; and when told about his graces wish to adorn the rock with
trees, he suggested a plan by which this might be accomplished. In front of the
dukes castle he noticed an old cannon, which had been used for firing salutes on
great occasions. He got this cannon removed to a convenient point near the rock;
and then putting a large quantity of the seeds of pine and fir trees into a round tin
canister, he rammed it into the mouth of the cannon with a charge of gunpowder,
and fired it at the top of the rock. The canister, when it struck the rock, broke into
bits and scattered the seeds in every direction. A great many of them fell into the
nooks and crannies of the rock, where a little moss or soil had gathered; and with
the first showers they began to sprout and send up their tiny shoots, which took firm
hold of the rock. After years of slow and steadfast growth, for they had exceedingly
little soil, they became trees which completely clothed the naked rock and made it
one of the most picturesque parts of the landscape. Now, this was a very strange use
to make of a cannon, and a very strange way of sowing seed. A cannon is usually
employed to cause death and destruction. But on this occasion it was used to do
good, to clothe a naked rock with beauty and fertility, to bring life out of death. It
made a loud terrifying noise; it broke the rock in splinters, it burst the canister into
fragments, but it scattered the seeds of life where they were wanted. Never was
gunpowder employed in a more beneficent work! Now, God sometimes sows his
seeds of eternal life by means of a cannon; He persuades men by terror. He says,
indeed, of Himself, Fury is not in Me. It is contrary to His nature; for He is love.
And yet He is sometimes obliged to do things that terrify for His peoples good.
There are proud, lofty natures, full of conceit and self-sufficiency, that rise above
their fellows in their own esteem, and lord it over them, and yet are bare and barren
of any spiritual good thing, neither profitable to God nor man. If the seed of eternal
life is to be sown at all in such lofty, inaccessible natures, it must be by means of a
cannon. They must be persuaded by terror. God must thunder forth to them His
warnings and invitations. (H. Macmillan, D. D.)
 LAMENTATIONS 3
LAM 3:1-21
I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath.

The Man that hath seen affliction

Whether we regard it from a literary, a speculative, or a religious point of
view, the third and central elegy cannot fall to strike us as by far the best of the five.
Like Tennyson, who is most poetic when he is most artistic, as in his lyrics, and like
all the great sonneteers, the author of this exquisite Hebrew melody has not found
his ideas to be cramped by the rigorous rules of composition. Possibly the artistic
refinement of form stimulates thought and rouses the poet to exert his best powers;
or perhaps and this is more probable he selects the richer robe for the purpose of
clothing his choicer conceptions. This elegy differs from its sister poems in another
respect. It is composed, for the most part, in the first person singular, the writer
either speaking of his own experience or dramatically personating another sufferer.
Who is this Man that hath seen affliction? There is just the possibility that the poet
is not describing himself at all; he may be representing somebody well known to his
contemporaries perhaps even Jeremiah, or just a typical character, in the manner
of Brownings Dramatis Personae. While some mystery hangs over the personality of
this man of sorrows, the power and pathos of the poem are certainly heightened by
the concentration of our attention upon one individual. Few persons are moved by
general statements. The study of abstract reports is most important to these who
are already interested in the subjects of these dreary documents; but it is useless as
a means of exciting interest. Philanthropy must visit the office of the statistician if it
would act with enlightened judgment, and not permit itself to become the victim of
blind enthusiasm; but it was not born there, and the sympathy which is its parent
can only be found among individual instances of distress. In the present case the
speaker who recounts his own misfortunes is more than a casual witness, more than
a mere specimen picked out at random from the heap of misery accumulated in this
age of national ruin. He is not simply a man who has seen affliction, one among
many similar sufferers; he is the man, the well-known victim, one preeminent in
distress even in the midst of a nation full of misery. Yet he is not isolated on a
solitary peak of agony. As the supreme sufferer, he is also the representative
sufferer. He is not selfishly absorbed in the morbid occupation of brooding over his
private grievances. He has gathered into himself the vast and terrible woes of his
people. Thus he foreshadows our Lord in His passion. The idea of representative
suffering which here emerges, and which becomes more definite in the picture of the
servant of Jehovah in Isaiah 53, only finds its full realisation and perfection in Jesus
Christ. It is repeated, however, with more or less distinctness wherever the Christ
Spirit is revealed. The portrait of himself drawn by the author of this elegy is the
more graphic by reason of the fact that the present is linked to the past. The striking
commencement, I am the man, etc., sets the speaker in imagination before our
eyes. The addition who has seen (or rather, experienced) affliction connects him
with his present sufferings. His own personality has slowly acquired a depth, a
fulness, a ripeness that remove him far from the raw and superficial character he
once was. We are silenced into awe before Job, Jeremiah, and Dante, because these
men grew great by suffering. Is it not told even of our Lord Jesus Christ that He was
made perfect by the things that He suffered? It is to be observed that here in his self-
portraiture just as elsewhere when describing the calamities that have befallen his
people the elegist attributes the whole series of disastrous events to God. So close
is the thought of God to the mind of the writer, he does not even think it necessary to
mention the Divine name. Like Brother Lawrence, this man has learnt to practise
the presence of God. In amplifying the accounts of his sufferings, after giving a
general description of himself as the man who has experienced affliction, and adding
a line in which this experience is connected with its cause the rod of the wrath of
Him who is unnamed, though ever in mind the stricken patriot proceeds to
illustrate and enforce his appeal to sympathy by means of a series of vivid
metaphors. Let us first glance at the successive pictures in this rapidly moving
panorama of similes, and then at the general import and drift o! the whole. The
afflicted man was under the Divine guidance; he was not the victim of blind self-will;
it was not when straying from the path of right that he fell into this pit of misery. The
strange thing is that God led him straight into it led him into darkness, not into
light, as might have been expected with such a Guide. The first image, then, is that of
a traveller misled. God, whom he has trusted implicitly, whom he has followed in the
simplicity of ignorance, God proves to be his Opponent! He feels like one duped in
the past, and at length undeceived as he makes the amazing discovery that his
trusted Guide has been turning His hand against him repeatedly all the day of his
woeful wanderings. For the moment he drops his metaphors, and reflects on the
dreadful consequences of this fatal antagonism. His flesh and skin, his very body is
wasted away; he is so crushed and shattered, it is as though God had broken his
bones. Then the scene changes. The victim of Divine wrath is a captive languishing in
a dungeon, which is as dark as the abodes of the dead, as the dwellings of those who
have been long dead. The horror of this metaphor is intensified by the idea of the
antiquity of Hades. There the prisoner is bound by a heavy chain (Lam 3:7). He cries
for help; but he is shut down so low that his prayer cannot reach his captor (ver. 8).
Again, we see him still hampered, though in altered circumstances. He appears as a
traveller whose way is blocked, and that not by some accidental fall of rock, but of set
purpose, for he finds the obstruction to be of carefully prepared masonry, hewn
stones (Lam 3:9). Therefore he has to turn aside, so that his paths become crooked.
Yet more terrible does the Divine enmity grow. When the pilgrim is thus forced to
leave the highroad and make his way through the adjoining thickets, his Adversary
avails Himself of the cover to assume a new form, that of a lion or a bear lying in
ambush (Lam 3:10). The consequence is that the hapless man is torn as by the claws
and fangs of beasts of prey (Lam 3:11). But now these wild regions, in which the
wretched traveller is wandering at the peril of his life, suggest the idea of the chase.
The image of the savage animals is defective in this respect, that man is their
superior in intelligence, though not in strength. But in the present ease the victim is
in every way inferior to his Pursuer. So God appears as the Huntsman, and the
unhappy sufferer as the poor hunted game. The bow is bent, and the arrow directed
straight for its mark (Lam 3:12). Nay, arrow after arrow has already been let fly, and
the dreadful Huntsman, too skilful ever to miss His mark, has been shooting the
sons of His quiver into the very vitals of the object of HIS pursuit (Lam 3:13). Here
the poet breaks away from his imagery for a second time, to tell us that he has
become an object of derision to all his people, and the theme of their mocking songs.
This is a striking statement. It shows that the afflicted man is not simply one
member of the smitten nation of Israel, sharing the common hardships of the race
whose badge is servitude. Returning to imagery, the poet pictures himself as a
hardily used guest at a feast. He is fed, crammed, sated; but his food is bitterness,
the cup has been forced to his lips, and he has been made drunk not with pleasant
wine, however, but with wormwood (Lam 3:15). Gravel has been mixed with his
bread, or perhaps the thought is that when he has asked for bread stones have been
given him. He has been compelled to masticate this unnatural diet, so that his teeth
have been broken by it. Even that result he ascribes to God, saying, He hath broken
my teeth. It is difficult to think of the interference with personal liberty being
carried farther than this. Here we reach the extremity of crushed misery. Reviewing
the whole course of his wretched sufferings from the climax of misery, the man who
has seen all this affliction declares that God has cast him off from peace (Lam 3:17).
This most precious gift of heaven to suffering souls is denied to the man who here
bewails his dismal fate. So, too, it was denied to Jesus in the garden, and again on
the Cross. It is possible that the dark day will come when it will be denied to one or
another of His people. In the elegy we are now studying, a burst of praise and glad
confidence breaks out almost immediately after the lowest depths of misery have
been sounded, showing that, as Keats declares in an exquisite line
There is a budding morrow in midnight.
When we come to look at the series of pictures or affliction as a whole, we shall
notice that one general idea runs through them. This is that the victim is hindered,
hampered, restrained. He is led into darkness, besieged, imprisoned, chained, driven
out of his way, seized in ambuscade, hunted, even forced to eat unwelcome food.
This must all point to a specific character of personal experience. The troubles of the
sufferer have mainly assumed the form of a thwarting of his efforts. If the
opposition comes from God, may it not be that the severity of the trouble is just
caused by the obstinacy of self-will? Certainly it does not appear to be so here; but
then we must remember the writer is stating his own case. Two other characteristics
of the whole passage may be mentioned. One is the persistence of the Divine
antagonism. This is what makes the case look so hard. The pursuer seems to be
ruthless; He will not let his victim alone for a moment. One device follows sharply
on another. There is no escape. The second of these characteristics of the passage is
a gradual aggravation in the severity of the trials. At first God is only represented as
a guide who misleads then He appears as a besieging enemy; later like a destroyer.
And correspondingly the troubles of the sufferer grow in severity, till at last he is
flung into the ashes, crushed and helpless. All this is peculiarly painful reading to us
with our Christian thoughts of God. It seems so utterly contrary to the character of
our Father revealed in Jesus Christ. But then it was not a part of the Christian
revelation, nor was it uttered by a man who had received the benefits of that highest
teaching. That, however, is not a complete explanation. The narrator may be
perfectly honest and truthful, but it is not in human nature to be impartial under
such circumstances. Even when, as in the present instance, we have reason to
believe that the speaker is under the influence of a Divine inspiration, we have no
right to conclude that this gift would enable him to take an all-round vision of truth.
Finally, it would be quite unfair to the elegist, and it would give us a totally false
impression of his ideas, if we were to go no further than this. To understand him at
all we must hear him out. The triplet of verses 19 to 21 serves as a transition to the
picture of the other side of the Divine action. It begins with prayer. Thus a new note
is struck. The sufferer knows that God is not at heart his enemy. So he ventures to
beseech the very Being concerning whose treatment of him he has been complaining
so bitterly, to remember his affliction and the misery it has brought on him, the
wormwood, the gall of his hard lot. Hope now dawns on him out of his own
recollections. God, too, has a memory, and will remember His suffering servant. (W.
F. Adeney, M. A.)

Ecce homo!
I. CONSIDER THE GENERALITY OF AFFLICTION IN THE NATURE THEREOF.
We met all generally in the first treason against ourselves in Adams rebellion; and
we met all, too, in the second treason the treason against Jesus Christ. All our sins
were upon His shoulders. All the evils and mischiefs of life come for the most part
from this that we think to enjoy those things which God has given us only to use.

II. CONSIDER AFFLICTION AS BEARING ON MAN. I am the man that hath

seen affliction. Man carries the spawn and seed and eggs of affliction in his own
flesh, and his own thoughts make haste to hatch them and bring them up. We
make all our worms snakes, all our snakes vipers, all our vipers dragons, by our
murmuring.

III. CONSIDER AFFLICTION IN ITS SPECIAL APPLICATION TO ONLY MAN.

That man the prophet Jeremiah, one of the best of men. As he was submitted to
these extraordinary afflictions, we see that no man is so necessary to God as that
God cannot come to His ends without that man. God can lack and leave out any
man in His service. The best of our wages is adversity, because that gives us a true
fast, and a right value of our prosperity.

IV. CONSIDER THIS WEIGHT AND VEHEMENCE OF AFFLICTIONS.

1. They are aggravated in that they are the Lords. They are inevitable; they
cannot be avoided; they are just, and cannot be pleaded against; nor can
we ease ourselves with any imagination of our innocency, as though they
were undeserved.
2. They are in HIS rod. Our murmuring makes a rod a staff, and a staff a
sword, and that which God presented for physic, poison.
3. They are inflicted by the rod of His wrath. It is the highest extent of
affliction that we take God to be angrier than He is.

V. CONSIDER THE COMFORTS WE HAVE IN AFFLICTIONS.

1. That we see our afflictions, we understand, consider them. We see that
affliction comes from God, and that it is sent that we may see and taste the
goodness of God.
2. That, though afflicted, we still retain our manhood. God may mend thee in
marring thee; He may build thee up in dejecting thee; He may infuse another
manhood into thee, so that thou canst say, I am that Christian man; I am
the man that cannot despair since Christ is the remedy.
3. That the rod of Gods wrath is also the rod of His comfort and strength (Mic
7:14; Psa 45:6, 23:4). (J. Donne, D. D.)
The personality of sorrow
This chapter would seem to be the property of all sorrowful men. Jobs
lamentation over the day of his birth, and Jeremiahs lamentation over his personal
sufferings, are the heritage of sorrow throughout all time. We never know what
sorrow is until we feel its personality. Every man must have his own sorrow, must
receive sorrow into his nature, so that the whole plan of life may, so to say, be
saturated with tears, and be made to know how much weight God can lay upon
human life, as if He were heaping it up in cruelty. What would be sorrow to one man
would be no sorrow to another; hence the infinite variety of the Divine visitation of
our life. God knows where the stroke would hurt us most, and there He delivers the
blow, so that we may know ourselves to be but men. Every man having a sorrow of
his own is thereby tempted to make a species of idol of it. Are there not persons.,
who make a luxury of sorrow? Are they not pleased to be the objects of social
interest and sympathy, instead of being humbled by their losses, and taught to seek
the true riches which are in heaven? Silent sorrow is the most poignant. If sorrow
could sometimes shed tears, it would be relieved of its keenest agony. In many cases
it is impossible for the sufferer to give expression to his distress, and therefore he is
deprived of all the compensation and holy excitement to be derived from earnest
and intelligent human sympathy. If a man has not seen affliction, what has he seen?
The deepest students of human life assure us that unless joy has in it somewhat of a
tinge of melancholy it is not pure gladness. We must look at both sides of the picture;
we must allow the light and the shadow to interplay, and judge not by the one nor by
the other, but by the result. (J. Parker, D. D.)

My flesh and my skin hath He made old.

Punishment seen in the body

1. Gods punishments for sin often appear even in the body of man.
(1) Because sin is committed in the body.
(2) The body being the more sensitive part, it may affect us the more when
we feel Gods punishments in it.
(3) That others may have the more clear example in beholding our bodies
punished.
2. The wasting and withering of the body is to he acknowledged a punishment from
God; and the flourishing of the same to be a special blessing.
3. There is no torment so grievous but the godly feel it when Gods hand is upon
them for their sins.
(1) His anger is most grievous and intolerable.
(2) He would have us thoroughly affected and humbled. (J. Udall.)

He hath hedged me about that I cannot get out.

The sinners hedges

I. The hedge of MORAL SENSE. Conscience shuts the sinner in and
prevents him from a full development of all the wicked passions and impulses
of his nature.

II. The hedge OF SOCIAL LIFE.

1. Social relationship. How many sinners are held in by the influence of
father, mother, brother, sister!
2. Social sentiment. In a morally enlightened age like ours, public sentiment is
strong against wrong, and most men stand in awe of public sympathy.

III. The hedge of PERSONAL INCAPACITY.

1. The want of physical health. Many men would do far more mischief were
they not so physically frail.
2. The want of intellectual ability. Many men would swindle on a large scale,
propagate infidelity by their writings and their oratory, had they the ability.
3. The want of secular means. Were there not so much incapacity and
poverty, the world would abound with Alexanders, Caesars, and
Napoleons. Thank God for these hedges! (Homilist.)

LAM 3:8
Also when I cry and shout, He shutteth out my prayer.

Unregarded prayer
I. Although our prayers were never, in a single instance, directly answered in this
world, YET IS PRAYER NOT IN VAIN, FOE TO PRAY IS A COMMANDED DUTY; and
to the dependent creature it can never be unprofitable to obey a Divine command.
Prayer, in its very nature, tends to mortify sin, to compose our minds into a frame of
devout dependence on Almighty power, and to maintain in us sentiments of habitual
trust, and rejoicing confidence in God.

II. Though prayer be not immediately answered, IT MAY NEVERTHELESS BE

ANSWERED AT SOME AFTER PERIOD, even in the present world. The glory of
God, the arrangements of Providence, and our own good, may render delay
expedient; but delay is not denial

III. The thing we ask MAY BE INCONSISTENT WITH THE RECTITUDE OF THE
DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY, and on that account must necessarily be denied.

IV. IT IS NOT ALWAYS IN WRATH, HOWEVER, THAT OUR PRAYERS FOR

OTHERS ARE NOT HEARD, BUT OFTEN IN MERCY TO THEM. In our fond
attachment to children or to friends, we would detain them from God and glory, to
suffer amid the evils of time. In our ignorance we ask things detrimental for ourselves
as well as for others. In labour, poverty, and trouble, we seek ease, and peace, and
competency, and freedom from affliction; but it may enter into Gods plan for
preserving and perfecting us, to withhold from us health and a prosperous state. And,
besides, the thing we desired may be refused, in order to give us something better than
we sought. Oh, what need there is of the Spirit to help our infirmities! for we know
neither what we should pray for, nor as we ought.

V. When we pray to God, it becomes us to REMEMBER THE INFINITE DISTANCE

BETWIXT THE CREATURE AND THE GLORIOUS CREATOR; AND THOUGH
EARNEST, LET US BEWARE OF BEING WILFUL AND PEREMPTORY. (J.
Sievewright, M. A.)

Unheeded prayers
God wants more than prayer from His creatures, when that prayer is limited
to mere asking, or to the expression of a beggars desires. Prayer may be but a
religious form of selfishness. Asking must, of course, enter into prayer: every day
brings its need; but what is prayer in its widest and most enduring acceptation? It is
communion with God. When we omit this element, we degrade ourselves and our
prayers to the level of selfishness, and when our prayer is so degraded it is shut out
from heaven. There is no mystery in this. Let us always understand that we are
accepted, not because of our formality, but because of our sincerity and earnestness
and importunity. Good men in all ages have had experience of this exclusion of
prayer from heaven, and sometimes they have misjudged it (Job 30:20; Psa 22:2). It is
well to have such experiences, terrible as they are at the moment of their realisation;
they chasten the spirit, they are full of theological teaching, they drive us back to first
principles, they constrain us to ask the most serious and penetrating questions. God
will not allow such experiences to be unduly prolonged, for he knows that the
extension of such trial would end in despair or madness. The Lord can take us very
near to the brink, but He will not let us fall over. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Prayer not immediately answered

1. Afflictions do make the dullest and most forward of Gods children cry for
help (Lev 26:41; Psa 6, 19, 28).
2. The heaviest plague that man can endure in this life is to have God
refuse to hear his prayer when he calleth upon Him in distress (Pro
1:28; Jer 14:11-12).
3. God often deferreth to hear the prayer of His children, when He yet
purposeth in due time to grant their requests (Psa 22:1, 77:8).
(1) To try their patience, and exercise their faith.
(2) To move them to continue and to grow in fervency. (J. Udall.)

Prayers shut out

Or shutteth His ear to my prayer. This was very grievous to any good heart;
more than it could be to fully, a stranger to the true God, who yet bewaileth the matter
to his brother in these words: I would pray to the gods for those things; but that, alas!
they have given over to hear my prayers. (J. Trapp.)
 LAM 3:14-21
I was a derision to all my people.

Deriding the godly

1. The godly are usually more subject to reproaches than any other people.
(1) Because godliness seemeth mere foolishness to them that are
naturally minded.
(2) They show, as they think, their own wisdom in disdainfully
contemning the godly.
2. Then are the godly most derided by the wicked, when the hand of God is
heaviest upon them to afflict them.
3. All sorts of people (though divers one from another) do deride the godly in
their adversity.
4. Those that are nearest unto the godly, and not fearing God, will be
crosses unto them in the time of trouble.
5. The wicked do greatly delight themselves in mocking the godly.
(1) Thereby they think to suppress and disgrace the truth forever.
(2) They think their own folly by that means will justify and
advance.
6. The wicked are never satisfied, but still continue their hatred against the
godly.
(1) Because they do greatly delight therein.
(2) They are afraid that they have never done enough to defame
them. (J. Udall.)

He hath filled me with bitterness.

Filled with sorrow

1. This sorrow did arise especially from the derision they were in by their
adversaries, and yet it being ascribed unto the Lord, teaches us that there is
no outward trouble more grievous to the godly than to be reproached by
their adversaries in the time of their affliction.
2. There is no outward trouble more grievous to the godly than to be
reproached by their adversaries in the time of their affliction.
(1) Because we are much comforted in the hope that our sufferings shall
advance the truth, which professed derision hindereth.
(2) Such reproaches are accompanied with much blasphemy and
wickedness.
(3) Such dealing carrieth many weak professors from the affecting of our
 cause and sufferings.
3. The godly have often upon them all the greatest griefs that can be
desired.
4. It is the Lord above that frameth our hearts to be affected with our
afflictions, else they remain stony and astonished.
5. The godly may not be as Stoics, but must be most passionate in their
afflictions.
(1) Because their sins procure them their troubles, which ought to grieve
them most of all, that God is offended with them.
(2) God afflicteth us that we should repent, which we cannot do without
great remorse.
6. The godly are often so laden with miseries, that they are exceedingly
distracted therewith, both in body and mind. (J. Udall.)
My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord.

Hopeless sorrow
1. The godly are often brought to such extremity as they find no way out of it.
2. According to our strength, generally of knowledge, and particularly of
feeling, so do we hope. Because hope is grounded upon faith, and faith upon
knowledge (Heb 11:1).
3. The godly in their afflictions do recount what blessings they have lost.
(1) Because of the love and delight that they had therein, which is most
remembered when it is lost.
(2) That their hearts may be made the more affected with grief for the loss
thereof, and with desire to be restored thereunto again.
4. The godly do not always feel the comfort of Gods favour in the like
measure.
(1) Because God will make it the more delightful unto them by
intermission.
(2) That they may see what they are, if God should leave them unto
themselves.
(3) That they may be the more careful to use all good means to keep it
while they have it.
5. The godly are often so grievously afflicted that they grow to a great
measure of desperation.
(1) Because of their great weakness when God, who is strong,
trieth them.
(2) They judge according to their present feeling.
(3) Because of the consciousness of their deserts for sin.
(4) The abundance of natural infidelity which, always being in us, doth
then appear to have the greatest power. (J. Udall.)
Remembering mine affliction and my misery.

Weighing Gods punishments

1. The deep weighing of Gods punishments for sin felt in times past doth often
most effectually move the heart unto great lamentation.
2. Though grief and sorrow be naturally the effects of affliction, yet in the godly
it must be, because of the sin committed, and not for the penalty sustained.
3. In recounting any former thing, we must take only so much thereof as may
serve our turn.
(1) That it may affect us the more.
(2) That our minds be not employed about any other matter. (J.
Udall.)

My soul hath them still in remembrance.

Memory in affliction
1. There is no meditation that is available to further in godliness, but that
which is earnest and effectual.
(1) Else it moveth not the heart.
(2) Nothing else prevaileth with the affections.
2. The heart must be thoroughly touched before we can profit by any
action of religion that we take in hand.
(1) Every point of religion concerneth principally the heart.
(2) God accepteth nothing but that which proceedeth from the
heart.
3. When we are thoroughly affected with any part of Gods Word, or His
works, then do we much consider of it, and cannot easily forget it.
(1) Because it hath taken root in the heart, which is the fountain of all
serious meditations.
(2) It setteth the affections on work, to digest it, unto the end
whereunto the heart desireth to bring it. (J. Udall.)

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.

A stay to the troubled heart

1. It is a special stay to the troubled heart, to consider how it hath striven to
be at peace.
(1) It calleth to mind the strife betwixt the flesh and the spirit,
which argueth that God hath a portion there.
 (2) It showeth our desire of well-doing which must needs be the
work of grace.
(3) It daunteth Satan our adversary, depriving him of hope to
prevail.
(4) It administereth us hope, that we shall stand even in the
strongest temptations.
2. The right and thorough meditation of Gods punishments upon us for sin,
and our striving to profit thereby, hath always hope of the issue.
(1) Because it taketh away all those refuges which naturally we flee unto,
as friends, wit, riches, strength, etc., and forceth us to fly unto God.
(2) The Lord respecteth, and is ready to help the broken and
contrite hearted (Isa 66:2).
3. All our care in peace and in affliction must be how to gather to ourselves a
certain hope that God will be merciful unto us.
(1) Because we have more need of it then of all things else.
(2) Satan will labour more to deprive us of it than of anything else.
4. It is our duty to hope for Gods favourable hand to rid us out of any
trouble that we are in, though it continue and increase upon us, and no
means of redress appear.
(1) Because God afflicteth us not to east us off, but to amend us and
try us.
(2) He useth so to deliver His servants.
5. The consideration of Gods heavy rod upon us in this life giveth us hope to
find favour for the life to come.
(1) God chastiseth those whom He receiveth.
(2) It is a token of bastardy to be without correction.
(3) The whole life of the godly hath been continual affliction (J.
Udall.)

Fruitful memories
The prophet begins to realise the results of discipline wisely and gratefully
accepted. At first probably, like all other men, he was obstinate, resentful, and wholly
indisposed to look for moral teaching in the midst of physical suffering. Better
thoughts came to his aid. After a while he began to survey the situation, and, as he
looked upon the plan of God, light came to him, and he saw that Gods meaning
even in mans humiliation was the elevation and perfecting of the man himself. Let
us be rich in remembrance. Who cannot recount the sorrows which have been turned
to his advantage! There was a day that was all cloud, a cloud that was all thunder,
and we said we should die when that cloud discharged its tempest upon us. The
cloud broke, the thunder rolled, and our life was refreshed by the very torrent that
we looked forward to with dread. Do not let us forget those days of rain and storm
and high wind, but call them to remembrance, and count them as amongst our
jewels, for we then saw somewhat of the treasures of the Most High, and saw how
even in what appeared to be extremity God could provide a way of deliverance. The
prophet derives hope from a sanctified review of providence therefore have I
hope. The sorrow had not been in vain; it had become a sweet gospel to the soul
which it overshadowed, and this it will become to us if we remember that the Lord
reigneth, and that discipline as well as benediction is in the hand of the living God. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

Memory the handmaid of hope

Memory is very often the servant of despondency. Despairing minds call to
remembrance every dark foreboding in the pact, and every gloomy feature in the
present. Memory stands like a handmaiden, clothed in sackcloth, presenting to her
master a cup of mingled gall and wormwood. Like Mercury, she hastes, with winged
heel, to gather fresh thorns with which to fill the uneasy pillow, and to bind fresh
rods with which to scourge the already bleeding heart. There is, however, no
necessity for this. Wisdom will transform memory into an angel of comfort. That
same recollection which may in its left hand bring so many dark and gloomy omens,
may be trained to bear in its right hand a wealth of hopeful signs. She need not wear
a crown of iron, she may encircle her brow with a fillet of gold, all spangled with stars.
When Christian, according to Bunyan, was locked up in Doubting Castle, memory
formed the crab tree cudgel with which the famous giant beat his captives so terribly.
They remembered how they had left the right road, how they had been warned not
to do so, and how in rebellion against their better selves, they wandered into By-path
Meadow. They remembered all their past misdeeds, their sins, their evil thoughts
and evil words, and all these were so many knots in the cudgel, causing sad bruises
and wounds in their poor suffering persons. But one night, according to Bunyan,
this same memory which had scourged them, helped to set them free; for she
whispered something in Christians ear, and he cried out as one half-amazed, What
a fool am I to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty! I have a
key in my bosom, called Promise; that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in
Doubting Castle. So he put his hand into his bosom, and with much joy he plucked
out the key, and thrust it into the lock; and though the lock of the great iron gate, as
Bunyan says, went damnable hard, yet the key did open it, and all the others too;
and so, by this blessed act of memory, poor Christian and Hopeful were set free. We
lay it down as a general principle, that if we would exercise our memories a little
more, we might, in our deepest and darkest distress, strike a match which would
instantaneously kindle the lamp of comfort. There is no need for God to create a new
thing, in order to restore believers to joy; if they would prayerfully rake the ashes of
the past, they would find light for the present; and if they would turn to the book of
truth and the throne of grace, their candle would soon shine as aforetime. I shall
apply that general principle to the cases of three persons.

I. First of all, to THE BELIEVER WHO IS IN DEEP TROUBLE. If you turn to the
chapter which contains our text, you will observe a list of matters which recollection
brought before the mind of the prophet Jeremiah, and which yielded him comfort.
1. First stands the fact that, however deep may be our present affliction, it is of
the Lords mercy that we are not consumed. This is a low beginning
certainly. The comfort is not very great, but when a very weak man is at the
bottom of the pyramid, if he is over to climb it, you must not set him a long
 step at first; give him but a small stone to step upon the first time, and when
he gets more strength then he will be able to take a greater stride. Now,
consider, thou son of sorrow, where thou mightest have been. Have you
seen those foul dungeons of Venice, which are below the watermark of the
canal, where, after winding through narrow, dark, stifling passages, you may
creep into little cells in which a man can scarcely stand upright, where no ray
of sunlight has ever entered since the foundations of the palace were laid
cold, foul, and black with damp and mildew, the fit nursery of fever, and
abode of death? And yet those places it were luxury to inhabit compared with
the everlasting burnings of hell. When you are kindling your household fire,
before which you hope to sit down with comfort, you do not first expect to
kindle the lumps of coal, but you set some lighter fuel in a blaze, and soon
the more solid material yields a genial glow; so this thought, which may seem
so light to you, may be as the kindling of a heavenly fire of comfort for you
who now are shivering in your grief.
2. Something better awaits us, for Jeremiah reminds us that there are some
mercies, at any rate, which are still continued. His compassions fail not,
they are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. Evil your plight may
be, but there are others in a still worse condition. You can always, if you
open your eyes and choose to do so, see at least this cause for thankfulness
that you are not yet plunged into the lowest depth of misery. This again is
not a very high step, but still it is a little in advance of the other, and the
weakest may readily reach it.
3. The chapter offers us a third source of consolation. The Lord is my portion,
saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him. You have lost much, Christian, but
you have not lost your portion. Your God is your. all; therefore, if you have lost
all but God, still you have your all left, since God is all.
4. The prophet then reminds us of another channel of comfort, namely, that
God is evermore good to all who seek Him. The Lord is good unto them that
wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him. Let Him smite never so hard,
yet if we can maintain the heavenly posture of prayer, we may rest assured
that He will turn from blows to kisses yet. Bunyan tells us that when the City
of Mansoul was besieged it was the depth of winter and the roads were very
bad, but even then prayer could travel them; and I will venture to affirm that
if all earthly roads were so bad that they could not be travelled, and if
Mansoul were so surrounded that there was not a gap left through which we
could break our way to get to the king, yet the road upwards would always
open. No enemy can barricade that; no blockading ships can sail between our
souls and the haven of the mercy seat.
5. We are getting into deeper water of joy, let us take another step, and this time we
shall win greater consolation still, from the fact that it is good to be afflicted. It
is good that a man should hear the yoke in his youth. Why should I dread to
descend the shaft of affliction if it leads me to the gold mine of spiritual
experience? Why should I cry out if the sun of my prosperity goes down, if in
the darkness of my adversity I shall be the better able to count the starry
promises with which my faithful God has been pleased to gem the sky?
6. One step more, and surely we shall then have good ground to rejoice. The
chapter reminds us that these troubles do not last forever. When they have
 produced their proper result they will be removed, for the Lord will not
cast off forever. Who told thee that the night would never end in day? Who
told thee that the sea would ebb out till there should be nothing left but a
vast track of mud and sand? Who told thee that the winter would proceed
from frost to frost, from snow, and ice, and hail, to deeper snow, and yet
more heavy tempest? Who told thee this, I say? Knowest thou not that day
follows night, that flood comes after ebb, that spring and summer succeed
to winter? hope thou then! Hope thou ever! for God fails thee not.

II. We will speak to the DOUBTING CHRISTIAN WHO HAS LOST HIS
EVIDENCES OF SALVATION.
1. Let me bid you call to remembrance in the first place matters of the past. Do
you remember the place, the spot of ground where Jesus first met with you?
Perhaps you do not. Well, do you remember happy seasons when He has
brought you to the banqueting house? Cannot you remember gracious
deliverances?
2. Possibly, however, that may not be the means of comfort to some of you.
Recall, I pray you, the fact that others have found the Lord true to
them. They cried to God, and He delivered them.
3. Remember, again, and perhaps this may be consolatory to you, that though
you think you are not a child of God at all now, yet if you look within you
will see some faint traces of the Holy Spirits hand. The complete picture of
Christ is not there, but cannot you see the crayon sketch the outline the
charcoal marks? What, say you, do you mean? Do not you want to be a
Christian? Have you not desires alter God? Well, now, where God the Holy
Ghost has done as much as that, he will do more.
4. But I would remind you that there is a promise in this Book that exactly
describes and suits your case. A young man had been left by his father heir of
all his property, but an adversary disputed his right. The case was to come
on in the court, and this young man, while he felt sure that he had a legal
right to the whole, could not prove it. His legal adviser told him that there
was more evidence wanted than he could bring. How to get this evidence he
did not know. He went to an old chest where his father had been wont to
keep his papers, turned all out, and as he turned the writings over, and over,
and over, mere was an old parchment. He undid the red tape with great
anxiety, and there it was the very thing he wanted his fathers will in
which the estate was spoken of as being left entirely to himself. He went into
court boldly enough with that. Now, when we get into doubts, it is a good
thing to turn to this old Book, and read until at last we can say, That is it
that promise was made for me.
5. If these recollections should not suttee, I have one more. You look at me, and
you open your ears to find what new thing I am going to tell you. No, I am
going to tell you nothing new, but yet it is the best thing that was ever said
out of heaven, Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. You have
heard that a thousand times and it is the best music you have ever heard.
If I am not a saint, I am a sinner; and if I may not go to the throne of grace
as a child, I will go as a sinner. In a lamentable accident which occurred in
 the north, in one of the coal pits, when a considerable number of the miners
were down below, the top of the pit fell in, and the shaft was completely
blocked up. Those who were down below, sat together in the dark, and sang
and prayed. They gathered to a spot where the last remains of air below
could be breathed. There they sat and sang after the lights had gone out,
because the air would not support the flame. They were in total darkness,
but one of them said he had heard that there was a connection between that
pit and an old pit that had been worked years ago. He said it was a low
passage, through which a man might get by crawling all the way, lying flat
upon the ground he would go and see: the passage was very long, but they
crept through it, and at last they came out to light at the bottom of the other
pit, and their lives were saved. If my present way to Christ as a saint gets
blocked up, if I cannot go straight up the shaft and see the Light of my
Father up yonder, there is an old working, the old-fashioned way by which
sinners go, by which poor thieves go, by which harlots go come, I will
crawl along lowly and humbly, flat upon the ground I will crawl along till I
see my Father, and cry, Father, I am not worthy to be called Thy son; make
we as one of Thy hired servants, so long as I may but dwell in Thy house.

III. A few words with SEEKERS.

1. Some of you are troubled about the doctrine of election. You have got an idea
that some persons will be sent to hell, merely and only because it is the will of
God that they should be sent there. Throw the idea overboard, because it is
a very wicked one, and is not to be found in Scripture. Remember again, that
whatever the doctrine of election may be or may not be, there is a free
invitation in the Gospel given to needy sinners, Whosoever will let him take
of the water of life freely. Now you may say, I cannot reconcile the two.
There are a great many other things that you cannot do. Leave your
difficulties till you have trusted Christ, and then you will be in a capacity to
understand them better than you do now. Trust Christ even if thou should
perish, and thou shalt never perish if thou trustest in Him.
2. Well, if that difficulty were removed, I can suppose another saying, Ah! but
mines a case of great sin. Recall this to mind and you will have hope,
namely that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom,
Paul says, I am the chief. The stupendous bridge which Christ has flung
across the wrath of God will bear the weight of your sin, for it has borne ten
thousand across before, and will bear millions of sinners yet to the shore of
their eternal rest. Call that to remembrance, and you may have hope.
3. Yes, says one, but I believe I have committed the unpardonable sin. My
dear brother, I believe you have not, but I want you to call one thing to
remembrance, and that is that the unpardonable sin is a sin which is unto
death. Now a sin which is unto death means a sin which brings death on the
conscience. The man who commits it never has any conscience afterwards;
he is dead there. Now, you have some feeling; you have enough life to wish to
be saved from sin; you have enough life to long to be washed in the precious
blood of Jesus. You have not committed the unpardonable sin, therefore have
hope.
4. Oh, but, you say, I have a general unfitness and incapacity for being
 saved. Then call this to remembrance, that Jesus Christ has a general
fitness and a general capacity for saving sinners. I do not know what you
want, but I do know Christ has it. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The reason of hope

This therefore ought to be to us like a great gate of entrance into a kings
house. If the logic fails here, it falls everywhere. We must keep our eye upon the
therefores of Divine and human reasoning and providence. We must note the time
of things; we must not set up the standard at the wrong place; nor must we judge
the evening by the morning nor the morning by the evening. There is a manhood of
infancy, and a manhood of youth, and a manhood of old age: each period has its own
manhood, its own Bible, its own vision, its own song or groan. This third chapter of
Lamentations opens well I am the man that hath seen affliction. That is the man we
want to hear talk; we do not want any foamy babble; we cannot now do with any
piled or inflammatory rhetoric. There comes a time in life when affliction must speak
to us. He hath filled me with bitterness, He hath made me drunken with
wormwood. And yet I am told I should be cheerful, and pray, and look up, and be
happy, and be expectant; how can I pray when the Lord hath broken my teeth with
gravel stones and covered me with ashes? Can the grave praise His majesty? And so
long has He removed my peace and my joy that I have forgotten prosperity, My soul
has been removed from peace; strength and hope I have none. But, remembering
mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall, my soul hath them still in
remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I
hope. It Is as if insanity suddenly emerged into sobriety, self-control, and a true
spiritual realisation of the meaning and purpose of things. The very memory of the
gall and the wormwood makes me hope; I have had so much of them that there
cannot be any more to have; it has been so terrible that now surely it is going to be
summer time and joy. We need those great prophetic voices. Sometimes we need the
very biggest soul that ever lived, and we seem to need him every whir all his
brains, all his heart, all his music. He is not too much for us because our grief is so
deep and so sensitive, and the whole outlook is a horizon of blackness, and darkness
has no history and no measuring points. This is where the religious element enters
into life with great copiousness, and where it should be received with unutterable
welcomes. I wonder if there are any analogies that may help us in the explanation of
the meaning and the application of the purpose of this mysterious therefore. Seed
grows. If it does grow, what then! Everything. As what? As the resurrection; that is
answer enough to your mean inquiry. If a little seed can grow, why may not the
planted bulb of the body grow? Thou sowest not the body that shall be, and yet a
body in some real, strong, clear, and satisfactory sense. But some man will say,
How? Oh, universe, halt! call thy suns and moons to stand still, to answer this fools
How? When we come to question asking, we had better fall to praying. Do not
mistake impertinence for inquiry; and do not suppose that the whole universe, with
all its constellations, will say to itself, Hush! here is some poor dark stumbling soul
that wants to understand how. There will be no answer given to him until time, with
all its evolution and declaration of answers to enigmas and mysteries, shall work out
its purpose, and the man shall be answered by a great vision. Therefore. I have
never seen the stars except in the darkness, therefore the night may have something
to show me as well as the day the night of loneliness and desolation and bitter
sorrow. Intellect grows, therefore character may grow. The little may become great,
the weak may become strong, that which is far off may be brought nigh, and that
which is barren may be fruitful. We know that intellect grows; we have seen it in the
little child, we have almost seen the new idea enter the opening brain; it is as if we
saw a beautiful little bird fly into a bush in the summer time and reappear, so to say,
though not literally, not as a bird, but as a song. Who can tell when the ideas came to
fruition in the human brain? Who can fix the date when the little boy became almost
a philosopher? Who can say at what hour the meaning of certain words was revealed
to any one of us? If this process of mental expansion can go forward with such happy
results, so the human soul, when it is known under the name of character, nobleness,
self-control, love of God, may grow, and no man can say just when or just where. (J.
Parker, D. D.)

LAM 3:22-24
It is of the Lords mercies that we are not consumed.

Man living by mercy

I. MANS WHOLE LIFE, BODILY, MENTAL, AND SPIRITUAL, IS SUSTAINED
BY THE MERCY OF THE LORD.
1. It is of the Lords mercy that we are not consumed bodily. Consider the waste
constantly going on, etc. Set against this the powers of digestion and
assimilation, and the constant supply of food.
2. It is of the Lords mercy that we are not consumed intellectually.
Consider the wear and tear of the brain, the continual evolution of thought, the
daily anxiety of mind; and against this set the all-renewing energy of the Holy
Ghost, who gives strength day by day, repairing the waste of faculty and
renewing the resources of power.
3. It is of the Lords mercy that we are not consumed morally. Consider our sins,
our daily provocations, our constant obduracy of heart. Why aces lie withhold
the stroke of righteous vengeance? The answer is, in His mercy! Very beautiful is
the expression, They are new every morning new just as we want them
standing at the very threshold of the day to help us through all work and trial,
all darkness and light.

II. To know what the mercy is, consider WHAT IS MEANT BY CONSUMPTION.
Figure a tree that is diseased at the roots; a man who is daffy pining away; a soul
wasting! From such consumption there is no protection but in Gods mercy. Show the
vanity of all human schemes. Call the attention of Christians to the fact that every day
is provided for; if the trial comes daily, so does the mercy. Human preservation is not
merely a question of science or prudence; underlying all are the compassions which
are new every morning. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Mercy and faithfulness

I. The application of this to the case of the Jews is very obvious, considering their
multiplied provocations, and Gods multiplied mercies toward them; but we may well
consider it in its application to ourselves, for AS SINNERS WE HAVE ALL DESERVED
TO BE CONSUMED. The wages of sin is death. Sin is the transgression of the law.
Sin therefore is man practically separating himself from God, refusing to love Him, to
serve Him, preferring to go with the great enemy of God and godliness, and to be led by
him according to his evil will, and to do the vile work which he commands. Thus sin is
no trifle. We have all sinned in our different ways. In how many ways, how many times
we have abused the faculties which God hath given us, whether of body, soul, or spirit!
We have perverted the energies which should have been employed in serving Him, into
so many weapons of rebellion wherewith we dared to fight against God. And what have
we deserved? Surely to be consumed, to be cut off in our sins, to be separated from
God forever. Then how is it that we are here spared as we are? It is not of our merits,
but of the Lords mercies. This explains His wonderful forbearance towards sinners
while living in sin, forming habits of Sinning, and acting out those habits in
innumerable acts, and deeds, and thoughts of a sinful character, doing, in fact, nothing
to please God.

II. HIS MERCIES ARE TO BE TRACED UP TO HIS COMPASSIONS; even because

His compassions fail not. His mercies are the streams of which His compassions are
the source. His compassions are in the essential goodness of our God, prompting Him
to manifest His mercies in a way consistent with His glorious perfections. Of His
compassion to guilty sinners He sent His Son to take mans nature, to become mans
substitute, to be his surety, to suffer the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to
God. Thus His compassions prompting, His mercies can flow freely through the
mediation of Christ. God can be just, and yet justify the ungodly, believing in Jesus for
His sake. Hence, if partakers of His mercies in Christ Jesus, we are quickened, who
were dead in trespasses and sins; we are justified by faith, and so have peace with God,
who were guilty before God, under condemnation, deserving hell. We, who were by
nature the children of wrath, even as others, are made the children of God by adoption
and grace. We are being trained and educated by the Holy Spirit for dwelling with God
in heaven; our trials and sufferings are all being sanctified for our souls profit. Thus
how great the compassions of our God! what a never-failing source of mercies ever
flowing and overflowing!

III. THESE MERCIES, SO TRACED UP TO THE COMPASSIONS OF OUR GOD,

ARE ALL SECURED BY HIS FAITHFULNESS. Every morning brings a new or a
renewed need to every man of the mercies and compassions of God. The coming day
will bring its duties and its trials, its difficulties, its dangers, its temptations, it may be
its sufferings. For all these we need new or renewed grace. The grace that was sufficient
yesterday will not serve for today. We need like grace, or more grace today, and this
our God in covenant is ready to supply. As thy day is, so shall thy strength be. It is
morning. Son, go work today in My vineyard, the Lord of the vineyard is saying; then,
Lord, I must look to Thee to give working strength, otherwise I faint and fail. But He
giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might, He increaseth strength.
Thus out of weakness we are made strong. Every working Christian, as he goeth forth,
to his work and to his labour until the evening, can say or sing of Gods mercies and
compassions. They are new every morning. But again, it is morning; a voice from
heaven is saying, My child, today go not out to work; stay at home and suffer according
to the will of God; commune with thine own heart upon thy bed, and be still, and know
that I am God. Here, then, is harder duty than outdoor work. But here again the mercies
and compassions of our God are found new every morning; the throne of grace is
nearer to us than before; these trials draw the soul nearer to God, and into closer
communion with Him; there is more leisure now for retirement and devotion, or if pain
and weakness interrupt, there is by the medium of pain a reminder of Christs own
sufferings and their saving object. He can make His strength manifestly perfect in this
felt weakness. Thus the day of suffering, though it may seem long and tedious, may ye
short and sweet in the experience of His mercies. (John Hambleton, M. A.)

Profitable discipline
Spiritual experience must be looked at as a whole. It is not right to fix
attention either upon this side or upon that, to the exclusion and the forgetfulness of
the other. One side is very dark and full of sadness, sharply inclined towards
despair; the other is brighter than the summer morning, tuneful, sunned with all the
lustre of saintly hope: so we must take the night with the morning, if we would have
the complete day. Where we find the highest mountains we find the deepest valleys.
In proportion to the range and spirituality of the world in which a man lives will be
the pensiveness and gloom of his occasional hours. If the poet droops when his harp
does not respond to his touch, how must the soul faint when God hides Himself? If
the timid child moans because his chamber light has gone out, with what bitterness
of complaint should we speak if the sun were extinguished? If men say they are
never depressed, that they are always in high spirits, it is probably because they
never were really in high spirits at all not knowing the difference between the
souls rapture, mental and spiritual ecstasy, and merely animal excitement. A great
deal depends upon the clearness of the atmosphere as to whether we appreciate this
object or that in natural scenery. So it is with souls. A great many of us seem to have
such long winters, short days, with poor, artificial light, and such murky, gloomy,
dispiriting weather, with cruel fogs. Others of us have more sunshine, more summer
weather in the soul. But what we want to understand is this that religion, right
relations with God, a true standing before the Almighty, does not depend upon this
feeling or upon that; it is not a question of climate, atmosphere, air, spirits: it is a
question of fact. The question is not, How do you feel today? but, Where are you
standing? are you on the rock? The rock will not change; the climate will. Be right in
your foundation, and the season of rejoicing will come round again. Taking
Jeremiahs experiences as a whole, what do we find that sanctified sorrow had
wrought in him?
1. In the first place, it gave him a true view of Divine government. Jeremiah was
brought to understand two things about the government of God. He was
brought to understand that Gods government is tender. What words do you
suppose Jeremiah connected with the government of God? Why these two
beautiful words, each a piece of music, Mercies, Compassions. A man can
only get into that view of government by living the deepest possible life. A
God all strength would be a monster. A God throned on ivory, ruling the
universe with a sceptre of mere power, could never establish Himself in the
confidence and love and trust of His creatures. Man cannot be ruled and
governed by mere power, fear, overwhelming, dominating, crushing
strength and force. So we find David saying, Power belongeth unto God:
unto Thee also, O Lord, belongeth mercy. Power in the hands of mercy,
Omnipotence impregnated by all the tenderness of pity. That is the true
 exposition of Divine nature which opens up the fatherliness, motherliness,
mercifulness, and compassion of Gods great heart.
2. This discipline wrought in Jeremiah the conviction that Gods government was
minute. Speaking of Gods mercies, he says, They are new every morning.
Morning mercies daffy bread. That is it. God shutting us up within a day and
training us a moment at a time. The Psalmist said, Thy mercies have been ever
of old. And another singer said, Thy mercies are new every morning. Is there
no contradiction there? Ever of old every morning! Old as duration, new as
morning; old as human existence, new as the coming summer. These are all
inconsistencies that mark our life. Jeremiah having given this view of the Divine
government, tells us two things about discipline. He tells us, in the first place,
the goodness of waiting: it is good for a man to wait. Observe you: wait for God.
I am not called upon to wait because somebody has put a great waggon across
the road; I might get that out of the way. But if God had set an angel there, I
must make distinctions. There is a waiting that is indolence; there is a waiting
that is sheer faithlessness; there is a waiting that comes of weakness. This is the
true waiting, wanting to get on, resolute about progress, and yet having a
notion that God is just before us teaching patience. Jeremiah tells us this
second thing about the Divine government. It is good for a man to bear the
yoke. Commend me to the man who has been through deep waters, through
very dark places, through treacherous, serpent-haunted roads, and who has yet
come out with a cheerful heart, mellow, chastened, subdued, and who speaks
tenderly of the mercy of God through it all. And that man I may trust with my
hearts life. A right acceptance of Gods schooling, Gods rod, Gods judgment,
and Gods mercy, mingled together, will cause us to become learned in Divine
wisdom, tender in Divine feeling, gentle and charitable in all social judgment;
good men whilst we are here, and always waiting, even in the midst of our most
diligent service, to be called up into the more fully revealed presence and the
still more cloudless light. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Gods mercy acknowledged

I. A STATE OF DESERVED PUNISHMENT. It is not enough to compare England with
other nations in the glory of her institutions, in the valour of her arms, in the extent
and enterprise of her commerce, in the growth of her civilisation, in the freedom of her
laws, in the grandeur of her discoveries, and in the nobility and genuine heartedness of
her people and then to boast of her superiority. No. We must look upon our nation
in the light of her moral and spiritual character as she stands related to the God of the
universe. And what is the nature and character of the spectacle? Have we not reason
for humiliation? But regard this part of our subject in an individual point of view. Let us
bring the matter home to our own hearts. And do we not find in them reason upon
reason why the vengeance of Almighty God should fall upon us? Well then may we
exclaim, It is of the Lords mercies that we are not consumed.

II. A REASON FOR THE DIVINE CONDUCT. Because His compassions fail not.
Thus our hopes are centred in the unchangeableness of Gods mercy and love. Other
things do change. The sunshine gives place to the blackness of the tempest. The life
and bloom of spring and summer pass away into the fading beauties of autumn and
the cold sterility of winter. The health of childhood, of youth and manhood, soon
yields to the power of sickness, and perishes beneath the blight of death. Prosperity
is oftentimes overcast with the gloomy shadows of adversity. The smiles of peace are
changed into the frowns of war. Promises and compacts are broken superseded
by the avarice of selfishness, by the grasping aims of ambition, by the caprice of
pride, and by the tyranny of despotism. But the compassions of God fail not.
They are ever new, and ever abiding.

III. DUTIES SUGGESTED BY THE TEXT.

1. What more consistent and natural than thankfulness and gratitude?
2. Trust in God, and not in man, is another duty founded upon the constancy and
immutability of Gods compassion. There is something sublime, as well as
consolatory, in trust in God: sublime, as respects its object, so infinitely superior
to any other in the glory and majesty of its nature, its eternity and perfectibility;
consolatory, inasmuch as the human mind is cheered and strengthened with the
conviction, founded upon the most certain evidence, that they who trust in the
Lord shall never be confounded. And herein, too, lies the special privilege of
the Christian.
3. Another duty presented to us by the text is repentance. And what so calculated
to effect this glorious result as the unfailing compassions of the Almighty? (W.
D. Horwood.)

Preservation
I. THE PRESERVATION. It is ascribed in this passage to three attributes.
1. Mercy. Many mercies here referred to, for there are many
manifestations of the same mercy e.g., there is atoning mercy, forgiving
mercy, sanctifying mercy, and preserving mercy all of which are combined
in the salvation of the believer.
2. Compassion. This differs from mercy, because it does not, like mercy,
necessarily imply sin.
(1) It fails not. In it there is neither fickleness nor exhaustion (Heb 13:8).
(2) It is new every morning. There are fresh mercies every day daily
bread, daily power for work, daily comforts, daily privileges of family
prayer, etc.
3. Faithfulness. Faithfulness implies unchanging love. There may be faithfulness to a
covenant, faithfulness to a promise, and faithfulness to a person. The latter seen
in the faithfulness of a mother or nurse.

II. THE EFFECT OF THIS PRESERVATION ON THE MIND OF THE

PROPHET. Seen in his declaration for the present, and determination for the
future. (E. Hoare, M. A.)

Manifold mercy
As John Bunyan says, all the flowers in Gods garden are double; there is no
single mercy; nay, they are not only double flowers, but they are manifold flowers.
There are many flowers upon one stalk, and many flowers in one flower. You shall
think you have but one mercy, but you shall find it to be a whole flock of mercies.
Our beloved is unto us a bundle of myrrh, a cluster of camphire. When you lay hold
upon one golden link of the chain of grace, you pull, pull, pull, but lo! as long as
your hand can draw there are fresh linked sweetnesses of love still to come.
Manifold mercies! Like the drops of a lustre, which reflect a rainbow of colours
when the sun is glittering upon them, and each one, when turned in different ways,
from its prismatic form, shows all the varieties of colours, so the mercy of God is
one and yet many, the same, yet ever changing, a combination of all the beauties of
love blended harmoniously together. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Innumerable mercies
I was going home one winters evening with my little maiden at my side,
when she looked up into the sky and said, Father, I am going to count the stars.
Very well, I said, do. And soon I heard her whispering to herself, Two hundred
and twenty-one, two hundred and twenty-two, two hundred and twenty-three, and
then she stepped and sighed. Oh dear! I had no idea they were so many! Like that
little maiden. I have often tried to count my mercies, but right soon have I had to
cry, I had no idea they were so many! (Mark Guy Pearse.)

His compassions fail not.

The unfailing goodness of God

Although the elegist has prepared us for brighter scenes by the more hopeful
tone of an intermediate triplet, the transition from the gloom and bitterness of the
first part of the poem to the glowing rapture of the second is among the most
startling effects in literature. How could a man entertain two such conflicting
currents of thought in closest juxtaposition? In their very form and structure these
touching elegies reflect the mental calibre of their author. A wooden soul could
never have invented their movements. They reveal a most sensitive spirit, a spirit that
resembles a finely strung instrument of music, quivering in response to impulses
from all directions. The author composes the first part in an exceptionally gloomy
mood, and leaves the poem unfinished, perhaps for some time. When he returns to it
on a subsequent occasion he is in a totally different frame of mind, and this is
reflected in the next stage of his work. Still the point of importance is the possibility
of the very diverse views here recorded. Nor is this wholly a matter of temperament.
Is it not more or less the case with all of us, that since absorption with one class of
ideas entirely excludes their opposites, when the latter are allowed to enter the mind
they will rush in with the force of a pent-up flood? Then we are astonished that we
could ever have forgotten them. Still it may seem to us a strange thing that this most
perfect expression of a joyous assurance of the mercy and compassion of God should
be found in the Book of Lamentations of all places. It may well give heart to those
who have not sounded the depth of sorrow, as the author of these sad poems had
done, to learn that even he had been able to recognise the merciful kindness of God
in the largest possible measure. A little reflection, however, should teach us that it is
not so unnatural a thing for this gem of grateful appreciation to appear where it is.
We do not find, as a rule, that the most prosperous people are the foremost to
recognise the love of God. The reverse is very frequently the case. The softening
influence of sorrow seems to have a more direct effect upon our sense of Divine
goodness. Perhaps, too, it is some compensation for melancholy, that persons who
are afflicted with it are most responsive to sympathy. The morbid, despondent poet
Cowper has written most exquisitely about the love of God. Watts is enthusiastic in
his praise of the Divine grace; but a deeper note is sounded in the Olney hymns, as,
for example, in that beginning with the line
Hark, my soul, it is the Lord.
In his new consciousness of the love of God, the elegist is first struck by its amazing
persistence. Probably we should render the twenty-second verse thus
The Lords mercies, verily they cease not, etc.
There are two masons for this emendation. First, the momentary transition to the
plural we is harsh and improbable. Second and this is the principal consideration
the balance of the phrases, which is so carefully observed throughout this elegy, is
upset by the common rendering, but restored by the emendation. The topic of the
triplet in which the disputed passage occurs is the amazing persistence of Gods
goodness to His suffering children. The proposed alteration is in harmony with this.
The thought here presented to us rests on the truth of the eternity and essential
changelessness of God. We cannot think of Him as either fickle or failing; to do so
would be to cease to think of Him as God. If He is merciful at all He cannot be
merciful only spasmodically, erratically, or temporarily. The elegist declares that the
reason why Gods mercies are not consumed is that His compassions do not fail.
Thus he goes behind the kind actions of God to their originating motives. To a man
in the condition of the writer of this poem of personal confidences the Divine
sympathy is the one fact in the universe of supreme importance. So will it be to every
sufferer who can assure himself of the truth of it. But is this only a consolation for
the sorrowing? The pathos, the very tragedy of human life on earth, should make the
sympathy of God the most precious fact of existence to all mankind. Portia rightly
reminds Shylock that we all do look for mercy; but if so, the spring of mercy, the
Divine compassion, must be the one source of true hope for every soul of man.
Further, the elegist declares that the special form taken by these unceasing mercies
of God is daily renewal The love of God is constant one changeless Divine
attribute; but the manifestations of that love are necessarily successive and various,
according to the successive and various needs of His children. The living God is an
active God, who works in the present as effectually as He worked in the past. There
is another side to this truth. It is not sufficient to have received the grace of God
once for all. If He giveth more grace, it is because we need more grace. This is a
stream that must be ever flowing into the soul, not the storage of a tank filled once
for all and left to serve for a lifetime. Therefore the channel must be kept constantly
clear, or the grace will fall to reach us, although in itself it never runs dry. There is
something cheering in the poets idea of the morning as the time when these mercies
of God are renewed. Gods mercies do not fail, are not interrupted. The emphasis is
on the thought that no day is without Gods new mercies, not even the day of
darkest trouble; and further, there is the suggestion that God is never dilatory in
coming to our aid. He does not keep us waiting and wearying while He tarries. He is
prompt and early with His grace. The idea may be compared with that of the promise
to those who seek God early, literally, in the morning (Pro 8:17). Or we may think
of the night as the time of repose, when we are oblivious of Gods goodness,
although even through the hours of darkness He who neither slumbers nor sleeps is
constantly watching over His unconscious children. Then in the morning there
dawns on us a fresh perception of His goodness. To the notion of the morning
renewal of the mercies of God the poet appends a recognition of His great
faithfulness. This is an additional thought. Faithfulness is more than compassion.
There is a strength and a stability about the idea that goes further to insure
confidence. The conclusion drawn from these considerations is given in an echo
from the Psalms
The Lord is my portion.
The words are old and well worn; but they obtain a new meaning when adopted as the
expression of a new experience. The lips have often chanted them in the worship of the
sanctuary. Now they are the voice of the soul, of the very life. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)
Mans desert and Gods compassion
I. GOD HAS THE ORDERING OF BOTH WHAT HIS PEOPLE FEEL AND WHAT
THEY ARE KEPT FROM FEELING; that they are cast down, and yet not destroyed;
afflicted, and yet not consumed. All their times are in His hand (Isa 45:7; Am 3:6). He
orders what affliction shall befall any one of His children, and in what manner; to
what degree it shall prevail, how long continue, and what shall be the issue (1Sa 2:6;
Job 38:11). This is agreeable to His nature, and His relation to them; to His love
and promise to His people, and to the design He is carrying on by all His dealings
with them, which is to fit them for the kingdom He hath prepared for them (Psa
103:8-9, 14; Isa 57:16). In judgment He remembers mercy, correcting in measure,
and staying the rough wind in the day of His east wind (Isa 27:8).

II. THE PEOPLE OF GOD UNDER THEIR HEAVIEST SUFFERINGS, ARE TO

LOOK TO THE FAR GREATER MISERY WHICH GOD MAY RIGHTEOUSLY
INFLICT UPON THEM FOR THEIR SINS. Think of the misery due to sin, as it
includes
1. The loss or being deprived of the image and Spirit of God, being
abandoned by Him, and left to live without Him in the world.
2. It is part of the misery due to sin, to be cast out of the favour of God, and
abhorred by Him.
3. A being stript of all external comforts, of whatever might make life easy or
desirable; a deprivation of all such things, is our due upon the account of sin.
4. Having the body filled with pain and torment, making its beauty to consume
away as a moth-eaten garment, is part of the punishment due to sin.
5. Having the soul filled with horror, belongs to the punishment of sin; which some
have felt to that degree, as to extort from them that doleful cry (Psa 88:15).
6. Being cut off by death, and cast into hell, is the destruction due to sin.

III. Such is the evil of sin, and so much of it is found even in saints
themselves, that SHOULD GOD BE STRICT TO MARK INIQUITY, THEY
WOULD HAVE NOTHING TO EXPECT BUT TO BE CONSUMED.
1. Such is the evil of sin, that it deserves this. It is the abominable thing that God
hates; and well it may, as by it His majesty and justice are affronted, His
power and wisdom disowned, His goodness despised; His holiness
reproached, His truth contradicted, His promises and threatenings slighted,
as if His favours were not valuable, nor His wrath to be feared.
2. So much of this is found in saints themselves, as would expose them to
destruction, should God deal with them according to it.

IV. It is TO THE DIVINE MERCY AND COMPASSIONS THAT EVEN THE

PEOPLE OF GOD OWE THEIR PRESERVATION FROM BEING CONSUMED.
1. The evidence of this is obvious.
(1) As it is not owing to any worth nor power of their own, not to anything
they could do for God, or do against Him.
(2) Nor is their preservation owing to this, that God is unacquainted with
the sins of His people, or makes light of them.
(3) Nor is their preservation owing to Gods want of power to punish to
the height of the desert of sin.
(4) He has given dreadful proofs of His power on His implacable enemies;
and that His people are otherwise treated, is because His mercies and
compassions fail not. It was mercy that spared them in their
unregenerate state, though they were by nature children of wrath, even
as others (Eph 2:3). It was mercy in God that provided us an all-sufficient
Saviour, even His own Son (Joh 3:16). It was mercy that from eternity
designed their recovery whom God is pleased to set apart for Himself;
and according to it, in the appointed season, He called them into the
kingdom of His dear Son.
2. What kind of mercy it is.
(1) It is most free and sovereign, This is His own declaration (Ex 33:19; Rom
9:15).
(2) It is rich and full; large and abundant in the fountain, and extending to
all His people.
(3) It is most wonderful mercy; considering by whom it is exercised,
towards whom, against what provocations, in what manner, and to what
ends. Considering by whom exercised. How astonishing is it that the
High and Holy One, who humbleth Himself to behold the things that
are in heaven, will attend to the preservation of any in this lower world!
Considering to whom it is exercised, to men, to sinners; recovered
indeed, but very imperfect; such whom He fetched out of nothing by His
power, and from a state of guilt by His grace. Considering against what
provocations, even from those towards whom it is exercised. How
often do we offend our God, while preserved by Him? How many, how
great are our sins? How grievous to Him, and how plain before Him?
How worthy of destruction are we, and yet He spares us! Considering in
what manner it is exercised by God, even with delight. Judgment is His
strange work. Considering to what end it is exercised, namely, in order
to their salvation, for them or in them, preparatory to their being with
Him in heaven, the blissful state to which by mercy they are designed.
(4) It is most seasonable mercy. How often has my life been in danger, and
yet God has appeared for me, when unable to help myself, and the help
of fellow creatures was tried in vain, in how remarkable a juncture did
He take my case into His own hands; proving thereby that to Him alone
belong the issues from death?
(5) The mercy of God, to which saints owe their preservation, is distinguishing,
such as He did not exercise towards apostate spirits.
(6) The mercy of God is never-failing (Psa 103:17). This makes up the greatest
part of His name, and what He esteems His glory (Ex 34:6).
 3. The manner in which this mercy is exercised.
(1) Through a Mediator, for His sake, and upon His account.
(2) In a covenant way. (D. Wilcox.)

The perennial stream of Divine compassion

Because His compassions are not spent, wasted; but as the oil in the cruse,
as the spring ever running, the sun ever shining, etc. This should ever shine in our
hearts as the sun doth in the firmament. (J. Trapp.)

Gods mercies recognised

Joseph Parker bids us never go to God for new blessings before we have
given Him a receipt for the old ones. We may at least recognise them, and the
recognition is sure to render us grateful. But, on the contrary, most lives are one big
sponge, one hungry petition, always greedily asking, and never stopping to repay.
(Amos R. Wells.)

A memorial of Gods mercy

Many times Captain Holm had crossed the Atlantic Ocean without losing a
spar, but at last disaster overtook him. He says, On one voyage my ship was struck
by lightning in mid-ocean. The bolt came down the mizzenmast through the cabin
and passed into the hold, leaving a long black scar on the mast as it went. We were
cotton loaded, and we had every reason to fear the horrors of a ship on fire at sea.
But the Lord in His mercy spared us, and we came safely to port. When, a little later,
men came on board to make some repairs, I went into the cabin one day, just as the
painter was raising his brush to paint out the lightning mark on the mast. Stop!
stop! I said; dont you put a brushful of paint on that mast. So long as I am master
of this ship, that scar on the mast shall stand, so that I may never forget how good
the Lord was to save us when my cotton-loaded ship was struck by lightning:
(Christian Age.)

LAM 3:23
They are new every morning.

Dayspring mercies
It is almost startling to find this tender and inspiriting utterance embedded in
the very heart of a book of lamentations. It is not what we expect. The hurricane that
has been haunting all hearts with the frenzy of its unceasing roar lulls itself for a
moment to listen to the low-ringing, fearless prattle of a child. The wreaths of smoke
that rise from sacked and smouldering homes and from crackling cities part as some
passing breeze stirs the air, and the calm, lustrous azure of the firmament peeps out
again. The shrieks that break from a thousand homes of death, and rend the awful
midnight, grow shrill for a while; and in the mysterious pause a nightingale begins to
pour out its stream of dainty melody.
I. THE INEXHAUSTIBLE WEALTH OF GODS FORGIVENESS. But for the daily
renewal of Gods mercy to His people, they would have been utterly cut off.
1. Alas! with many of us every day has its acts of shortcoming, if not of conscious
transgression, and Gods pardoning love must needs go before us in new
forms of manifestation. I once visited the ruins of a noble city that had been
built on a desert oasis. Mighty columns of roofless temples still stood in
unbroken file. Halls in which kings and satraps had feasted two thousand
years ago were represented by solitary walls. Gateways of richly careen stone
led to a paradise of bats and owls. All was ruin. But past the dismantled city,
brooks, which had once flowed through gorgeous flower gardens and at the
foot of marble halls, still swept on in undying music and unwasted freshness.
The waters were just as sweet as when queens quaffed them two thousand
years ago. A few hours before, they had been melted from the snows of the
distant mountains. And so Gods forgiving love flows in ever-renewed form
through the wreck of the past.
2. And when there is no fresh wandering to be forgiven, Gods new mercy awaits
us at the dawn to refresh our joy and invigorate our strength, and to give to
us the power of a new and sinless consecration. Close by one of the great
cities of the East, there is a large stretch of grass that is always green.
Sometimes the showers are rare and scanty, and the thermometer mounts to
an appalling height, and one wonders to see the grass green and lush as
though it were growing in some English meadow. It is kept so by a heavy
dew that never fails to fall in the nighttime. And so with our life of
consecration. There is no dawn without the dew of abounding love and
compassion descending to keep it green.

II. THE RESOURCEFULNESS OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE. The mercy that is ever

fresh to pardon is ever fresh to guide and shape the circumstances in the midst of
which the pardoned life is spent. Weeping may endure for the night, but Gods
gracious hand never forgets to make ready its surprise of joy for the morning. The
setting sun sees Gods people beleaguered by hostile legions, and with hearts sinking
beneath the weight of perplexity and despair; but the path of providential leading
has turned a sharp corner in the night, and the morrows sun has risen upon a
traversed sea, and the dreaded foe strewn like helpless wreck drift along the shore.
And even when there are no special difficulties awaiting the solution of Gods
providence, and our life is uneventful in its outward complexion, providence is
always versatile in its unseen methods and processes. We may sometimes seem to be
left at the mercy of unalterable forces; no interposition; old natural laws that shaped
the destiny of Adam shaping ours without any break, old events repeating
themselves, all mechanism. Yet as bridges built in the time of the Conquest carry
over their lines day by day new men with new thoughts to be accomplished in the
world, these ever-repeating events are working by the line of an old order to new
providential issues. Astronomers at one time puzzled themselves over a problem in
solar physics. How was the heat of the sun maintained? It seemed a natural inference
that as it was always giving off heat in stupendous volumes, ultimate exhaustion must
one day come. Within recent times the suggestion has found wide acceptance, that
the sun is constantly drawing meteors and asteroids and comets to itself, and that
the heat is maintained by the impact of these bodies, as they fall into the sun. Things
come to us from time to time that seem out of all accord with the harmonies around
us. Strange difficulties, stumbling blocks, tribulations start up in the path of our
daily life. These things are drawn into the circle of Gods control and government for
their solution, and it is in this way that the very glory of Gods providence is
maintained.

III. THE UNFAILING TRUTH AND FAITHFULNESS OF GOD in His relation to

His people. Gods renewed mercies are linked with the morning, because the return
of the day is one of the most perfect and intelligible symbols of constancy to be
found in the economy of nature. How unlike human love in many of its forms,
which, once embittered by disappointment, changes into gall, cynicism,
misanthropy! There are not a few hearts from whose
affection all elasticity has forever gone. The affection is like a spring that has been
rendered limp and useless through overstrain. A shrewd observer of human nature
has stud, For a woman there is no second love. Her nature is too delicate to
withstand a second time that most terrible shock and convulsion of soul. Think of
Juliet. Could she have sustained a second time that overpowering bliss and horror?
Well, that statement is true, within certain limits of both man and woman alike. The
human love that is centred on human objects cannot renew itself forever. It may be
so crushed, that no dew or sunshine can lift it up again. Old people do not care to
form new friendships. How transcendent the Divine love! It has been grieved and
crossed and contemned by our weaknesses, insincerities, rebellions, a thousand
times; and yet it renews itself unceasingly with every day dawn.

IV. THE UNFAILING PROMPTNESS OF GODS MINISTRATIONS. His mercies

are new every morning; that is, just as soon as, or even before, we begin to need
them. We receive our salvation and guidance and defence, not of our own work, but
of His free love. If it were of our own work, we must needs wait for the nightfall
before we could receive any recompense. Wages are paid at sunset. But it is all His
gift. So the mercy in which we rejoice comes to us with the dawn, before we have
done a solitary stroke of work. The regulations of the court at Pekin are so framed as
to give to the Chinese Empire an example of promptness and despatch. The emperor
always receives his cabinet ministers and councillors at three or four oclock in the
morning, long before day dawn. And so God awaits His servants with new pardons,
new counsels, new honours in His kingdom, long before the day dawn. Gods
mercies are new for you at the outset of every morning. There are some flowers that
do not open till noon, and others that pour out the stores of rare spices hidden in
their hearts at sunset only. Gods mercy begins to shine before the sun, and diffuses
its incense about our path through every succeeding hour of the day. An ingenious
botanist, by watching the hours at which certain flowers opened, hit upon the pretty
conceit of constructing what he called a flower clock. Gods matchless mercies, like
circles of thickset bloom that break into splendour with a rhythm that never halts,
are measuring out the successive hours of our life. No winter comes to blast the
flowers, and the clock is never behind time. His opening compassions anticipate the
light.

They are new every morning.

V. THE PERPETUAL FRESHNESS OF THE DIVINE NATURE. Gods compassions
are unceasingly new, because they well, pure and fair, out of the sacred and stainless
and infinite depths of His Fatherhood. They have the ever-renewed and living
sweetness of His own spring-like nature in them. A smile never grows old, because it is
kindness turned into the grace of outward line, and the charm of kindness is undying.
Art may pall upon the taste, and music jar to torture over-wrought nerves. But not so
the smile of sincere and unaffected human kindness. A smile with the love of a finite
nature behind it is always new. How much more is that true of a smile with the infinite
kindness behind it! Gods daily mercies come to us clothed with the enkindled grace of
His own matchless smile, and full of the light of an immortal May time. He cannot give
or do without putting the buoyancy of His own untiring and eternal youth into each
boon and act. Charles Lamb, in a few wise and beautiful sentences, dedicates one of his
books to his afflicted sister Mary, with whom he had been living for years in tender and
unselfish affection. He says that when people are living together day by day, they are
too apt to take for granted the affection they bear each other, and to forget those
special expressions of affection that are the gauge of its true and constant depth. He
would therefore make the publication of his book the occasion for that special
expression of love he might have forgotten to render amidst the bustle and routine and
commonplace of daily life. God is always with us, but He never suffers us to take His
tender affection for granted. Each of His daily mercies comes to us with a new
dedication upon it. It is a legible evangel, witnessing to the exceeding love of our Father
on high. How sweet and lightsome life would be to us, if we could only enter into the
prophets view of the ever-renewed mercy with which it is filled! Solomon had jaded his
nature with false luxury and mock grandeur, and voluptuous habits that would have
better suited a pagan, when he moaned out his epitaph upon human life, There is
nothing new under the sun. Some one has said he counted the sun itself a piece of
warmed up pleasantry only. A Frenchman would have put an end to himself when he
had reached that point. Solomon was kept from that madness by his reserve of religions
principle, and made to warn all the ages against the vanity of a life spent away from
God. He would have tuned his harp to a better key than that, if, like his father, he had
bathed his spirit day by day in the fountain of Gods perpetual goodness. He could not
see the goodness and mercy that were ever following him. Is life wearisome and
insipid? It is because we are blind to Gods ever-renewed mercies. I read the other day
of a man who had lest his sense of taste through the shock of a railway collision. And
some of us are like that. Our faith has had its shocks, and our hopes its
disappointments, and our life plan its abrupt and disastrous interruptions, and we
sometimes find it an empty counsel to taste and see that the Lord is good. We fail to
appreciate the newness of His daily mercy. It is fitting that new mercies should be
greeted with new songs. The heart alive to the freshness of Gods mercy will find new
language in which to express itself. Whilst passing in early manhood through a stage of
deep dejection, John Stuart Mill found occasional comfort in music. One day he was
thrown into a state of profound gloom by the thought that musical combinations were
exhaustible. The octave was only composed of five tones and two semi-tones. Not all the
combinations of these notes were harmonious, so there must be a limit somewhere to
the possibilities of melody. No such possibility can limit the range of the new song, for
it shall be pitched to the key of Gods ever-renewed mercies. (T. G. Selby.)

New mercies
There is, I am persuaded, no greater evil committed by any of us than a
practical forgetfulness of the common mercies of life, mercies which, because of
their commonness, cease to be regarded as mercies. The Psalmist, you will
remember, calls upon us to forget not all Gods benefits, and he thus indicates
our perpetual danger, a danger which he himself felt and against which he had to
guard his own soul. There are two great causes which may be said to account for
our forgetfulness of the mercies of God which are new every morning.

I. THE HAND OF THE GIVER IS INVISIBLE. He is a Spirit, and He can only manifest
Himself to the senses of His creatures by such physical operations as appeal to their
senses. To ask that we may see God, and see Him with our eyes, is to ask that He may
cease to he what He is, namely, an infinite Spirit; or else it is to ask that we should
cease to be what we are. We forget, when we wish to see God who giveth us all things
richly to enjoy, that we do not even see each other. My friend may give me presents,
but I do not see that in my friend which these presents express and reveal. I can only
infer that he loves me because of what he has given me, and of he should send me gifts
every day and every moment, I should still only infer the same. And if he were some
unknown friend that is, a person whose face I had never seen at all, but who for some
reason or other should supply me with all the necessaries of life every day the fact
that I had never seen him would not impair the value of his gifts, nor would it diminish
the gratitude which I should feel towards him. It may be, too, that the gifts of a friend
might come to me through a chain of a thousand hands, some of which I might see, and
some of which I might not see; but no matter how long the chain of intermediate agents
through whom the blessings come, they would still he the gifts of a friend. Nay, if the
chain were long, so far from our forgetting the friend, or being ungrateful for his gifts,
we should see in every separate link of the chain a fresh proof of his regard, and should
say, how much he must love me when he takes so much pains that his gifts shall not
miscarry, but provides agents at every step to hand on the gifts until they reach me in
safety. This is what God does. He is this friend, except that though unseen He is not
unknown. He is our Father in heaven Who loves us and cares for us.

II. Another cause of our forgetfulness of our mercies as gifts of God is THEIR
CONSTANCY, OR REGULARITY. This is strange, and sad as well as strange, that the
very faithfulness and constancy with which Gods blessings come down to us should
create forgetfulness, and should lead us to undervalue them. He has made them
constant that we may never lack, has remembered us always that we might always
remember Him, has given, us perpetual mercies that we might give Him perpetual
praise; and we forget Him, forget Him because His mercies are new every morning.
What if they were not? What if they were intermittent? Let us look at a few.
1. Take as the first illustration, sleep. I venture to say that there are thousands who
never kneel down and thank God for sleep. While it visits us unwooed,
unsolicited, even unsought, and sometimes even unwelcomely, it takes its place
without any distinct recognition among the regular facts in the order of nature.
We sleep; of course we sleep; we sleep as we stand, or walk, or eat, or think,
so much, is it a matter of course! Happy they who can speak thus; happier still if
they Knew the priceless value of this boon, and happier still if, with the breaking
day, they have a heart to bless that God from whom sleep cometh. It is a mercy
which no money can buy, which no rank can command. I call you, then, today to
thank God for the common blessing of sleep, which is new every night.
 2. Look at another of these common mercies which are too often forgotten. I mean
our reason. The value of this gift is practically disesteemed from the very fact of
its commonness. We need at times to see men and women bereft of their
reason, that we may see by comparison with these sad foils how much we need
to bless God that our intellects are preserved. To see a man once sound in brain
and rich in faculty, with high powers of reasoning and of speech, wild and
wandering, the victim of strange and delirious fantasies, turning his heart away
from those he has most deeply loved, and sometimes blaspheming the very God
whom it has been his joy to worship and to serve; this is a spectacle to fill one
with grief and horror. But should it not also awaken in us a perpetual wonder
that we have been preserved from such a calamity; and should it not stir us up
to daily thanksgiving to Him whose mercies are new to us every morning?
3. Look at another common mercy the power of motion and action and
speech, or, in other words, that general energy of body which constitutes
the great part of our daily outward life. Have you ever thought of this? Has
not its very commonness hidden its value and meaning from you? (E. Mellor,
D. D.)

The originality of human life

I. NATURE PRESENTS A CERTAIN UNIFORMITY, BUT IN THAT UNIFORMITY
WE FIND INFINITE VARIETY. It is commonplace to say, No two blades of grass
are alike. The ancients believed that a new sun rose every day a technical error,
but a positive truth. We never look twice at the same sun; we never twice see the
same river. The water flows along and next moment is a new river. This is true of the
whole universe about us. Landscapes, mountains, forests, oceans, skies, all change
while we gaze. So with man. All life is newness.

II. THE ORIGINALITY OF HUMAN LIFE PRESENTS AN UNCEASING

DISCOVERY OF DIVINE MERCIFULNESS. His mercies are new every morning.
The text contains two grand ideas
1. The inexhaustibility of the Divine mind. In this way we consider His
works from the intellectual standpoint.
2. The inexhaustibility of the Divine heart. Not only do Gods thoughts fail not,
but His compassions fail not. His love is as great as His power.

III. THIS RENEWAL OF MERCIES SHOULD MATERIALLY AFFECT OUR

DAILY LIFE.
1. New every morning. Then how blind we are! There is a huge gloomy crowd to
whom life lacks variety, freshness, gladness. The carnally-minded, whose
heart is gross, etc., cannot see the glory of life, the grandeur of events, the
power and prophecy of all things. It is far otherwise with the man whose
spiritual nature has made them full of life. So with the Bible. It is a field of
treasure. But how many scan its pages, yet miss its precious thoughts!
2. New every morning. Then how thankless we often are! Judging from our
spirit and speech, it would hardly seem as if we had any mercies at all. As a
great rose grower was walking with a lady in his grounds, she expressed the
 desire to possess one of the most beautiful blossoms. He plucked the coveted
flower and gave it to his friend, only to find, shortly after, that in a fit of
unconsciousness she was plucking the leaves and dropping them to the
ground. Is not this a picture of ourselves? We covet certain things health,
wealth, knowledge, friendship. Yet, having obtained these and other mercies,
how coldly and carelessly we receive and use them. The rose grower was so
deeply offended that he gave away no more prize flowers This was like man,
but not like God. He still gives, although the dying leaves of many wasted
mercies are ever lying at our feet. Heaven drops fresh blossoms into our
hands, only to be ignored and wasted in their turn.
3. New every morning. Then how foolish we often are! Every mercy has a
mission, and designs the enrichment of our life and character. How much,
then, do we lose by our carelessness and ingratitude! There is a fairy tale, in
which a boatman in the evening time ferried across a river a strange being,
who gave him as a reward what seemed to be only shavings and stones, which
he threw over in disgust. But next morning, when the sun arose, he
discovered that a few fragments of the gift had escaped destruction, and the
light showed him that it consisted, not of shavings and dirt, but of gold and
precious atones, and, too late, he cursed his hateful folly. So through life we
go casting aside from us our daily benefits as if they were poor and
meaningless, and appropriating to ourselves but a fraction of that which is
more precious than rubies. (W. L. Watkinson.)

New daily mercies

There are a great many mercies that are new every morning. One of them
is the benefit of yesterdays experience. This life is a training school; each day teaches
its needed lessons. Experience is a pretty rough instructor, but, next to the Holy
Spirit, none is more valuable. If yesterday led us astray, then we are worse than
fools if we take the same track again. The mischief with bad habits is that we
thoughtlessly put them on again as we put on our clothes. If they are ever to be
broken off, they must be taken by the throat; and the beginning of a new day is a
good time to begin. A distinguished minister once said to me, I found that hard
smoking wee killing me, and one morning I stopped square off, and it has saved my
life. It is doubtful if he had squelched that enemy as successfully later in the day.
How can we ever hope to grow in grace, and make real progress in the Divine life, if
we are satisfied to start every day on the same old beaten tracks, and repeat the old
blunders; and let the same besetting sins get firmer hold on us? (T. L. Cuyler, D. D.)

No monotony in Gods gifts

Mr. Gladstone, speaking at the National Workmens Exhibition, said he
remembered how, in the old coaching days, the dead level of nearly thirty miles on
the Slough road killed more horses than any other road, because the same muscles
were constantly in action, whereas there would have been a change in going up or
down hill. Nature has no dead levels. Ruskin says that, with one or two exceptions,
there are no lines nor surfaces of Nature without curvature. Gods gifts to us are
never staled by frequence. They are new every morning. He ordains constant
changes in our life and its sceneries, lest we be wearied, and faint in our minds.
(Quiver.)

LAM 3:24-26
The Lord is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in Him.

The believers hope in God, and waiting for His salvation

I. GOD IS THE PORTION OF EVERY ONE OF HIS PEOPLE.
1. What may be said of God as the portion of His people? He is
(1) A most suitable portion to them.
(2) An all-sufficient portion.
(3) An infinite portion.
(4) As the portion of His people, He is most safe and secure to
them.
(5) He is an eternal, durable portion.
(6) As the result of all this, He is a satisfying portion: What we can never
be weary of, or desire to change.
2. Every one of Gods people has a special interest in Him as his. How He
comes to be so? There is a mutual claim, and tis brought about by
something on each side; on Gods part and on theirs.
(1) On Gods part, it is owing to His own love resolving to raise them to the
highest happiness. This He has done from all eternity (Psa 103:17; Eph
1:3-4). To make way for this, His Son is given to die for them. God
expressly makes over Himself in the covenant of grace to be theirs,
saying, I am God All-Sufficient, and your God: And to every individual
believer, I am, and will be Thine: One whom thou hast an interest in, and
mayst call thy own.
(2) On His peoples part, they accept of Him as such; having their minds
enlightened by HIS Spirit to discern what a portion God is, how much
preferable to all others, and their wills sweetly bowed to choose and
close with Him.

II. THE SOUL THAT HAS THE LORD FOR HIS PORTION HAS
ABUNDANT ENCOURAGEMENT TO HOPE IN HIM.
1. Under an affecting sense of the Churchs sufferings.
2. When low and despised in the world, exercised with pressing necessities and
straits, the soul that can say, The Lord is my portion, may take
encouragement to hope in Him.
3. When walking in darkness, and seeing no light, the soul that can say, The
Lord is my portion, has encouragement still to hope in Him.
4. When buffeted by Satan, the soul that has the Lord for his portion has
reason also to hope in Him.
 5. The people of God are not exempted from afflictions: But when these are
their lot their interest in God is sufficient for their support.
6. The righteous must die as well as others: but, under the apprehensions of
this, the interest he hath in God is a solid ground of hope.

III. PRAYER AND PATIENCE ARE TO BE THE COMPANIONS OF HOPE IN

THE PEOPLE OF GOD, TO BOTH WHICH THEY HAVE A POWERFUL
ARGUMENT IN HIS GOODNESS.
1. The people of God are a generation that seek Him.
2. Everyone that seeks God aright has his soul engaged in the work.
3. They whose souls are engaged in seeking God, will and ought to wait for
Him.
4. The goodness of God is a powerful argument to engage His people to seek
to Him, and wait for Him.

IV. NO SERVANT OF GOD SHALL BE A LOSER BY HIM; BUT EVERY ONE OF

THEM BE LED TO OWN AT LAST THAT IT IS GOOD TO HOPE AND QUIETLY
WAIT FOR HIS SALVATION.
1. What is included in the salvation waited for?
(1) A salvation from every kind and degree of evil; sin, temptation, the
troubles of this world, and future everlasting miseries (Rev 21:3-4).
(2) A being put into a possession of all good.
2. Consider it under its engaging title, the salvation of the Lord.
(1) It is a salvation worthy of him (Heb 11:16).
(2) It is designed, prepared, and promised by Him.
(3) It is a salvation that will consist in the enjoyment of God; dwelling in His
presence under the light of His countenance, the freest communications of
His love and goodness, filling the soul with that fulness of joy, which nothing
short of possession can acquaint us with.
3. What is implied in hoping, and patiently waiting for it?
(1) Having the heart fixed by faith on the salvation of God as real,
though out of sight.
(2) A firm persuasion, that the salvation of God will come at last,
though for a time deferred.
(3) Expecting Gods salvation in His time; depending upon His
wisdom to choose the fittest season, and His faithfulness to
remember us when that season comes.
(4) Serious care to he found ready whenever called to enter upon the
salvation of God we have been waiting for.
4. In what respects may it be said to be good, thus to hope and quietly wait for
the salvation of God?
 (1) As it redounds to Gods glory; as it is a testimony to His power and
grace, as what bears us up during our stay in this world, and fully
provides for our complete blessedness.
(2) As it may encourage others to put in for a share in the salvation of
God; by the hope of which we are borne up amidst the difficulties of
the present state, and enabled patiently to wait for the salvation of
God in a better.
(3) As it will be comfortable to ourselves, disposing us to meet the will
of God in a becoming manner.
Application
1. Does every one of Gods people say from His soul the Lord is my portion? Hence
learn that real religion is an inward thing; and the power of it lies in what
passes between Heaven and the heart, in transactions that only God and the
soul can be witnesses to.
2. Does every one that comes into the number of the people of God say from
his soul, The Lord is my portion? Of what importance is it to inquire what
is the language, the sense, of my soul?
3. How great and amiable is the change that grace hath made on every saint,
in leading him to take up the language of the text as his own, The Lord is
my portion; and thereupon to hope, and quietly wait. for his salvation.
4. If you have chosen God for your portion, living and dying, hope in Him as
such.
5. But how may it be known when this is said in truth?
(1) Where any say in truth, The Lord is my portion, they have been so far
sensible of His worth, and their own need of Him, as to be incapable of
being satisfied without Him, or taking up with anything else?
(2) The soul that has said, the Lord is his portion, has entered into
covenant with Him.
(3) Where the soul says, The Lord is my portion, it loves Him, above all, or
with a superlative affection.
(4) The soul that saith, The Lord is my portion, values communion with
Him more than any sensible enjoyment.
(5) The soul that saith, The Lord is my portion, cannot but delight and rejoice,
so far as apprehended to be so, and is greatly thankful for the direction and
grace that inclined and enabled him to make the happy choice which he
would not now exchange for all the world.
(6) The soul that saith, The Lord is my portion, feels the greatest grief for
the apprehended loss of Him, or when in the dark as to an interest in
Him.
(7) The soul that saith, The Lord is my portion, will, by prayer and supplication,
frequently go to Him, and be more earnest for His favour and grace than for
any lower good.
(8) The soul that saith, the Lord is his portion, will make Him the ground
 of his trust and triumph, when outward comforts may be withdrawn or
denied (Hab 3:17-18).
(9) Where the soul saith, The Lord is my portion, there will he a care to please
and serve Him with the inward man, and a fear to offend Him, even in the
thoughts, or things that do not come under the eye of the world.
(10) The soul that says, The Lord is my portion, is breathing after that
world and state where it shall have the full enjoyment of Him; and
frequently, with pleasure, taken up in the believing thoughts and hopes
of it; as its chief felicity will then begin, when this world is to be forever
left, and all lower sensual delights at an end. (D. Wilcox.)

Choice portions (with De 32:9)

The love of God changes us into its own image, so that what the Lord saith
concerning us, we also can declare concerning Him. God is love essentially, and when
this essential love shines forth freely upon us, we reflect it back upon Him. The Lord
loveth His people, and we love Him because He first loved us; He hath chosen His
saints, and they also have made Him their chosen heritage.

I. THE LORDS PORTION IS HIS PEOPLE.

1. The Church of God is the Lords own peculiar and special property. The whole
world is Gods by common right, He is Lord of the manor of the universe; but
His Church is HIS garden, His cultivated and fenced field, and if He should
give up His rights to all the rest of the wide earth, yet He never could
relinquish His rights to HIS separated inheritance. The Lords portion is
His people. How are they His?
(1) By His own sovereign choice. As our text says, Jacob is the lot of his
inheritance, or as the Hebrew has it, the cord of His inheritance, in
allusion to the old custom of measuring out lots by a line of cord; so by
line and by lot the Lord has marked off His own chosen people, and
they shall be Mine, saith the Lord, in the day when I make up My jewels.
(2) By purchase. He has bought and paid for them to the utmost
farthing, hence about His title there can be no dispute.
(3) By conquest.
(a) Upon your necks, Oh, ye tyrants of the Church, hath the Anointed put His
feet; He hath dashed you in pieces with His own right hand!
(b) We are Christs this day by conquest in us. What a battle He had
in us before we would be won!
2. The saints are the objects of the Lords especial care. The eyes of the Lord
run to and fro throughout the whole world, with what object? to show
Himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him. The
wheels of Providence are full of eyes; but in what direction are they gazing?
Why, that all things may work together for good to them that love God, to
them who are the called according to His purpose. It is sweet to reflect how
careful God is of His Church. We are jealous of our eyes, but the Lord keeps
His people as the apple of His eye. What a wonderful affection birds have for
 their young; they will sooner die than let their little ones be destroyed! But
like as an eagle fluttereth over her nest, so doth the Lord cover His people,
and as birds flying so doth the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem. What love a
true husband has for his spouse! How much rather would he suffer than that
she should grieve! And just such love hath God towards His Church. Oh,
how He careth for her; how He provideth for her as a king should provide for
his own queen! How He watcheth all her footsteps; guardeth all her motions;
and hath her at all times beneath His eye, and protected by His hand.
3. The Church is the object of the Lords special joy, for a mans portion is that
in which he takes delight. See what terms He uses; He calls them His
dwelling place. In Jewry is God known, His name is great in Israel, in Salem
also is tabernacle, and His dwelling place is Zion. For the Lord hath chosen
Zion; He hath desired it for HIS habitation. Where is man most at ease?
why, at home. Beloved, the Church is Gods home; and as at home a man
unbends himself, takes his pleasure, manifests himself to his children as he
does not unto strangers, so in the Church the Lord unbendeth Himself,
condescendingly manifesting Himself to them as He doth not unto the world.
We are expressly told that the Church is the Lords rest. This is My rest
forever; here will I dwell, for I have desired it. As if all the world beside
were His workshop, and His Church His rest. Yet further, there is an
unrivalled picture in the Word where the Lord is even represented as singing
with joy over His people. who could have conceived of the Eternal One as
bursting forth into a song? Once more, remember that the Lord represents
Himself as married to His Church. The joy and love of the young honeymoon
of married life is but a faint picture of the complacency and delight God
always has in His people.
4. Gods people are His everlasting possession. There is an allusion here to the
division of the portions among the different tribes. There was a law made,
that if any man should lose his inheritance by debt, or should be driven to the
necessity of selling it, yet at the year of jubilee it always came back again to
him; so that you see no Israelite ever lost his portion. Now, God maps out
for Himself His people. He says, These are My portion; and think you God
will lose His portion? They are His, and they shall be His while time lasts;
and when time ends, and eternity rolls on, He never can, He never will, cast
away His chosen people.

II. THE LORD IS MY PORTION, SAITH MY SOUL.

1. This implies that true believers have the Lord as their sole portion. It is not,
The Lord is partly my portion, not The Lord is in my portion; but He
Himself makes up the sum total of my souls inheritance. When Martin
Luther had a large sum of money sent to him, he gave it all away directly to
the poor, for he said, O Lord, Thou shalt never put me off with my portion
in this life. Now, when Gods children receive anything in the way of gift
from Providence, they thank God for it, and endeavour to use it for His
honour and glory, but they still insist upon it that this is not their portion. St.
Augustine was wont very often to pray, Lord, give me Thyself. A less
portion than this would be unsatisfactory. Not Gods grace merely, nor His
love; all these come into the portion, but the Lord is my portion, saith my
 soul.
2. As God is our only portion, so He is our own portion: The Lord is my
portion, saith my soul. Come, brethren, have you got a personal grip of this
portion? Are you sure it is yours? We have heard of a great man who once
took a poor believer and said, Do you look over there to those hills. Yes,
sir. Well, all that is mine; that farm yonder, and that yonder, and beyond
that river over there it is all mine. Ah, said the other
look at yonder little cottage, that is where I live, and even that is not
mine, for I have to hire it, and yet I am richer than you, for I can point up yonder
and say there lies my inheritance, in heavens unmeasured space, and let
you look as far as ever you can you cannot see the limit of my heritage, nor
find out where it ends nor where it begins. Oh, what a blessing it is if you and
I can say, He is my heritage!
3. The Lord is to His people an inherited portion. If children, then heirs; heirs of
God, and joint heirs with Christ; but if not children, then not heirs, and the
heritage cannot be yours.
4. This heritage is also ours by choice. We have chosen God to be our
heritage. Better to have Christ and a fiery faggot, than to lose Him and
wear a royal robe. Better Christ and the old Mamertine dungeon of the
Apostle Paul, than to be without Christ and live in the palace of Caesar.
5. God is His peoples settled portion. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the
covenant grace shall not be removed. The covenant of day and night may be
broken; the waters may again cover the earth, sooner than the decree of
grace be frustrated.
6. The Lord is my all-sufficient portion. God fills Himself; and as Manton says,
If God is all-sufficient in Himself, He must be all-sufficient for us; and then
he uses this figure That which fills an ocean will fill a bucket; that which
will fill a gallon will fill a pint; those revenues that will defray an emperors
expenses are enough for a beggar or a poor man; so, when the Lord Himself
is satisfied with Himself, and it is His happiness to enjoy
Himself, there needs no more, there is enough in God to satisfy.
7. I think I may add and the experience of every believer will bear me out we
have today a portion in which we take intense delight. I tried in a poor way
to show that God had a delight in His people. Beloved, do not His people,
when they are in a right state of heart, have an intense delight in Him? Here
we can bathe our souls: here we riot and revel in inexhaustible luxuriance of
delight; here our spirit stretches her wings and mounts like an eagle; here she
expands herself, and only wishes she were more capacious, and therefore she
cries, Lord, expand me, enlarge my heart, that I may hold more of Thee.
Often have we felt in the spirit with Rutherford, when he cried, Lord, make
me a heart as large as heaven, that I may hold Thee in it! But since the
heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee, Lord, make my soul as wide as seven
heavens, that I may contain Thy fulness.
8. This is to the saints of God an eternal portion. Indeed, it is in the world to
come that believers shall have their portion. Here they have none except
trials and troubles; in the world ye shall have tribulation. But as God
 cannot be seen, and as He is the believers portion, so their portion cannot
be seen. It is a good remark of an excellent commentator upon that passage,
For which cause He is not ashamed to be called their God. He writes to
this effect: If it were only for this world, God would be ashamed to be called
His peoples God, for HIS adversaries would say, Look at those people, how
tried they are, what troubles they have, who is their God? and, saith he, the
Lord speaks as if He might be ashamed to be called their God, if this life were
all; but the Scripture says, Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their
God: for He hath prepared for them a city: Thus may the Lord turn upon
His enemies, and say, I am their God, and although I do chasten them sore,
and lead them through the deep waters, yet see what I am preparing for
them see them as they shall be when I shall wipe all tears from their eyes,
and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters. Hence it is in the
prospect of bliss so ecstatic, joy so boundless, glory so eternal, that He is not
ashamed to be called their God. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Christ is our portion

I. THE LORD JESUS CHRIST IS A BELIEVERS PORTION.
1. The word portion is sometimes taken for a piece or part of a thing, be it a
less part or a bigger part. Now our heavenly Father hath made comfortable
provision, set by a competent portion for every child of His, and that portion
is Christ. He hath not divided Christ among them, given a part of Him to
one, and a part of Him to another. Is Christ divided? No; hut He hath given
Him all, all wholly and entirely to each one of them, so that each one may
say, all Christ is mine, mine to all intents and purposes.
2. What in Christ is a believers portion? All that He is, and all that He
hath, both as God, and as God-man.
(1) As God. All His wisdom, and power, and goodness is theirs. I say
theirs, to be employed for their best benefit and advantage.
(2) As God-man; as Mediator. His merit and righteousness is theirs for
justification; His blood for reconciliation; His sufferings and death to make
atonement. His spirit and grace are theirs for sanctification; of His
fulness they receive (Joh 1:16). His comforts are theirs, to revive and
refresh them when they are sad and drooping (Isa 50:4). His Word is for
their guidance and direction in all their doubts and difficulties, like the
pillar of cloud and fire. His presence is theirs, for their preservation and
protection in all their perils and dangers (Gen 15:1). His crown, and
throne, and kingdom are theirs, eternally to reward them (Rev 3:21).
3. What kind of portion is Christ?
(1) In general, He is a worthy portion allusion to 1Sa 1:5 that is, a dainty,
delicate portion, excelling all other; none like it, worthy of all
acceptation, that is, to be readily accepted of, and closed with by each of
us as soon as offered.
(2) In particular, He is a soul portion as here, He is my portion, saith my
soul. The portion of my heart (Psa 73:26), of my spirit, my inner man. A
sufficient portion. There is enough in Him, enough and enough again to
 make us all happy. Merit enough, spirit enough, grace enough, glory
enough. He is El Shaddai God, that is enough (Gen 17:1). A satisfying
portion. The soul that hath Him will own and acknowledge it hath
enough (Psa 116:7). A sweet portion exceedingly pleasant and
delightful. It doth not only satisfy the soul that hath it, but fills it with joy
unspeakable, and full of glory (Psa 16:5-6). A suitable portion. If it were
not suitable it would not be sweet; if not proper, not pleasant. A sure
portion (Isa 55:3). A part in Christ is, therefore, a good part, nay, the best
part, because it cannot be taken away from us.

II. INFERENCES.
1. Then it follows that Christ is a rich Christ, who hath wherewithal to
portion such abundance of people, as in all ages and generations have been
portioned by Him. The apostle calls it the unsearchable riches of Christ (Eph
3:8). He is a bottomless mine of merit and spirit; a boundless ocean of
righteousness and strength; a full fountain of grace and comfort.
2. Then all that are true believers are really and truly rich people.
3. Then how much doth it concern us all to make this portion ours. May we
do so? We certainly may, each of us. But how? By a sincere, hearty,
deliberate choice of it. Choose it, and thou shalt have it. Thus Mary did
(Luk 10:42).
4. There are four sorts of persons who should especially hearken to this
motion.
(1) Those that are young. The days of your youth are the days of your
choice, your choosing days. Now choose Christ (Ecc. 12:1).
(2) Those that are poor, and low in the world. The less we have on earth
the more need there is to make heaven sure; lest we should be doubly poor,
poor here, and forever miserable.
(3) Those that are convinced, whose eyes are m some measure opened,
whose hearts God hath touched.
(4) Those that have children (Gen 17:7).
5. Then if Christ be our portion, and we can make out our title upon good
grounds, and that we have thus chosen, then it is our duty to hope in Him;
as here. Therefore will I hope in Him, rely upon Him, trust to Him. If He
be thy portion, He may well be thy hope, thy refuge.
(1) A refuge as to the things of this life. Thou art well provided for,
thou shalt want no good thing (Psa 34:10, 142:5).
(2) A refuge as to our everlasting condition (1Co 15:19).
6. Then we should carry it as those whose souls can say the Lord Christ is their
portion. In all holy obedience before Him (Psa 119:57), fearing to offend Him,
caring to please Him. (Philip Henry.)

God the portion of His people

I. WHAT IS MEANT BY A PORTION AND WHAT SORT OF A PORTION GOD IS.
The word is taken from the distribution of Canaan, by which each of the Israelites
had a quantity of ground assigned to him and his heirs. This they called their
portion (2Ki 9:21). According to this explanation, it is not what a man has originally
of his own, but something assigned to him, by special gift or course of law. So God
is the portion of the saints; not from any original right or property which they have
in Him, but by His own particular and gracious appointment. God also is the
portion of His people, as they have a peculiar interest in Him, of which they can
never be deprived. As a portion also is that which we chiefly depend upon for our
maintenance, so is God, in a spiritual respect, to His people. His favour is their life.
In answer to the inquiry, what kind of a portion God is, I reply, first, that He is a
spiritual portion; and for that reason little valued or sought after by the world. Let
the rich man glory in his riches, my soul shall make her boast in the Lord: let the
sensualist talk of his pleasures, the Lord is my portion, saith my soul. He is a
sufficient as well as a spiritual portion: every way complete; and adequate to all the
wants and desires of His creatures. The Lord is also a sure portion; and in our
fluctuating world, this is a circumstance particularly interesting and encouraging.
Earthly possessions and enjoyments are so precarious, that there is no dependence
on them for a moment. But our Divine portion is subject to no such accidents; it is
secured to us by an unchangeable covenant. The Lord is therefore an eternal
portion. He is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever. After this, I may
very well add, that He is a transcendent portion, excellent and glorious beyond all
comparison.

II. HOW CAME THE LORD TO BE THE PORTION OF HIS CREATURES?

1. First, by free gift on Gods part. We durst not have asked such a thing. Or, if
we had, what could we have expected, hut to have our petition rejected,
and our presumption and rashness punished with severity? But what we
durst not ask, God has freely bestowed.
2. It is, secondly, by free choice on mans part. What God gives, we must
receive; not with a cold indifference, as if we did not care whether we had it
or not; but with eagerness, gratitude, and joy.
3. I add, thirdly, that it is by the gracious mediation of Christ on both parts.
Whenever, therefore, you are rejoicing in the Lord as your portion, and are
happy in the pledges of His presence and favour, bless God for Jesus Christ;
and ascribe all to the praise of the glory of His grace, in which He has made
us accepted in the beloved.

III. WHAT BELIEVERS MAY HOPE FROM GOD AS THEIR PORTION. They are
not to hope for a total exemption from trouble. No! Can any that are acquainted
with the Word of God, and the nature of His covenant, expect any such exemption?
Is it any where promised, or hinted, that Gods people shall be so privileged? But if
we must not hope for an exemption from present trouble, what may we hope for? I
answer, that we may expect present support and subsistence. You may hope that if
your sufferings for Christ abound, your consolation by Christ shall much more
abound; that if outward comforts drop off, He will grant you better instead of them;
and that when He cuts off the stream, He will give you nearer access to the fountain.
You may hope that when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, He will
be with you, and that His rod and staff shall comfort you. In short, you may hope
that goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life, and that you shall
dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
1. If God then is the portion of His people, we infer that they are richer and
happier than the world supposes them to be.
2. Is God the only satisfying portion, then the men of the world are not so
happy as they appear. Not so happy! Alas! they are in the most miserable
condition.
3. Let us seriously inquire whether the Lord be our portion or not.
4. Walk worthy of your portion. It would be a shame for a prince to appear
like a beggar; for one who is heir to a crown, to herd with the lowest of
the people; and it would be equally disgraceful for you, whose treasure is
in heaven, to be as vain and trifling, as careful and troubled about many
things, as those who have no hope in the favour of God. (S. Lavington.)

God our portion

I. HOW DOES THE LORD BECOME OUR PORTION?
1. By showing us our poverty. Sin has blotted out its amiable excellencies, and
robbed the soul of all its original treasure. Poor is the Christless master of a
world. Men think, with talents and honour and power, the soul is rich; but,
alas! in it there is a meagre poverty.
2. By enlarging our capacities and improvements.
3. By giving Himself.

II. THE EVIDENCE WE HAVE WITHIN US OF THAT DIVINE PORTION. The

expression, Saith my soul, is fraught with instruction He that believeth hath the
witness in himself. It is not what we hear or read or pray, that can tell us we are
Christians; it is some conviction of the soul within us, not founded in presumption, nor
arising from pride, but founded in knowledge, and arising from humility.
1. It speaks in meditation: not in noisy pleasure, in sallies of wit, in the hour of
feasting, nor in the fascination of indulgence, which things are so dangerous
to the Christian, since they confuse his religious feeling, introduce fears and
doubts, and even stop for a time communion with God; but in meditation,
when the thoughts are turned inwards then the voice of the soul is heard.
2. It speaks in prayer: not in that fluency and happy way of expression
which some have in prayer; not in apparent zeal, nor in aptness in quoting
Scripture, all these are nothing, except the soul is engaged in prayer. A
thought, or a sigh, or a devout breathing of spirit will mount to the throne
of God sometimes sooner than the wordy and eloquent appeal.
3. It speaks in trouble. Jeremiah was placed in circumstances of no common
oppression, and he said, Remembering mine affliction, etc. (ver. 19). It is in
such a moment, when everything seen is found to be but vanity and vexation of
spirit; when death stalks by us clad in his own terrific honours, and when our
 own careworn, sinful, oppressed hearts are ready to sink before the piercing
eye of the Judge of the whole earth, it is in such a moment that the renewed
soul is heard uttering the convictions of its safety.

III. THE EFFECT IT PRODUCES ON THE BELIEVING MIND. Therefore will I

hope in Him. He that hath this hope in Him, purifieth himself, even as Christ is
pure. That man awfully deceives himself who fancies he has any claim to a portion
in God, and yet lives in sin. Those who have that portion, will earnestly pray after
increased sanctification of the spirit, through the belief of the truth. (G. D. Mudie.)

God the portion of the soul

I. IMPORT OF THE WORDS.
1. A portion denotes whatever constitutes the stable and permanent source
of our chief enjoyment, as distinguished from an occasional and transient
benefit. The prophet rests in God as his portion; places on God his
expectation of good; concentrates all his hopes and affections, all the
sentiments of confidence and complacence, on Him, and on Him alone.
2. In a portion two qualities are requisite: protection from evil, and upply of
good; it should be a shield to defend and a sun to bless us: and the Lord God is
a sun and a shield; He will give grace and glory, and no good thing will He
withhold.
3. Though God alone is fit to be the portion of any of His creatures, He is not
such to any, unless they choose Him. Till He is fixed upon as such, and
preferred to all beside, we have no part or lot in His favour and perfections.

II. THOSE QUALITIES IN THE DIVINE BEING WHICH RECOMMEND HIM TO

US AS OUR PORTION AND ABUNDANTLY JUSTIFY THE CHOICE WHICH HIS
PEOPLE HAVE MADE.
1. That only is fit to be the portion of any rational being, which is congenial with
the nature of the mind. That which is not fitted for his thinking powers can
never be the portion of a thinking being. And as we are spiritual, nothing that
is not such can be our real good. The benefits and gifts of providence are not
sufficient; the Divine Being Himself is required to satisfy the desires of His
people: they see that, in His nature and character, which alone can fill their
souls.
2. The portion which we want must be one that can make us perfectly happy.
Give a man all the world, he will not be satisfied; the eye is not satisfied with
seeing, nor the ear with hearing; the passions of sensuality, avarice, or
ambition, are never satisfied by indulgence. But the Divine Being opens a
field of joy in which we may expatiate to all eternity! for He is the original of
all good; never can we exhaust the pleasures that arise from His power,
directed by His goodness; pleasures which must satisfy every desire.
3. A portion must be, not only valuable in itself, but communicable to us. Many
things may be admired, which are not communicable; they may be fit for
others, yet not fit for us. But God is infinitely communicable: He has the
 disposition, and He has the power, to disclose Him. self, to approximate
Himself to His creatures.
4. A portion must be something present with us, something that we can bear about
with us, and use whenever we desire. And such a portion is God! His presence is
always near; He is not a God afar off, but a God that is nigh! His ear is always
open to hear, His hand always stretched out to save us. As the stars, in
consequence of their magnitude and elevation, are seen alike in places the most
distant from each other; so God is the same to all His people; His presence is
equally enjoyed by them in every scene.
5. That which is worthy to be our portion should be something unchangeable in its
nature, not exposed to uncertain fluctuations. An things around us change.
Where we expected most, we are often most disappointed. But God is the same
now, as in all past generations; and Jesus Christ, in whom He manifests Himself
as the Saviour of them that believe, is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
6. A portion, to be perfect, must be eternal in its duration, capable of surviving
every change. Here the difference between God and all beside must be strikingly
apparent to all.
7. In choosing God for our portion, we return to our ancient course, we reclaim
and re-enjoy our original inheritance. Return unto thy rest, O my soul!
(R. Hall, M. A.)

The highest good

I. MANS POSSESSION OF THE HIGHEST GOOD. The Lord is my portion. What
does this mean? How can man finite possess the infinite? To possess a person is to
possess the love and friendship of another. The little child possesses his parents, he
has their hearts. The father may be a monarch, swaying his sceptre over millions, yet
the child has him, and with his lisping tongue he may say, That monarch is mine, I
have his heart. Thus a good man possesses the infinite. This wonderful possession

1. Answers the profoundest cravings of human nature.

2. Consummates the bliss of human nature.
II. MANS ASSURANCE OF THE HIGHEST GOOD. Saith my soul. Man is a
duality. In his nature there is the auditor and speaker. How does the soul give
this assurance?
1. By its reasoning. Its logic conducts to the conclusion
(1) That God gives Himself to souls of a certain character.
(2) That it is in possession of that identical character.
2. By its consciousness. Wherever there is genuine godliness, there is, I
believe, an impression apart from all reasoning of Gods love and
friendship.
III. MANS CONFIDENCE IN THE HIGHEST GOOD. Therefore will I hope in
Him. To trust in Him is to trust
1. In infinite love.
 2. In infallible wisdom.
3. In almighty power.
4. In unchanging all-sufficiency. (Homilist.)

The true portion

I. THE AUTHORITY UPON WHICH GOD IS CLAIMED AS THE PORTION OF
GOOD MEN. It is high language for worms of the earth sinners. Not natural
relation, for that has been forfeited by sin. Not Church privileges. The Jews were
mistaken in claiming the favour of God on account of Abraham, Moses, the law, and
the covenant, and the promises.
1. God claims His people by right of purchase. As Christ has purchased believers for
God, so He hath purchased God for believers; hence they are called heirs of
God. He is
(1) Of infinite power to support.
(2) Of infinite wisdom to direct.
(3) Of infinite goodness to supply.
2. He calls His people His portion, because they choose Him; and we call Him
our portion, because He chooses us.
II. THE ADVANTAGES OF SUCH AN ATTAINMENT.
1. Abundant and never-failing in its produce.
2. Satisfying in its enjoyments.
3. Eternal in possession.
III. THE DUTIES RESULTING FROM THIS RELATION.
1. Thankful acknowledgment. The lines are fallen, etc. These thankful
acknowledgments are made in private and in public.
2. Dependence upon God for every spiritual supply. As a man upon his
portion.
3. To reside in it dwell in God.
4. Defend your possession.
5. Delight in it. (J. Walker, D. D.)

The portions of the unbeliever and believer contrasted

I. In considering THE PORTION OF THE UNBELIEVER. God has placed before us
things temporal and things eternal, as containing all that He has in store for the sons of
men; and the unbeliever ever chooses his portion from some one or other of the things
which are temporal But whilst there is but one way to God, there are many ways from
Him; whilst we have only one method of pleasing Him, there are innumerable methods
of pleasing the flesh.
1. Pleasure, or at least what is called by that name, is the portion chosen by
many; and it consists in self-indulgence in whatever form is most suited to
the lusts of each carnal mind. They have chosen an empty, a worthless
 portion. The things after which they long, the things for which they have
forsaken God, cannot support them in the hour of death, or in the day of
judgment.
2. But whilst these are choosing a portion of sell indulgence, there are others
who choose one of self-denial, which is not the less, on that account, an
ungodly and a worldly portion. Their choice is covetousness, their portion is
riches. Amongst them you may find those who are called the wise, the
prudent, and the industrious, giving their diligence to everything except to
make their calling and election sure. Oh! what a poor portion for an
immortal being is this! It has required labour and self-denial in the
acquisition; it has required care and anxiety and watchfulness in the
possession; and death comes, and tears it from the grasp of the poor wretch
who has desired nothing better.
3. Others seek for their portion in human applause, and the admiration which one
worm bestows upon another. They can despise sensuality, they can hold riches
in contempt, but praise and worldly distinction are dear to them. Let such a
vainglorious sinner as this be but talked of by his fellow sinners: let him be
pointed at, and wondered at; and he has obtained his portion. And for this,
which is but the breath of a worm, an immortal being is ready to make the most
unremitting exertions, and to face the most appalling dangers.
4. Akin to this is another portion often chosen by the unbeliever knowledge. The
desire for this is not sinful in itself, for knowledge is
certainly both useful and desirable; but when it is sought merely for its own sake,
and when it is unsanctified by the Holy Spirit, it is only an idol which draws
away our hearts from God, and, as such, is an injury, not a blessing, to him
who attains to it.

II. THE PORTION OF THE CHRISTIAN. Pleasure, riches, fame, and knowledge, have
been aimed at by the unbeliever; and for a time he has acquired, or rather seemed to
acquire them: the Christian has been enabled by Divine grace to say, The Lord is my
portion, and he has acquired all these things for eternity. Whilst sensuality ever brings
with it disappointment and disgust, the Christian has a comfort from above to cheer
him. He has heard that voice which says, Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven
thee; and as the sense of unpardoned sin had ever been his heaviest affliction, so his
greatest pleasure arises from his being enabled to say, O Lord, I will praise Thee;
though Thou wast angry with me, Thine anger is turned away, and Thou comfortest
me. Then, as he goes on, by Divine grace, walking in the ways of the Lord, how sweet
to feel the Spirit bearing witness with his spirit that he is the child of God; to be taught
day by day that Gods dealings with him are all in mercy and in love; that his very
afflictions are tokens of kindness, and that his Heavenly Father is making all things to
work together for his good! (R. W. Kyle, B. A.)

The souls all-sufficient portion

If God is all-sufficient in Himself, He must be all-sufficient for us. That which
fills an ocean will fill a bucket; that which will fill a gallon will fill a pint; those
revenues that will defray an emperors expenses are enough for a beggar or a poor
man; so, when the Lord Himself is satisfied with Himself, and it is His happiness to
enjoy Himself, there needs no more, there is enough in God to satisfy. (T. Manton.)

The saints exhaustless portion

To little brooks men have often gone in seasons of drought, and found only
a parched bed, cracked open with the heat. But who ever saw the Atlantic low?
What ship ever failed to sail for Liverpool through lack of water? When some one
urged old John Jacob Astor to subscribe for a certain object, and told him that his
own son had subscribed to it already, the old man replied very dryly, Ah, he has got
a rich father. You and I have a rich Father too. You are an heir of the King of kings.
(T. L. Cuyler.)

Therefore will I hope in Him.

Hope in the Lord

A man having a soul must worship something as a God; he must look upon
something as the source of supply, of protection, of reliance, and trust; and if you do
not give him a God in revelation, he will go to work and make one. We want a God
whom we can adore. What is the character of the God of the Bible? He comes rolling
up to us in infinite grandeur from of old, from everlasting: His date is eternal. Then
look at His character how sublime! He is represented as being universally present.
That gives us the idea of infinite spirituality. He fills all space, is everywhere, and has
this peculiar characteristic, that He can bring all the perfections of His nature to
every point in space. wherever He is, He is there the Almighty, the all-knowing, and
the infinitely wise and good God. Well, now, from the universality of His presence
and knowledge, He is enabled to be the God of providence. He can interpose where
He sees the necessity, and where you call upon Him according to His promise to
interpose in your behalf, and superintend your wants. Well, then, we have a God
who can do everything, who is everywhere, and who is infinite in mind and in
knowledge. Thank God, He knows everything. I think the sublimest commentary
upon the knowledge of God is the declaration that He inhabiteth eternity. We have a
natural admiration for that which we feel to be infinitely greater than ourselves. The
fact is we feel it toward men in a measure; but as our minds expand a little we detect
mistakes and see that men are not so great as we thought, and as we go on a little
further we find that they do not know so much as we supposed they did; so that
these men keep going down as we keep going up. We detect many errors in their
policy and in their reasoning; and we find that they are nothing but men. Not so in
the study of our God, who has never made a mistake. We have never detected a
point of ignorance in the great Jehovah. The further we look into His works, the
grander they appear; and the further we look into the Word, how much fuller it is
than we perceived at first! As our minds expand they only catch glances of the
infinite sweep of His mind, which rolls on to interminable meanings, and culminates
in designs worth the infinite resources and plans of the infinite God of the universe.
Now, if I want something to adore, give me God. I adore Him in the exercise of His
power, in the displays of His wisdom, in the fountain of His goodness, and in the
plans that He has projected for my own well-being. I adore Him that He has a
remedial system going on over the infirmities and calamities of mankind that will
terminate in the resurrection. I adore God as an infinite, spiritual, and intelligent
Being, who made the whole universe, and who is full of power and goodness. That is
not all I adore Him for. The text says, Therefore will I hope in Him. I see His
resources, His plans, and His purposes, and I will hope in Him. Paul celebrates God
as the God of hope. This God has given me capacity to know, has given promises and
ground of hope, and has also arranged everything that pertains to hope. He has
authorised me to hope for eternal life, for unbounded wealth, for glory, honour, and
immortality; to look to the coming period when my head shall be crowned with life,
and my hand palmed with victory; when my soul shall be home in glory in the
presence of God, where there is fulness of joy, and pleasures for evermore. He
authorises me to hope for the triumph over all my enemies, to look for the rest that
remains to the people of God, and to anticipate association with the sweetest society
in the universe. What sort of hopes has God arranged for? Christians have the
highest hopes of any other class of beings that belong to this world. The politician
hopes to reach the presidential chair, and he knows there is only one chance out of
many millions, and that it is no great thing when he gets it at last, for it is mixed with
heavy burdens, terrible responsibilities, and a torrent of perpetual abuse. The
Christian hopes for a victory over all things; he hopes to ascend in glory, and to
enter into the rest that remaineth for the people of God; he hopes for a kingdom
prepared for him from the foundation of the world. Again, our God is not only the
God of hope; but He is also the God of all grace. It was to pardon guilty persons, to
purify defiled souls, and to provide an inheritance adequate to the wants of His
children; it was to help their infirmities, to comfort them in their distress, to
enlighten them in their darkness and ignorance, to solace them with the comforts of
holiness, and fit them for glory. He is the God of all grace; He has formed this
system of salvation, and carries it out until we are saved from sin, trouble, toil,
poverty, and ignorance. (Bishop Kavanagh.)

The sustaining power of hope in God

A crew of fifteen men once left a burning ship in mid-Pacific. They were
thousands of miles from land. They left the ship so hastily that they had no time to
take oars, or sail, or any other tackle or gear with which to produce motion. They
were only able to snatch at some food and water. They lived for six weeks in that
boat, and the last three-and-twenty days they dreamed every night of feasting, and
woke every morning to the same starving comrades, vacant waters for they passed
no ships and desolate sky. Yet these men never lost their courage, because they
perceived from the outset that their boat was in the current of an equatorial ocean, a
current which those who knew the geography of the sea were aware would slowly
but surely carry them at last to land, which it did. Sometimes the patience of hope in
the Christian life has to be exercised in that way. No oar and no sail; no strength
and no light; for many days neither sun nor moon nor stars appearing, but only the
magnet of faith pointing steadily to the Rock of Ages, and the current of eternal
nature of Him who is what He is, bearing us on to the promised land. (John Laidlaw,
D. D.)

The hope which fails not

An able seaman once said to me, In fierce storms we have but one resource:
we keep the ship in a certain position. We cannot act in any way but this. We fix her
head to the wind; and in this way we weather the storm. This is a picture of the
Christian. He endeavours to put himself in a certain position. My hope and help are
in God. The man who has learnt this piece of heavenly navigation shall weather the
storms of time and of eternity. This confidence has supported thousands in perilous
situations where others would have given up all in despair. (R. Cecil.)
 LAM 3:25-36
The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him.

Waiting for God

I. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN WAITING FOR GOD.
1. God has work for us, and we should be ready to do it.
2. There are blessings to bestow, and we should be waiting to receive
them. The fountain is flowing; let us go out and drink of it. God blesses His
people not according to their worth, but according to their wants; and in
proportion as you feel your parchedness, and look that it may be allayed, so
will be the shower that descends from these clouds which are big with
mercies.
3. In waiting for God we should wait His time. For as to certain services which
He requires and rewards which He bestows, there is need that we exercise
patience. He who is conscious that he deserves nothing, and that he needs
much, will feel as if God were not exacting anything unreasonable in making
him wait. He who knows how much is promised, and how certainly it will be
granted in proper season, will be delighted to wait.
4. Waiting for God implies sire and expectation. We are longing for the
blessings, as you see the husbandman looking over the whole sky for the
coming shower to refresh his crops, or for the signs of dry weather to enable
him to gather in his grain; as you have seen the mother in her eagerness, or
the father, saying less, but not less earnest, looking out for a son or daughter
who has been for years in a foreign clime, but who has promised to be at
home at such a time. How is every object in the dim distance examined! how
is every sound listened to! and, Why is he so long in coming? why tarry the
wheels of his chariot? Ah, if we were longing for spiritual blessings in this
spirit, they would come, assuredly come; and our faith would insure them,
and our eagerness would hasten them: for He that shall come will come, and
will not tarry.
II. HOW THE LORD ENCOURAGES THEM THAT WAIT FOR HIM.
1. It is a good thing in itself thus to wait when God so requires it. It braces and
invigorates the soul, and enables it to use the means to procure the
expected benefit!
2. It is good to wait, inasmuch as in waiting we receive many valuable lessons. A
pupil or apprentice puts himself under a master, who promises to teach him a
certain branch of knowledge. Now, it is possible that, in fulfilment of his
engagement, the master may just set the learner to work, and point out service
after service for him. Would the scholar be thereby justified in charging his
master with a breach of promise, and saying to him, You promised to give me
instruction and skill, and you set me instead to work and toil? We see at once
that if such a spirit were cherished by the pupil, it would indicate not only that
he is ignorant of the branch of knowledge he wishes to learn, but that he is
 labouring under a more deplorable ignorance, that he is ignorant of his own
ignorance; for it is in the very act of waiting on that master, and doing the work
which he prescribes, that he is to attain the skill he is seeking. It is the same in
the school of Christ.
3. The blessing is larger because we have waited for it. Why is it that man, when
he has an arduous work to do, must do it when he can, and hasten to perform
it? How is it that when he makes a promise he must be ready to execute it
when he can, and not wait till, as he supposes, some more favourable
opportunity may present itself? Plainly because his power is limited, because
his time on the earth is uncertain, and if he let one opportunity slip, another
may never present itself. But no such weakness is laid on the High and Holy
One who inhabiteth eternity, and with whom one day is as a thousand
years, and a thousand years as one day. He can allow opportunity after
opportunity, to pass away, till at last the fit time, the set time, the
fulness of times, comes. All is order and beneficence amidst so much
complexity and seeming irregularity. Everything is happening at its most
appropriate time, amid so much apparent delay and procrastination. While
nothing lingers beyond its time, nothing hastens to a premature conclusion.
God delays the blessing only that it may be larger when it comes. His
counsels ripen slowly, that the ear may be fuller, that the fruit may be richer
and mellower. How is it that the river, which rose in so small a fountain
among the rugged hills, now sweeps along so magnificently among fertile
plains? It is because in its lengthened and circuitous course it has gathered
contributions on either side, receiving a new stream from every valley which
it passed. Thus it is that the stream of Gods bounty is made to turn and
wind, only that it may receive contributions from every quarter as it sweeps
along, and flow at length more largely into the bosom. Hence it is that the
royal munificence of His bounty knows no limits at last. Thus it is that He is
good to them that wait for Him. (J. MCosh.)

Seeking and waiting

Throughout the Scriptures the two terms Seeking and Waiting run parallel as
describing prayer, earnest and effectual prayer, in all its acts and offices. The
command to seek the Lord and the command to wait on the Lord have the same
general meaning, and the same general promises are given to each. But in this
passage they are for once combined: their combination suggesting a certain
difference between them, and the perfection of devotion which results from their
union. Each has in it the blessedness of prayer: but each has a character of its own
as qualifying the other; and both, in their unity, form the highest devotion.

I. Generally, IN THE COMBINATION OF THESE TERMS EACH EXPRESSES THE

PERFECTION OF ALL PRAYER AS IT IS EITHER THE ACTIVE SEEKING OF GOD
OR THE PASSIVE WAITING FOR HIM; IN OTHER WORDS, WHAT MAN DOES
AND WHAT HE MUST EXPECT GOD TO DO IN THE WHOLE BUSINESS OF
DEVOTION. All communion with God requires this. Seeking suggests at once the
idea of the souls activity: making God the Unknown, the Unfound, the Unseen, the
Hidden, the Distant, or, better still, the Waiting God, its one great object. The spirit
in man goes out, as the Scripture says, after Him, on an infinite quest; and its
restless cry m, O that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His
seat! Alas, He is hidden from us in our natural state by a thick veil: not by distance,
but by worse than distance, by a cloud of thicker than Egyptian darkness, by a veil
which our sins and His justice have woven. But that veil has been rent in Christ. We
know where we may find Him, where His seat is: on the mercy seat, which is the
Cross. Now, the testimony is: He is good to the soul that seeketh Him. But that
seeking must be a waiting also. God m near at hand as well as afar off. Not only are
we brought nigh by the blood of Jesus, but He also is brought nigh: and in a very
different sense from that in which He is nigh to every one of us. The waiting soul
lays hold on that great truth, and calmly expects His revelation of Himself. In that
posture the wings of the seeking spirit are folded again, its voice is stilled to silence,
and it thinks rather than cries: O when will He come unto me! No seeking will find
until He make Himself present. The Lord is good to those that wait for Him. There
is a set time for His manifestation of Himself. The seeker after God must also, in the
very act of seeking, be a waiter upon Him. In the former, man does his part: in the
latter, God acts alone. It will be plain, then, that the two terms express one and too
same prayer throughout the whole history of devotion; from the moment when the
first glimpse of God lights up the desire, through all the acts of special supplication
and all the habits of communion with Deity, up to the full possession of God in the
beatific vision. All our communion with heaven from beginning to end is the union of
our activity with patient dependence on the Divine fidelity to His promise. And this
communion is the communion of the Holy Spirit: the New Testament secret, which
we must put into an Old Testament text. He, from above, lights up the energy of
seeking in our souls; and He, from above, reveals the Eternal God to our souls. But
my present point is only this: that the whole business of the religious life, which is,
in one word, the finding God, His goodness, and His salvation, is the union of our
intense activity and of our most passive expectation. In the seeking of God you have
a great work yourselves to do: in the waiting you acknowledge His absolute
supremacy in your salvation.

II. AGAIN, THE SEEKING STANDS HERE AND EVERYWHERE FOR THE
PLEADING BOLDNESS OF PRAYER, WHICH REQUIRES TO BE QUALIFIED BY ITS
WAITING HUMILITY. Nothing is more certain than that the petitioner who brings his
request to God is permitted to come with boldness. He is pledged by His immutable
word and oath to do for us all that is contained in the covenant. It is wonderful how we
are encouraged to plead by Gods own name and honour! In every way we are told to
remember that our humility must not forget its rights. Every prayer, from beginning to
end, has in it the strength of the voice, the irresistible voice, of Jesus. And this idea is in
the word seek as generally used in Scripture; as may be noted where calling is
connected with it. So, our Lord makes the seeking an advancement on the process of
asking; the knocking of bold importunity or shamelessness, in fact, being its highest
character. He always encourages in every petitioner what may be called an undaunted,
resolute, and bold spirit of appeal to heaven. Now, it is obvious that this requires to be
carefully guarded that boldness must be humble boldness, and must wait before God
humbly pondering its own unworthiness. The seeker must learn that, after all that
Christ has done to give him right of approach, the fact of his own utter vileness as
respects himself remains, and will remain throughout eternity. Now, the waiting spirit is
not simply the spirit that is content to tarry, but one that knows why the delay is
appointed. Read it here. It is good to bear the yoke. It is good to taste of the
wormwood and the gall before we think of the cup of salvation. The lesson of
penitence must be thoroughly learnt; the lesson of impotence. Waiting is self-
examination. Here is the secret of the Divine delay and the deferred hope. It is not that
He delighteth not in mercy, that He forgets to be gracious. But it is the eternal law of
the covenant of grace that salvation is given only to those who profoundly feel their
need, their unworthiness, and their utter helplessness: I do not say that they be
reduced to despair; for that is not the waiting, but the ceasing to wait. Hence, the
combination of these is the perfection of acceptable prayer: the Scripture terms it
humble boldness. Boldness is sure that the blessing is there, and is the confidence of
faith; humility can hardly be persuaded that the point of personal preparation is fully
come. The union is the achievement of the Holy Ghost; groanings that seek, but use an
unuttered language. Now you must apply this to your ease as a penitent seeker of
salvation: indeed, it is to your case as such that all this specially applies. You have come
to know that you have one sole business before you: to acquaint yourself with God being
the one thing needful. Before you think of anything else in heaven or earth, that
supreme matter must be settled: on that your eternal destiny depends. Now, you have
to seek in the prayer of confession, pleading the promises ratified in Christ, and urging
your plea day and night continually. But you must wait as knowing that pardon is a
deliberate act of God, to be attested by the Holy Ghost, when all the conditions are
perfect. When your seeking and waiting are both one in the perfection of entire self-
renunciation and simple faith, God will certainly show Himself good; but not till then.
Here is the secret of the Divine delay. On the other hand, though you merit not that
God should look at you, much less that He should embrace and love you as a child, your
seeking must be imperfect if you cannot rejoice in,, His mercy. You need to be aroused.
Be of good courage: rise, He calleth thee. Always be sure of this, that The Lord is
good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him.

III. Once more, THE TWO TERMS SIGNIFY THE FERVOUR AND
EARNESTNESS OF PRAYER JOINED TO PERSISTENCY IN THAT FERVOUR;
AND THE RARE COMBINATION OF THESE GIVES THE HIGHEST CHARACTER
TO THE TONE OF OUR DEVOTION. In almost every instance in which the seeking
is commanded, it is connected with the idea of intense ardour. This is the spirit of
devotion generally into which our acceptance introduces us. The man has become a
man of God, which is, in other words, a man of prayer. I prayer: the whole being
is one active desire for the gifts of God and for God Himself; and whether we regard
the value of the gifts or the infinitely greater value of the God who gives, it is obvious
that the undivided soul must be engaged in the seeking. Then shall ye find Me when
ye seek Me with your whole heart. It is the continuing instant in prayer. It is the
concentration of every faculty in its utmost strength on seeking spiritual good as hid
treasure. But spiritual good is God Himself. There is literally no limit to the degree
in which the desire after God may kindle the human spirit. The waiting habit is as
constantly commended to us as the seeking: first, as the test of real earnestness,
and, secondly, as its stimulant.
1. It is its test. There is a vehemence which deserves not to be called earnestness:
clamorous indeed and excited for a season, but cooling very soon under the
withering influence of delay, if, indeed, its own excitement does not consume it.
There is nothing which we need to have more deeply impressed on our minds
than this, that strong desires, lively feelings, and the rush of superficial ardour
are not themselves evidences of the indwelling of the true spirit of prayer. They
 may coexist with a very slight feeling of humility and with a very inadequate
sense of the value of what we ask for. But the sure test is the necessity of
waiting: this God knows how to apply. We apply it very often to each other. We
wait to see what will come of the vehemence of our fellows; and too often we
find that it is only the crackling of thorns. Continuance is the infallible test.
Blessed is that deep fervour of spirit which no time changes; which no delay can
dull.
2. But waiting is also the stimulant to seeking. And doubtless that is the secret of
the discipline of the Holy Ghost. The perfection of the spirit of prayer is the
permanence of strong and deep emotion in all devotional exercises. This is
what St. Paul calls continuing instant in prayer: instant, that is, ardent
and vehement; continuing instant, that is, keeping up that blessed glow at
all times and under all circumstances. Now, the injunction to wait simply
means this. We are to make it our study to keep up this ardour. And how is
that done but by feeding our desire in the pondering which studies our own
weakness and keeps alive the intense longing by considering our impotence
without heavenly grace? There is, indeed, a waiting which itself defeats this
end: which indolently acquiesces in the Divine delay; leaves all to the set time
of grace; and folds its wings too closely. But the true waiting of the spirit of
prayer only feeds desire, and gives it strength and permanence. The soul that
meditates much upon the greatness of the blessing sought spends no waiting
time in vain. Let us mark the combination as it is enforced and exemplified in
Scripture, and apply it to ourselves. There is nothing which our Lord has
more constantly and affectingly taught us than this. Almost all His lessons
pointed to this end; that men must pray always and not faint, though God
bear long with us. But He always impresses the combination as such. The
man whom we remember in His parable sought and waited; but his waiting
only rendered him desperately importunate and shameless. See how the
Master of prayer applies His own parable with a difference: every one who
asks receives, but the reserved mysteries of blessing are for those who wait
and knock at the innermost gate of heaven. So in that parable of real life.
How did the Lord keep the Syro-Phoenician waiting! And why? She asked
and received something, though we see it not; she sought and found
something, strength to knock; she knocked at the door of His heart, and it
opened to her. The entire history of devotion in Scripture illustrates this
combination. We see how the earlier and the later saints showed forth the
spirit of prayer which was in them; ardently seeking always and always
patiently waiting. From Abraham, and Job, and Jacob, that night-long
wrestler with the angel, and Hannah, and Samuel, and David, and Daniel,
and our Jeremiah, down to the Great Exemplar and those whom He taught
to pray, we see the utmost intensity of seeking desire combined with the
tranquil waiting of silent awe and patient expectation. Their intensity is not
measured by the multitude of pleading cries; for it rather tends always to few
words, again and again repeated, and even towards the limit of perfect
speechlessness. With deepening fervour they wait, and their groanings
become unutterable; their transports of desire are prolonged, and perfected
into the most passive tarrying for God. Be determined, therefore, to cherish
at all costs this sacred spirit of prayer. Learn it of our Masters precepts, and
learn it of His example. But remember here two things of great importance.
 First, that the lesson of this union is to be practised in the inner man of the
heart. There is the true place of prayer, where all the sacred arts of devotion
are to be learnt. There alone can we pray without ceasing, seek without
interruption, and wait without leaving the Divine presence. There we may
have ardour without vehemence, waiting without indolence: the combination
which belongs rather to the spirit and frame and tone of devotion than to its
direct acts. Therefore, preserve your spirit by all means in that posture and
condition: whatever it costs you. And, secondly, keep it ever in view that the
Holy Ghost is your teacher. He is the Spirit of intercession within us. And if
you always let Him guide you, the great lesson shall be learnt. He will prompt
you to such earnestness, and stimulate you to such deepening fervours, as
you cannot now conceive; and yet keep you in so tranquil a spirit that the
groanings shall not be uttered.

IV. WE MAY NOW PROFITABLY APPLY OUR TWO WORDS TO THE

CONFIDENCE AND SUBMISSION OF PRAYER AS IT HAS TO DO WITH THE
SEEKING AND WAITING FOR SPECIAL BLESSINGS. This is a further stage in our
present subject: it is not now the general union of seeking and waiting as belonging
to all prayer, to the prayer that seeks salvation, to the spirit of prayer in the
regenerate: but as specifically concerned with the individual requests of our
religious life. Throughout Scripture we are exhorted to seek everything we need
from God. Our wants are endless. For everything God will be inquired of; the
permission is as broad as the care of life: be careful for nothing, but in everything,
by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known.
Here the seeking is the seeking unto the Lord as an oracle; as to a hand forever
stretched out: as to an inexhaustible treasury. But we must not misunderstand this.
Our confidence is simply the making known our requests with certain faith that they
are heard: no more. Then submission comes in. We must blend waiting with our
seeking; and leave to God the whether, the when, and the how of His granting. He
may not bestow what we ask in some cases; and there is no true prayer which does
not leave to His supreme wisdom and Jove the decision as to the propriety of
granting its request. Now, the confidence of prayer is only required to wait in this
sense when it is asking the innumerable good things which we think to be good, but
which are directly connected with our providential allotment. We wait only to know
His will. He may have His own methods of granting our requests. This applies to
both orders of blessing. And this is the supreme lesson we have to learn. We pray in
confidence that our prayer is heard; but the method of Divine answer demands our
waiting. Let us now see this gracious combination in its effects. The perfect union of
confidence and submission will have a most happy influence on our life of prayer, as
it is a life of supplication. It will dispose and enable us to pray for temporal good and
earthly deliverances with entire submissiveness to the will of God: confident that we
are heard, but leaving the answer to His wisdom. The illustrations of this are
endless; but let the context suffice now. The seeking and waiting to which Jeremiah
referred was the seeking for deliverance from sore temporal troubles blended with
the pure resignation of waiting which accepted the denial of God. We need not ask
what the keen trial was which in this chapter pours out its exceeding bitter cry.
Jeremiah is a typical man of sorrows: and these lamentations are the lamentations of
humanity. He was in his meditation taught the blessedness of simply giving the case
up to God. The very waiting is good: It is good that a man quietly wait. It teaches
thankfulness that matters are not worse: This I recall to my mind. It is of the Lords
mercies that we are not consumed. Sometimes the earthly good is granted. But
what was true of providential interposition is also true of the delay of granting many
most important spiritual requests. We must plead for them, and yet learn in waiting
the reason why they are withheld. In other words, they are granted in an indirect
manner, and in the discipline of graces more valuable than the gifts themselves. This
refers especially to the petitioning for special manifestations of favour which are very
often denied, but strangely granted even in the denial no, St. Paul had not the thorn
removed; but a glorious manifestation of Divine strength was made perfect in his
weakness. By waiting upon God for any great blessing, we discipline the waiting
graces: trust, hope, faith, reverence, obedience, humility, submission. These, though
we seek them not, are precious results of waiting. There is, however, a combination
of seeking and waiting which rises to the pitch of assured hope of immediate
bestowment. The seeking and waiting are one in the present faith. This cannot be
doubted with the Lords words in our mind. If this were not added, we should be
unjust to the covenant. The Great Teacher of prayer does not make faith always its
own reward. There are blessings which He makes unconditionally ours; if we seek
and wait in assurance that they are ours. Now, in all these cases, He by His Spirit
prompts us to believe that they are given and must be given Believe that ye receive
them, and ye shall have them. Of what blessings is such a large word spoken? Of
such certainly as concern the honour of our Lord in our present salvation. These
blessings are not to be waited for so much as demanded.

V. Lastly, THE COMBINATION OF WHICH SO MUCH HAS BEEN SAID FORMS

IN ITS HIGHEST PERFECTION THE DEVOTIONAL STATE OF THE SOUL, IN
WHICH BOTH THE SEEKING AND THE WAITING GO BEYOND THEIR
FORMER MEANINGS AND BLEND INTO THE HABIT RATHER THAN THE ACT
OF COMMUNION WITH GOD. Remember that this is not a state which leaves
behind the outgoings of seeking and waiting in express supplications; it includes all
that has been spoken of; but it superadds something of much importance to the
higher spiritual life. In the state of soul I refer to, God Himself is an ever-present
internal Reality, neither to be actively sought nor passively waited for: the spirit lives
in God; it is purely filled with a desire that needs no words, and is always sensible of
His influence without needing to tarry for it. In such devotion the seeking is the
silent aspiration that is ever deepening towards infinity; and the petitioner rather
waits on the Lord than waits for Him. The soul has returned to its rest. It dwells in
God and God in it: and the consequence of that mutual indwelling speaks for itself.
That must in the nature of things be the tranquillity of perfect waiting: it must be in
the nature of things the ardour of ceaseless longing. But it must be the aspiration of
every one of us to reach that perfectness of union with God in which seeking and
waiting are one. The Triune God will come and make His abode with us. Thus shall
we live where all seeking and waiting are one in abiding communion with the
Supreme Good. It has been said that such habitual silent communion with God does
not supersede the acts and habits of formal worship: it graciously pervades them all.
We must be on our guard against an exaggeration of this deep truth which reckons
it the perfection of the devout estate to be free from every desire, and to keep every
feeling and impulse of the heart under such restraint as to be absolutely dead and
quiet before God, indifferent about everything that is His or from Him, and intent
only upon possessing Himself. Whether this is the perfection of heaven, we know
not; it is not the perfection of earth. We must not set such an unauthorised and
impracticable standard before us. If we follow this high and tranquil spirit of
devotion into the public ordinances, or rather, if we are so happy as to carry it into
them, we shall feel how good it is to pray for ourselves and for others, seeking
earnestly what the Lord waits to give, But our seeking will be one with the waiting:
which ponders the Divine perfections, worshipping Him while we are asking His gifts.
The whole service will be an act of seeking and waiting combined: all adoration and
praise, while all is seeking and prayer. If we retire with it into secret, what is its effect
there but such a combination of active petition and passive meditation as makes the
peculiar blessedness of closet devotion? There the laws are very free; no rules are
laid down in Scripture; the Spirit bloweth where it listeth. There the seeking and
waiting are or may be blended in a most gracious way. Sometimes the soul united to
God is drawn out in vehement requests which will not be denied; happy are you
when this is the case. But at such times, even when you are praying, with strong
crying and tears, you must be, you will be, waiting to be heard in that you fear
with humble reverence. Finally, this habitual union of waiting and seeking in the
presence of God makes the whole of life one constant preparation for the final
fulfilment of the promise of the text. After all, the highest reaches of devotion below
are only the seeking of what cannot be fully found on earth, the waiting for what
heaven alone can reveal This is the very blessedness of the seeking waiting life, that
its object is too good for time. The end is not yet: however perfect may be the
destruction of sin and the peace of God in the soul. Make it the great law of your
earthly existence that it shall be ruled by this boundless expectation. Expect much in
this world, but not too much. Render to earth wilt belongs to earth, and to heaven
what belongs to heaven. (W. B. Pope, D. D.)

Gods goodness to them that wait

1. Illustrate this by the case of sorrow. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and
none knoweth it beside. Sorrow is not to be painted or described, or quite
imagined. When it is heard of, it is known to be serious; when it is felt, it is
found to be misery. It is often a choice heart which is thus chosen for sorrows.
When the sorrow is godly, borne well by the soul which bends under it, then it
brings a true turning from the past: a living faith in the promises is itself a very
close communion with Christ. After such a trial we go softly all our days; so
softly that we can hear those voices, unheard or unheeded before, which tell us
the Lord is good unto them that wait for Him.
2. Take, again, the case of ill-health. At first, when the health has failed, life
seems to have lost its meaning. All occupations have to be changed, new and
unknown expedients adopted. The patient groans in weariness, Surely
against me is he turned. He turneth His hand against me all the day. But in
silent watchings and long dreary hours gleams of comfort gradually enter the
soul, till at last it is found; weakness has been a sort of watchtower, with an
outlook heavenward, and after many longings, many sighs and prayers, we
have seen and felt on the sick bed that the Lord is good unto them that wait
for Him, unto the soul that seeketh Him.
3. We might take other and frequently recurring cases in the anxiety of business
the feeling that one has a too heavy work to do, that one is bound to a
 career which is not congenial, has to do what one is not adapted for, or
placed where one is not best placed, that one has not the necessary means,
openings, or conditions of success, no certainties in the future, no prospect
of really advancing, or eventually holding ones own, that one cannot get
ones family well out in life, that if we are taken away we know not what will
become of them. How many have to watch for bad tidings which are already
pluming the wing for a heavy flight, to sit about with a sinking heart where
they would long to be near to help! When such trial is upon us, our heart
complains with the unreasoning sincerity of suffering, Thou hast remove a
my sore far off from peace; I forget prosperity. We forget prosperity in trial,
as we forget the Giver of good gifts in prosperity; we do not regard what we
had or what is left to us; we see that, and only that, which is taken away.
Then the school hour begins, and the lessons, at first irksome, are settled
down to at last. The Christian comes to a more patient docile waiting upon
God, a remembrance mat man does not live by bread alone; that the hand
which clothes the flower and feeds the bird will not forget us; that our issues
are with Him, and that, if our prosperity has grown poor, Jesus was poorer;
that our true riches lie hid in His. salvation.
4. Take the case of the besetting sin, known, deplored, wrestled with, yet
besetting still; a thorn in the spirit, buffeting and laying low the contrasting
shadow of our better self following us year after year along lifes road a
breach in the battlements of the inner life, where the enemy at his will
cometh in as a flood. Wait; bear on; by and by your infirmity will heal up, and
the Lord will so lift the load that in a day you may be free from it forever.
5. Or, take the trial of religious doubt the shadow of the intellect projected on
the page, discord in the ear, and therefore the music out of tune. Why does not
the system which has satisfied the most gifted satisfy us? Why does not the
path where the most gracious have walked secure give me some ease? I wish to
do service, but there again intrudes upon me the irritating problem. My
difficulty is nothing to another; his difficulty is none to me; yet. there we are,
both in difficulties alike. So all these things worketh God oftentimes with
man, and His object is still the same: to bring back his soul from the pit to be
enlightened with the light of the living. (T. P. Crosse, D. C. L.)

Awaiting Gods working

I stood one evening last summer watching the pure white flowers on a
creeper encircling the veranda I had been told that the buds that hung with closed
petals all day, every evening near sunset unfolded and sent out a fragrance. The
miracle was more than I had anticipated. A feeling of silent awe possessed me as I
saw bud after bud, as if under the touch of invisible hands, slowly fold back its leaves
until the creeper was filled with perfect blossoms, most beautiful and sweet. And I
said, If the finger of God laid upon these, His flowers, can do this in a way beyond
the power of human study to explain, cannot the same Divine touch, in ways we
know not of, do as much for human hearts? Shall the flowers teach a lesson of
patient waiting and holy trust for the coming messing? There are hearts for whom
we have prayed seemingly closed as yet to every influence of the blessed Spirit; but
let us be patient; we have sown the good seed; Gods rain and sunshine through His
own providences are nourishing the plant; the breath of prayer always surrounds it;
surely by and by the Divine touch will in a way we can least understand bring forth
the perfected flowers of His grace. (John Hall.)

Waiting and reliance upon the Unseen

When William Marconi, sitting among his instruments on the eastern coast
of Newfoundland, with the great skeleton tower of wires rising high into the air,
waited confidently for his first message across the broad Atlantic by wireless
telegraphy, waited, and got it, he furnished to all time a home illustration of
faith in an unseen reality. And so, when a message from God comes to the believers
soul, though God is unseen and the message unrecorded, save upon the unseen
tables of his heart, none the less not one particle the less does the believer
perfectly confide in it. Nothing can do more for a person than this reliance on an
unseen world. It more than doubles his resources. It adds the other and greater
world to this, and makes him master of both.

The grace of patience

Oh, impatient one! Did the leaves say nothing to you as they murmured
when you came hither today? They were not created this spring, but months ago;
and the summer just begun will fashion others for another year. At the bottom of
every leaf stem is a cradle, and in it is an infant germ; and the winds will rock it, and
the birds will sing to it all summer long; and next season it will unfold. So God is
working for you, and carrying forward to the perfect development all the processes
of your life. (H. W. Beecher.)

Waiting rewarded
I saw the proprietor of a garden stand at his fence, and call to his poor
neighbour, Would you like some grapes? Yes; and very thankful, was the ready
answer. Then bring your basket. The basket was quickly handed over the fence.
The owner took it and disappeared among the vines; and I remarked that he
deposited in it rich clusters from the fruitful labyrinth in which he hid himself. The
woman stood at the fence quiet and hopeful. At length he reappeared with a well-
filled basket, saying, I have made you wait a good while; but there are all the more
grapes. To the soul that seeketh Him. How good to those who seek! I do not
know whether it has ever struck you what a grand man Jeremiah was. It is the
prophet Jeremiah, in his Book of Lamentations, who says to you who are seeking the
Lord, The Lord is good to the soul that seeketh Him. You do not need to take any
discount off his words of cheer. Depend upon it, what he says is true. If he of the
weeping eyes, if he of the sorrowful spirit, yet nevertheless, in all the bitterness of his
misery, bears testimony that the Lord is good to the soul that seeketh Him, then,
depend upon it, it is so.

I. DESCRIBE A SEEKING SOUL.

1. He is under a sense of need, a need which he could hardly describe, but
which, nevertheless, weighs very heavily upon him. He wants something very
great, but he hardly knows what it is. He feels guilty, and He wants pardon.
He feels sinful, and he wants renewing. He feels everything that he ought not
 to be, and he wants to be changed, to be made a new man.
2. This seeker, also, is one who, though he does not know it, has a measure of
faith, for he believes, deep down in his heart, that if he could once get to God,
all would be well with him.
3. Further, this seeker sometimes seeks very unwisely. When a soul wants God,
and wants salvation, it will begin to seek the Lord by its own doings, by its
own feelings, by its own strange eccentricities, perhaps. Some of you think
that you must have a remarkable dream, others expect an angelic vision,
some are waiting to hear a very extraordinary sermon, and to feel very
singular emotions. This is the nature of seekers, that they often seek in a very
unwise way; but still, they do seek; and it is a mercy that they do seek, for
the Lord is good to the soul that seeketh Him.
4. I will tell you what true seekers do when they act wisely. I notice that they
often get alone. When a stag is wounded, it delights to hide in the recesses
of the forest, that it may bleed and die alone; and when God has shot His
arrow of conviction into a human heart, one of the first signs of the
wounding is that the man likes to get alone.
5. I will tell you another thing about the true seeker. You will find that he
begins to bring out his Bible, that much-neglected book.
6. And as, perhaps, in his study of the Scriptures he meets with difficulties, you
will find that this seeking young man is anxious to go and hear the Word
preached; for the Word rightly preached has a warmth about it, and a
vividness, which are not always so manifest to the seeker in his reading of
the Word.
7. And there is another sign of the true seeker that I always love to see; he
1ikes to get into godly company.
8. There is another mark of a seeker that is better still: Behold, he
prayeth. Possibly, he used to repeat a form of prayer; but he has given that up,
and now he talks to God straight out of his heart, and asks for what he really
wants; and he not only does that morning and evening, but he is praying
during most of the day.
9. I think there will be one more mark that you will see upon a sincere
seeker: he will quit all that is evil as much as possible, and he will seek after that
which is good, and especially, he will seek after faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
You will see him now trying to believe, very much like a little child tries to
take his first steps in walking alone. If, poor trembling seeker, your faith
should bring you no comfort, because it is so weak, yet keep on trusting to
Christ.

II. ASSURE THE SEEKING SOUL THAT THE LORD IS GOOD TO HIM. The Lord
is good to the soul that seeketh Him.
1. It is good of Him to have set you seeking at all. He might have left you in
your sins as He has left so many thousands of your fellow men.
2. God is also good to the seeker in giving him some gleams of comfort. Did
 you say that you had been seeking the Lord for months? Well, how is it that
you have kept on seeking! I think it must be because you have sometimes
had a few rays of light.
3. I think that He is also good in not letting us rest short of Himself. Often, the
surgeon, when he has a bad case, will not let the wound heal. No, not yet,
says he; if that wound heals too soon, there will be more mischief coming
from it. So he lets in his lancet again, and cuts out a bit of proud flesh; and
our Lord will not let us close up the wound that sin hath made lest it be but a
sorry healing that will end in a worse wound than before.
4. But He is much better to them that seek Him than you have ever
imagined, for He has given such rich promises to seekers. Oh, the blessed
invitations of Christ!
5. He is also good to seekers because He has made the way of salvation so
plain. A man with an intellect not much above that of an idiot may
understand this Gospel, and enjoy it, while a man with the greatest mental
powers cannot understand it any better; nay, he cannot understand it at all,
unless the Spirit of God shall reveal it to him.
6. Then, once more, is it not very good of the Lord in being found of
seekers in due time?

III. But, lest I weary any seeker where I want to win him, I shall close by FURTHER
CHEERING HIM ON IN HIS SEEKING.
1. Friend, be of good comfort, Christ is seeking you. You are drawing nearer
to each other every hour, and it will not be long before your arms are
about His neck, and His arms about yours; you will be rejoicing in Him,
and He will be rejoicing over you.
2. It may not be long before you find the Saviour; it may, indeed, be so little a
while, that, before the clock strikes again, you will have found Him.
3. And mark you this, when the blessing comes, it will be worth waiting for. The
joy and peace through believing which come from Christ are a wonderful
offset against the tears and sorrows that we have endured while we have
been seeking Him.
4. This is my closing thought: thou hast no need to go about seeking Christ any
longer. Thou hast no need to wait even five minutes ere thou findest Him,
for it is written, He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life. Dost
thou know what it is to believe on Him, to trust Him? Do so now. It would be
a great venture, says one. Then venture on Him. Would He save me? Try
Him. You have heard, I dare say, of the African who came over to England.
Before he came, the missionary told him that sometimes it was so cold in
England that the water grew hard, and men could walk on it. Now, the man
had heard a great many things that were not true which he had believed; but
this, he said, he never would believe. It was one great big lie; for nobody
ever could walk on water. When he woke up, one December morning, and
the stream was frozen over, he still said that he would not believe it. Even
when his friend went on the ice, and stood there, and said, Now you can see
that what I told you was true; this is water, yet it is hard, and it bears me
 up, the African would not believe it, till his friend said to him, Come along,
and he gave him a pull, and dragged him on the ice, and then he said, Yes, it
is true, for it bears me up. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

LAM 3:26-36
Hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.

Quiet waiting
Having struck a rich vein, our author proceeds to work it with energy. He sees
that he is not alone in enjoying the supreme blessedness of the Divine love. The
revelation that has come to him is applicable to other men if they will but fulfil the
conditions to which it is attached. In the first place, it is necessary to perceive clearly
what those conditions are on which the happy experience of Gods unfailing mercies
may be enjoyed by any man. The primary requisite is affirmed to be quiet waiting.
The passivity of this attitude is accentuated in a variety of expressions. It is difficult
for us of the modem western world to appreciate such teaching. No doubt if it stood
by itself it would be so one-sided as to be positively misleading. But this is no more
than must be said of any of the best lessons of life. The Church has learnt the duty of
working which is well. She does not appear so capable of attaining the blessedness
of waiting. Our age is in no danger of the dreaminess of quietism. But we find it hard
to cultivate what Wordsworth calls wise passiveness. And yet in the heart of us we
feel the lack of this spirit of quiet. The waiting here recommended is more than
simple passiveness, however, more than a bare negation of action It is the very
opposite of lethargy and torpor. Although it is quiet, it is not asleep. It is open-eyed,
watchful, expectant. It has a definite object of anticipation, for it is a waiting for God
and His salvation; and therefore it is hopeful. Nay, it has a certain activity of its own,
for it seeks God. Still, this activity is inward and quiet; its immediate aim is not to get
at some visible earthly end, however much this may be desired, nor to attain some
inward personal experience, some stage in the souls culture, such as peace, or purity,
or power, although this may be the ultimate object of the present anxiety; primarily it
seeks God all else it leaves in His hands. Thus it is rather a change in the tone and
direction of the souls energies than a state of repose. Quiet waiting, then, is the right
and fitting condition for the reception of blessing from God. But the elegist holds
more than this. In his estimation the state of mind he here commends is itself good
for a man. It is certainly good in contrast with the unhappy alternatives feeble
fussiness, wearing anxiety, indolent negligence, or blank despair. It is good also as a
positive condition of mind. He has reached a happy inward attainment who has
cultivated the faculty of possessing his soul in patience. His eye is clear for visions of
the unseen. To him the deep fountains of life are open. Truth is his, and peace and
strength also. To his reflections on the blessedness of quiet waiting the elegist adds a
very definite word about another experience, declaring that it is good for a man that
he bear the yoke in his youth. It is impossible to say what particular yoke the writer
is thinking about. The persecutions inflicted on Jeremiah have been cited in
illustration of this passage; and although we may not be able to ascribe the poem to
the great prophet, his toils and troubles will serve as instances of the truth of the
words of the anonymous writer, for undoubtedly his sympathies were quickened
while his strength was ripened by what he endured. If we will have a definite
meaning, the yoke may stand for one of three things for instruction, for labour, or
for trouble. The sentence is true of either of these forms of yoke. But now the poet
has been brought to see that it was for his own advantage that he was made to bear
the yoke in his youth. How so! Surely not because it prevented him from taking too
rosy views of life, and so saved him from subsequent disappointment. Nothing is
more fatal to youth than cynicism. The poets reflections on the blessedness of quiet
waiting are followed by direct exhortations to the behaviour which is its necessary
accompaniment for such seems to be the meaning of the next triplet, verses 28 to
30. The revisers have corrected this from the indicative mood to the imperative, Let
him sit alone, etc., Let him put his mouth in the dust, etc., Let him give his cheek
to him that smiteth him, etc. Who is the person thus indirectly addressed? The
grammar of the sentences would invite our attention to the man of the twenty-
seventh verse. If it is good for everybody to bear the yoke in his youth, it might be
suggested, further, that it would be well for everybody to act in the manner now
indicated that is to say, the advice would be of universal application. We must
suppose, however, that the poet is thinking of a sufferer similar to himself. Now the
point of the exhortation is to be found in the fact that it goes beyond the placid state
just described. It points to solitude, silence, submission, humiliation, non-resistance.
It is hard to sit in solitude and silence a Ugolino in his tower of famine, a
Bonnivard in his dungeon; there seems to be nothing heroic in this dreary inactivity.
It would be much easier to attempt some deed of daring, especially if that were in
the heat of battle. Nothing is so depressing as loneliness the torture of a prisoner
in solitary confinement. And yet now there must be no word of complaint because
the trouble comes from the very Being who is to be trusted for deliverance. There is a
call for action, however, but only to make the submission more complete and the
humiliation more abject. The sufferer is to lay his mouth in the dust like a beaten
slave. A yet more bitter cup must be drunk to the dregs. He must actually turn his
cheek to the smiter, and quietly submit to reproach. We cannot consider this subject
without being reminded of the teaching and example of our Lord. It is hard to
receive even from His lips the command to turn the other cheek to one who has
smitten us on the right cheek. But when we see Jesus doing this very thing the whole
aspect of it is changed. What before looked weak and cowardly is now seen to be the
perfection of true courage and the height of moral sublimity. What a Roman would
despise as shameful weakness, He has proved to be the triumph of strength. This
advice is not so paradoxical as it appears. We are not called upon to accept it merely
on the authority of the speaker. He follows it up by assigning good reasons for it.
The first is that the suffering is but temporary. God seems to have cast off His
afflicted servant. If so, it is but for a season. The second is to be found in Gods
unwillingness to afflict. He never takes up the rod, as we might say, con amore.
Therefore the trial will not be unduly prolonged. Since God Himself grieves to inflict
it, the distress can be no more than is absolutely necessary. The third and last reason
for this patience of submission is the certainty that God cannot commit an injustice.
(W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

The advantage of hoping and waiting for the salvation of God

I. WHAT IS INCLUDED IN THE SALVATION HERE SPOKEN OF.
1. A salvation from every kind and degree of evil sin, temptations, the troubles of
this world, and future everlasting miseries (Rev 21:3-4).
2. The being put into the possession of all good (2Ti 2:10; 1Pe 1:4-5). Every desire filled
up, every prayer answered, and all changed into the most exalted, everlasting praise
and thanksgiving.

II. WHY IS IT CALLED THE SALVATION OF THE LORD?

1. It is a salvation worthy of Him (Heb 11:16).
2. It is designed, prepared, and promised by Him (Rev 2:10).
3. It is a salvation that will consist in the enjoyment of Him.

III. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN HOPING AND PATIENTLY WAITING FOR IT?

1. Having the heart fixed by faith on the salvation of God as real, though out of
sight (Heb 11:1).
2. A full persuasion that the salvation of God will come at last, though for a time
deferred.
3. Expecting the salvation of God in His time; depending upon His wisdom to
choose the fittest season, and His faithfulness to remember us when that season
comes.
4. Serious care to be found ready, whenever called to enter upon the
salvation of God, which we have been waiting for.

IV. IN WHAT RESPECTS IT MAY BE SAID TO BE GOOD, THUS TO HOPE

AND QUIETLY WAIT FOR THE SALVATION OF GOD.
1. It is good, as it redounds to Gods glory; as it is a testimony of his
power and grace.
2. As it may encourage others to look, and wait for this salvation.
3. As it will be comfortable to ourselves, disposing us to meet the will of God
in a becoming manner. (Pulpit Assistant.)

Hope and patience

I. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE SALVATION OF THE LORD. The salvation of the
Lord here is something else than the first view which a sinful man obtains of pardon
and peace, through the great God our Saviour. It is the salvation which a man needs
in any crisis of life, where he suffers under trial or is threatened with it. And, in these
trials, hope and quiet waiting do not come at once into their fullest exercise. As long
as human means can avail, it is a mans duty, trusting to Divine help, to employ
them. To sit and wait, where effort can avail, is to insult Gods providence. The
salvation of the Lord is when all conceivable means have been employed, and have
failed. We may struggle on with a blind despair, and, as long as strength remains, we
must struggle on; but this power, too, seems to be failing. It is then that the ease
rises distinctly into the salvation of the Lord. Nothing can save us but His marked
interposition, and the heart must put itself in the attitude of hope and quiet
waiting for it. There may be some who are using every endeavour to secure
subsistence and an honourable position for themselves and those dependent on
them; and yet all their efforts are unsuccessful. If some change does not quickly
come, they feel that temporal ruin is on them. It is a time not to relax effort, but to
look out more intently for deliverance from God, and to have the heart resting on it.
Or there may be some one who has the presence of a constant difficulty in the
spiritual life, perhaps the want of that sense of religious comfort which is felt to be
so desirable, or the obtrusion of some painful doubt about doctrine or duty, through
which no present light can be seen. No exertion to reach light is to be neglected, but
there may be a more implicit confidence in Him who is the Father of lights,
holding steadfastly to what is felt to be true, and waiting for illumination on what is
doubtful casting out the anchor and wishing for the day. Perhaps there are some
who are deeply interested in the spiritual welfare of a soul dear to them as their own.
Their prayer has been rising, like that of Abraham for Ishmael, O that he might live
before God! But all means have appeared to fail. Then this remains to us, to take
all our endeavour, and leave it with God, in whose hand are the hearts of all men,
who can follow the wanderer wherever his feet or his thoughts may carry him, and
can bring him again to himself, and to his Fathers house. Or it may be there is some
life which has lost all the relish it once possessed, where wasting sickness has
undermined the strength, or friends who were the hue and perfume of it have
been taken away, or hopes that hung on its horizon like a coming glory have
melted into thin air, and existence seems to have no more an object, and duty
sinks into a dull mechanical round, and the night comes down dark and starless, and
the morning rises cold and colourless. It is hard to say what can restore to such a life
its vigour and freshness, for the mind comes oftentimes to have a morbid love of the
gloom which is its misery, and to reckon it treason to its past hopes to turn its eye
from their sepulchre. God only knows the remedy, and it is a special time to call up
higher duty to our aid the duty of turning to Him, and striving to feel that He has
it in his power, though we may not see how, to save us over the grave of our most
cherished hopes, without causing us to forget them, and to shine in with a reviving
light upon the dullest and bleakest of earthly walks.

II. WHAT IS MEANT BY THESE EXERCISES OF THE SOUL TOWARDS GODS

SALVATION, TO HOPE, AND QUIETLY TO WAIT. Every one of us knows,
without any laboured definition, what it is to hope. But if we are to set ourselves to
practise it in a Christian way, it may be useful to look at some of its elements. The
foundation of hope may be said to lie in desire. It differs from desire in this, that desire
pursues many things that can never be objects of hope to us. We can only hope for that
which is felt to be possible and reasonable. This, then, is the first thing for us to do, if
we would strengthen hope, to see that its objects are right and good, that is,
accordant with the Divine will, and beneficial for us. We may learn this by consulting
Gods Word, and our own thoughtful experience. The next element in Christian hope is
faith. Hope differs from faith in this, that we believe in many things in regard to which
we do not hope. Hope is faith with desire pointing out the objects. If we have sought to
make these desires Christian and reasonable, then we may consistently call in the aid of
faith. The Lord shall give that which is good. When we have sought to purify our
desires and to make them the subject of faith, as far as they are right and good, there is
still a third element to be added to make our hope strong that of imagination. It is
that power of the soul which gives to hope its wings. Let it but rise from the desire of
what is true and good, and be chastened by the faith of what God has promised, and it
can lift up the soul above the most terrible trials, and put it already in possession of the
unseen and heavenly. Every true Christian has the soul of the poet latent in his nature,
and if many are kept depressed and earth-attracted, it is because they do not strive
enough to free this power from sinful and worldly encumbrances, and to give it wings to
soar to its native home. The next exercise of soul which we are to cherish toward Gods
interpositions is quiet waiting. It is the part of hope to seek the future; it is the duty
of patience to rest calmly in the present, and not to fret to be satisfied to be where
God appoints, and to suffer what God sends. It is fitly pieced after hope, because it
follows it in the natural course of an educated Christian life. Hope belongs to youth;
patience is the lesson of maturity. As there are means for stimulating hope, so there are
also for strengthening patience, and there is, in some measure, a correspondence in
them. One means is common to both the employment of faith. It will enable us more
quietly to wait if we have confidence in the all-wise and all-merciful arrangements of
God. He can make all its wastes to be as Eden, and bring out the best spiritual results
from what seem to us the most barren spots. In other respects, the means for growing
in patience are very different from those that help hope. If hope is nursed by desire of
what we have not, patience is maintained by contentment with what we have. Our duty
may be, when desire of something lost or longed for is consuming us, to bend our look
more intently on the present, and try to discover how many things, and how precious,
God has left to us. Again, we must cultivate patience by a calm attention to duties. Quiet
waiting is not inaction. We may be waiting for one object, while we are steadily
working for another. It is a kind law of our nature, that labour expended on any object
gives an interest in it; and it is a still kinder law of the kingdom of God, that the tamest
and most insignificant of daily duties may be made noble and Divine, when the thought
of God and the will of Christ are carried into them.

III. THE BENEFIT OF UNITING THESE It is good both to hope and quietly to
wait. Every Christian heart feels how it can be going forward in thought to some
blessing God has promised, and yet resting, while it is withheld, in submission to the
Divine will, as John, in Patmos, walked the streets of the heavenly city, and listened
to its songs, and yet abode in his solitary exile, and was satisfied to be there as long as
God required.
1. The one is needful to save the other from sinking into sin. If hope possessed the
Christian heart alone, it would be ready to flutter itself into impatience. On the
other hand, if we had quiet waiting without hope, it would be in danger of
settling into stagnancy. The object of its waiting would disappear, and trials
without any end in view would benumb and paralyse it. The one is needful to
raise the other to his full strength. The Saviour still leaves us, as He left His first
disciples in the garden, with the words, Tarry ye here and watch, and promises
to come again. If hope can lay hold of this promise, and keep it fast, patience will
maintain its post like a sentinel who is sure of relief at the appointed hour, and
if the hour seems long, will beguile it with those words, which have passed like a
song in the night through many a weary heart, For yet a little while, and
He that shall come will come, and will not tarry. Then, as imps strengthens
patience, patience in turn will strengthen hope. Patience brooding over its own
quiet spirit, which yet it feels is not its own, has the presentiment and augury of
an end beyond itself. In the deep well of a tranquil heart, the star of hope is
lying, ever clearer as the calm is deepening, reflected down into it from
Gods own heaven. This is Gods manner, first, to give the inward peace of soul,
and afterwards the final deliverance. He came into the ship and calmed the
 disciples fears, and then He spoke and calmed the storm: I will be with thee in
trouble; and then it follows, I will deliver thee. And now, if it be possible to
unite these two, and if it be so needful, it should be the lesson of our life daily to
aim at it, to hope without impatience, and to wait without despondency, to
fold the wing in captivity, like a caged bird, and be ready to use the pinion when
He breaks our prison. We shall find increasingly how good it is. It is good now
in the depth of the soul, in the conscious assurance that it is better to rest in
the hardest of Gods ways than to wander at will in our own. Behold, we count
them happy who endure. We shall find it good in the growth of all the
Christian graces, under the shadow of patience. We shall find how good is in the
enhancement of every blessing for which we have to wait. Gods plan of
providing blessings for us is to educate the capacity which is to receive them.
We are straitened in ourselves, and must be kept waiting till our minds and
hearts enlarge. Ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of
God, ye might receive the promise. Of all the motives to hopeful endurance,
surely this last is not the smallest, that He who lays the duty upon us has
Himself given the example of it. He asks nothing from us that He has not done
for us, and done by a harder road, and with a heavier burden. (John Ker, D. D.)

Quietness and hope

Whether it was Jeremiah himself after he had taken refuge in a grotto near
the Damascus gate of Jerusalem, or as he stood over against the city in an attitude of
grief which a great artist has immortalised, or a godly man of the next generation,
who poured out this dirge over the miseries of his country, it makes very little
difference in regard to the abiding value of the words, and therefore also to their
ever-recurring usefulness. They come from a very remote past, stamped with the
finger of God; and they contain a bit of wisdom, in favour of which might be quoted
probably the whole experience of our race.

I. Apart from the actual contents of such a statement, beneath it and running through
it there is clearly implied AN INTENSE CONVICTION THAT GOD RULES THIS
WORLD, AND THAT HE RULES IT IN THE INTERESTS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. In
verses like the 37th and the 64th, such a conviction finds vigorous expression: And it is
still true that, in order to bear mystery and sorrow in peace and without any serious
disturbance of thought or spirit, a man cannot do better than cling to these
fundamental truths. Nature in some of their moods will have made most men feel, in
the certainty of her processes, the inerrancy with which her life unfolds in ever higher
forms of fitness and beauty, that,
The whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
History, too, if it reveals anything, reveals the throne of God above the nations, and
methods of government by which in the long run righteousness is always vindicated.
And unless conscience is to be regarded as inexplicable, a haunting mystery whose
immortal sanctions are simply meaningless, there must be in this world, and over it, a
living and active God, the primary source of all pure morals, whose rule in everything
makes for righteousness. It is not possible, indeed, always to see that such is the case.
For human experience is full of discords.
 1. Occasionally all that men can do, in the assaults of doubt to which they are
inclined to give no place, is to cry unto God with the prophet, Verily, Thou
art a God that hidest Thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour, and then the old
assurance comes back, solving all difficulties, charming every doubt away:
That the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from Thee: shall not
the Judge of all the earth do right? Therefore I will wait upon the Lord,
that hideth His face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for Him.
2. It is not difficult to determine the effect upon the feelings and state of heart
that ought in reason to follow this conviction and to be produced by it. Here
is a God whose rule is righteous, so absolutely righteous that under His rule
men always reap the fruit of their own ways. Just as, therefore, disaster must
overtake the wicked, salvation must come to the God-fearing man. Again,
therefore, he may venture to regard it as certain, and, however unlikely it
seems, to hope and quietly to wait for it. What particular form the salvation
assumes is of little importance, provided it is one which relates to the real
interests of the soul.
3. But this important little word quietly must not be overlooked. There are
some qualities or possible accompaniments of hope that altogether spoil it,
and make it anything rather than a minister to comfort and salvation. Of
these undesirable companions, the worst are perhaps impatience and
suspense, for indifference, as being almost the negation of hope and fatal to
vigour, need not be considered. Impatient hope, weary of slow process and
gradual growth, eager to grasp the prize before it has been fairly earned,
and to pluck the fruit before the sun and the showers have had time to ripen
it it is met with often enough in the ordinary life. Most Christians will have
found themselves disposed now and again to complain that the influences of
grace have not more quickly perfected them, that the first brief prayer has
not been followed by the flight of every temptation. The Divine rule is, alike
for peace and for progress in religion, Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently
for Him. Gods care for His people, His effective interference for their
protection and safety, the completion of the work that is being done by His
sanctifying Spirit, these things, as far as the Operation of His grace is
concerned, do not admit of any doubt. Hope quietly that is, without any
excitement and with full confidence of success. The salvation of the Lord is
certain; and accordingly the prophet bids us treat it as certain, not worry or
make a noise about our difficulties, but go steadily on day after day, doing
our duty, making the best of our troubles, strangers to fear.
4. That, says the prophet, is good for a man which word, in his usage,
which is not unlike the modern ethical usage, denotes the blessed
combination of dutifulness and personal satisfaction. In this verse almost
every phrase implies the possession of some main element of happiness. He
who hopes quietly for the salvation of the Lord will be tranquil in spirit,
exercising self-control, will have the sense of security and the knowledge that
a God is caring for him and is gradually disciplining him into Godlikeness;
and it is no wonder the prophet pronounced that to be good for a man.

II. Jeremiah did not feel any necessity to limit and qualify his advice, or to exclude
any section of a sincere life from its application. It sets forth therefore THE
ATTITUDE WHICH A CHRISTIAN MAN MAY VENTURE TO MAINTAIN
UNIFORMLY TOWARDS MATTERS THAT MAY BE A SOURCE OF PERPLEXITY
TO ALL, AND ALSO TOWARDS THOSE WHICH ONLY HIS OWN
TEMPERAMENT OR HIS OWN TENDENCIES OF THOUGHT MAKE
ALARMING. Not least of all does it apply to the controversies concerning Church
and faith, scripture and doctrine, which because of their complexity are apt to be
invested with needless terrors, and because of their connection with personal
religion seem sometimes to threaten and imperil the most sacred convictions.
1. With respect to the unexaggerated difficulties in doctrine or in organisation that
do exist, such questions as those of inspiration, of the authorship of various
parts of the Old Testament and its bearing upon the authority of the New, of
the relationships of the Churches and the methods of worship, this verse
prescribes the way in which we should regard them not shut our eyes to their
existence, or be frightened at them but hope and quietly wait for the salvation
of the Lord.
2. With the political and social problems of the day, the cares of enterprise, and
of children and home, the perpetual disappointments and troubles that are
crowded into every mans life, the same rule holds good, that Christian men
should not worry, or despond, or doubt, but remember the throne of God over
all, and quietly wait for His salvation. If obedience to that rule is not always
easy, it is always reasonable and a blessed ministry of strength and peace.
Few troubles continue unendurable, when a man knows that through them
the grace of God will be with him, and that after them will come such a
blessed and permanent reversal of experience as will more than compensate
for all. (R. Waddy Moss.)

The Christians hope and patience

I. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE SALVATION OF THE LORD. Salvation literally means
the act of delivering any one from danger or misfortune; and implies at once some
misery or peril from which deliverance is needed, and some power sufficient to work
that deliverance out. And the statement that there is salvation with God, is a
declaration of the miserable condition in which we are by nature, and an
announcement that God has set before us a means whereby we may escape, and that
His mighty hand is put forth to render those means effectual.

II. WHEREFORE IT IS GOOD THAT A MAN SHOULD HOPE FOR THIS

SALVATION. There are many who cannot be properly said to hope for it; they
appear to be certain that they shall attain to it, although not one of the marks of
Christs flock be visible upon them. Others, again, are manifestly utterly careless about
it; they pass through life without showing a single desire for salvation, or a single
anxiety respecting the state of their souls. And others yet again appear to despair;
they seem to acknowledge their need of salvation, but to think that it is not possible
that they can ever lay aside those sins which separate them from God. Now, none of
these can be said to hope; because hope is a mixture of desire to obtain, of fear of
coming short, and of belief in the possibility of attaining the salvation of the Lord;
and those who have not fixed their minds upon it, in the sense of their own guilt, and of
the power and willingness of the Lord to forgive, are as yet utterly destitute of this
Christian grace. But the awakened sinner, along with that conviction of his sins which
the Holy Spirit has wrought in him, receives the hope that God will be merciful to him,
for the sake of a crucified Saviour; and this draws him to that Saviour.

III. WHEREFORE IT IS GOOD THAT A MAN SHOULD QUIETLY WAIT FOR

THIS SALVATION. This almost appears to contradict the former part of the text;
because nothing can seem more opposed to hope than quietly waiting. But this
contradiction is only in appearance. The reason that there is so much impatience
connected with all human wishes and expectations is, that our hopes with respect to
this world are ever uncertain. But it is otherwise with respect to the salvation of the
Lord. In it there is nothing doubtful; for He Himself has promised to give it; in it
there is no deceit; for Jesus the Author and the purchaser of our salvation is indeed
a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. In clinging then to Him, and laying
hold on His salvation, the poor sinner finds that he receives the fulfilment of all the
promises; and as the sweetest and the best of these hold out to us deliverance not
only from the punishment but from the dominion of sin, he looks on the very
disposition to wait quietly, so contrary to unconverted human nature, as a part of
the salvation for which he hopes. The Christian should therefore quietly wait; but
he should do so in the diligent use of the means for growth in grace; stirring up the
gifts which have already been bestowed on him, of faith, whereby he lays hold on the
promises, of hope, whereby he looks for their fulfilment, of prayer, whereby he
expresses that faith and that hope to God, and seeks to have the crowning grace of
love shed abroad on his heart. And this he may well do, if taught by the Spirit of God
that his heavenly Father deals more wisely with him than he would deal with himself,
were the freedom of choice allowed him. It is true that it is not so pleasant to remain
in this state as it would be to have at once the fulness of spiritual joy; but it is more
profitable to the heir of immortality to be trained to the habitual exercise of patience
and submission to the Divine will, as this must be the best preparation for heaven
(R. W. Kyle, B. A.)

The advantages of a state of expectation

Our incapacity of looking into the future has much to do with the production
of disquietude and unhappiness. Under the present dispensation we must calculate
on probabilities; and our calculations, when made with the best care and
forethought, are often proved faulty by the result. And if we could substitute certainty
for probability, and thus define, with a thorough accuracy, the workings of any
proposed plan, it is evident that we might be saved a vast amount both of anxiety
and of disappointment. Yet when we have admitted that want of acquaintance with
the future gives rise to much both of anxiety and of disappointment, we are
prepared to argue that the possession of this acquaintance would be incalculably
more detrimental. If we could know beforehand whatever is to happen, we should, in
all probability, be unmanned and enervated; so that an arrest would be put on the
businesses of life by previous acquaintance with their several successes. We shall
endeavour to prove, by the simplest reasoning, that it is for our advantage as
Christians that salvation, in place of being a thing of certainty and present
possession, must be hoped and quietly waited for by believers. We can readily
suppose an opposite arrangement. We can imagine that, as soon as a man were
justified, he might be translated to blessedness, and that thus the gaining the title,
and the entering on possession, might be always contemporary. But the possibility of
the arrangement, and its goodness, are quite different questions; and whilst we see
that it might have been ordered, that the justified man should at once be translated,
we can still believe it good that he both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the
Lord. Our text speaks chiefly of the goodness to the individual himself; but it will be
lawful first to consider the arrangement as fraught with advantage to human society.
We must all perceive that, if true believers were withdrawn from earth at the instant
of their becoming such, the influences of piety, which now make themselves felt
through the mass of a population, would be altogether destroyed, and the world be
deprived of that salt which alone preserves it from total decomposition. Whilst the
contempt and hatred of the wicked follow incessantly the professors of godliness, and
the enemies of Christ, if ability were commensurate with malice, would sweep from
the globe all knowledge of the Gospel, we venture to assert that the unrighteous owe
the righteous a debt of obligation not to be reckoned up; and that it is mainly because
the required ten are still found in the cities of the plain that the fire showers are
suspended. And time given for the warding off by repentance the doom. Over and
above this, it is undeniable that the presence of a pious man in the neighbourhood
will tell greatly on its character; and that, in variety of instances, his withdrawment
would be followed by wilder outbreakings of profligacy. It is, however, the goodness
of the arrangement to the individual himself which seems chiefly contemplated by
the prophet. Now, under this point of view, our text is simpler at first sight than
when rigidly examined. We can see at once that there is a spiritual discipline in the
hoping and waiting, which can scarcely fail to improve greatly the character of the
Christian. We take the case, for example, of a man who, at the age of thirty, is
enabled, through the operations of grace, to look in faith to the Mediator. By this
looking in faith the man is justified: a justified man cannot perish; and if, therefore,
the individual died at thirty, he would sleep in Jesus. But, after being justified, the
man is left thirty years upon earth years of care. and toil, and striving with sin
and during these years he hopes and waits for salvation. At length he obtains
salvation; and thus, at the close of thirty years, takes possession of an inheritance to
which his title was clear at the beginning. Now, wherein can lie the advantageousness
of this arrangement? We think that no fair explanation can be given of our text,
unless you bring into the account the difference in the portions to be assigned
hereafter to the righteous. We bring before you, therefore, as a comment on our text,
words such as these of the apostle: Our light affliction, which is but for a moment,
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. We consider that
when you set the passages in juxtaposition, the working power, ascribed by one to
affliction, gives satisfactory account of the goodness attributed by the other to the
hoping and waiting. We are here, in every sense, on a stage of probation; so that,
having once been brought back from the alienations of nature, we are candidates for
a prize, and wrestlers for a diadem. It is not the mere entrance into the kingdom for
which we contend: the first instant in which we act faith on Christ as our
propitiation, sees this entrance secured to us as justified beings. But, when justified,
there is opened before us the widest field for a righteous ambition; and portions
deepening in majesty, and heightening in brilliancy, rise on our vision, and animate
to unwearied endeavour. We count it one of the glorious things of Christianity, that,
in place of repressing, it gives full scope to all the ardour of mans spirit. It is
common to reckon ambition amongst vices: and a vice it is, under its ordinary
developments, with which Christianity wages interminable warfare. But,
nevertheless, it is a staunch, and an adventurous, and an eagle-eyed thing: and it is
impossible to gaze on the man of ambition, daunted not by disaster, wearied not by
repulse, disheartened not by delay, without feeling that he possesses the elements of
a noble constitution; and that, however, to be wept over for the prostitution of his
energies, for the pouring out this mightiness of soul on the corrupt and the
perishable, he is equipped with an apparatus of powers which need nothing but the
being rightly directed, in order to the forming the very finest of characters.
Christianity deals with ambition as a passion to be abhorred and denounced, whilst
urging the warrior to carve his way to a throne, or the courtier to press on in the
path of preferment. But it does not cast out the elements of the passion. Why should
it? They are the noblest which enter into the human composition, bearing most
vividly the impress of mans original formation. Christianity seizes on these elements.
She tells her subjects that the rewards of eternity, though all purchased by Christ,
and none merited by man, shall be rigidly proportioned to their works. She tells
them that there are places of dignity, and stations of eminence, and crowns with
more jewellery, and sceptres with more sway, in that glorious Empire which shall
finally be set up by the Mediator. And she bids them strive for the loftier recompense.
She would not have them contented with the lesser portion, though infinitely
outdoing human imagination as well as human desert. And if ambition be the
walking with the staunch step, and the single eye, and the untired zeal, and all in
pursuit of some longed for superiority, Christianity saith not to the man of ambition,
lay aside thine ambition: Christianity hath need of the staunch step, and the single
eye, and the unfired zeal; and she therefore sets before the man pyramid rising above
pyramid in glory, throne above throne, palace above palace; and she sends him forth
into the moral arena to wrestle for the loftiest though unworthy of the lowest. There
would seem nothing wanting to the completeness of this argument, unless it be proof
of what has been all along assumed, namely, that the being compelled to hope and to
wait is a good moral discipline, so that the exercises prescribed are calculated to
promote holiness, and, therefore, to insure happiness. We have perhaps only shown
the advantageousness of delay; whereas the text asserts the advantageousness of
certain acts of the soul Yet this discrepancy between the thing proved, and the thing
to be proved, is too slight to require a lengthened correction. It is the delay which
makes salvation a thing of hope, and that which I am obliged to hope for, I am, of
course, obliged to wait for; and thus, whatever of beneficial result can be ascribed to
the delay may, with equal fitness, be ascribed to the hoping and waiting. Besides,
hope and patience for it is not the mere waiting which is asserted to be good; it is
the quietly waiting; and this quiet waiting is but another term for patience hope
and patience are two of the most admirable of Christian graces, and he who
cultivates them assiduously, cannot well be neglectful of the rest. (H. Melvill, B. D.)

Hoping and waiting

There are three things named here, and they reach a sort of climax in the
third to hope, to wait, and to wait quietly, or in silence. It is sometimes hard to
hope when there are no signs of promise, and no break in the clouds; it is harder to
wait. And the heart gets sick with deferred hope, and still the end seems no nearer;
but the hardest thing is to wait without a word of anger, reproach, or impatience,
though the eyes have got wearied with watching watching for what never comes.
And yet this hardest thing is the best if we can attain to it. It is good that a man
should both hope and wait, and wait in silence.
I. PATIENT WAITING. This is a Divine virtue. It is that quality in man which makes
him most like God. It is commended to us in every part of the Bible as the
distinguishing quality of the faithful. It is needed in every age, but we especially need
it in this particular age, for the times in which we live are characterised by rush,
fever, and haste. That is the paramount feature of the time. We want to force the
pace, to break the record, and to make Gods machinery, as well as human machinery,
move faster. It is a fast age; life is in a ferment of activity, the nerves are too highly
strung, the brain is in a whirl, and we cannot bear delays. We want to see the dawn
breaking while it is still midnight, and to clear away all our obstructions, difficulties,
and troubles by one stroke. We want to be rich without any loss of time; to reach to
top places without the disagreeable necessities of slow climbing, and oh! that some
prophet would fix the day and the hour for us; how handsomely we would pay him if
he would fix it early and antedate Gods time, for the mill of God does grind so
slowly, so slowly. But here comes the sweet, tender, chiding answer. It is good that
a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.

II. HOPE DEPENDENT ON WAITING. Without hope life has no sky; it is a plant
which virtually dies for want of nourishment, light, and air. When hope goes, energy
goes, and all earnest hope, and any emotion of joy, and there is nothing left to live
for. The pessimist says, Is life worth living? and I answer him emphatically, No, it
is not to one in your mood. Hope always perishes where there is no patient
waiting. If you cannot bear to have your hopes delayed, you soon come to the
conclusion that every hope is a deception, every promise is a delusion, and every
prayer a mockery; and then presently you are found repeating with grim despair
that most dismal of all proverbs, Blessed is the man that expecteth nothing.
Pessimists are always men who have lost their hopes and lost their hearts because
their hopes have not been speedily fulfilled.

III. WAITING THE TEST OF MANHOOD. It marks the highest type of man, it
distinguishes the man from the child, the thinking man from the intellectual
weakling, the higher races from the lower races, the civilised man from the savage.
The savage is always like a child, impatient; you can hardly persuade him to till the
ground, because he would have to wait six months for the harvest; he kills the goose
which lays the golden eggs, because he cannot wait for a slow return. And there are
hundreds of young men who are as senseless as the savage in that respect: they burn
the candle of pleasure at both ends, and in the middle too, heedless of darkness that
is coming in future years, if they can only make a big glaring flame at the present
moment. But as soon as ever you lift men up in the scale of being, they begin to
build and plant and labour, though the results may not be seen for years; and you
can always measure the strength and nobility and the very magnitude of a man by
this: Does he know how to wait? We are told of the astronomer Kepler that when his
great discoveries were announced, but rejected and scorned by all the learned and
religious world, he quietly said, If the Almighty waited six thousand years for one
man to see what He had made, I may well wait two hundred years for one man to
understand what I have seen. There was a great soul behind that utterance.

IV. The BLUNDERS OF IMPATIENCE. Men become like wild creatures in their
hurried haste to be rich; they want to win in a day what honest industry would only
win in years, and then craft takes the place of toil; astute cunning and sleight of
hand the place of diligence and perseverance; madness engulfs sober reason, greed
devours all human feeling, and manhood perishes; and often the only end of it is
bankruptcy, ruin, and disgrace. These are the works of impatience; and am I not
right in saying that nearly all the follies of political life and the blunders Which great
nations commit are the result of impatience? Just think what a wretched coil of
trouble was made for us in the Transvaal some years ago by the strong-headed men
nay, the hot-headed boys who raided and failed: mad haste and long
repentance for them and others that is what comes of it. And now through all this
crisis we hear voices urging the same mad haste. Strong and sober and level headed
men have been saying throughout, and are saying now, Be firm, press your just
claims, do not draw back, but above all things be patient. It is patience that wins in
these difficulties, and especially when justice is on its side.

V. THE REWARD OF WAITING. If you labour on and do not lose heart, and bind
yourselves fast to that hard, just master, Duty, you win your proper place in time. If
God sees the fitness in you, the world will see it by and by. Nothing can keep a man
permanently down if the higher voice is bidding him Come up higher. It is only a
question of time and patience, if you labour and do always the thing that is right.
The Christian work that has been so disappointing and unprofitable will at last yield
the fruits of righteousness. And your own besetting sins, too, against which you
fought and prayed so long, will at last be trampled down by Him who subdues all
things unto Himself. (J. G. Greenhough, M. A.)

LAM 3:27
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.

The best burden for young shoulders

Yoke bearing is not pleasant, but it is good. It not every pleasant thing that
is good, nor every good thing that is pleasant. Sometimes the goodness may be just
in proportion to the unpleasantness. Even apart from the grace of God, and apart
from religion, it is a great blessing for a man to bear the yoke in his youth! that is to
say, first, it is good for us when we are young to learn obedience. It is half the
making of a man to be placed under rule, and taught to bear restraint. It is good for
young people to bear the yoke, too, in the sense of giving themselves in their early
days to acquire knowledge. If we do not learn when we are young, when shall we
learn? It is good for young people, too we are now talking about the natural
meaning of the passage good for them that they should encounter difficulties and
troubles when they begin life. The silver spoon in the mouth with which some
people are born is very apt to choke them. It is not, however, my business to preach
about these matters at any length; I am not a moral lecturer, but a minister of the
Gospel. I have fulfilled a duty when I have given the first meaning to the text, and
now I shall use it for nobler ends.

I. IT IS GOOD TO BE A CHRISTIAN WHILE YOU ARE YOUNG. It is good for a

man to bear Christs yoke in his youth.
 1. For, see, first, the man whose heart is conquered by Divine grace early is made
happy soon. That is a blessed prayer in the psalm, O satisfy us early with Thy
mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days
2. Besides, while early piety brings early happiness, let it never be forgotten that
it saves from a thousand snares. Eleventh hour mercies are very sweet. But
what a double privilege it is to be set to work in the vineyard while yet the
dew is on the leaves, and so to be kept from the idleness and the wickedness
of the market place in which others loiter so long.
3. It is good for a man to bear Christs yoke in his youth, because it saves him
from having those shoulders galled with the devils yoke. Sins long, indulged
grow to the shoulders, and to remove them is like tearing away ones flesh.
4. There is this goodness about it, again, that it gives you longer time in which to
serve God. Blessed be His name, He will accept eventide service; but still, how
much better to be able to serve the Lord from your youth up, to give Him those
bright days while the birds are singing in the soul, when the sun is unclouded,
and the shadows are not falling; and then to give Him the long evening, when at
eventide He makes it light, and causes the infirmities of age to display His power
and His fidelity.
5. There is this goodness about it yet further, that it enables one to be well
established in Divine things. I bless God that a man who has believed in
Jesus only one second is a saved man; but he is not an instructed man, he is
not an established man. He is not trained for battle; nor tutored for labour.
These things take time.
6. And then, let me say, it gives such confidence in after life to have given your
heart to Jesus young.

II. IT IS GOOD FOR YOUNG CHRISTIANS THAT THEY BEAR THE YOKE
OF JESUS.
1. It will be for your good as long as ever you live to render to Jesus complete
obedience at the very first. Every young Christian when he is converted
should take time to consider, and should say to himself, What am I to do?
What is the duty of a Christian? He should also devoutly say to the Lord
Jesus, Lord, show me what Thou wouldst have me to do, and wait upon
the Holy Ghost for guidance.
2. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth, by attaining clear
instruction in Divine truth. We ought to go to the Lord Jesus Christ to learn
of Him, not merely about ordinances and actions, but about what to think
and what to believe.
3. It is good for young converts also to bear the yoke by beginning to serve
Jesus Christ early. There is work for every believer to do in Christs vineyard.
Ah, says one, I shall begin when I can preach. Will you? You had better
begin writing a letter to that young friend with whom you went to school.
You had better begin by dropping a tract down an area, or by trying to speak
to some young person of your own age.
4. It is also good that when we begin to serve God we should bear the yoke in
another sense, namely, by finding difficulties. It is a good thing for a true worker
 for the devil to labour to put him down, because if God has put him up, he
cannot be put down, but the attempt to overthrow him will do him good,
develop his spiritual muscle, and bring out the powers of his mind.
5. It is good to meet with persecution in your youth. A Christian is a hardy plant.
Many years ago a larch was brought to England. The gentleman who
brought it put it in his hothouse, but it did not develop in a healthy manner.
It was a spindly thing, and therefore the gardener, feeling that he could not
make anything of it, took it up and threw it out upon the dunghill. There it
grew into a splendid tree, for it had found a temperature suitable to its
nature. The tree was meant to grow near the snow; it loves cold winds and
rough weather, and they had been sweating it to death in a hothouse. So it
is with true Christianity. It seldom flourishes so well in the midst of ease and
luxury as it does in great tribulation.
6. I believe it is good for young Christians to experience much soul trouble. It is
much better on the whole that a man should be timid and trembling than
that he should early in life become very confident. Blessed is the man that
feareth always is a scriptural text not the slavish fear, nor yet a fear that
doubts God, but still a fear. These ordeals are of essential service to the
newborn believer, and prepare him alike for the joys and the sorrows of his
spiritual career.

III. Practically WE ARE ALL OF US IN OUR YOUTH. None of us will come of age
till we enter heaven. We are still under tutors and governors, because we are even
now as little children.
1. It is good that we who have gone some distance on the road to heaven should
still have something to bear, because it enables us to honour Christ still. If
we do not suffer with Him, how can we have fellowship with Him? If we
have no crosses to carry, how can we commune with our Lord, the chief
cross-bearer?
2. It is good for us all to bear the yoke, too, because thus old Adam is kept in
check. Sheep do not stray so much when the black dog is after them; his
barkings make them run to the shepherd. Affliction is the black dog of the
Good Shepherd to fetch us back to Him, otherwise we should wander to our
ruin.
3. Besides, it makes you so helpful to others to have known affliction. I do not
see how we can sympathise if we are never tried ourselves.
4. Once more, is it not good to bear the yoke while we are here, because it will
make heaven all the sweeter? What a change for the martyr standing at the
stake burning slowly to death, and then rising to behold the glory of his
Lord! What a change for you, dear old friend, with all those aches and pains
about you, which make you feel uneasy even while you are sitting here! (C. H.
Spurgeon.)

Good to bear the yoke in youth

The figure is taken from farm life. If a ploughing ex is to be well adapted for
its labour, and make a good furrow, it must be disciplined while it is quite young. If
this be neglected, it is vain to attempt it by and by; the beast will only be fretted and
irritated, and any work it is put to will be a failure. A traveller in the East graphically
describes, as an eyewitness, the difficulty of getting an untrained ox to perform
agricultural work. I had frequent opportunities, he says, of witnessing the
conduct of oxen, when for the first time put into the yoke. They generally made a
strenuous struggle for liberty, repeatedly breaking the yoke, and attempting to make
their escape. At other times such bullocks would lie down upon their side or back,
and remain so in defiance of the drivers, though they lashed them with ponderous
whips. Sometimes, from pity to the animal, I would interfere, and beg them not to
be so cruel. Cruel! they would say, it is mercy; for if we do not conquer him now,
he will require to be so beaten all his life.

I. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of SUBJECTION TO AUTHORITY.
The unkindest thing you can do to a child is to throw the reins over his shoulders, and
let him do as he likes. If you wish to ruin his prospects, and to develop a mean, selfish,
overbearing nature, never contradict him, never oppose him, let his every freak and
fancy be gratified. But it is not only for little children that the yoke of subjection to
authority is wholesome. It is quite possible that the yoke may be removed Coo soon.
Until the character is fairly formed, and the judgment is stronger than the will, and the
mind and conscience have ascendancy over the lower nature, the controlling influence
of another should be felt.

II. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of SELF-RESTRAINT.
However widely we may differ in appetite and temperament some, of course,
finding the needful self-control much harder than others there are, with all of
us, desires and tendencies which we have sternly to resist, and the denying of
which is part of the training by which we are fitted for a noble and useful life. The
very lusts, passions, appetites, and tempers of which, more or less, we are all
conscious, may be turned to real service in our moral equipment for life; for, in the
steadfast resistance of them, and victory over them, we become stronger men than
had these been no conflict at all.

III. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of DIFFICULTY AND TOIL.
Nothing like having to rough it a bit in early life. It is very far indeed from being an
advantage to a man to have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It is good
for us all to have to work for our bread. Our Creator intended us for labour, and not
for indolence. Many is the prosperous man of business who will tell you that he can
never be too thankful for having had to bear in his youth the yoke of genuine hard
work. It was this that developed his energies, strengthened his muscle, and, under
God, made his life successful and happy.

IV. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of LIVING GODLINESS. It is to
this that our blessed Saviour invites us when He says, Take My yoke upon you, and
learn of Me. It is good for a man to become a decided Christian in early life. Now it is
perfectly true that, as Christ says, this yoke is easy, and this burden light; and yet it
would not be called a yoke at all if it did not mean something that the flesh does not
readily take up something that is contrary to our fallen nature. It is not natural to us
to be Christians. Like the bullock, we have to bend, we have to stoop, that the yoke may
be put upon us; and this stooping is what none of us like. Our proud wills must be
humbled; our old self must be crucified.

V. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of a PUBLIC CHRISTIAN
PROFESSION. The first thing, of course, is to be a Christian; but the next thing is to
avow it. It is good in a thousand ways good for yourselves now; good for others; good
for the cause of Christ; good for the glory of God; good for your own future comfort and
joy, that, without delay, you step right over to the ranks of the Lords people, and
openly attach yourselves to the Christian Church.

VI. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of CHRISTIAN SERVICE. It will
help your own faith wonderfully to be engaged in some real labour for the Lord. Drop a
solemn word in the ear of some careless companion, and see how the Lord helps you in
that. Link your arm with some thoughtless young fellow, and try to bring him with you
to the house of God. Write a kind letter to your cousin who is getting tinged with
infidelity, and tell him of the nobler and better way.

VII. It is good for a man to bear in his youth the yoke of PERSONAL AFFLICTION.
Many an one has thanked God all his days for some heavy cross he had to carry when
he was young. In the memoir of Dr. Norman MLeod it is stated that nothing
produced a greater effect upon him during the whole course of his life, than the
death of a favourite brother, when they were both quite young men. There are many
other forms of trial, as you well know: there is the breaking up of a happy home; the
coming away from all the tender associations and hallowed scenes of infancy; the
solitude of a great city where all are strangers to you; the loss of a situation, or
disappointment in your efforts to obtain one: all these things are trying, and may
prove a heavy yoke to bear; but, believe me, it is good to bear them in ones youth.
You may be the better all your days for the bitter discipline. (J. T. Davidson, D. D.)

On bearing the yoke in youth

1. There is, for example, the yoke of home. Woe to that home which lays no
yoke upon its inmates! That is the very office of the family towards its
young and inexperienced members. To turn the current of the young life
into a right channel to make good habitual by use, and (to that end) to
insist upon conformity to a good rule to require, as the condition of
maintenance, as the condition of protection, as the condition of life, that
this and not this shall be the conduct and the speech and the temper and
(down to very minute particulars) the mode of living this is the duty of a
home, in order that it may bring after it Gods assigned and certain
blessing. Now all this implies compulsion; for it demands of the young life
that which it cannot give, and cannot be, without constraint.
2. But the home must at last send out its sons and its daughters into a rougher
school of experience, and the hallway house on this journey is, first, the
school, with its discipline, longer or shorter as the case may be, either of
elementary or classical learning, and then in some form or other that which
comes for most young men afterwards, the more special training for a
particular profession or trade. Here too there is a yoke, and a yoke bearing; or
 else a refusal of the yoke, with many sad consequences of sorrow and shame.
A day is coming for you, even in this life, when you will give God thanks for
every days trial, for every days privation, for every days hardship, which
you have honestly and bravely borne.
3. Many suffer seriously throughout their life by not having borne in their youth
the yoke of a Church. It is not well to be entirely at large in these matters.
Who is the person looked to for counsel, who is the person privileged to
advise, who is the person bound to reprove and do not all young people
need these offices from some one? if the young Christian is sometimes at
church, sometimes at chapel sometimes at this church or this chapel,
sometimes at that thus evading, by a perpetual shifting of the scene, all the
responsibilities and all the accountabilities of each and of all?
4. There is One who uses this very figure concerning His own Divine
office, Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me. Certainly of this yoke it must
be true that it is good for a man to bear it in his youth. No age is too young
for it: He Himself declared that infant children were not too young to put it
on: He Himself dealt tenderly and lovingly with the young man who came
to Him to be taught the way of life: and there is no doubt that, unless it is
put on in youth, it never will sit quite easily, and it never will be without
some galling pressure in later years, just because there is always some
spiritual wound in the shoulder, or some effeminate softness in the arm of
him who has tried other yokes first, of him who has begun by serving self,
sin, or the world, and only comes late and in pain to submit himself to the
healing and guiding and saving hand of Christ. (Dean Vaughan.)

Bearing the yoke

1. Men rarely if ever feel prepared to bear the good yoke the moment it is
presented to them.
2. The qualification for bearing the yoke is obtained in bearing it. Practical skill
comes only by practice.
3. Those who refuse to gain qualification for a place by working in that place,
always fall of qualification and of usefulness anywhere. He who will be a tramp
in religion must not expect the glory of immortality.
4. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth, because then he will
not suffer from having wasted time.
5. In view of all this, how beautiful the Saviours call, Take My yoke upon you, for
if men take not the yoke of Christ, then they must take the yoke of sin and
everlasting despair. (O. T. Lanphear, D. D.)

The good of early obedience

There is a threefold yoke which it is good for a man to bear in his youth.

I. The yoke of AFFLICTION.

1. Good for all kinds of men.
 2. Enlightening.
3. Preparatory to grace and conversion.
4. Strengthens spiritual convictions.
5. Stirs up the heart to prayer.
6. Teaches the emptiness of the creature.
II. The yoke of CONVICTION OF SIN.
1. The sooner it is borne the easier it is borne.
2. Those who are subjects of early convictions grow rich in grace.
III. The yoke of SUBJECTION AND OBEDIENCE TO CHRIST.
1. He has yoke.
2. It is the concern of every one to take his yoke in youth, because of the call
of God, the claims of Christ, the invitation of the Spirit; sin gets advantage
by continuance; the earlier the easier; it has the kindest acceptance with
God; it is the fittest season for religion; the danger of delay. (M. Mead.)

The yoke, of religion

I. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN BEARING THE YOKE HERE SPOKEN OF. We naturally
run wild, like a wild asss colt upon the mountains; with respect to our
understanding, in speculation and error; our will, in stubbornness, dis. obedience,
and rebellion; our affections, in irregular and inordinate love, desire, hope, joy, etc.
True religion, when put on in reality, and, as it were, buckled close upon us by faith,
restrains our disposition to wander from God.
1. The subjection to which it obliges us. Naturally we wear Satans yoke, and are
in subjection to him (Eph 2:2); to the world (Gal 1:4); to the flesh (Rom 7:5, 28);
to sin (Joh 8:34); to death, and the fear of it (Heb 2:15). True religion delivers us
from these other lords, and brings us into subjection to Christ, whose loyal
subjects we become, and He reigns in us by His grace, and over us by His
laws (Rom 14:17).
2. The service in which it engages us. We are yoked, not to lie down and sleep,
or stand still, but to work, not only in the use of every means of grace, for our
own salvation, especially prayer, watchfulness, self-denial, faith, obedience to
all known duty, and a patient continuance in well-doing; but for the glory
of God, in endeavouring to make Him known and feared by all men; and for
the good of our neighbour, in all works of justice, mercy, charity.
3. The associates with which it connects us. A bullock is not yoked that it may
draw alone. We are united to the people of God, and in conjunction with
them, should serve the Lord in the fore-mentioned particulars.
4. The patience and submission to which it obliges us, under our various
chastisements (Jer 31:18). Oxen, when brought under the yoke, are untoward,
or refractory, or lazy, and, therefore, have need of the goad. We have need of
it also for similar reasons. The words of the wise are as goads; and so are
the various trials and troubles which we meet with.
II. HOW IT APPEARS THAT IT IS GOOD FOR A MAN TO BEAR THE YOKE
AND THAT EVEN IN HIS YOUTH.
1. It is reasonable. It becomes us, trod is our duty, that we should come under the
restraint before described; that we should be in subjection to and the servants
of Christ; that we should be united with Gods Church; and be patient and
submissive under His chastisement.
2. It is honourable. A yoke of some kind we must wear, and a yoke we do
wear; and is it not more honourable to wear that of Christ, than that of
Belial? Is it not an honourable thing to be a subject of a very great, powerful,
and gracious King? a servant of a rich, noble, and benevolent Master? a
friend, a brother, nay, and the spouse of the Prince of the kings of the
earth?
3. It is advantageous.
(1) As to this life. Godliness hath the promise of the life that now is.
Does the husbandman feed his bullocks, and shall not God provide
for those that draw in His yoke? They shall have all things needful
(Mat 6:32-33); all things useful (Psa 84:11); evils turned into good
(Rom 8:28).
(2) As to the life to come, they enjoy the favour of an infinite and eternal
Being; they are adopted into His family; restored to His image; hold
communion and fellowship with Him; have peace of mind; a lively hope
of eternal life; and an earnest thereof in their hearts, until the
redemption of the purchased possession; but they will reap still greater
advantages after death, in the intermediate state, at the day of
resurrection and final judgment, and forever.
4. It is easy and pleasant. What; to bear a yoke? Yes; a yoke lined with love.
His commandments are not grievous to a loving heart, to a new nature.

III. HOW WE MAY BE ENABLED TO DO SO.

1. Come out from among the carnal and wicked, and be separate. For, a
companion of fools shall be destroyed.
2. Associate with the people of God (Pro 13:20).
3. Use much retirement, and read, and meditate on the Scriptures (2Ti 3:15).
4. Pray. The wisdom and strength of man is utterly insufficient; but they that
wait on the Lord, etc. (Isa 40:31).
5. Be always watchful and circumspect (Eph 5:15).
6. Deny yourself, and take up your cross daily (Mat 16:24). (J. Benson.)

On the duty of restraining the young

I. The restraints of which I speak at present, are only THOSE WISE AND NECESSARY
RESTRAINTS WHICH SERVE TO GUARD THE INNOCENCE AND TO DIRECT THE
ACTIVITY OF THE EARLY MIND. Even a child soon learns to distinguish the
restraints that are dictated by a sincere regard to his happiness, from those which have
their origin in caprice. To the former, indeed, he may not at all times submit with
becoming cheerfulness; but against the latter he will perpetually rebel. One of the worst
effects which excessive severity produces on the minds of the young is, that it tempts
them to the violation of truth; and hence it sometimes happens that parents are less
acquainted, than even the most indifferent persons, with what passes in the minds of
their children. Beware of this fatal error. Provoke not your children to wrath; tempt not
your children to falsehood. I am aware, however, that this is not the extreme in which
parents are most apt to err. Their natural affection for their children will generally be
sufficient, without any other motive, to preserve them from too rigorous an exercise of
authority. The danger is that this affection may transgress its proper bounds, and
betray them into an opposite error, not less fatal to the interests of their children. It is
surely necessary that the young be restrained from every species of vice, and directed
to such pursuits and studies as may prepare them for being useful in the world. For this
purpose they must be early taught that they have serious duties to perform; they must
be accustomed to submit to discipline, and limited even in those innocent pleasures
which would interfere with their more important concerns. Let the rules, which you
prescribe, be such as are proper in themselves; and let them be uniformly and steadily
executed. Steadiness and consistency of conduct is the great secret in the management
of the young. It begets respect and reverence, and ensures a willing obedience. When
the duty of the child is clearly marked out to him, and the performance of it regularly
exacted, he is, in no case, at a loss to discover what will please, and what will offend. In
proportion as his faculties open, he perceives the propriety of the discipline through
which he is maple to pass. He admires the wisdom and consistency of the plan by which
his most important interests are promoted. He finds that the authority which, in his
youth, he hath been taught to acknowledge, is the mild and regular dominion of
reason; and is prepared, as his years advance, to exchange the dominion of reason in
the breast of his parent, for the dominion of reason in his own mind.

II. SOME OF THE ADVANTAGES WHICH THIS DISCIPLINE IS FITTED TO

YIELD. Even in our maturer years, our industry needs often to be animated by
looking forward to the distant advantages which it is fitted to yield. This, however, is
a reflection which seldom occurs to the young. They think only of the moments as
they pass. They perceive not how much their characters, and their advancement in
the world, depend on their present application. But you, who are parents, perceive
it. Your observation hath long ago taught you that attention and diligence in youth
are the only sure foundation on Which a respectable manhood can be reared. To you,
therefore, it belongs, by the judicious exercise of authority, to remedy the
inexperience of the young, and to urge them on in the path in which, at present,
perhaps, they walk with reluctance, because they see not the end to which it leads.
The success of your children in the world is an object which deserves your attention;
but it is not the only object that is worthy of a parents care. Their virtue is their
highest interest; and this, also, is most likely to be promoted by discipline. In order
that the mind may be formed to virtue, it must be accustomed to submit to
restraint; for what else is virtue but the habit of self-government, the power of
regulating our affections and passions by the dictates of reason and conscience? To
live according to rule is not a task for the young alone; it is a duty incumbent on all;
it is that which, in every period of life, distinguishes the virtuous from the vicious.
Now, this is the very habit to which the mind of the child is formed by the exercise of
parental authority. How many useful lessons doth he learn from the discipline of his
fathers house! He is prepared, by obedience to his parents, to obey his conscience
and his God. He will be meek, for he hath learned to bear contradiction; he will be
just, for he hath learned to moderate his desires; he will be temperate, for he hath
learned to resist the solicitations of pleasure; he will be generous, for he hath
learned, at the call of duty, to forego his own ease and comfort, and he is prepared
for every sacrifice which benevolence may require him to make. Happy, surely, is the
man who hath thus borne the yoke in his youth! (W. Moodie, D. D.)

The trials of youth

To bear the yoke is to be in subjection: to be compelled to walk in certain lines
at the will of another, to be prevented from choosing for ourselves and being our own
masters. The compulsion which is most commonly felt in youth is the compulsion of
circumstances. Without being in absolute poverty, the majority of young men find that
they have no choice, but must at once try to earn a livelihood. And the limitations thus
prescribed by circumstances are often very serious, and press very heavily on the mind
of the aspiring youth. Still, if there is a spark of real manhood, a leaven of generosity in
the spirit, it will be found good to bear this yoke. To throw a boy into the water is a
rough-and-ready lesson in the art of swimming, but with a boy of spirit it is likely to be
successful. The training which straitened circumstances give is one which no money can
purchase. A lad is put upon his mettle, and if there is grit in him at all, it will appear. He
is conscious that it depends entirely on himself whether he is to succeed or to fail. He
feels himself face to face with the world, and is compelled to use all his faculties and
powers to save himself from defeat. The habits of industry, the love of work, the delight
in mastering difficulties, the ability to put pressure on himself, and the independence of
character which a lad thus acquires, pass into his nature as its permanent and most
valuable ingredients. It must also be considered that the privations which press so
heavily on some families, and which in some unhappy instances benumb affection, do in
the main afford opportunities for self-sacrifice and considerateness and concern for the
common good which bind families together, and give a richness and beauty to the
family life which you might have sought in vain had circumstances been easy and
calling for no sacrifice. But in other senses it is good that a man bear the yoke in his
youth. He must put himself under control and discipline if he is to get the full benefit of
his youth. All this control and discipline is intended to fit him for liberty afterwards, as
all drill and gymnastics are meant to give the body freedom of movement, and to give a
man the perfect use of all his powers. To allow passions, cravings, propensities, to rule
us and govern and determine our conduct is to become the worst of slaves. Freedom
comes through discipline; through absorbing into our own will the laws which govern
our life; to be our own master is to exercise self-control, and allow that in us to rule
which was intended to be supreme. When we submit ourselves to the rule of
conscience and come into harmony with Gods laws, approving them in our heart, then
only are we free. You yourself are something nobler and better than any of your
members or any faculty in you; these are your organs and instruments whereby you
work on the world around you, but you yourself are different from these, and are called
to rule all these. Thus only is it possible to become your own master. Coming to detail,
then, we must exercise self-control in respect of all unworthy pleasures. The youth of a
certain kind and brought up in certain companies thinks he is scarcely a man till he has
tasted pleasures which he knows to be forbidden. The very fact that they are forbidden
makes them objects of desire. The true corrective of this bias towards unworthy
pleasures is to be found in filling our life with worthy pursuits. Of course knowledge
also helps. When one has seen a little more of life, the pleasures which attract the mass
of young men seem so very childish, so false and tawdry, so positively repulsive in many
respects, that one wonders where the charm is. In the cloakroom of many a place of
entertainment you must with your coat leave your self-respect, and all respect for
humanity, and necessarily come out a poorer man, with less fitness for life. But even
when the pleasures that attract are recognised to be such as no men of any real stature
and dignity could possibly stoop to, our self-control needs some other aid than that of
knowledge. It is good to say to ourselves, these scenes I am asked to join are degrading
and delusive. Instead of proving my manhood by entering them, I show distinctly that
my manhood is poor and weak, easily deceived, easily led, ignorant and undeveloped. It
is good to cherish and strengthen our self-control thus, and by reading such healthy
writers as Thackeray, whose scorn of all that is base and foolish and filthy and profane
communicates itself to the reader and makes that seem contemptible which is
contemptible, and that be repulsive to us which in itself is repulsive. But the true
safeguard is to fill the heart and life with higher things, to commit ourselves cordially to
the Christian life, recognising its attractiveness and finding in it enough and more than
enough to interest, to stimulate, to satisfy. It is in Christs service you find true life and
true freedom and true manhood. Another detail in which self-control must be
exercised is in the books we read. Happily, English literature is rich enough to make it
quite unnecessary for us to open one suspected volume. Form your taste on Scott and
Thackeray, Carlyle and Emerson, and you will have no relish for unclean and
corrupting literature. Here again, if you feel you are losing something by not reading
what others read, exercise self-control, and remember that what you lose is well lost, a
tainted mind, a lowered tone, a polluted imagination, while you gain self-respect,
manliness, and purity. But again, those who have too much self-respect to find any
attraction in such undesirable knowledge, sometimes show a similar craving, but in a
higher and purer sphere. It is not uncommon to meet with persons who have a silly
ambition to be recognised as having passed through a severe struggle with doubt and
spiritual perplexity. Now there are two kinds of doubt which are very different in their
origin and character, and which must be treated differently. There is the doubt which is
almost invariably begotten in a strong and independent mind when that mind first
applies itself to the solution of the mysteries of nature, of life, and of God. There is also
the doubt which is assumed, like any other manner or habit which finds favour in
society; sometimes there is an affectation of weariness and ennui, sometimes of
indifference, and so in some circles there is an affectation of doubt. It is the thing to
talk disparagingly of traditional belief, and to assume a sceptical attitude towards
miracles and other objects of faith. The fictitious or imitative doubter may always be
distinguished from the true doubter by his frivolous and ignorant manner of meeting
proposed solutions of his doubts. He who merely apes doubt and seems to consider it a
desirable mental condition, shrinks from conviction and seeks to perpetuate his
uncertainty. To such as fancy that sceptical difficulties are symptoms of enlightenment
may be commended the words of the great philosopher who may be said to have
consecrated doubt. After describing how he stripped himself one by one of all beliefs, he
goes on to say, For all that, I did not imitate the sceptics who doubt for doubtings
sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to
arrive at certainty, and to dig away the drift and sand until I arrived at the rock
beneath (Descartes in Huxley, 122). It is not through the understanding so much as
through the conscience and the heart that a man becomes a Christian. And so long as
any one is loyal to Christ because he is conscious that in Him he is brought into
harmony with God, and because he desires to live in fellowship with Christ and to serve
Him, it is not essential that he should believe all that he has been taught. There is room
in the Church of Christ for questioning spirits as for docile and credulous spirits; and as
there is work for the one class, so is there work for the other. What is wanted much
more than acceptance of traditional belief is tolerance, based on the clear perception
that many articles of our creed are not certain, and that thoughtful men cannot but
have different opinions regarding their truth. Until we fight against sin as the allies and
subjects of Christ, as well as for our own sake, we seem to fight not in Christs strength,
but in our own. And if we think of our sin as mainly our affair, if we hate it mainly for
the shame it brings upon us, then when we are tempted by it and when our own view of
it is changed, the advantage and pleasure of it being now clear and the shame of it
remote and dimly seen, there is absolutely nothing to restrain us from it. But if we
habitually live with Christ and consider His will in all things, and that our sin brings
grief to Him, when we are tempted, though our own view of sin is altered, we are
conscious that His view of it remains the same, and in sympathy with His judgment we
also condemn it. Every evil habit you suffer to find place in you lowers your energy
throughout life, weights and burdens you, and holds you back from what you aspire to.
The sin you admit into your life is not like a stone in a horses hoof, that cripples for a
few steps but can easily be knocked out and leave no trace: it is a morbid growth, it is in
your blood, it taints your whole system, and is a weakness to the end. Turn then from
all that is low, and defiling, and secretive, and ungenerous, turn from what is ungodly
be sure you are gladly living under the great law of human life, dependence on Jesus
Christ, and with Him there will enter your life, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
things are honourable,just,pure,lovely,of good report. (M. Dods, D. D.)

Yoke bearing
I. A BROAD ASSERTION WHICH REQUIRES TO BE QUALIFIED. It is not
good to bear the yoke of
1. Civil despotism.
2. Spiritual despotism.
3. Sinful despotism.

II. AN ASSERTION TO BE READILY RECEIVED.

1. The yoke of affliction.
2. The yoke of genuine religious principle.
3. The yoke of Christ.

III. WHY IT IS SO GOOD TO BEAR THIS YOKE IN YOUTH.

1. It is a check to the presumption of youth, which, like a vessel without
ballast, would soon be endangered.
2. It is a safeguard against the dangers of youth.
3. It often proves a fitting preparation for eminent usefulness.
4. It is often the precursor of high character and of exalted
enjoyment.
IV. HINTS TO THOSE WHO HAVE TO BEAR THE YOKE.
1. Place your mercies over against your trials.
2. Recollect that God has wise and kind designs.
3. Let affliction lead you to God as your proper and changeless portion.
4. Recollect the brevity of the season in which the yoke is to be borne.
(Homiletic Magazine.)

Bearing the yoke in youth

I. THERE IS A YOKE WHICH IT IS NOT GOOD FOR A MAN TO BEAR IN
HIS YOUTH.
1. The yoke of civil bondage.
2. The yoke of ceremonies and superstitions.
3. The yoke of sin. A bad habit acquired in youth grows with a mans
growth, and strengthens with his strength.

II. WHAT YOKE IS IT GOOD FOR A MAN TO BEAR IN HIS YOUTH?

1. The yoke of affliction. There is a natural exuberance in youth which
needs to be reduced a luxuriousness which requires pruning an
impetuosity which needs to be checked. And what will effect this like
affliction when sanctified by God?
2. The yoke of subjection to legitimate authority.
3. The yoke of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is a yoke which every man must
take upon him at some period of his life, or perish everlastingly. (John
Hambleton, M. A.)

A sermon to young men (with Mat 11:29)

The yoke! The very word has a sound of severity in it! Yet Christ spake it
He, whom all ages since His advent have accepted as the ideal of gentleness! He who
alone, amid the boasted culture of the nineteenth century, can bestow real liberty.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty there alone. We gain freedom
from false dominions by accepting the kingship of Christ.

I. YOUNG MEN WHO ACCEPT THE YOKE OF CHRIST ARE BEST FITTED FOR
AN EARTHLY CITIZENSHIP. England prospers or perishes by character!
Selfishness slew Sparta. Cruelty corrupted Athens. Lust laid low the power of Rome.
Material wealth does not constitute our prosperity, nor the genius of statesmanship,
nor the facilities for commercial intercourse character makes a nation! and to this
hour is I know of no power which can create holy character, purify the heart, cleanse
the conscience, and inspire a truly heroic life but the Gospel of Christ it is the
power of God unto salvation, and as such it manifests no over-weening confidence
to say I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. Upon its social side, our earthly
citizenship will be beautiful just in the proportion that Christ reigns in our hearts!
Your safety is in making harmony with the spirit and purpose of Christ, the ruling
law of all

II. YOUNG MEN WHO ACCEPT THE YOKE OF CHRIST ARE FULFILLING THE
HIGHEST IDEAL OF LIFE. Each man has some ideal of life. It is natural to suppose
that we do not eat, work, and sleep, with no other aim than the day contains; we were
unworthy of the majesty of manhood not to have some conceptions of duty and
destiny. Christ found men full of the ideals of life. There was the pharisaic ideal,
which combined ecclesiastical hauteur and Jewish privilege; there was the publican
ideal, that money makes the man, and that once wealthy, men could invite wit,
genius, and learning to their board; there was the Roman ideal, which was prowess
in arms, pride of military pomp and glory of military fame; there was the Philosophic
ideal, which mingled contempt for ignorance, with superiority in the schools; there
was the commercial ideal, which meant illimitable luxury, and a merchant princes
palace on the Tiber banks; there was the gladiators ideal, which meant earnest eyes
looking down upon the fight, and beauty and fashion craving the victors love.
Everywhere around the Christ were ideals of life! and what was His own? The cup
which my Father hath given Me to drink, shall I not drink it, Father, not as I will,
but as Thou wilt. This was Christs ideal of life I an ideal that had in it the only true
happiness. My meat and my drink is to do the will of Him that sent Me.

III. YOUNG MEN WHO ACCEPT THE YOKE OF CHRIST PRESERVE THEIR
MORAL INDEPENDENCE. They are bound by the law of Christ, and the law of Christ
alone. They are not compelled to accept all the yokes, either sanctioned by Puritan
custom, or by Ecclesiastical tradition; nor will they look to the law of Christ as to a legal
statute book. Thou shalt nots would fill not only this world, but the whole stellar
system with books which they could not contain. The spirit of Christ is our only
safeguard, our only life, our only law, and it is enough.

IV. YOUNG MEN WHO ACCEPT THE YOKE OF CHRIST PASS THE GREAT CRISIS
OF LIFE. All things are ready! The Atonement has opened wide the door of mercy, the
Spirit of the living God has awakened the conviction of sin, righteousness, and
judgment to come; the soul is close to the Kingdom almost saved. Oh! moment of
appalling interest; here is an act we can delegate to none, the acceptance or rejection of
Christ, on that moment hangs for each soul all the immortal sanctities of heaven, or the
wailings of infinite grief. If probation come again in some future state, it is revealed in
some Bible of which I have no copy and is a Divine secret of which I have no key.
Viewed in such a light as this, are you prepared now, yes! now; whilst Christ looks with
the wistfulness of Divine love in your face, to obey His voice, Take My yoke upon you.

V. YOUNG MEN WHO ACCEPT THE YOKE OF CHRIST MAKE A BLESSED USE
OF THE FORMATIVE PERIOD OF LIFE. It is good for a man to bear the yoke in
his youth. He is supple and sinewy in mind and body. Moreover it is not only the
age of a rare enthusiasm, but of unenriched experience, the age when we too often
obey a quick impulse, rather than a quiet conscience; an age too when we are apt to
despise service as service. Let men be proud of work, proudest of it when it takes
the form of service. Let us never forget that our Master came not to be ministered
unto, but to minister; that the Lord of angels took on Him the form of a servant.
Never let service be considered vulgar! It is good to bear the yoke in youth; good not
to begin where our fathers left off, good that we should have something better than
an ignorant physical athleticism, and be moral athletes, able to cope with difficulty,
preferring an escutcheon with a spade on it to a purchased coat of arms. If, however,
it is good to bear the yoke early, in earthly duties, it is good to give of our time,
strength, and substance in early youth to the cause of the Redeemer. The great day
alone can reveal how much depends upon our enlisting the rising manhood of
England in the intelligent service of the Church. May God the Holy Ghost inspire the
conviction, that loyalty to Christ demands not only the mental admission of His
claims, but the moral wearing of His yoke.

VI. YOUNG MEN WHO PUT ON THE YOKE OF CHRIST GIVE PROMISE OF THE
OUTCOME OF SALVATION. The age is not wanting in appreciation of Christian life.
The Church, however, in some of its most fervent Evangelical teachers, has made
justification the only tenet in its creed. Christianity is life in God; it is more than the
first paroxysm of penitential grief, more than the most passionate confession of sin,
more than the thrill of a first love, more than occasional rhapsodies of glad emotion,
more than an exquisite appreciation of the life of Christ: by this alone can the world
know we are Christs disciples, that we keep His commandments. This is the true
outcome of salvation, the test is not emotive in our feelings, nor mental in our
intellectual belief alone, but practical, in yoke bearing after Christ. (W. M. Statham,
M. A.)

Yoke-bearing in youth
We adopt the principle of yoke-bearing in youth in the matter of intellectual
education: why not in the matter of the higher moral training and chastening? Who
puts off the learning of the alphabet until he is well advanced in life? Who at middle
life could begin to commit to memory the things which almost seem to grow up in
the mind of childhood and to abide there forever? Yet the child must be constrained
to undergo the discipline needful to the acquisition of elementary knowledge. His
play must be curtailed, his inclinations must be rebuked, his indolence must be
overcome; it is for the childs good that his parents should insist upon the
acceptance of the yoke, otherwise the child will grow up to be an ignorant man. Is it
not also true that in youth passion is most violent, and might hurry the young life
into the uttermost excesses were it not curbed or cooled or in some degree
restrained? Hence it is important that young life should be filled with work, should
be almost exhausted at times by long-continued labour. The profit is not seen in the
labour alone; behind all the labour there are moral advantages which can hardly be
described in words: passion is subdued, pride is mortified, the energy of the will is
turned into the right direction, and labour so treated becomes in the end pleasant,
as music is pleasant, and easy as breathing is easy. What may be expected from one
who has borne the yoke well in his youth Chastened but not extinguished energy.
Paul the apostle must be as energetic as was Saul of Tarsus, but the energy must be
expressed along different lines. Mature saints are not expected to be demure,
exhausted, feeble, indolent, or lacking in interest in the pursuits and ambitions of
youth: they are expected to take a right view of those pursuits and ambitions, to set a
proper estimate upon them. No man has borne his own yoke well who has lived
without sympathy for those who are still feeling the burden. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Yoke-bearing
This is as good as a promise. It has been good, it is good, and it will be
good for me to bear the yoke.
1. Early in life I had to feel the weight of conviction, and ever since it has proved
a soul-enriching burden. Should I have loved the Gospel so well had I not
learned by deep experience the need of salvation by grace? Jabez was more
honourable than his brethren because his mother bare him with sorrow, and
those who suffer much in being born unto God make strong believers in
sovereign grace.
2. The yoke of censure is an irksome one, but it prepares a man for future
honour. He is not fit to be a leader who has not run the gauntlet of
contempt. Praise intoxicates if it be not preceded by abuse. Men who rise
to eminence without a struggle usually fall into dishonour.
3. The yoke of affliction, disappointment, and excessive labour is by no means to be
sought for; but when the Lord lays it on us in our youth it frequently develops a
character which glorifies God and blesses the church. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The necessity and advantage of early afflictions

The crosses we meet with are not the effects of blind chance, but the results
of a wise and unerring providence, which knoweth what is fittest for us, and loveth
us better than we can do ourselves. There is no malice or envy lodged in the bosom
of that blessed being whose name and nature is love. He taketh no delight in the
troubles and miseries of His creatures: He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the
children of men. Holiness is the highest perfection and greatest happiness we are
capable of: it is a real participation of the Divine nature, the image of God drawn on
the soul; and all the chastisements we meet with are designed to reduce us to this
blessed temper, to make us like unto Himself, and thereby capable to be happy with
Him to all eternity.

I. This will more clearly appear if we reflect on THE NATURAL TEMPER OF OUR
MINDS AND THE INFLUENCE WHICH PROSPEROUS OR ADVERSE FORTUNE IS
WONT TO HAVE UPON THEM.
1. We are naturally proud and self-conceited; we have an high esteem of
ourselves, and would have everybody else to value and esteem us. This
disease is very deeply rooted in our corrupt nature: it is ordinarily the first
sin that betrays itself in the little actions and passions of children; and many
times the last which religion enables us to overcome. Pride alone is the
source and fountain of almost all the disorders in the world; of all our
troubles, and of all our sins: and we shall never be truly happy, or truly good,
till we come to think nothing of ourselves, and be content that all the world
think nothing of us. Now, there is nothing hath a more natural tendency to
foment and heighten this natural corruption, than constant prosperity and
success. Sanctified afflictions contribute to abate and mortify the pride of our
hearts, to prick the swelling imposthume, to make us sensible of our
weakness, and convince us of our sin.
2. Another distemper of our minds is our too great affection to the world and
 worldly things. We are all too apt to set our hearts wholly upon them; to
take up our rest, and seek our happiness and satisfaction in them. But God
knows that these may well divert and amuse a while, they can never satisfy or
make us happy; that the souls which He made for Himself can never rest till
they return unto Him, and therefore He many times findeth it necessary
either to remove our comforts or imbitter them unto us; to put aloes and
wormwood on the breasts of the world, that thereby we may wean our
hearts from it, and carry them to the end of their being, the fountain of their
blessedness and felicity.
3. Another bad effect which prosperity is wont to produce in our corrupt
natures, is, that it makes us forgetful of God, and unthankful of His mercies:
We put very little value on our food and raiment, and the ordinary means of
our subsistence, we have been sometimes pinched with want. We consider
not how much we are indebted to God for preserving our friends, till some
of them be removed from us. How little do we prize out health, if we have
never had experience of sickness or pain! Where is the man who doth
seriously bless God for his nightly quiet and repose! And yet, if sickness or
trouble deprive us of it, we then find it to have been a great and invaluable
mercy, and that it is God who giveth His beloved sleep.
4. Prosperity rendereth us insensible of the miseries and calamities of
others. But afflictions do soften the heart, and make it more tender and
kindly; and we are always most ready to compassionate those griefs
which ourselves have sometime endured: the sufferings of others make
the deepest impressions upon us, when they put us in mind of our own.

II. TAKE NOTICE OF THE SEASON WHICH IS HERE MENTIONED AS THE

FITTEST FOR A MAN TO BEAR AFFLICTION. It is good for a man that he bear the
yoke in his youth. We are all willing to put off the evil day; and, if we must needs bear
the yoke, we would choose to have it delayed till we grow old. We think it sad to have
our morning overcast with clouds, to meet with a storm before we have well launched
forth from the shore. But the Divine wisdom, which knoweth what is fit for us, doth
many times make choice of our younger years, as the most proper to accustom us to the
bearing of the yoke.
1. It is then most necessary. For youth is the time of our life wherein we are in
greatest danger to run into wild and extravagant courses: our blood is hot,
and our spirits unstayed and giddy; we have too much pride to be governed
by others, and too little wisdom to govern ourselves. The yoke is then
especially needful to tame our wildness and reduce us to a due stayedness
and composure of mind.
2. Then also it is most supportable. The body is strong and healthful, less apt to
be affected with the troubles of the mind; the spirit stout and vigorous, will
not so easily break and sink under them. Old age is a burden, and will soon
faint under any supervenient load. The smallest trouble is enough to bring
down grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. And therefore, since we must
meet with afflictions, it is certainly a favourable circumstance to have them at
the time of our life wherein we are most able to endure them.
3. And, lastly, the lessons which afflictions teach us, are then most advantageous
 when we learn them betimes, that we may have the use of them in the conduct
of our after lives.

III. THE PARTICULAR ADVANTAGE OF AFFLICTIONS WHICH IS

MENTIONED IN THE TEXT: He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he
hath borne it upon him. The words are capable of a twofold interpretation, and
both suit well with the purpose: for we may either understand them properly, of
solitude and silence; or metaphorically, of patience and quiet submission; both of
which are the good effects of sanctified and well-improved
afflictions: and accordingly we shall say something to both.
1. Nature hath made us sociable creatures: but corruption hath carried this
inclination unto excess; so that most persons think it an intolerable burden
to be any considerable time alone. Though they love themselves out of
measure, yet they cannot endure their own conversation; they had rather be
hearing and discoursing of the most naughty and trivial things, than be
sitting alone and holding their peace. Outward prosperity heightens this
humour. When the heart is dilated with joy, it seeketh to vent itself in every
company. Crosses, on the other hand, render a man pensive and solitary;
they stop the mouth, and bind up the tongue, and incline the person to be
much alone.
(1) He who considers, on the one hand, the guilt we are wont to contract,
and the prejudice which we sustain, by too much conversation with
others, and, on the other hand, the excellent improvement we may make
of solitude and retirement, will account it a good effect of afflictions, that
they incline and dispose us unto it. In considering the evils of frequent
conversation, we are not to prosecute the grossest and more scandalous
vices of the tongue. We rather choose to mention such evils as are wont
to be less noticed, and can he more hardly avoided. And, first, experience
may teach us all, that much conversation doth ordinarily beget a
remissness and dissolution of spirit; that it slackeneth and relaxeth the
bent of our minds, and disposeth us to softness and easy compliances.
Another prejudice we receive by society, is, That it fills our minds with
noxious images, and fortifies our corrupt notions and opinions of things.
When we are alone in a sober temper, and take time to reflect and
consider of things, we are sometimes persuaded of the vanity and
worthlessness of all those glittering trifles whereunto the generality of
mankind are so sadly bewitched: but when we come abroad, and listen to
the common talk, and hear people speak of greatness, and fiches, and
honour with concern and admiration, we quickly forget our more sober
and deliberate thoughts, and suffer ourselves to be carried away with the
stream of the common opinion. And though the effects be not so sudden
and observable, yet these discourses are still making some secret and
insensible impressions upon us. Thus also is our judgment corrupted
about the qualities and endowments of the mind. Courage and gallantry,
wit and eloquence, and other accomplishments of this nature, are
magnified and extolled beyond all measure; whereas humility, and
meekness, and devotion, and all those Christian graces which render a
soul truly excellent and lovely, are spoken of as mean and contemptible
 things: for though men have not the impudence formally to make the
comparison, and prefer the former; yet their very air, and way of
discoursing about these things, sufficiently testifies their opinion. I shall
mention but another of those evils wherewith our conversation is
commonly attended. The most ordinary subject of our entertainments are
the faults and follies of others. Were this one theme of discourse
discharged, we would oft-times find but little to say. I scarce know any
fault whereof good persons are so frequently guilty, and so little sensible.
(2) But solitude and retirement do not only deliver us from these
inconveniencies, but also afford very excellent opportunities for bettering
our souls. The most profane and irreligious persons will find some serious
thoughts rise in their minds if they be much alone. And the more that any
person is advanced in piety and goodness, the more will he delight in
retirement, and receive the more benefit by it. Then it is that the devout
soul takes its highest flight in Divine contemplations and maketh its nearest
approaches to God. Little doth the world understand those secret and
hidden pleasures which devout souls do feel when, having got out of the
noise and hurry of the world, they sit alone and keep silence, contemplating
the Divine perfections, which shine so conspicuously in all His works of
wonder; admiring His greatness, and wisdom, and love, and revolving His
favours towards themselves; opening before Him their griefs and their cares,
and disburdening their souls into His bosom; protesting their allegiance and
subjection unto Him, and telling Him a thousand times that they love Him;
and then listening unto the voice of God within their hearts, that still and
quiet voice, which is not wont to be heard in the streets, that they may hear
what God the Lord will speak: for He will speak peace unto His people, and
to His saints, and visit them with the expressions of His love.
(3) But I would not be mistaken, as if I recommended a total and constant
retirement, or persuaded men to forsake the world, and betake
themselves unto deserts. No, certainly; we must not abandon the
stations wherein God hath placed us, nor render ourselves useless to
mankind. Solitude hath its temptations, and we may be sometimes very
bad company to ourselves. It was not without reason that a wise person
warned another, who professed to delight in conversing with himself.
Have a care that you be keeping company with a good man. Abused
solitude may whet mens passions, and irritate their lusts, and prompt
them to things which company would restrain. And this made one say,
that he who is much alone, must either be a saint or devil. Melancholy,
which inclines men most to retirement, is often too much nourished and
fomented by it; and there is a peevish and sullen loneliness, which some
people affect under their troubles, whereby they feed on discontented
thoughts, and find a kind of perverse pleasure in refusing to be
comforted. But all this says no more, but that good things may be
abused; and excess or disorder may turn the most wholesome food into
poison. And therefore though I would not indifferently recommend much
solitude unto all; yet, sure, I may say, it were good for the most part of
men that they were less in company, and more alone.
2. Thus much of the first and proper sense of sitting alone and keeping silence. We
 told you it might also import a quiet and patient submission to the will of God;
the laying of our hand on our mouth, that no expression of murmur or
discontent may escape us. We cannot now insist in any length on this Christian
duty of patience, and submission to the will of God; we shall only say two things
of it, which the text importeth.
(1) That this lesson is most commonly learned in the school of afflictions.
(2) That this advantage of afflictions is very great and desirable; that it is
indeed very good for a man to have borne the yoke in his youth, if he
hath thereby learned to sit alone and keep silence when the hand of the
Lord is upon him. There is nothing more acceptable unto God, no object
more lovely and amiable in His eyes, than a soul thus prostrate before
Him, thus entirely resigned unto His holy will, thus quietly submitting to
His severest dispensations. Nor is it less advantageous unto ourselves;
but sweeteneth the bitterest occurrences of our life, and makes us relish
an inward and secret pleasure, notwithstanding all the smart of
affliction: so that the yoke becomes supportable, the rod itself comforts
us; and we find much more delight in suffering the will of God than if He
had granted us our own. (H. Scougal, M. A.)

The necessity for early yoke-bearing

If a bullock is not broken in when it is young, it will never be worth much for
the plough. The work will be galling for itself, and most unsatisfactory for the
husbandman. If this be neglected, it is vain to attempt it by and by; the beast will
only be fretted and irritated, and any work it is put to will be a failure. A traveller in
the East graphically describes, as an eyewitness, the difficulty of getting an untrained
ox to perform agricultural work. I have frequent opportunities, he said, of
witnessing the conduct of oxen when for the first time put into the yoke. They
generally made a strenuous struggle for liberty, repeatedly breaking the yoke, and
attempting to make their escape. At other times such bullocks would lie down upon
their side or back, and remain so in defiance of the drivers, though they lashed them
with ponderous whips. Sometimes from pity to the animal I would interfere, and beg
them not to be so cruel. Cruel, they would say, it is mercy, for if we do not conquer
him now, he will require to be so beaten all his life. (J. Thain Davidson.)

Deferring the yoke leads to regret, in after years

It was the sorrow, of Samuel Rutherfords. later years, as it was of St.
Augustines, that he allowed himself to reach manhood before he yielded his heart to
God. Like a fool as I was, he says, I suffered my sun to be high in the heaven, and
near afternoon. Few things in the Letters are more beautiful than the earnestness
with which he beseeches the young to consecrate their freshest hours to eternity. It
was a sweet and glorious thing for your daughter Grissel to give herself up to Christ,
that tie may write upon her His fathers name and His own new name. I desire
Patrick to give Christ the flower of his love; it were good to start soon in the way.
He would have none to imitate him, loitering on the road too long, and trifling at
the gate. (Alexander Smellie.)

Youth the time for taking Christs yoke

 Live the bullock, we have to bend, we have to stoop, that the yoke may be put
upon us, and this stooping is what none of us like. Our proud wills must be
humbled; our old self must be crucified. There are few men who enter into the light
and liberty of happy believers without knowing something of this inward conflict. It is
well to have it over in early life. I remember an old and godly man who was much
tried in the latter years of his life with spiritual depression, saying to me, Ah, sir, it is
not good to have to bear the yoke in ones old age. (J. Thain Davidson.)

Ideal education
Writing upon Uppingham School a recent author says: Here a boy drops
rank, wealth, luxury, and for eight or ten years, and for the greater part of these
years, lives among his equals in an atmosphere of steady discipline, which usually
compels a simple and hardy life, and in a community where the prizes and applause
are about equally divided between mental energy and spiritual vigour. Here respect
and obedience become habitual to him; lie learns to regard the rights of others and
to defend his own; to stand upon his feet in the most democratic of all societies a
boy republic. Above all, he escapes the mental and moral suffocation from which it is
well-nigh impossible to guard boys in rich and luxurious homes. (H. O. Mackey.)

LAM 3:28-29
He sitteth alone, and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it upon him. He putteth his
mouth in the dust, if so be there may be hope.

Solitude, silence, submission

Thus the prophet describes the conduct of a person in deep anguish of heart.
When he does not know what to do, his soul, as if by instinct, humbles itself. He gets
into some secret place, he utters no speech, he gives himself over to moaning and to
tears, and then he bows himself lower and yet lower before the Divine Majesty, as if
he felt that the only hope for him in the extremity of his sorrow was to make complete
submission to God, and to lie in the very dust before Him.
I. In the time of great trouble HOLY SOLITUDE is commended to us. Let him
sit alone. I earnestly advise you who are under concern of soul to seek to get
alone, and to be quiet and thoughtful in your solitude; not merely to be alone,
but to sit by yourself like a person in the posture of thought.
1. I commend solitude to any of you who are seeking salvation, first, that you
may study well your case as in the sight of God. If a true shepherd will not
neglect his flocks and his herds, should not a wise man care about his
thoughts, his feelings, and his actions? I implore you, do not let your ship go
at full steam through a fog; but slacken speed a bit, and heave the lead, to
see whether you are in deep waters or shallow. Sit alone a while, that you
may carefully consider your case.
2. Get alone again, that you may diligently search the Scriptures. Alas, the dust
upon many mens Bibles will condemn them! I beseech you, as sensible and
reasonable beings, do not let God speak to you, and you refuse to hear.
3. Get alone, further, that you may commune with your God. After we have once
 learnt the way, we can commune with God anywhere, amidst the roar and
turmoil of the crowded city, or on the top of the mast of a ship; but, to begin
with, it is best to be alone with the Lord. Oh, speak with Him at once! Perhaps
five minutes earnest speech with Him may be the turning point of your life.
4. Get alone also, that you may avoid distraction. How often may even godly and
gracious people talk upon some theme that may rob their fellow believers of all
the good they have received in Gods house; and, as for unconverted persons, I
am sure that, if they ever feel impressed under the Word, it will be their utmost
wisdom to take care of that first impression, and not let it be driven away by
foolish or frivolous conversation. Some of us are old enough to recollect the
day before there were matches of the kind we now use, and early on a frosty
morning some of us have tried to strike a light with flint and steel, and the old-
fashioned tinder box. How long we struck, and struck, and watched, and
waited, and at last there was a little spark in the tinder, and then we would hold
the box up, and blow on it very softly, that we might keep that little spark alight
till we had kindled the fire that we wanted. That tenderness over the first spark
is what I invite everyone to practise in spiritual matters.

II. The text goes on to say, that we should practise SUBMISSIVE SILENCE.
Let him sit alone and keep silence.
1. If the burden of sin is pressing upon thee, be sure to abstain from all idle talk,
for if the idle talk of others, as I have reminded thee, can distract thy
thoughts, how much more would thine own!
2. Keep silence also in another respect. Do not attempt to make any excuse for
your sin. Oh, how ready sinners are with their excuses! There was a negro
who used to get drunk and he said that it was his besetting sin; but his
brother negro said, No, Sambo, it is your upsetting sin; and so it was. He
that does not want to get wet should not go out into the rain. Instead of your
excuse making your case any better, it makes it worse; therefore, keep silence
before thy God.
3. Keep silence from all complaining of God. No man is truly saved while he sets
himself up as the judge of God; yet this is the practice of many men. Go, thou
guilty one, sit thee still, and hold thy tongue, and bring thy rebellious heart
to submission. Shall the flax contend with the fire, or the stubble fight with
the flame? What canst thou do in warring with thy Maker?
4. Sit thou alone, and keep silence, next, from all claims of merit. There is no
way of mercy for any one of us until we shut our mouths, and utter not a
single boastful word, but stand guiltily silent before the Lord.
5. I think it is well, too, when a poor sin-burdened soul is silent before God, and
unable to make any bold speeches. It would have been well if Peter had been
silent when he said to his Lord, Although all shall be offended, yet will not
I. I like a man who knows, not only how to speak, but how to sit still; but
that latter part is hard work to many. There came a young man to
Demosthenes to learn oratory; he talked away at a great rate, and
Demosthenes said, I must charge you double fees. Why? he asked.
Why, said the master, I have first to teach you to hold your tongue, and
afterwards to instruct you how to speak. The Lord teaches true penitents
 how to hold their tongues.
III. Now I shall ask your special and patient attention to the third point, which
is, PROFOUND HUMILIATION. What can this expression mean? Let him put
his mouth in the dust, if so be there may be hope.
1. It means, first, that there must be true, humble, lowly, confession of sin. You
say that you have been praying, yet you have not found peace; have you
confessed your sins? This is absolutely necessary. Do not cloak or dissemble
before the Almighty. Let all your sins appear. Take a lowly place; not simply
be a sinner in name, but confess that thou art a sinner in fact and deed.
2. Further than that, when it is said that we are to put our mouths in the dust, it
means that we are to give up the habit of putting ourselves above other
people, and finding fault with others. I believe a sincere penitent thinks
himself to be the worst man there is, and never judges other people, for he
says in his heart, That man may be more openly guilty than I am, but very
likely he does not know so much as I do, or the circumstances of his case are
an excuse for him.
3. It also means that we realise our own nothingness in the presence of
God. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

LAM 3:31-36
The Lord will not cast off forever.

Comfort for the sorrowful

I. A CHEERING ASSURANCE GIVEN.
1. That Gods abandonment of His people is only temporary.
2. That the favour with which he will visit them will be signal and
abundant.

II. AN IMPORTANT REASON ADDUCED. For He doth not afflict willingly, etc.
This may be inferred from,
1. His character. He is a God of love.
2. The relationship He sustains to His people. He is their Father.
3. Their sufferings are attended with many alleviations. Had He any
pleasure in punishing us, so much mercy would not be mingled with
judgment.
4. The object He has in view in afflicting His children. It is for their profit, that
they might be partakers of His holiness.
5. His readiness to remove His chastening hand when the visitation has
answered the end intended.

III. A GRACIOUS LIMITATION SUBJOINED. To crush under His feet all the
prisoners of the earth, to turn aside the right of a man, etc. Whenever He afflicts,
it is
1. Within the bounds of moderation. To crush, expresses what is extreme and
destructive (Isa 27:8; Jer 10:24, 46:28).
2. Never in violation of the principles of equity. To subvert a man in his cause,
the Lord approveth not. He is the righteous Lord, that loveth
righteousness, and all He doeth is in accordance therewith. (Expository
Outlines.)

Divine mercy in human affliction

I. THE RELUCTANCE WITH WHICH THE AFFLICTION PROCEEDS FROM
GOD. He doth not afflict willingly. Suffering is repugnant to His benevolent
nature, why then does He allow it to come?
1. Because it is according to the benevolent laws of the universe. Love has linked
indissolubly suffering and sin together. The greatest calamity that could
happen to the universe would be a dissolution of this connection.
2. Because sufferings have a disciplinary influence. They tend to quicken
spiritual thought, loosen interest in the material, and throw the soul back
upon itself, the spiritual and the everlasting.

II. THE LOVING KINDNESS WITH WHICH AFFLICTIONS ARE EVER

ATTENDED. Yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of His
mercies. Divine mercy is always seen in sufferings.
1. In the slightness of the suffering compared both with the deserts and the
enjoyments. How much misery does the sinner deserve? Let his own
conscience answer. How little are his sufferings, compared with this l How
much happiness does he enjoy every day! What are his pains, compared with
the bulk of his enjoyments?
2. In the alleviations and sustaining ministries afforded under suffering.
How much to alleviate suffering has the greatest sufferer, how many
relieving ministries at hand loving friends, medical science, etc., etc.
(Homilist.)

He doth not afflict willingly.

Reasons for affliction

I. AFFLICTIONS ARE PECULIARLY INSTRUCTIVE. Griefs and pains are very
unacceptable. Most men find it difficult to bear them with commendable patience.
And as the mind is troubled under them, nothing is more natural than to inquire
whence they come and why they are sent. And thus the mind is led away to God,
and reminded of the justice of His character. If there had been no suffering here, if
all around us was fair, and bright, and
happy, every face dressed in smiles, and every heart bounded with joy, men would
have asked where is there any proof of Gods anger? of His aroused and operative
justice? of His great displeasure against sinners? And by such courses of thought the
natural atheism of the human heart would have fortified itself against the truth.

II. GOD SENDS AFFLICTIONS UPON MEN FOR THE SAKE OF THEIR
INFLUENCE AS THEY BEAR UPON THE PASSIONS AND PURPOSES OF LIFE.
1. Amid the prosperities of life, when pains, disappointments, and distress are
strangers, pride is very apt to be strong and influential. The miseries of this
life are sent to repress this pride. They rebuke it. They check it. They stand
in its way and hinder its influences. Pain and pride do not thrive well
together. Far from it. There is little manifest arrogance and haughtiness, or
even ambition, on Caesars bed of sickness. When amid the burnings of his
fever he cries: Give me some drink, Titanius, like a sick girl, he is a very
different man and different example from what he was at the head of his
legions, his strong hand upon his sword. He cares very little now for his
eagles very little for glory.
2. These afflictions of life also repress worldliness of spirit. What a lecture a
fever gives to it! or a funeral! What a lesson the graveyard reads in its ears!
What a rebuke when the man bears to the tomb the son for whom he
thought he was hoarding his thousands!
3. These miseries, too, have an influence upon disappointed ambition,
envy, and such like. They are seen to be impartial.
4. Our miseries, too, affect our purposes. Indeed there are very few of our lost
purposes that are formed without them.
5. Our afflictions tend strangely to impress us with a sense of our
dependence on God.

III. THE AFFLICTIONS EXPERIENCED BY THE PEOPLE OF GOD FURNISH

OPPORTUNITY AND MEANS FOR THE CULTIVATION OF THE HIGHEST AND
MOST DIFFICULT VIRTUES. If there were no instances of distress, we should have
nothing to excite our pity. If there were no instances of want, there would be nothing
to call forth our charity. If nobody injured or offended us, we should have nobody to
forgive. Aside from something to distress or annoy us, the virtue of patience would not
be called into action and cultivated. Our fortitude, if not much of our faith, could never
be exercised at all, if there were no burdens to bear, no distresses to endure, no
furnaces of trial to burn upon us.

IV. HOW COULD YOU, THEN, JUDGE WHETHER YOU WERE A CHILD OF
GOD OR NOT? The temper we have and the demeanour we exhibit in afflictions,
and toward the afflicted, constitute more just criterions of our character than any
other. If there were no afflictions here, we should have no good Samaritan to copy,
and no priest and Levite, whose irreligious example to shun. God may have sent us
trials and filled His world with sorrows, not willingly, but to furnish us opportunity
to test our faith and find whether we are on the way to heaven.

V. AFFLICTIONS MAKE DEMONSTRATIONS OF MEN, PROOFS, EXHIBITS TO

THE WORLD, OF THE POWER AND DIVINITY OF FAITH. The world needs such
demonstrations. The wicked are not to be convinced by principles merely. In trial
grace brightens it shines it demonstrates. For this reason God sends trials.

VI. IT IS JUST IN TIMES AND BY MEANS OF AFFLICTIONS, THAT GOD

BESTOWS UPON YOU HIS MOST PRECIOUS GIFTS. (I. S. Spencer, D. D.)

Afflictive dispensations
I. THE SOURCE WHENCE THEY PROCEED. He causes grief. not the enemy of
souls, but the Friend of sinners; not the tyrant of the hour, but the eternal
Sovereign of the skies. Not a needless sigh ascends from the human bosom; not one
unnecessary tear, which God originates, flows down the face of man. We are sure of
this
1. From the infinite benevolence of His nature, and the mercy that
characterises all His dispensations.
2. From the fewness of our afflictions compared with our deserts.
3. From the large aggregate of happiness which we all enjoy.
4. From the fact that many of our sorrows are self-originated.
5. From the direct statements of the written revelation.

II. THE DESIGN FOR WHICH THEY ARE SENT. Their ordinary uses are
1. To discipline character. This is all the fruit, to take away sin. While we are
under affliction, we are under a process of cure.
2. To prove principle. It does this to ourselves and to others.
3. To increase usefulness. Who visits the sick? Chiefly those who have
suffered affliction.
4. To detach from the vanities of earth, and prepare the soul for heaven.

III. THE ALLEVIATIONS BY WHICH THEY ARE ACCOMPANIED.

1. In the appointment of them you are privileged to discern and
acknowledge the Divine hand.
2. In the endurance of them you are often favoured with peculiar supports
and consolations.
3. In the final review you will assuredly have occasion to bless God for all.
IV. THE SPIRIT IN WHICH THEY SHOULD BE MET.
1. An inquiring spirit. Show me wherefore thou contendest with me.
Inquire into their causes, their tendency, and especially the influence which they
exert upon your character.
2. A prayerful spirit. There is no time more favourable for the exercises of
devotion, no time in which we are more likely to obtain the richest blessings,
than the time of affliction. This is eminently a time in which God may be
found.
 3. A submissive spirit.
4. A thankful spirit.
5. A spirit of cheerful expectation and hope of better days hereafter. (S.
Thodey.)

Origin of evil
I. THE EXISTENCE OF MISERY RECONCILED WITH THE BENEVOLENCE
OF GOD.
1. You were created happy, by your own faults you became miserable;
your Creator, notwithstanding, redeemed you from this state; and the only
penance for your guilt is a mixture of misery with happiness, in that short
interval which passes between the cradle and the grave.
2. Those sufferings to which we are exposed in this world, are absolutely
necessary for the recovery of that perfection in which we were first created,
and for the regaining of that dignity and purity which we forfeited by the
fall.

II. THE UNREASONABLENESS AND INGRATITUDE OF DISCONTENT

AND DESPONDENCY.
1. They were not originally designed for us, but having been introduced by the
folly and guilt of our first ancestor, they are necessary and unavoidable; and
not only so, but they are in a high degree salutary and medicinal.
2. Though it must be allowed that some portion of misery will fall to the share
of all men; that no prudence, virtue, or good fortune can entirely escape it:
yet I believe that it may he assumed, and will hold true for the most part,
that the hours which we spend in ease and happiness are greatly superior, in
number, to those which are passed in misery and pain.
3. Many of the evils which are the subject of our hasty complaints, are brought
on us by our own imprudence; disappointments frequently arise from
unreasonable expectations; poverty is the general product of idleness;
sickness is, in many instances, caused by intemperance; the loss of
reputation, by vice or folly: in these cases, shame, one would think, should
silence our murmurs, and prevent us from attributing to the constitution of
human affairs what is only to be imputed to ourselves. (G. Haggitt, M. A.)

Nature and design of affliction

I. ALL AFFLICTION COMES FROM GOD. Every arrow which wounds the sons of
men receives its commission from the skies, and never fails to strike its appointed
mark: while infinite wisdom appoints, unerring power executes. and so it is, whether
intermediate instrumentality be employed or not. Wicked men and wicked spirits arc
continually made the unconscious instruments of furthering the merciful designs of
Almighty God, in this world of irregularities. They mean evil; but He overrules their
agency for good: and so long as his watchful eye is upon them, and they act under
His control and permission, in afflicting the children of men, the Church may say,
with her Redeemer, in the depths of His expiatory sufferings The cup which My
Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?

II. AFFLICTION SHOULD BE REGARDED BY CHRISTIANS AS NEEDFUL

DISCIPLINE, OR AS SALUTARY CHASTISEMENT. It is true that if God saw fit, He
could as effectually carry on the work of grace in the hearts of His people, and as
speedily ripen them for the bliss of heaven, without, as with, the instrumentality of
affliction: but then, we know that His general plan is to convey the promised influences
of His Spirit through the medium of naturally operating causes. He brings persons
under the sound of the Gospel, and then He makes the faculty of hearing a means of
their becoming wise unto salvation: He softens a mans heart by affliction, and then, as
in a prepared soft, He sows that precious seed which springs up in a rich and abundant
harvest. And this is all that we mean, when we speak of trials as necessary for the
people of God: they are necessary on the principle of that analogy which pervades the
various dispensations of the Almighty, both in Providence and in grace. His watchful
eye detects some irregular desire beginning to operate in the breast, or some evil
passion which, like a flower m the bud, only waits to be acted upon by the influence of
temptation, in order to be brought to maturity: and hence, like a wise and affectionate
parent, He kindly interposes to prevent the threatening danger.

III. AFFLICTION, WHETHER IT COMES UPON THE BELIEVER IN THE WAY

OF DISCIPLINE OR OF CHASTISEMENT, IS REGULATED, FROM FIRST TO
LAST, BY INFINITE WISDOM AND UNBOUNDED MERCY. To Him all hearts are
open: He is intimately acquainted with the peculiar temperament of individual
experience: and He determines, with unerring accuracy, when, and how, and to what
extent, the discipline or the chastisements of His grace are necessary, in each
separate instance. (W. Knight, M. A.)

The infliction of evil upon mankind

Sorrow, pain, change, and death, affecting ourselves, affecting others,
everywhere prevail. This fact we cannot alter. But in the manner in which we view it,
our happiness, our improvement, are deeply concerned. That God could terminate
such a state of things, is certain. That He does not, is equally certain. And yet, He
doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.

I. THE PROOFS OF THIS DOCTRINE.

1. The first proof that He cannot afflict willingly, or, as it is in the Hebrew, from
His heart, is found in His nature. Love can take no delight in our afflictions,
and must ever be ready to mitigate or remove them.
2. We can trace all misery up to causes independent of the will and
appointment of God.
3. In all cases we find more of mercy than judgment. You have sickness, but
how much more health! pain, but how much more ease! disappointment,
but how many gratifications! You sigh for a good which you have not; but
how many do you actually enjoy!
 4. The success of prayer in removing afflictions.

II. MUCH AFFLICTION WILL BE FOUND TO REMAIN AFTER ALL; AND

WE STILL WANT THE REASON OF IT.
1. To keep man in mind that God notices his sins, although He may delay their
final punishment, Sin is no trifling evil.
2. To give a spiritual direction to our affections, by showing to us the
vanity of the world.
3. To call good principles into exercise, and thus to prepare us for heaven.
Faith, patience, sympathy for others, are all strengthened in affliction.

III. THE LIMITATIONS BY WHICH IT IS GRACIOUSLY REGULATED.

1. He does not so afflict and grieve, as to crush under His |set the prisoners of
the earth. Oh no. Our Lord has purchased liberty for the prisoners of the
earth, and the Gospel is the proclamation of it. We are called forth into light
and liberty, into joy and hope.
2. He doth not so afflict as to turn aside the right of a man before the face of
the Most High. The face of the Most High; the Shechinah, or visible glory of
the Lord; symbolising the throne of grace in heaven; God accepting the
oblation and offering of His Son for our sake, and appointing Him our
Mediator, and giving us the covenant right of approaching to Him, with all
our guilt and misery, that we may obtain the provided deliverance. And
never does God turn away the exercise of this gracious right. In darkness,
ask His light; in sorrow, inward joy; in temptation, strength and victory; in
all pressing circumstances, help in thy time of need; in sickness, patience; in
death, life; in all, submission. (R. Watson.)

The evils of life

I. MANY OF THE EVILS WITH WHICH MEN ARE VISITED, BEING THE
INSEPARABLE ATTENDANTS OF VICE AND FOLLY, ARE TO BE ASCRIBED TO
THEIR OWN MISCONDUCT. Whence, for example, the disease and wretchedness of
the voluptuous? Whence the ignominy that overwhelms the false and the unjust?
Whence the fears that disturb the breasts of the guilty, and the heavy punishment that
follows atrocious wickedness? Are they not evils into which men wantonly plunge? and
do not they form a great proportion in the number of human woes? But while the evils
which follow guilt are to be ascribed to the misconduct of the guilty, they serve an
important purpose in the moral government of the world; they set bounds to the
destructive progress of vice, and often are the source of unspeakable good to the guilty
themselves. Often they destroy our relish for sinful enjoyments, and turn the heart into
another course. By withdrawing us for a little from the hurry of our guilty pursuits, they
give us time to pause and consider, and thus the careless may be led to sober thought,
and the criminal stopped in the midst of a career which would have ended in
irrecoverable ruin. Even when remorse is awakened, though its pangs be severe, it is
often the commencement of a new era in a mans life, and the forerunner of virtue and
peace.
II. WITH RESPECT TO THOSE EVILS WHICH DO NOT ARISE FROM GUILT,
BUT ARE COMMON TO THE GOOD EQUALLY WITH THE BAD, THEY ARE
USEFUL FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF OUR MINDS, AND FOR THE TRIAL
AND CONFIRMATION OF OUR VIRTUE. Were there no hardships in our lot, no
dangers to be encountered, no injuries nor calamities to be experienced; our
contentment, our fortitude, our forgiveness, our resignation, virtues which so
adorn the human character, would be untried and unknown. We may add on this
point, that the frequent repetition of evils, sometimes in a milder, and sometimes in
a more formidable shape, not only calls forth but confirms the virtue of good men.
It is well known that when frequent returning opportunities of sinning are indulged,
they produce a general tendency to vice: the heart becomes enslaved to corruption,
and the fetters which retain it in bondage become too strong to be broken, without
the most vigorous efforts. In like manner with respect to our good qualities, each
succeeding act of virtue promotes the general tendency to goodness, and by
repeated exercise, virtuous dispositions at length acquire a prevailing influence.

III. THE EVILS OF LIFE ARE OFTEN THE IMMEDIATE SOURCE OF SOME OF
OUR MOST REFINED ENJOYMENTS, CALLING FORTH THOSE EXERTIONS OF
SYMPATHY WHICH ARE SO GRATEFUL TO THE SUFFERER. Visit the abode
where such a man is labouring under the pressure of calamity, and where will you
find a more improving spectacle? Are they not the best feelings of the heart, which
dictate the prayer of resignation that ascends to God? Are they not the most sacred
and endearing exertions, when affection marks the supplicating eye, and hastens to
relieve, shares and alleviates the weight of sorrow, watches perhaps the last
moments of the departing spirit, and sweetens the slumber of death?

IV. THE EVILS OF LIFE SERVE A FURTHER IMPORTANT USE, BY LESSENING

OUR ATTACHMENT TO THE PRESENT WORLD. Were heaven revealed in its full
splendour, it would excite a fervour of mind amidst which the world would be
utterly forgotten. But it is the will of God that our present duties be fulfilled, and
therefore He hath drawn a veil over the glories of immortality. On the other hand,
lest we should sink law amidst the pleasures of this life, and rest satisfied with them,
we are visited with disappointment and calamity. Thus, without overwhelming us
with the view of heavenly felicity, means are provided to make the prospect welcome
to us, means peculiarly suited to a state of moral discipline; and think how much the
hope of immortality would be banished from mens minds, if nothing occurred to
weaken their attachment to the world. You may observe, moreover, the wise
accommodation of sufferings to the period of life which we have attained. In youth,
some strokes of adversity are sent to touch and awaken our minds. But as we
advance in life, cares multiply, the things of this world present themselves in their
true light, and we discover that trouble and uncertainty are part of the lot of man.
When old age comes, and the period of our departure is at hand, the prospect is
more and more clouded. Our earthly hopes fail, and what remains but to look
beyond the approaching limits of our pilgrimage, and steadily to fix our wishes on
the world to come? Of how much importance it is, that while we continue under our
present preparatory discipline, our views should be directed forward to what finally
awaits us, must be abundantly obvious. It assists us in opposing the power of
temptation; it provides a rich treasure of pure enjoyment, it imparts an elevating
and sanctifying influence to our minds, and thus corresponds with the great
purposes for which our present state is appointed. (T. S. Hardie, D. D.)

Affliction not accidental

A more melancholy, dirge-like plaint than that of this heart-broken prophet
never fell from human lips. The lofty confidence of this suffering man in the fidelity
and compassionate rule of God, his own bitter grief notwithstanding, is not less
majestic than his sorrow is plaintive (vers. 22-26). Then comes this grand prophecy
of a triumphant faith in the providence of a Divine compassion, under which all
suffering is being ministered with a purpose and mixed with a tenderness out of
which emerge definite and healing results, as it is given in the text: For the Lord
will not cast off forever: but though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion. For
He doth not afflict willingly. This apparent contradiction between the Divine
compassion and our human griefs, is today what it has been from the beginning, the
standing problem, the bitter tragedy of human life. It has but one solution. Man as
he actually is, is under a providential training for what it is possible for him to
become. There are not two Gods, as the old Persian theosophy imagined, one good
and the other evil, contending for man; but one God, contending with the evil that is
in man.

I. HERE, THEN, IS THE FACT THAT GRIEF IS THE HERITAGE OF MAN.

1. The whole creation, said the apostle, groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now. Things have not altered much in their outer aspect in
this matter since the apostles time. Life is still the natural history of sorrow
mans life the bitterest of all. Man is born into a world where he does not
so much find the trouble, as the trouble finds him. He is born into it, as the
insect is born into the air. There are troubles which belong to the lot of
individual man. And in this form they are the impartial inheritance of the
race. All men, in whatever other things they may differ, agree in this, that
they are alike born heirs to a patrimony of sorrow. If we escape it in one
form, it meets us in another. There are the troubles which afflict the
community, which fall upon the mass in its aggregation of families,
neighbourhoods, communities, and nations; in which men indiscriminately
seem to be the victims of a common affliction, of which no account can be
given. The air gets contaminated, and chokes them wholesale with its
pestilential fevers. Then there are the troubles which overtake us not
unfrequently in the form of sudden calamities, the terrible things which, in
the shape of accidents, explosions, fires, and shipwrecks, strike dumb a
nations heart. The judgments of God, or some strange license in the physical
agencies of the universe, seem embattled against the interests and the safety
of man. Suffering, like sin, has no vacation: it keeps no holiday. If in this
huge complex of human grief it were true that the guilty only suffered, or
that the profane and the incorrigible were chiefly its victims, one might
suppose that a natural providence were somehow at work to guard the
rights of the virtuous against the wrongs of the sinning. But as we have
seen, there is no discharge in this war. There is one event to the righteous,
and to the wicked.
 2. Let us bear in mind that we have been speaking only of facts, not of causes or
theories. And, further, let it be remembered that these facts are
independent of any belief or disbelief as to their origin or purpose, and as to
the relation, if any, which man holds to a moral government. They are not
the creations of our Christian philosophy; and they are not the coinage of
our Christian faith. They are a difficulty to the Christian philosopher; but
they are equally so to the sceptic. They are to both equally facts. They pertain
as much to the newest infidelity, as they do to the oldest Christian belief. Nor
will atheism itself, the doctrine that chance or fate rules the destinies of men,
afford its advocates even a momentary relief from the perplexing enigmas of
fact. That doctrine, indeed, deprives us of a personal God, and,
consequently, of all intelligent provision in the arrangements of the
universe; it cuts us adrift from all relation to a fatherly providence. Instead
of the living God, our Father in heaven, whose tender mercies are over
all His works, it gives us an unconscious, unintelligent, and eternal nature.
In the place of creative law and a final purpose, it sets up a grim and
remorseless fate. But it mitigates no evil; alleviates no pang; dries no tear in
the sorrowful history of man. You ask: Why, if there be not only goodness
but an Almighty justice reigning over the world and men, does it not stretch
forth its hand to rescue and save from suffering? But why, if there be an
Almighty chance, or fate, does it not do that? If thinking matter, or
materialised thought be God, still it is a God under whose creative auspices
man is born into a world of trouble. By one man, sin entered into the world
and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have stoned.
Man is a fallen being, a self-ruined intelligence poised and quivering
between two infinities; from the one of which he is banished, for the other of
which he is being trained. He is Gods child, in exile. He suffers as a
discrowned king. That is the one interpretation. Suffering and guilt are
correlated facts. They mutually involve and explicate each other.

II. WE HAVE, SECONDLY, THE DIVINE COMPASSION, IN ITS RELATION TO

SUFFERING. He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.
1. And here, first, it is claimed that all human suffering comes within the fore.
knowledge, and is under the control of God. While, as a fact, suffering in its
origin and infliction does always hinge on to secondary causes in the fatalities
and falsities of man; those secondary causes in their action do always,
immediately or remotely, fasten on to the purpose of God. Afflictions are not
an accident. The curse causeless shall not come. The writers of the Old
Testament Scriptures are never more emphatic than in their assertion of this
double parentage of human sorrow. If they knew but little of the scientific set
up and mechanical movements of the laws of nature, they knew a great deal
inspirationally of the supreme life, of which those laws were the appointed
expression. They never ignore the immediate presence of God in His works;
they never unfasten His governing hand from the smallest or the greatest
events. They neither substitute the sovereignty of the Divine will for natural
law; nor put natural law in the place of the Supreme will. As these writers
uniformly teach, the plan of Providence takes in the universe as a whole. The
individual is never forgotten in the multitude or the magnitude of the Divine
cares. The interests of the man have a place in the complications of his
 actings in the world. His eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of men.
Even in what are held to be the accidents of life, those strange, unforeseen,
and as we are apt to think, purely fortuitous events, which anticipate all our
foresight and calculation, and which entail so constantly so large a measure
of suffering upon the man and the community, the inspired writers have a
place for the anticipation and the activity of a prescient providence. They are
contingencies to us, a mere chapter of accidents; but not to the foreplanning
and all-seeing mind of God. Surely there can be no absenteeism, no
indifference, no incapacity in the all-perfect infinite God. Along the myriad
antecedent lines of concatenated human agency at any point of space or
time, He, indeed, is alone able to look. But that the first link and the last link
and each intermediate link in the chain of human causes leading to that and
similar catastrophes fasten on to the foreknowledge and governing will of
God, we can accept on the testimony of His Word. We are speaking of
foresight, of that prescient outlook of Providence, which takes all human
occurrences out of the run of chance surprises, and puts them amongst
foreseen and permitted events. There can be no accidents in the scheme of
infinite thought; there can be no surprise to the intelligence that infinitely
knows We see only results. To God the beginning, with its antecedents all
hidden and remote, is a presence.
2. Many of our troubles, probably most of them, have their causes in ourselves.
They come within the Divine plan not as visitations which God foreordains, or
directly inflicts; but as actualities which He foresees, emergent in the history of
man. They would be equally facts if they were not foreseen: that they are
foreseen does not necessarily make them facts. This is not to shut out all direct
intervention on the part of God from the sufferings of man; it only puts in a
protest against the notion that makes all suffering the direct and arbitrary
infliction of God. Providence is the action of God through law; and, as a general
rule, providential laws work best for him who works the best with them. They
work it may be silently and in secret but they work surely against the man
who works against them. There are laws of health, physical, and mental which, if
a man wilfully disregard or habitually transgress them, will work directly
against and not for him. A man is intemperate in his habits; he lives in excess.
Very well. Subsequent temperance may alleviate, but it cannot wholly
exonerate him from the penalty of a long course of riotous living. In how many
ways, and with what a perverse tenacity of wilful ignorance, we are violating
these laws and are suffering bitterly and hopelessly in consequence, can be
known only to God. That we do violate them, that many of our sad experiences
are due to such violations, it would be idle to dispute. This suicidal raid on the
economies of life, in spite of the warnings and protests of God, is one of our
deadly sins. So, too, in what is called the mystery of sudden death. In the case
of many a successful man of business, the cup is dashed from his lips just when
its fragrant sweetness is being filled to the brim. Of course, everyone is shocked
at the mystery of Providence which, in so arbitrary a manner, puts its arrest on
the life of such a man. To God, it may be, all the mystery of the case is explained
in that mans dogged determination to crowd the work of two lives into one.
The engine. work of the brain was driven at high pressure; and so the
machinery broke down.
3. But now there are troubles and afflictions and these not few which we
 must consider only as the punishment of sin. The Lord doth not afflict
willingly nor grieve the children of men. But then He does afflict and grieve
them, when they offend. He will not cast them off forever. He will have
compassion according to the multitude of His mercies. But the compassion
is in the use of the rod, not in the withholding of it. We thus suffer because
we sin. And, presumably, we all suffer in some form and at some time,
because we have all sinned against some law or commandment of God. Do a
wrong thing, with a bad intent, and though you put the breadth of creation
between you and it, the penalty will reach you. Though hand join in hand,
the wicked shall not be unpunished. In the Old Testament Decalogue we
have a summary of the moral statues under which man is placed. And as
these were intended to determine the actions of men and do determine
them, all men keeping or breaking, or alternately breaking and keeping
them; so the providence of God, as the guardian of law, deals retributively
with men. May we not expect that God will claim the right to be heard, and to
vindicate Himself and His works against the insults of men? No: God will not
abdicate His throne because of the atheism of men. We may refuse to see any
convincing proofs of His busy presence with us. We may openly deny that
any such presence exists; or we may distress ourselves with a superficial
reading of the many mysteries which are burdening the air with shrieks or
breaking human hearts with grief. But that presence, if unseen and
unrecognised by men, is immanent and real God works in silence. He works
and waits, on lines that stretch into the eternal And now, what, in view of
these conclusions, is the first sentiment with which we ought to fill our
minds? Is it not that of profound thankfulness for that revelation in which
the origin and the purpose of all human suffering are made known? In the
meantime, let us always recollect this, that the dealings of God with men
are regulated and are to be interpreted by the fact that we are a race of
sinners. And, finally, let us also remember that the issues of this strife
between God and man are not all played out in the present world. They do
not expire always in the waste of health, in the loss of friends, the wreck of
property, the crumbling down of the pride of man. The last settlement will
cover all the future; as it will explain all the past. Let us then be patient and
submissive. The Lord is at hand. (John Burton.)

Gods afflictive dealings with His people

Whoever will consider the state of the world and human experience cannot
but conclude that God is more concerned to make men holy than happy; for many
are able to rest in their sorrows for the sake of their use and end, but no one finds
rest in unholy delights. In sinful pleasure God follows man with a scourge; in sorrow,
with balm. (J. Pulsford.)

God has no delight in human suffering

God is the greatest of Kings and potentates, but yet has nothing of a tyrant in
His nature. It is no pastime to Him to view the miseries of the distressed, to hear the
cries of the orphans or sighs of the widow. He seems to share in the suffering while
He inflicts it, and to feel the very pain of His own blows while they, fall heavy upon
the poor sinner. Judgment is called Gods strange work, a work that He has no
proneness to, nor finds complacency in. He never lops and prunes us with His
judgments, because He delights to see us bare, but because He would make us
fruitful. Common humanity never uses the lance to pain and torture, but to restore
the patient. But now the care and tenderness of an earthly parent or physician is but
a faint shadow and resemblance of that infinite compassion which God bears to His
children, even in the midst of His severest usage of them. (R. South.)

LAM 3:35
To turn aside the right of a man.

Mans rights and wrongs

I. MAN HAS RIGHTS.
1. Man has an inalienable right to the enjoyment of that happiness for
which he was created. What is necessary to this?
(1) Physical health. Where there is a diseased, enfeebled body there cannot
be happiness. But what millions in this free country of ours, who have
committed no crime, are doomed by the tyrannic force of commercial
cupidity, and by the injustice of legislation, to spend their time in filthy
garrets and in foetid alleys.
(2) Intellectual culture is essential to happiness. We have a mind as well as
a body; nay, we are mind. There is no paradise for man where the tree of
knowledge does not bloom, knowledge gives a new interest to life, a new
meaning to the universe, a new sphere for the full play of our faculties.
If, then, knowledge is essential to happiness, what is necessary to
knowledge is a right.
(3) A good conscience is a necessary element of happiness. He who surrenders
his conscience to the dictates of others, degrades his nature; and he who is
forced to lend his support to principles contrary to his own convictions is an
insulted and an injured man.
(4) Social respect is another element in happiness. Whatever tends to degrade a
man in the estimation of his contemporaries is an infringement of this right.
2. Man has an inalienable right to those conditions essential to the discharge of his
obligations. Duty meets us everywhere, it is ubiquitous, it meets us at home and
abroad, in solitude and society, in business and in pleasure. The cardinal duties
of our being may be put into three groups, domestic, civil, and religious.
(1) The domestic group, The duty of filial reverence and love meets us at the
beginning of our history, and is enjoined both by nature and the Bible.
Honour thy father and thy mother, is a mandate that not only rings in
the Decalogue, but echoes ever more through natural reason and
conscience. It is not incumbent on any child to honour morally ignoble
parents, or to love those whose characters arc false, and mean, and
corrupt. Nor could they do so. Parental government, therefore, is based
upon the right that children have to expect from parents the spiritually
noble and pure.
 (2) The civil group. Outside of the domestic sphere, out lying close to its
door, there is the great world of our fellow creatures which we can
society. This society has its institutions, its laws, and government. We live
in this world, and we cannot live without it. Whoever is the chief
administrator of the laws that govern society, whether placed in his
supreme position by lineage or suffrage, for his whole life or for a certain
period, he is the king, and we are commanded to honour and obey him.
But this duty implies that the king is honour-worthy, and that his laws
are righteous.
(3) The religious group. The great duty that grows out of our relation to our
Maker is this, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, etc. But this supreme
obligation of humanity implies rights on mans raft. If the Supreme Being
requires me to love Him supremely He must furnish me with a revelation
of Himself, and with capacities capable of understanding and
appreciating that revelation. He must appear as the infinitely lovely One,
the altogether beautiful, in order to kindle my highest affections. Now in
relation to Him our rights are equal to our obligations. He has given us
all that we require to fulfil the duties He demands.

II. MAN HAS WRONGS. His wrongs are the antitheses or rather,
deprivations and violations of his rights.
1. How mans wrongs are inflicted. The despoilers of his rights may be
divided into two classes, the external and the internal.
(1) The external. Who and what outside of man deprive him of his rights?
Unrighteous government. Who can look at some of the laws of England
without denouncing them as unrighteous. Take the laws in relation to land.
Take the laws in relation to labour. Honest labour is an institution of
heaven. And is not that law unrighteous which, to support regal luxuries,
and gorgeous pageantries, government pensions, huge naval and military
establishments, despoils the honest worker of much of the produce of his
labour? Secular monopoly. Vast as are the resources of this earth, they are
not boundless. It is the purpose of our Maker that all men should have an
adequate, if not an equal participation in them. He, therefore, who
appropriates to his own personal use an amount which would be sufficient
supply the wants of a number, is a monopolist, and interferes with the rights
or the multitude. Social chicanery. It has been said that so rife is the
ravenous greed and the unscrupulous dishonesty in society, that one can
scarcely have a business transaction with any man without the liability of
being cheated. Justice between man and man is generally torpid, and often
extinct. The spirit of fraud and falsehood fills the air.
(2) The internal. There are elements or forces in the human soul that are
perhaps greater despoilers of rights than any that are without: in fact, the
external tyrants derive their energy and continuance from them, outward
despots would scarcely live were it not for the inward. Indolence. Perhaps
in most men naturally the desire for rest is stronger than that for action.
The lazy hang on others, they will fawn on and flatter tyrants,, only let them
have a little more folding of the hands in sleep. Servility. This, indeed, is
an offspring of the former. It means the loss of all sense of manly
 independency. Credulity is also the child of indolence; not until men rouse
themselves to intellectual study so as to become qualified to form an
independent judgment, will they free themselves from those fraudulent
forces and impostures that turn aside the right of a man. Intemperance in
either form, eating or drinking, is one of the greatest despoilers of human
rights.
2. How mans wrongs arc to be removed.
(1) Not by violent declamation against existing authorities. Demagogism
has ever done more harm than good.
(2) Nor yet can you regain your rights by physical force. The real chains
that fetter men are too subtle to be cut by the sword.
(3) How then? By the promotion of sound knowledge. Popular ignorance
is the cradle of tyrannies. By sound knowledge I mean primarily, a
knowledge of the ethics of Christ. (Homilist.)

Might and right

I. PITY SHOULD ALWAYS TEMPER PUNISHMENT.
1. To prevent despondency. Despondency unmans men.
2. Punishment should always be tempered with pity that it may prove a
discipline. The good have that comfort in adversity, that the worst that
meets them here is intended for their good.
3. Punishment should always be tempered with pity, in consideration of the
dignity and great possibilities of mans nature. He was created in Gods
image; he may be restored to the same image again. God punishes us in pity
for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness.

II. RIGHT SHOULD ALWAYS GUIDE MIGHT.

1. Because the right will be just to a mans physical needs and his moral
powers. To trample upon those who are down is brutal conduct. That is to let
might crush the right. Those who are down should excite our pity, not
incite us to perpetrate cruelty.
2. Because the right will respect mans religious requirements.
3. Because the right will teach men to respect the claims of their fellow men
and the truth.

III. JUSTICE SHOULD ALWAYS BE THE AIM OF LAW.

1. Because the Lord is an eyewitness of all we do. Our most secret
thoughts before ever they become actions are known to Him.
2. Because the Lord is pleased or pained with all we do. If we really and
devoutly considered this how differently would we act frequently.
3. Because God will punish all wrong-doers. (D. Rhys Jenkins.)
The right of a man before God
There is a general impression that God does as He pleases without any
reference to sanctions or immunities of ours. This, however, is far wide of the truth.
God is never arbitrary.
I. One of our rights with respect to God is LIFE. This is a natural right. It is written
that when God created man He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life so that
he became a living soul. In this particular man was created in the Divine likeness.
His life was like a spark thrown off from the infinite life of Deity. It is impossible,
therefore, to think of annihilation or of conditional immortality in connection with
him. Our life is the only created thing in the universe that has not in it the seed and
certainty of death. An oak may resist the storms of a thousand years, but it falls at
last. Our bodies are never free from disease; it is only a question of time when each
shall return to the dust as it was. But the soul has in it no seeds of decay. Its eyes
never grow dim, its blood does not stagnate, and whenever the query is
propounded, If a man die, shall he live again? its answer is instant, I shall live and
not die!

II. The second of our rights before God is FREEDOM. This again is a natural right. It
belongs to us by virtue of the fact that God created us in his own likeness. In this again
man is unique among all created things. The sun goes forth out of its chambers in the
morning to run its race, and has no alternative. God speaks and it obeys. The sea rolls
to and fro as He directs. But to you and me He says, Thou shalt, and if I please I may
make answer, I will not. If would win me He must reason with me. If He would
capture me He must draw me with the cords of a man. If, notwithstanding His
goodness, we persist in sin, He can only suffer us to have our way. Ye will not come
unto Me that ye might have life.

III. We are entitled to THE FULL BENEFIT OF THE MORAL LAW. This also is a
natural right. We are normal beings. As God Himself is the source and centre of law,
so we, being made in His likeness, are made under law; and we may claim all the
benefits and privileges of it. There is, however, little comfort in claiming these
privileges of the moral law. For what is law? The soul that sinneth, it shall die. And
what is justice? Eternal separation from God and goodness. We are sinners, all alike
under the penalty of death. To stand upon our rights just here is to court despair.

IV. Fortunately for us we have another right, not natural like the
foregoing, but conferred, to wit, the right of APPEAL FROM LAW AND JUSTICE TO
THE MERCY OF GOD. No one among us can presume to stand upon his merits. On Sir
Henry Lawrences tomb at Lucknow is this inscription: Here lies a man who tried to do
his duty. May God have mercy on his soul! If he tried to do his duty why did he not ask
for justice? Because, no matter how earnestly he had striven to live well, he had made a
measurable failure of it. Mercy, therefore, was Sir Henrys only hope. He is a wise man
who in like manner, after doing his best and being mindful of his shortcomings, casts
himself with an utter abandon on the mercy of his God.
1. This right of appeal is a conferred right. It is purely of grace. But once
conferred it is inalienable. Him that cometh unto Me no matter how
 scarlet his sins I will in no wise cast out.
2. This right is the purchase of the Saviours blood. But for His atoning work it
could not, consistently with justice, have been conferred upon us.
3. This right is conditioned upon the exercise of faith in Jesus Christ. A man may
do as he pleases about exercising this faith, but in default of it he lives obviously
under the law and must take the consequences. (D. J. Burrell, D. D.)

Justice
The cultivation of wisdom, courage, and temperance is necessary to the doing of
justice, and the cultivation of justice reacts favourably on the cultivation of these other
virtues. But, on the whole, those three first are personal; this is public. In cultivating
the first three virtues, a man is looking within; in cultivating this fourth one, he is
looking without and around. For justice is to render to everyone his due. It is the
virtue of a man, not as he stands alone, but as he stands in society; and as he cultivates
this virtue, he has to keep his eye upon all his fellow creatures, his superiors, inferiors,
and equals, and on all the circles of society in which he stands, such as the family, the
city, the nation, and the Church. As man has relations to other creatures beneath him
and to other beings above him, as well as to his fellow creatures, it has sometimes been
proposed to include in justice the duties of man to animals, and the duties of man to
God. I notice in some of the newer books on ethics, that the subject of cruelty to
animals is discussed in connection with justice, and in many of the older books, in the
writings of the schoolmen, and especially in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, the duties
of man to God are not only included in justice, but made the principal part of it: all parts
of Divine worship, for instance, being discussed under this head. But it seems to me
that it is better to limit justice to the duties of human beings to one another. This is a
wide enough field. It comprehends the mutual duties of parents and children,
husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbours, clergy and laymen,
employers and employed, rulers and subjects, and others too numerous to mention. It
anyone in all these relationships were a model man, then he would be a perfect man,
and hence, justice has often been treated as if it were the whole of virtue; and even
Aristotle, in an unusual outburst of enthusiasm, says: It is more beautiful than the
morning or the evening star. When justice is defined as rendering to every one his due,
that might seem a very simple affair, but it is not so simple as it looks; and this you
immediately begin to realise if you ask what is due to any other person, because the
question always slips in, And what is due to me? That is what makes it so difficult to
keep the balance straight the bias in favour of self. Note

I. The justice of the law of the land.

II. The justice of public opinion.

III. The justice of conscience.

IV. The justice of Christ.

That everyone should get his due is so essential to human welfare, that in every
country, in the slightest degree above the level of barbarism, the very best brains
have been set to determine what justice is, and the united strength of the community
to enforce it. In ancient Rome, for instance, the Twelve Tables were set up in the
market place, that everyone might read them, and there, in the plainest words, the
citizen was told his duty, and was made acquainted with the penalties of
transgression. In our own country and in other civilised countries, picked men are
brought together in Parliament, who spend their time year by year, defining what
justice is. Law courts are set up; judges and juries sit; lawyers plead, to bring special
eases under the general laws which Parliament has enacted; and prison and
punishment exist for the purpose of bringing home to the general mind the majesty
of justice. These institutions in our midst form a school, to which we are all sent,
that we may learn to give to everyone his due. The law of the land has been our
schoolmaster, telling us what to do and what not to do, and telling us effectually;
and the very unconsciousness of our minds as to our having anything to do with the
police and the prison, is just the evidence of how well this schoolmaster has done his
work. In all civilised countries the justice of the law of the land is an inheritance from
many centuries, during which the best brains of the country have been set apart to
determine what justice is. In our own law, extremes of wisdom mingle, derived on
the one hand from the classical nations, and on the other hand from our Teutonic
ancestors. And yet, in spite of all that has been done, and is being done, from year to
year, the law of the land is a very imperfect embodiment of justice, and a man may
all his life keep out of the clutches of the police, and yet be an extremely unjust man.
If a man steals a pound note from his neighbours, the law will set its whole
machinery in operation to deal with him, but the very same person may, by the arts
of temptation carried on for many years, make the son of his neighbour a drunkard,
and his daughter something still worse, and yet the law of the land may not say a
single word. A man may all his life keep wide of the clutches of the law, which may
never have one word to say to him; yet society may know him to be guilty of deeds
which it intensely despises, and will not allow to be committed with impunity. It
does not fine or imprison, but it turns its back on him. Thus, silently but sternly,
society punishes the man who is known to be breaking the eighth commandment,
and especially the woman who is known to be breaking the seventh commandment.
It is often very cruel at all events, it looks cruel and yet on the whole it is
beneficent, and the world is a far more habitable place because of the school of
public opinion into which all have to come. Then there is the school of conscience.
There are holes in the net woven by public opinion, just as there are in those woven
by the law of the land, far worse than that even. There are many cases in which public
opinion commands things it ought to forbid, and in which it forbids the things that it
ought to command. But perhaps a custom established in public opinion is more
difficult to deal with than a wrong statute. The appeal from it, however, is to the
conscience of the individual, and this is the third school into which we all have to
pass. If a man is doubtful about what is right and what is wrong, let him simply
retire with the question into his own breast, and ask, What ought I to do? and if he
is really willing to do what he knows to be right, he will very seldom be without the
right answer. This often is a far sterner tribunal than either that of public opinion or
the law of the land. The great interest of religion is to strengthen the conscience, so
that a man may feel that in its presence he is standing before a more august judge
than if he were in any court of law, or than if he were surrounded by a whole theatre
of spectators. Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to
them. That is the soul of justice. As I have just quoted the golden rule, it might be
thought we had already got to the justice of Christ. Jesus was a moralist. He was the
heir and successor of the prophets. He denounced wrong with a plainness never
elsewhere exemplified in the world. He emitted many rules of justice, and the golden
rule among them. Yet that was not the principal lift He gave to justice. It is well to
understand that. There are things that make it easy to give to any one his due, or
even perhaps a little more than his due. There is not a town in the world where the
well dressed do not receive more courteous treatment than the ragged. That is
human nature. I dare say it is sometimes contemptible, but at all events it is a good
thing to take advantage of it for those at the opposite extreme of society. What
Jesus did to secure justice for the common man, was to raise the estimation of the
common man. If the poor receive scanty consideration because there is nothing
about them to attract attention, on the other hand, they will receive respect and
attention if they are invested with dignity, and none can take in the teaching of Jesus
Christ without recognising that the humblest belong to that humanity which He
took into His heart, and for which He sacrificed His life. And if thus we look at our
fellow creatures through the eyes of Jesus Christ, if we see God in them, then we
have a new and the finest of all reasons for treating them with justice. Let us take for
an illustration that which we are all thinking so much about in the present day, the
relations of employers and employed. What do these four kinds of justice say about
what the employer owes to the employed and what the employed owe to the
employer? Take the law of the land; what it says is very brief and to the point; it just
says to the employer: Pay that thou owest, and to the employed, Thou shalt not
steal. There are multitudes both of employers and employed to whom that is
perfectly simple, but are there not others to whom these simple statements are the
very thunder of God? Then public opinion goes a good deal further, although its
voice in this case is divided. There is an opinion of employers which employers,
perhaps, listen to too exclusively, and there is a public opinion of the employed to
which they, perhaps, listen too exclusively. But there is a wider public opinion that is
more impartial, and I think I should say that it frowns upon the employer of labour
who is not endeavouring to bring the conditions of labour in his business up to the
best that has been attained in the same business; and this wider public opinion
frowns upon the employee if he does not do his best. Outside public opinion in such
eases is apt to be only partially informed, and its decisions need correction by larger
knowledge; but I should say that on the whole they are wholesome; and it is good
for both sides that the voice of public opinion is to be heard. There is the appeal,
though, for both employer and employed, to conscience. A man can go into his own
breast and ask, What is my duty? What would God like me to do? And then there still
remains the justice of Christ. What would Christian principle say in this case? It
would remind the employer that what are called his hands are in reality immortal
beings, and therefore ought to be spared as much as possible things such as Sabbath
labour and excessive hours, which secularise and brutalise; and bid servants hear the
voice of Christ behind them as they labour, Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as
unto the Lord and not unto men. I am not saying that even with the help of all
these four kinds of light the problem of justice is always easy. I do not think it is. It
seems to me to be specially difficult where, not individuals, but large bodies of men
are concerned. But it is only by keeping these four lights streaming down upon life
that the relations of men will become more just, and so more sweet, and that the
individual will be prepared to appear before that tribunal where all the judgments of
this earth will be reconsidered, and where a decision will be given from which there is
no appeal. (J. Stalker, D. D.)

LAM 3:37
Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it not?

Gods Word supreme

Here we are called upon to produce instances in which mans word has
prevailed against the Word of God. Has any man commanded the sun to go
backwards, and the sun has obeyed the instruction? Has any man commanded the
seasons to change the order of their procession, and have they changed accordingly?
Has any man been able to reverse moral duties, moral actions, and moral
consequences, so that evil shall end in joy, and iniquity shall conduct to rest and
heaven? The Lord asks for the production of evidence by which people may be able
to judge as to moral duty and moral consequence. The interrogation assumes a
gracious and initial fact, namely, that the Word of the Lord alone can stand fast, and
ultimately and completely prevail in the direction and settlement of human affairs.
Has this assumption the justification of history? H so, see what wondrous inferences
may be drawn from that justification! Let us at once inquire for the Word of the
Lord, and study it, and exclude from our ears all other voices, because in the word of
the Lord alone is complete wisdom, and in the testimony of the Lord is an assured
protection. (J. Parker, D. D.)

LAM 3:38-39
Out of the mouth of the Most High proceedeth not evil and good?

God and evil

The eternal problem of the relation of God to evil is here treated with the
keenest discrimination. That God is the supreme and irresistible Ruler, that no man
can succeed with any design in opposition to His will, that whatever happens must
be in some way an execution of His decree, and that He, therefore, is to be regarded
as the author of evil as well as good these doctrines are so taken for granted that
they are neither proved not directly affirmed, but thrown into the form of questions
that can have but one answer, as though to imply that they are known to everybody,
and cannot be doubted for a moment by anyone. But the inference drawn from them
is strange and startling. It is that not a single living man has any valid excuse for
complaining. That, too, is considered to be so undeniable that, live the previous
ideas, it is expressed as a self-answering question. But we are not left in this
paradoxical position. The evil experienced by the sufferer is treated as the
punishment of his sin. What right has he to complain of that? Quite a number of
considerations arise out of the curious juxtaposition of ideas in this passage. In the
first place, it is very evident that by the word evil the writer here means trouble
and suffering, not wickedness, because he dearly distinguishes it from the sin the
mention of which follows. That sin is a mans own deed, for which he is justly
punished. The poet, then, does not attribute the causation of sin to God; he does not
speculate at all on the origin of moral evil. Meanwhile a very different problem, the
problem of suffering, is answered by attributing this form of evil quite unreservedly
and even emphatically to God. Now, is there not something reassuring in the
thought that evil and good come to us from one and the same source? There must be
a singleness of aim in the whole treatment of us by providence, since providence is
one. Thus, if only as an escape from an inconceivably appalling alternative, this
doctrine of the common source of good and evil is truly reassuring. We may pursue
the thought further. Since good and evil spring from one and the same source, they
cannot be so mutually contradictory as we have been accustomed to esteem them.
They are two children of a common parent; then they must be brothers. But if they
are so closely related a certain family likeness may be traced between them. This
does not destroy the actuality of evil. But it robs it of its worst features. If it is so
closely related to good, we may not have far to go in order to discover that it is even
working for good. Then if evil and good come from the same source it is not just to
characterise that source by reference to one only of its effluents. We must not take a
rose-colored view of all things, and relapse into idle complacency, as we might do if
we confined our observation to the pleasant facts of existence, for the unpleasant
facts loss, disappointment, pain, death are equally real, and are equally derived
from the very highest Authority. Neither are we justified in denying the existence of
the good when overwhelmed with a sense of the evil in life. Is it only by accident that
the poet says evil and good, and not, as we usually put the phrase, good and evil?
Good shall have the last word. Evil exists; but the finality and crown of existence is
not evil, but good. The conception of the primary unity of causation which the
Hebrew poet reaches through his religion is brought home to us today with a vast
accumulation of proof by the discoveries of science. The uniformity of law, the co-
relation of forces, the analyses of the most diverse and complex organisms into their
common chemical elements, the evidence of the spectroscope to the existence of
precisely the same elements among the distant stars, as well as the more minute
homologies of nature in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, are all irrefutable
confirmations of this great truth. Moreover, science has demonstrated the intimate
association of what we cannot but regard as good and evil in the physical universe.
Thus, while carbon and oxygen are essential elements for the building up of all living
things, the effect of perfectly healthy vital functions working upon them is to combine
them into carbonic acid, which is a most deadly poison; but then this noxious gas
becomes the food of plants, from which the animal life in turn derives its
nourishment. Similarly microbes, which we commonly regard as the agents of
corruption and disease, are found to be not only natures scavengers, but also the
indispensable ministers of life, when clustering round the roots of plants in vast
crowds they convert the organic matter of the soil, such as manure, into those
inorganic nitrates which contain nitrogen in the form suitable for absorption by
vegetable organisms. The more clearly we understand the processes of nature the
more evident is the fact of her unity, and therefore the more impossible is it for us to
think of her objectionable characteristics as foreign to her being alien immigrants
from another sphere. Physical evil itself looks less dreadful when it is seen to take its
place as an integral part of the complicated movement of the whole system of the
universe. But the chief reason for regarding the prospect with more than
satisfaction has yet to be stated. It is derived from the character of Him to whom
both the evil and the good are attributed. We can go beyond the assertion that these
contrarieties spring from one common origin to the great truth that this origin is to
be found in God. All that we know of our Father in heaven comes to our aid in
reflecting upon the character of the actions thus attributed to Him. The account of
Gods goodness that immediately precedes this ascription of the two extreme
experiences of life to Him would be in the mind of the writer, and it should be in the
mind of the reader also. The poet has just been dwelling very emphatically on the
indubitable justice of God. When, therefore, he reminds us that both evil and good
come from the Divine Being, it is as though he said that they both originated in
justice. The last verse of the triplet startles the reader with an unexpected thought.
The considerations already adduced are all meant to check any complaint against the
course of providence. Now the poet appends a final argument, which is all the more
forcible for not being stated as an argument. At the very end of the passage, when
we are only expecting the language to sink into a quiet conclusion, a new idea
springs out upon us, like a tiger from its lair. This trouble about which a man is so
ready to complain, as though it were some unaccountable piece of injustice, is simply
the punishment of his sin! The deserts of the city are only the deserts of her citizens.
It will be for everybody to say for himself how far the solution of the mystery of his
own troubles is to be looked for in this direction. A humble conscience will not be
eager to repudiate the possibility that its owner has not been punished beyond his
deserts, whatever may be thought of other people, innocent children in particular.
There is one word that may bring out this aspect of the question with more
distinctness the word living. The poet asks, Wherefore doth a living man
complain? While the sufferer has his life preserved to him he has no valid ground of
complaint. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

Through repentance to faith

Nothing could be more dismal than the opening of this third lament over the
ruin which had befallen the Holy City, and the dire calamities which had overtaken her
people; but there is some radiant shining at the heart of it. One side of a mountain is
often wrapped in clouds, while the other is bathed in noonday brightness. I never have
a chagrin, said Goethe, but I make a poem of it. Some of the divinest poems we know
have been the result of the saddest mortifications of life. The author sings from the
heart of a fiery experience of his own, as well as that which he has shared with his
nation. He comprehends the depths if not the heights of human experience, and yet he
has kept the faith. He can still declare that the Lord is his portion, and that his
mercies are a multitude, new every morning. Ah! these are the men to speak to us
about the compassion of God: men who have had to climb the climbing way, and who
declare the truth in tones that were born in the darkness and sorrow of the night. It is
easy enough for most of us, whose lives have fallen in pleasant places, to talk to the
broken-hearted about the love of God, and to persuade ourselves that He is the Father
of us all and infinitely good. But if we have taken a light skimming view of life, if we
have lived where it is always afternoon, it becomes us to be silent, or to speak only in
the name of those who have faced the sternest realities, and have yet believed. We can
listen with patience to these ancient seers. They speak without mocking the worlds
trouble. They have stood where life wails its saddest notes and have not lost hope.
True, this man had been tempted to believe, in one dark moment, that though God was
leading him, He was against him; but when we follow him into the light when his night
is past and jocund day stands tip-toe on the mountains, we hear him speak of the
compassions which fail not. Oh, this is faith, is it not, when a man can stand face to
face with all the contradictions of life, face to face with his own unbelief, and say, I will
not let Him go; I will have God in the whole of my life, in its tragedies as well as in its
bliss, in its broken fortunes as well as in its sunny days? Out of the mouth of the Most
High cometh there not evil and good? For though He cause grief yet will He have
compassion, according to the multitude of His mercies. This is the faith that
overcomes all repining. The Hebrew singer is one with the great prophets in this, that
he is in no confusion about the source and meaning of Israels trouble. He does not find
the good hand of God in His deliverances alone. There is mercy even in the exile; in the
sweeping disasters which have overtaken the nation. He who has been with His people
in the calm is with them in the storm. Nay, He creates the storm, and causes the grief,
and the living man has no ground of complaint though he be punished for his sins,
for the wages of sin is death and it is of the Lords mercies that he is not
consumed. And here is the key to the mans faith. These are not songs of sorrow alone;
they are songs of confession and repentance, and therefore of hope. Here are the Jews
in Babylon far away from the city they love. Their hearts are broken and their eyes are
dimmed with tears; but they are tears of remorse leading to a searching of heart and a
trying of their ways. The author would have them believe that exile is the outcome of
their sin. It is not faithfulness that has compassed their downfall. The Lord has afflicted
Zion not willingly, but for the multitude of her transgressions. He has suffered His
people to go into exile that it may work its moral discipline and bring them back to
confidence in Him, and to righteousness of life. Wherefore doth a living man complain,
a man for the punishment of his sins? Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to
the Lord. There is some suffering, it does not need to be said, that is not for
punishment. The sharpest pang of the singer as he thinks of the miseries of Israel comes
from the cry of suffering children. But thinking not of children but of men and women, it
is a commonplace to say that some of the noblest and saintliest lives have been shaped
in affliction. It is the accent of self-righteousness that finds in all your suffering the
punishment of sin. A man whose heart has never been broken should have little to say
to another man of his sins. And yet, surely, no man need ask why he suffers. If you
have sinned, your own heart will tell you plainly what is the sin for which you suffer. If
you have not sinned, you will have something still to do with your sorrow. There were
some devout Jews who were not the cause of Israels exile, and they too had lessons to
learn which have enriched all posterity. But the lesson for all of us is this: that
transgression leads to exile; that the broad way narrows; that to the man who persists
in sin there must come a day when he will be confronted by fearful threatenings and
apprehensions, and when the judgments of the Most High will breathe within him their
Divine protest against his sin. He whose compassions fail not can yet cause grief. The
Most High sends forth evil as well as good. In the heart of the Father dwells a most
exacting righteousness, that will by no means clear the guilty until they have
acknowledged their offence. Oh listen; there is suffering which is for sin. This man is
speaking of facts; addressing living men, conscious of grievous wrongdoing, bidding
them take all the punishment honestly and humbly, and count it a mercy new every
morning that a throbbing heart and beating pulse are Gods assurance that He will
have compassion, if they will return to the Lord. The one hope of our coming to this
faith in His compassions is in confession and repentance. The Gospel of forgiveness and
peace will never find the man who does not know the bitterness and guilt of sin. The
experiences we have with conscience are to produce in us that godly sorrow which
worketh repentance unto salvation. This, indeed, is the Gospel for all of us. Whatever
be our trouble repentance is our first need. You may not be able to trace your sorrow
to any particular sin. It may not be due to any sin of yours at all; but I tell you, the one
spirit to which Gods reason for causing any grief is never revealed, is the spirit that has
not known and will not know repentance. Who are we, the best of us, to say that this or
that trial of life has nothing to do with our sin? Nay, it sometimes troubled these holy
men of old, lest when they had confessed the sin of which they were conscious, there
should be lurking within them latent evil, beyond their finding out, and only to be
revealed to them by Him from whom nothing is concealed, who will have truth in the
hidden parts. Search me, O God, they cried, and know my heart, try me and know
my thoughts, and see if there be any way of wickedness in me. It is only to the penitent
soul that the secret of the Lords compassions can be revealed; you cannot believe that
deep love lieth under these pictures of time, if you are among the wise and prudent;
but if you are among the babes, of a humble and receptive spirit, the day will come
when you can say, in the face of every perplexity, even so Lord, for so it seemeth good
unto Thee. These, I say, are the men to speak to us about the compassion of God.
They know the love that passeth knowledge, for they know the sin that love bears. And
Divine love cannot further go than that. It was for this He came, who was a Man of
Sorrows, and acquainted with grief; for this that He stood in dark Gethsemane and
died the death of the Cross. And when you and I stand with Him there, and enter into
the fellowship of His suffering, then all life is transformed for us. There is something for
the heart to rest upon in the deepest distresses. We can go bravely to our encounter with
whatever shall come to us, for He is with us who has borne our griefs and carried our
sorrows. Has the Most High caused you any grief? Surely He has! There is some
pathetic thing concealed in every heart. Then what will you do? Will you complain, will
you resent it as a bitter and undeserved wrong? Will you go on to the end remembering
nothing but the wormwood and the gall? Or will you say, Search me, O God, and
know my heart, try me and know my thoughts, send whatsoever ordeal Thou wilt, so
that at the last I may know thy salvation? Then you are on the way to that attitude of
soul which is faith. (John Holden, M. A.)

Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of

his Sins?

Wherefore complain in affliction

This question suggests two considerations; each of which demonstrates the
injustice of the complaint. Why should a living man complain? a living man! Life is
still left thee; and of whatsoever thou hast been stripped, there is such a counterpoise
in the continuance of life that complaint must be groundless. A man for the punish.
meat of his sins! There hath nothing befallen thee saving the just recompense of thy
misdoing. How can a complaint against justice be itself just! Thus are these two
arguments of the text demonstrative of the unfairness of human complaint when the
dealings of the Most High pass under review. And these two arguments we will apply,
first, to Gods general dealings; and, secondly, to His individual.

I. How easy and how common is to it discourse in A QUERULOUS STRAIN ON THE

FACT OF OUR BEING MADE TO SUFFER FOR A FOREFATHERS
TRANSGRESSIONS AND ON THE FACT OF OUR DERIVING A POLLUTED
NATURE FROM GUILT IN WHICH PERSONALLY WE TOOK NOT ANY SHARE.
And we do not deny that the question of original sin is one of great difficulty; and
that there requires a chastened and subjugated intellect ere the doctrine can be
received in its full and scriptural extent. Nevertheless the transactions of paradise
were not so dark and unintelligible that we can decipher nothing of the fitness and
justice of the present dispensation. Let it be remembered that not only was Adam
the natural parent of the human race; he was also their federal representative; he
stood forth as their head, so that by his obedience they were to stand, and by his
disobedience to fail. And no appointment could be presented unto the human
population with so great a likelihood of duty and blessing. Had the choice been in
our power, we would gladly have given our fate into the keeping of Adam;
stimulated as he must have been to obedience by so rich a deposit. For there was an
infinitely greater probability that Adam, with the fall of millions committed to his
keeping, would have watched diligently against the assaults of temptation, than that
any lonely individual of his descendants, left to obey for himself, and disobey for
himself, should have maintained his allegiance and preserved his fidelity. Therefore
do we say, that in appointing mankind to stand or fail in Adam, God dealt with them
by a measure of the widest benevolence. No other arrangement can be conceived
which would have been equally likely to have advanced their well-being. But if so,
complaint is at once removed by the second consideration which the text suggests.
It is for the punishment of our sins that we are born the children of wrath and
condemnation; and, if for just punishment of our sins, by what right do we
complain? If it be in unison with the attributes of God that we should all be
reckoned to have taken share in Adams transgression, it follows that whatever there
be of bitterness in our birthright, it has been imposed only as a punishment of sin;
and all complaint at our condition is complaint against justice, and therefore itself
must be unjust. And this one part of the question of Jeremiah applies itself to
reproof of complaint at Gods general dealings with man; namely, the part which
represents suffering as the punishment of sin. Will not the other part do the same
Wherefore doth a living man complain? You learn that the threatening by which
Adam was warned in tasting the tree of knowledge was most explicit and decisive,
whereas the mode in which the threatening was executed seems hardly to accord
with the denunciation, In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die,
was the threatening; but Adam died not on the day that he ate, though, we believe,
that he then became liable to death. And we may well suppose that the actual
infliction of death was suspended through the interposition of the Mediator; and
that when Adam sinned, and with him the whole race of which he might be the
progenitor, it was only because Christ Jesus had undertaken from all eternity to
achieve redemption that the guilty pair were not immediately destroyed. And,
therefore, I can never feel within me the boundings of life, nor avail myself of the
furniture of mental endowment, nor survey the varied loveliness of-creation, nor
mark the springing of flowers, nor hear the warbling of birds without being
reminded that I am reaping the fruits of the Mediators passion; for unless there had
been His omnipotent interposition, the original curse might have received literal
execution; and the throbbings of life have ceased to beat throughout this creation. If
our very life have been given to us only in return for the marvellous humiliation to
which Deity was subjected by tabernacling in the flesh, we have all been the subjects
of a loving kindness so vast, so transcendent, so overpowering, that it were base
effrontery to describe ourselves as having cause of complaint against God. Living
men living only because Christ died wherefore should they complain? Yes, you
may argue, if you will, that to a great mass of the human race life is no blessing at
all; but we meet you upon this point. We affirm, on the contrary, that life is so
invaluable a blessing that all of us have cause to join heartily in the general
thanksgiving of our Church, We bless Thee for our creation. Is not life then a
blessing? Does it cease to be a blessing just because I may debase, and prostitute,
and desecrate it? Am I not rather warranted in declaring that life is so vast a
blessing that it is a counterpoise to all those disadvantages which are consequent
upon the fall, so that he who is disposed to arraign Gods general dealings with his
race, may justly at once be silenced by the interrogation of our text? Yes, it may in
the first place most truly be said, that as the children of a disobedient race, whatever
suffering we have to undergo, we endure it for the punishment of our sins. But this
is not all: we are living creatures; and not merely living a frail and mortal life, but
baptised into the faith of Him who is the resurrection and the life; so that we may
live forever in glory without measure; in happiness without bounds. Let, then, all
murmuring be hushed. Who will dare to repine?

II. But having thus applied the considerations suggested by the text to the
complaints which are grounded on the ruin and sinful condition of mankind, we
proceed to make A LIKE APPLICATION TO THE COMPLAINTS CALLED FORTH
BY INDIVIDUAL AFFLICTION. Whosoever thou art, on whom God hath laid heavily
the rod of chastisement; and whatever the visitation beneath which thou art bowed,
let all murmuring be hushed with the demand, Wherefore doth a living man
complain, a man for the punishment of his sins? When God sends affliction,
without doubt He designs that it should be felt as affliction. The cross is a burden
which we must carry on our shoulders, and not throw it into the fire. But it is one
thing to be sensible of affliction, and another to complain of it. And while we may feel
acutely, and yet not transgress; we cannot murmur and be blameless. And it is
against a repining and not against a suffering spirit that our text must be considered
as directing its censure. And, therefore, it applies to none but those who would
question the justice of Gods dealings; and not to those who resign themselves
meekly, although deeply wounded. But before we can bring the considerations
suggested by our text to bear upon this complaint, we must examine in what sense it
may be affirmed that affliction is allotted to us in punishment of our sins. There may
often be an error here. Wherever and whatever I suffer, I suffer as a sinner; but there
is no such nice proportion maintained between what I do as a sinner, and what I feel
as a sufferer, that for every grief inflicted, I shall be able to produce an offence
committed. Sometimes, indeed, it wilt happen that the judgment bears a distinct and
palpable reference to the iniquity, so that the particular cause of Gods wrath can
hardly be overlooked; but we have no warrant for expecting that sin and sorrow
should thus necessarily correspond; or that we should be able to calculate precisely
the fault to which God hath apportioned present calamity. And it is in exact
accordance with these remarks that our text represents affliction as a punishment,
not of this sin, or of that sin, but generally, for the punishment of a mans sins. And
this should suffice to show you the injustice of complaint. It is much, as we have
already shown you, that every one of us transgressed in Adam; that in virtue of his
standing as our federal representative, we have fallen from our first estate. It is
much that as the result of the earliest rebellion we are all involved in one vast
condemnation, so that when successive generations rise up and possess this earth,
there is between each individual and his God such a separation that he has right to
expect nothing but unmitigated wrath. But when you add to the contemplation of
original sin, all the complicated catalogue of actual sin; when you remember that
man is a transgressor, not only by imputation, but by every positive and personal
working of evil, surely the marvel must be not that so much of wormwood should
drug the cup of human life, but that so much of sweetness should still have been left,
and that so much of brilliancy should still sparkle on the waters. Is it justice that man
impeaches, or is it mercy, when he utters complaints against the dispensations of
God? Justice! which of us is there unto whom, if he were dealt with by strict measure
of justice, there would not be assigned so stripped and wasted an inheritance that no
solitary flower should bloom on him, no smile of friendship gladden him, no voice of
affection cheer him? And as to mercy shall mercy be impeached by those who do
daily a scornful despite to the attributes of God? Invert the calculation. Measure the
mercy not by what is denied, but by what is bestowed; not by what is taken away, but
by what is left by what we have rather than by what we have not; and mercy
stands forth wonderful in its extent; putting out even on behalf of a vast company,
energies which are not to be expressed by all the imagery of the material universe.
And this too far worse than this! for a being who has thrown himself, by his
iniquities, out of the pale of loving kindness, and who if he were left like a blasted tree
on the mountain top, leafless and branchless the sole survivor of a goodly forest,
torn by the tempest, and scathed by the lightning, might, nevertheless, be
pronounced a monument of mercy. And once more. We are living men. And
whatever the woe and bitterness of our portion, wherefore should living men
complain? Ye all know that this our mortal estate has been appointed by God as a
probation for our immortal. Ye all know that we suffer for a while in these houses of
clay; that when they shall have been demolished by the inroads of death, our souls
must unite and form anew and hasten to a sphere of new and untried being. And life
when regarded as the seed time of eternity life must appear to be so enormous in
value that its sternest and most aggravated sorrows dwindle away into comparative
nothingness. Living is never so terrible that man does not shrink from dying, and
thus he practically owns that he retains the greater blessing, though he may have
been stripped of the lesser. May it not then be said of him, with all the emphasis of
an indignant remonstrance, Wherefore, yes, wherefore, dost thou a living man
complain? And this gift of life should repress the murmurings of the righteous as
well as of the unrighteous, for a disposition to complain shows that patience has not
yet done its perfect work, and the prolongation of life gives opportunity for this work
to be completed. And, therefore, as the waters of the raging sea soothed themselves
into calmness at the mandate of the Redeemer, let every rebellious and unholy
passion be hushed before the Lord our Creator. Be still, and know that I am God.
(H. Melvill, B. D.)

Address to complainers
I. THE NATURE OF SINFUL COMPLAINTS.
1. Complaints as to our situation in life. Not satisfied with our lot. Not
content with the bounties of providence.
2. Complaints as to providential visitations. Disappointments in business,
blighted prospects, loss of friends, seasons of affliction, etc.
3. Complaints as to spiritual sorrows. Many are the afflictions of the
righteous, etc.
4. Disappointed prayers and expectations. David, for his child; Paul, for the
removal of the thorn.
II. THE EVIL OF SUCH COMPLAINTS.
1. It is a sin against reason. Who so fit to manage for us as God?
2. It is a sin against goodness. Then how ungrateful to complain!
3. It is a sin against Divine faithfulness and truth. Gods declarations run thus,
that He will withhold no good thing from them that walk uprightly. My
God shall supply all your need, etc. Now to complain is the essence of
unbelief, the essence of distrust.
4. It is a sin especially against Divine condescension and abounding mercy.
5. It is a sin fraught with evil consequences to ourselves. It must incur Gods
righteous displeasure. See the fire of the Lord consuming the Israelites in the
camp (Num 11:1). And for what? They complained against the Lord. See, also,
Jude 16. It deprives of all the enjoyment of Divine goodness.

III. THE REMEDY FOR SINFUL COMPLAINTS.

1. Look within yourselves. See your utter unworthiness.
2. Look abroad. You are poor; others are destitute, naked, starving. You are
afflicted, but how lightly! (J. Burns, D. D.)

Affliction considered a, punishment

I. IT COMES FROM GOD. The text points us to the moral Governor of the world, to
Him who has made us, and made us men, and who orders things with reference to
our condition and character as souls and as sinners. The Bible, of course, traces all
suffering to God. It teaches us that He creates evil and good; that He causes light
and darkness; that He appoints the rod; that if evil is in the city He hath done it;
that is, it ascribes trouble to Him, as it ascribes everything else to Him, of whom,
through whom, and to whom all things are, who made all things, for Himself, even
the wicked for the day of His wrath. Apart from questions of inspiration, such
language is natural. The natural piety and scientific ignorance of men would delight,
and be obliged, to use it; piety longing to make as much of God as possible, and
ignorance not knowing what else to do. There is, no doubt, a sense in which God
does all things. That is, since He has a plan, and accomplishes that plan in other
words, since He is all-wise and all-powerful, He must exercise a universal
superintendence and control. God may be said to bring about results, even in the
case of the voluntary acts of men, if He has so ordered the existing system that
those results shall follow those acts. For our present purpose it is enough that in
any true sense what happens to us is referable to His will; that it is His pleasure
that it should happen; that He knows of it, and either causes it, or intentionally
allows it. Our miseries, of every kind and source, are from Him; that is, from a
Being having intelligence and will; not from what we call, with or without meaning,
chance, or fate; a personal God, a Father, a moral Ruler, means them. It is
punishment shall we complain?

II. WE HAVE OURSELVES ONLY TO BLAME FOR OUR TROUBLES. It is quite

true, generally, that we suffer because we sin. We should not know trouble if we
were not guilty. We are not to vex ourselves, as good people often do, with
inquiries as to the individual reasons and designs of our troubles; we are not to ask,
in the sense of Job, Show me wherefrom Thou contendest with me; we are not to
institute a particular search into the occasions of our trials, as if each had a special
meaning, and indicated a special sin, after the manner of Adonibezeks
punishment. It is enough for us that we are sinful, and therefore sorrowful; that we
should not be where we are if we were not what we are; that God has placed us in a
world of thorns and briers as well as flowers and fruits; in bodies whose organs
pain as well as please; in a system of wicked and unreasonable men; and many
more very weak and thoughtless, intercourse with whom must often vex and distress
us, because we were, in His foresight, creatures meriting chastisement, and able to
profit by it. But we may go much farther than this in reference to many of our
troubles. We cause them by our own acts. They are the direct results of our own
conduct, of single deeds, or of courses of conduct. And we may know it, and ought
to know it. Sins are of many kinds, but they are always violations of rule. Sin is the
transgression of the law. And law always has penalty, sooner or later, milder or
more severe. Take the case of physical health. Many of our grievances are bodily. We
have trouble in the flesh. And as Gideon took thorns of the wilderness and briers,
and with them taught the men of Succoth, so we learn from material experiences,
and they are often painful ones. Indeed, many people can learn no otherwise. The
messenger of Satan, is only in return for some foolish message of our own; and
the thorn in the flesh is there a pressure we ought to have avoided. The father of
a family is struck down by paralysis; all the mystery of the case is in his persisting, in
spite of friends and feelings, in putting two days work and worry into one. A young
woman has just died of consumption; the only marvel is that she let herself, and
others let her, go out of a heated room into the cold air, or wear a dress that
compressed the action of her vital organs. A young man comes home from school
or university to die; there is nothing inscrutable about it, except in the unnatural
strain of brain or body by work or play. Wherefore should a man complain for the
punishment of his sins? And the same remarks apply to the lowness and gloom of
spirits, and a hundred evils of mind and soul, that flow from a diseased or languid
action of the bodily powers. Despondency, and even despair, may come from
indigestion. Unstrung nerves may make any one walk in darkness, and have no
light. Many Christians go to the Divine for comfort, when they should go to the
doctor for cure. They think God is hiding His face, when He is really showing
Himself, showing His love for them and for all men, in upholding the order of
things, in which their welfare and that of all men is concerned. Wherefore should a
man complain for the punishment of his sins?

III. TROUBLE, AS AND BECAUSE PUNISHMENT, MIGHT HAVE BEEN

WORSE, AND MAY BE BETTER. Wherefore should a living man complain? Stress
is to be laid upon this. The trouble, whatever it is, might have been greater. It has
exceptions and alleviations. The darkness does not cover the whole sphere of vision.
The ingredients of the cup are not all bitter. We are not afflicted in all kinds, and in
all degrees, like Job. We can imagine worse trouble. We can find worse. We deserve
worse. We cannot have the worst while living. There are sorer sorrows after death:
the sorest here might be but the beginning of sorrows, a foretaste and an earnest
of the uttermost wrath of God. While living, we are not wholly lost. To him that is
joined unto all the living, there is hope hope of living even here, and hope of living
in the fulness and infinitude of life hereafter. And this punishment of the living is to
prevent their ever dying, in the full import of that awful word. This trouble, while it
might have been worse, may be better may be best of all. In the highest sense we
may say, This sickness is not unto death, but unto life. This loss is not unto ruin,
but unto wealth. This sorrow is not unto hopeless misery, but exceeding and eternal
joy. (A. J. Morris.)

The sin and unreasonableness of complaints against providence

We will on this subject meet at once the tenets of the boldest
complainants.
1. It is asserted, then, by some, that, under all the circumstances of this life, they.
cannot consider creation as a blessing, and cannot offer up thanksgivings for
it; that, born into the world without their own consent, they have a right to
the good things of it; that, although a distant heaven may be promised, yet,
as a distant hell is also threatened, the hopes of the one are more than
counterbalanced by the fears of the other; and that it would be better not to
have been born, than to live so circumstanced. These are high words against
your Maker. They proceed, he assured, either from ignorance of the true
state of things, or from a mind perverted by some love of sin. When you
complain of being born into the world without your own consent, it should
seem that you consider yourself flung into it, by some blind necessity, or
senseless chance. But is this the real state of things? You know it is not. From
the moment of your birth, you became the care of an almighty, all-seeing, all-
merciful God: in your progress through this world to that for which He
graciously designs you, there is not a step in your path but you are
surrounded by His presence, and upholden by His power!
2. But it is not, perhaps, under a distrust of the general providence of God that
you look upon life as no blessing; but under a view of your own individual
situation, as born, according to the scriptural representation of you, subject
to misery and death. Had that curse upon your first parents, which
subjected you to these calamities, left you under them; had the future
generations of mankind been, from that awful hour, devoted unto wrath, anti
forsaken, some excuse might be urged for pleading, though even then with
the deepest reverence of Omnipotence, Why hast Thou made me thus?
But search the Scriptures, and see whether such pleading will bear you out.
Earth at one and the same time heard the denunciation of death, and the
promise of redemption. Man was to be gradually fitted for that heaven,
which, from the first, was designed him. The care of Omnipotence was
thenceforth exerted in preparing the world for the coming of Him, in whom
the nations of the earth were to be finally blessed.
3. Now, had Adam never fallen, or had it been ordained you to live with him in
his early days of innocence and peace; had it been your lot, after a few years
thus sojourning in peace in the garden of Eden, to have been removed from
the shadows of this world to the realities of a better; will you say that
creation would have been no blessing to you? that it would be nothing to
have been brought from the dust of the earth into the everlasting fruition of
spiritual bliss? I will not degrade your reason by thinking it capable of
harbouring a thought so low and so unworthy. Well, then, if a spiritual
immortality be deemed a blessing, what is there in the trials and sorrows of
 this life to check your aspirings after it? Shall the land of your inheritance be
given up, because a boisterous Jordan rolls before you, and the sons of Anak
must be struggled with? I would require you, with the book of revelation in
your hand, to descend into your heart; to mark its pride, its sensuality, its
worldly-mindedness, and vanity; and would urge you to say whether
anything was ever more weak, more earthy, less fitted to mingle with the
saints in light! You will plead that this pride and vainly proceed from a
corruption inherent in your nature; and that their existence is no fault of
yours. But it is your fault that they are not corrected. The Almighty has
promised His everlasting Spirit to them that ask it. You have not asked it as
you ought. Why, then, should a living man complain, man for the
punishment of his sins?
4. We may go yet farther, and even ranking you among those whose errors are
the most venial, and omissions of duty the fewest, may ask you whether you
ever felt real cause for lasting repining at the occasional mixture of evil with
your good. Indeed, the nearer you approach to fulness of obedience, and to
a perfect love of God, the more thankful you will be for those warnings which
tend to estrange you from the things of earth. Consider, therefore, this world
m its true nature; consider it as a scene of preparation for another: that no
state is so dangerous as undisturbed prosperity; that, during our
continuance here, we must be purified to qualify us for perfect happiness in
the presence of God: that such purification must be effected by triads and
temptations; and that trials and temptations necessarily suppose troubles
and afflictions. Let these considerations take place in the mind, and, at the
brightness before them, clouds and darkness shall disperse, doubts and
difficulties shall vanish away. (G. Mathew, M. A.)

Sinful man is a complaining creature

Observe here
1. The fault taxed, complaining. It denotes an action that passeth on a mans self,
and intimates fretting, whereby one torments himself increasing his own grief
and sorrow for his affliction.
2. The unjustifiableness of this before the Lord. Losers think they may have
leave to speak; but religion teaches rather to lay our hands on our mouths,
and our mouths in the dust before the Lord, who does us no wrong.
3. On what accounts it is unjustifiable, what are these things that may silence all
our complaints? We are men that should act more rationally. We are living men
that might therefore be in a worse condition. We are Sinful men, whose
hardships are the just punishment of our sins. We are men that have another
thing to do. Let each man complain for his sin.
I. THERE IS A SINFUL COMPLAINING UNDER CROSSES AND AFFLICTIONS.
1. Let them complain of themselves, as the causes of their own woe. The sinful
nature, heart and life, are father, mother, and nurse to all the miseries that
come u n us. These are the carcass to which these eagles gather together.
Remove that, and they would all quickly fly away. If the clouds return after
the rain, let us blame our own misguidance.
 2. Let them complain to God and welcome (Psa 102:1-11).
(1) We must not complain of God.
(2) We must not complain of our lot, or murmur because better has not
fallen to our share.
(3) We must not arrest our complaining eye on the unjust instruments of
our afflictions, like the dog snarling at the stone, but looking not to
the hand that casts it.

II. SINFUL COMPLAINING IS SELF-TORMENTING.

1. To God whose Spirit is grieved with it, and provoked to anger by it.
2. To others, as marring the harmony of society, and often when people give
way to that black passion, God in His just judgment inhibits others, that
they have no power to help the complainer.
3. To a persons self it is disagreeable and tormenting. It is a breach of the sixth
commandment, a sin against ones own life, destructive to the body. The
sinful complainer puts a load above his own burden. For if ones will were
submitted to the will of God, how easy would it be to bear afflictions; but
when the proud heart cannot stoop, the apprehension magnifies the cross,
and of a molehill makes a mountain.

III. MAN, SINFUL MAN, IS A COMPLAINING CREATURE.

1. Men do not entertain due thoughts of the sovereignty of God, and His awful
majesty (Mat 20:11-15).
2. Men, often see not the designs of holy providence, and they are apt to
suspect the worst, for guilt is a nurse and mother of fears.
3. Pride of heart is the cause of sinful complaining. Men are naturally like a
bullock unaccustomed to the yoke. An unsubdued spirit under a cross makes
a heavy burden.
4. Unmortified lust, when crossed with afflictions makes a fearful mutiny. If
men were not too much addicted to the creature, too closely wedded to the
things of time, they would not raise such complaints on the loss of them.
Grasp hard a mans hand that hath a sore finger, he presently cries out; but
if his hand was whole, he would take it kindly.
5. Want of a due sense of the evil of sin and of our unworthiness on that
account.
6. Overlooking our mercies.
7. Dwelling and poring upon crests and difficulties. This is just taking an
unbelieving lift of our own burden, which will certainly increase it.
8. Unbelief is the great cause of all It was the generation that believed not that
murmured in the wilderness. Faith brings the soul to rest in God in all
conditions. It satisfies the soul with a full Christ in the want of all things
(Hab 3:17-19).
IV. BECAUSE WE ARE MEN WE OUGHT NOT TO COMPLAIN.
1. We are men and not brutes. We are endowed with rational faculties, by
which we may take up such considerations, from the sovereignty of God
and the demerit of our sins, that might silence our complaints.
2. We are men and not gods, creatures and not creators, subjects and not
lords, and therefore ought to submit and not to complain.
3. We are men and not angels. We are not inhabitants of the upper regions,
where no storms blow, where there is an eternal spring and uninterrupted
peace. Can we think that the rocks must be removed for us, that Gods
unchangeable purpose in the management of the world must be changed for
us?
4. We are men and not devils. We, at our worst, in this world, are not in that
desperate, hopeless, and helpless state in which they are. But have
something to comfort us which they have not.

V. BECAUSE WE ARE LIVING MEN WE OUGHT NOT TO COMPLAIN.

1. Our life is forfeited yet continued, therefore there is no reason to
complain.
2. Living, we are not in hell, and therefore should we praise and not
complain (Lam 3:22).
3. Living, we have the means of grace and hopes of glory. So we have
access to better our estate in the other world, if it should never be better in
this.
4. Living, it may be worse with us ere we go out of the world than it is, if we do
complain.
5. Living, we may live to see our case better. While there is life there is hope.
We have to do with a bountiful God.
6. We have no surer hold of our life than of the comforts of life. The latter are
uncertain, so is the former. The stroke that takes away a comfort might
have taken away our life.
7. When other comforts are lost, and our life is continued, that which is best
is preserved to us.
8. The time of life is the time for all mens praising, because they sit all at the
common table of mercy, and therefore not for complaining.

VI. WE ARE SINFUL MEN JUSTLY PUNISHED FOR OUR SIN AND
THEREFORE OUGHT NOT TO COMPLAIN.
1. Our sins are the procuring causes of all afflictions. God hath joined
together the evil of sin, and the evil of punishment, hence drawing the first link
of this chain, we draw the other also on ourselves, why then do we
complain?
2. When our afflictions are at the highest pitch in this world, yet they are not
 so great as our sins deserve.
3. We receive much undeserved good, while at the worst we get but our
deserved evil.
4. Our afflictions are necessary for us. Our hearts are hard to wean from a
frowning world, how would we do if it were smiling on every hand. Nay,
there are many mercies in thy lot. there must be a mixture of crosses in it,
something crooked, something wanting, to be a corrective. Why then should
we be so angry with our blessings?
5. We might get out from under them, if we would speedily answer the
design of them (Lev 26:41-42).
6. How often is the sin visibly written on the punishment, that men may clearly see
the cause of Gods contending, and lay their mouths in the dust.

VII. UNDER OUR AFFLICTIONS WE SHOULD TURN OUR COMPLAINTS

ON OUR SINS.
1. Instead of complaining of God, let us complain of ourselves to God,
instead of taxing a holy God with severity, let us charge ourselves with
folly before Him.
2. Instead of the hearts bleeding for trouble, let our hearts bleed for sin.
3. Instead of tossing our cross in our minds to fret ourselves, let us toss our
sin there to humble ourselves.
4. Instead of labouring to get up our lot to our mind, let us labour to get our
minds brought down to our lot. (T. Boston, D. D.)

Complaint under affliction

I. SOME COMPLAINTS ALLOWABLE.
1. It is lawful to express what we feel and suffer in those ways nature
prompts us.
2. May complain to friends, relations, and acquaintances.
3. To God as well as to men.

II. COMPLAINTS PROMPTED BY IMPATIENCE WITH GODS

DEALINGS CONDEMNED.
1. It is long before God takes the rod in hand to correct.
2. He is soon prevailed with to lay it aside.
3. He lays no more on us than our sins deserve.
4. We enjoy many mercies in the meantime by which the bitterness of
affliction is allayed.
5. God has a sovereignty of power and dominion to deal with us as He
pleaseth.
III. COMPLAINTS MAY BE SILENCED
1. By keeping alive in your heart a sense of Gods love in every
dispensation.
2. By labouring to have a fresh remembrance of your sins.
3. By considering the extreme danger of quarrelling with and
opposing God. (D. Conant.)

Living men ought not to complain

I. STATE THE MOST COMMON CAUSES OF COMPLAINT.
1. Our circumstances in the world.
2. The sufferings to which we are doomed.
3. Our condition as moral agents.

II. SHOW THE IMPROPRIETY OF SUCH CONDUCT.

1. It is unreasonable.
2. Useless.
3. Impious and profane.
4. Endangers his immortal interests.

III. POINT OUT ITS MOST EFFECTUAL REMEDY.

1. Seek the regeneration of our natures.
2. Consider what pain and punishment we deserve.
3. Think of the sufferings of others.
4. Remember the design of God in afflicting us.
5. Pray that our day of strength may be as our day.
(Sketches of Four Hundred Sermons.)

LAM 3:40-42
Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord.

The return
Before it is possible to return to God, before the desire to return is even
awakened, a much less inviting action must be undertaken. The first and greatest
hindrance to reconciliation with our Father is our failure to recognise that any such
reconciliation is necessary. If the souls quarrel with her Lord is ever to be ended it
must be discovered. Therefore the first step will be in the direction of self-
examination. We are led to look in this direction by the startling thought with which
the previous triplet closes. If the calamities bewailed are the chastisements of sin it is
necessary for this sin to be sought out. The language of the elegist suggests that we
are not aware of the nature of our own conduct, and that it is only by some serious
effort that we can make ourselves acquainted with it, for this is what he implies
when he represents the distressed people resolving to search and try their ways.
The externalism in which most of our lives are spent makes the effort to look within
a painful contradiction of habit. When it is attempted pride and prejudice face the
inquirer, and too often quite hide the true self from view. Even when the effort to
acquire self-knowledge is strenuous and persevering, and accompanied by an honest
resolution to accept the results, however unwelcome they may be, it often fails for
lack of a standard of judgment. We discover our actual characters most effectually
when we compare our conduct with the conduct of Jesus Christ. As the light of the
world, He leads the world to see itself. He is the great touchstone of character. We
may be reminded, on the other hand, that too much introspection is not
wholesome, that it begets morbid ways of thought, paralyses the energies, and
degenerates into insipid sentimentality. No doubt it is best that the general tendency
of the mind should be towards the active duties of life. But to admit this is not to
deny that there may be occasions when the most ruthless self-examination becomes
a duty of first importance. Then while a certain kind of self-study is always
mischievous the sickly habit of brooding over ones feelings, it is to be observed
that the elegist does not recommend this. It is not emotion but action that he is
concerned with. The searching is to be into our ways, the course of our conduct.
The word ways suggests habit and continuity. These are more characteristic than
isolated deeds short spasms of virtue or sudden falls before temptation. The final
judgment will be according to the life, not its exceptional episodes. A man lives his
habits. He may be capable of better things, he may be liable to worse; but he is what
he does habitually. Our main business in self-examination is to trace the course of
the unromantic beaten track, the long road on which we travel from morning to
evening through the whole day of life. The result of this search into the character of
their ways on the part of the people is that it is found to be necessary to forsake
them forth. with; for the next idea is in the form of a resolution to turn out of them,
nay, to turn back, retracing the footsteps that have gone astray, in order to come to
God again. These ways are discovered, then, to be bad vicious in themselves, and
wrong in their direction. This is a case of ending our old ways, not mending them.
No engineering skill will ever transform the path that points straight to perdition
into one that conducts us up to the heights of heaven. The only chance of coming to
walk in the right way is to forsake the wrong way altogether, and make an entirely
new start. Again a very significant fast the return is described in positive
language. It is a coming back to God, not merely a departure from the old way of sin.
The initial impulse towards a better life springs more readily from the attraction of a
new hope than from the repulsion of a loathed evil. The hopeful repentance is
exhilarating, while that which is only born of the disgust and horror of sin is dismally
depressing. Following up his general exhortation to return to God, the elegist adds a
particular one, in which the process of the new movement is described. It takes the
form of a prayer from the heart. The resolution is to lift up the heart with the hands.
Lastly, the poet furnishes the returning penitents with the very language of the
hearts prayer, which is primarily confession. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

The saving effect of suffering

Suffering only fulfils its mission when it constrains a man to look within
himself and search and try his reins and ways that he may know how far he is
sincere. Only suffering can get at our hearts with any profound and saving effect. Joy
touches the surface, success hovers above us a singing bird: it is when we are in the
furnace of affliction that we discover what we really are, and what we really need.
The sufferers in this case come to wise decisions. No longer will they murmur against
the Lord, as if providence were fickle and arbitrary, as if providence found a wicked
pleasure in the torture of human life: the sufferers say, The fault must be in
ourselves; we carry the deadly poison within us; our hearts are lacking in the spirit of
loyalty and obedience; they are lifted up in the ways of haughtiness, and they submit
themselves to the rule of vanity; the time has now come for a different discipline and
a different policy; we must lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens:
we do not lift up the heart alone, as if we were intending to be religious in one part
of our nature, and to reserve the liberty of self-service in another; nor do we lift up
our hands alone, as if we were willing to indulge in bodily exercise, in ceremony, in
ritual, or as if we were prepared to render in some degree the service of a hireling;
but we lift up both our heart and our hands in sign of a complete consecration.
Religious exercises cleanse and elevate the worshipper. The very act of lifting up
heart and hand unto God in the heavens is an act of purification and ennoblement.
All such exercises are valuable as parts of a larger discipline. Herein is the value of
public worship: man helps man; voice increases voice; joy and sorrow mingle
together, and produce a tender melancholy that is the surest pledge of perfect and
enduring delight. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Self-examination a guard against sin

I. The work of self-examination has this advantage, that it is A REAL, PERSONAL
ACT; and in religion what a man does for himself is of much more avail than what
others do or can do for him. Other religious actions may be gone through, as it
were, with little thought and attention; but self-examination, if performed at all, is
performed with the mind; with a real application of the faculties to the matter in
hand.

II. Self-examination is a PRIVATE WORK. The public ordinances of religion have

their place and value. But the religious improvement of the heart is entirely
dependent on what passes in private; I mean, is measured by that. What a man is in
private, that he is; and it is in the personal interviews with our Maker that the critical
transactions of our religious history are performed.

III. Self-examination is A REHEARSING OF THE JUDGMENT DAY, for it is a

having the soul up before conscience, and conscience is Gods voice in the heart.
But in the judgment day, we are instructed to believe that there shall be a bringing
forth to the light of each mans every action, in its detail and particular, and (which
is much to be observed) in its motive and inward cause. Now these are the things
which cannot be discerned without much of careful consideration and thought. The
case, in short, is this, in order to repentance we must know what we have to
repent of; for it were a mere trifling with our Maker to use the language of contrition
when not really thinking of the things which we have done in disobedience to Him
and disregard of His holy will. Keep short accounts with thy soul; the dealers of this
world can teach thee thus much. A heathen found out thus much. Let not sleep,
said Pythagoras, fall upon thy soft eyelids, until thou hast first gone over thrice the
actions, all and each of them, of the day; asking thus, Where have I transgressed?
what good have I done? and what duty have I left undone?

IV. The practice of this careful and periodical self-examination will most assuredly
SOFTEN AND HUMANISE THE CHARACTER IN REGARD OF THE SOCIAL
INTERCOURSES OF LIFE; making him who is diligent in such practice, gentle and
merciful and forgiving toward his fellow creatures. The slight, the disrespect, the
unthankfulness, and forgetfulness of promises, just the things which are taken so
unkindly between man and man, which constitute the sting of injury, and alienate
between heart and heart, are the very same which we find that we have to ask our
Heavenly Father, having experienced at our hands, not to resent, but to forgive; for
mercys and for Christs sake, to forgive. Therefore the self-examiner is a merciful man.

V. And lastly, he is what each one of us would desire to be, but what the
neglecter of self-examination will hardly be A PROFITABLE ATTENDANT ON
THE SERVICES OF THE CHURCH. And he is so for this reason; that having
considered his ways, he knows what he has to confess when he comes into his
Makers presence. The visits to Gods house are stages in his life, are steps from
earth to heaven, to him whose thoughts have been rightly employed during the
interval between his visits there; whose one confession speaks to his former
confession, and (may be) rebukes it, but with a sweet rebuke, for it is administered
at the footstool of a merciful and forgiving God. (C. P. Eden, M. A.)

Self-searching
Prayer, praise, the public ordinances, consistent
walking, are obligations, laid though not with equal depth, yet laid on the
consciences of all who are taught of God. But the point of deep and thorough
consideration of our ways, is I fear, but little reflected upon, as its deep
importance demands.

I. THE EXHORTATION. How awfully affecting the description in Lam 2:5-17. Yet with
all this, the great mass of the people remained hard and impenitent. Ah, how little is it
in the power of any judgment to turn the heart. It is under this conviction that the
prophet calls them to deep searchings of heart.
1. The prophet includeth himself, Let us. So Dan 9:4-5. Have we not invariably
found the most spiritual are the most ready to take the low place?
2. Remark the expression, Our ways. It is one of the deepest incentives to self-
condemnation, humiliation before God, and holiness d heart, to mark
diligently, prayerfully, watchfully, all the way by which we have been brought.
Let us note down our mercies, pray to have them continually on our hearts,
on our lips; this is no small part of the precept. But it refers principally to
search and try the ways in which we are walking. Am I in the way? What a
question! How important the answer. Walking in Jesus, the way of pardon,
the only way of salvation, of holiness, of happiness, the only way to God, and
heaven, the abode of God. And how am I walking in this way? By faith? in
dally repentance? in real, sincere, and honest obedience? happily? If not, why
am I not?
 3. The expression implies difficulty in the act of obedience to the precept, Let
us search and try our ways. Much is required to its accomplishment.
(1) Sincerity is needed (Jer 17:9). Ah, what heavenly sincerity, honesty, integrity,
are required to investigate motives, try principles, decide practice.
(2) Quiet is needed. A piece of gold cannot be discerned in the unquiet
waters of a turbid stream, so the graces of the Spirit cannot be
clearly discerned in the defilements of an unquiet spirit.
(3) Time is required. The viper sin that coils, and coils, and coils beneath
the verdure of the grass, cannot be seen in a moments glance.
(4) Faith, too, is needed, laying the hand on the head of Jesus, or there
is no fair review.
(5) Filial repentance is required. Legal repentance only extenuates the sin.
(6) Above all. there must be much real, fervent, persevering prayer (Psa 139:23-
24).

II. THE BLESSED CONSEQUENCES OF SEARCHING OUR WAYS AND

TURNING TO THE LORD. A man may, without this, be admired, courted,
applauded, followed; as a minister he may draw crowds, as a man, be flattered to the
skies; but never can he be a spiritually-minded man, a close walker with God, a
happy, holy, and consistent Christian. This inestimable good is bound up in it. It is
the certain, the necessary consequence. It is the mode of the Divine operation, the
order of the Divine Spirit (Jam 4:8). It is so in the first approach of the sinner to God
(Isa 55:7). It is so in every after approach (Jer 3:1). The sinner is called to consider his
ways (Hag 1:5). Real consideration leads to repentance (Eze 18:28). It is the breath of
spiritual life, it is the germ of the new creation, the spark of heavenly fire. (J. H.
Evans, M. A.)

The importance of self-examination

I. THE ADVANTAGES THAT BY ARISE FROM IT. There is no possibility, either of
viewing a bad action, in a full light, without abhorrence, or of weighing its
consequences without terror. Wickedness, therefore, always banishes thought, and
piety and virtue encourage it. A good man, far from being driven to hide his inward
condition from himself, though he find many things that want still to be amended,
yet finds at the same time, so many, which, through the aid of Gods Holy Spirit, are
already grown, and daily growing better, that he feels no joy equal to that of his
heart telling him what he is. Therefore the Psalmist speaks of self-amendment as the
immediate fruit of self-inspection (Psa 119:59-60). Nor doth it only excite in us good
resolutions, but furnishes directions how to put them in practice. Reflection will
show us, and nothing else can, by what defect within, or what opportunity without,
each of our faults got ground in our breasts: and which is the way to root it out
again. Another use of searching frequently into our past ways, is to preserve
ourselves from the secret approach of future dangers. All these are general
advantages flowing from the practice of self-inspection. But in many cases it hath yet
a more especial good influence. A distinct knowledge of ourselves will greatly secure
us from the iii effects of flattery, which would persuade us that we are what we feel
we are not; and enable us to bear unjust reproach, thinking it a very small thing that
we should be judged of mans judgment, when we can reflect with comfort that He
who judgeth us is the Lord. Experience of our infirmities will teach us humility, and
move us to compassion and forgiveness (Gal 6:1). Experience where our strength, as
well as our weakness lies, will show us how we are best able to serve God and our
fellow creatures; what we may attempt, what will be too much for us. And strict
observation of our own hearts will qualify us, beyond all things, to give useful
cautions to others, and direct their steps in the right way.

II. SOME RULES TO BE OBSERVED FOR CONDUCTING IT PROPERLY. Of these

the fundamental one is, that we consider it as a religious duty; perform it as in the
presence of God; and earnestly beg Him to show us in a true light to ourselves (Psa
19:12). Let us therefore neither be too tender, nor too proud, to bear inspecting our
hearts and lives: and, that we may bear it well, let us learn to moderate, if we have
need, the uneasiness which it may give us. For every passion that we have may be
raised so high as to defeat its own end. And though we can dislike nothing so justly
as our faults; and very few dislike them near enough; yet if we dislike ourselves for
them too much to have patience to think of them, and mend them; that runs into a
new fault: and we should check ourselves for it, mildly indeed, but very carefully;
considering well both our natural frailty, and our Makers goodness: but especially
the promises of forgiveness and grace, which He hath recorded for our use in His
Holy Word; not in order to reconcile us at all to sin, but in a reasonable degree to
ourselves. And how mortifying soever a needful examination may still prove, it is
surely worth while to support the most painful reflections for the present, when it
will secure us a succession of pleasing and happy ones ever after. Nor must we
examine only into the weak and suspicious parts of our characters and conduct: but
those which procure us the most applause from others and ourselves: for want of
which, even vices, a little disguised, may pass upon us for great virtues; and we may
be doing, with entire satisfaction, what we should abhor, if we understood it right.
Nor are these general grounds of caution the only ones; but every person will find,
on inquiry, particular reasons for being watchful and distrustful of himself, in some
point or other; arising, perhaps, from unhappy experience of failures, at least from
conviction of the dangers, incident to his natural disposition, age, employment,
company; and, which is a matter of no small consideration, rank in the world. For
they, above all, should be careful m searching their own breasts, whose higher
condition subjects them most to flattery, and removes them farthest from hearing
censure. (Archbishop Secker.)

The duty of self-reflection

I. ITS USEFULNESS.
1. Teaches us to know ourselves.
2. We discover our sins.
3. Provides good company and comfortable employment.

II. ITS NEGLECT MISCHIEVOUS.

1. Hardens the heart.
2. A daily increase of sin.
 3. Renders a man the more unwilling to reckon with himself.

III. DEMANDS DILIGENCE.

1. There is a natural reluctance to attend to the duty.
2. Many sins not easily discovered, unless diligent search is made.
3. A convenient time should be set apart for the work.
4. Affliction a time for heart searching.
5. Let not the difficulty of the work discourage you.
6. A work that must be often repeated.

IV. LEADS TO REPENTANCE. Turn again to the Lord. Sin is an aversion and
turning away from God; repentance is a returning to Him.
1. Repentance must be speedy.
2. Thorough.
3. Resolute and steadfast. (D. Conant.)

Strict self-examination
Set thyself in good earnest to the work; beset thy heart and life around, as
men would do a wood where murderers are lodged; hunt back to the several
stages of thy life, youth, and riper years, all the capacities and relations thou hast
stood in; thy general calling and particular, every place where thou hast lived, and
thy behaviour in them. Bid memory bring in its old records, and read over what
passages are written there; call conscience in to depose what it knows concerning
thee, and encourage it to speak freely without mincing the matter. And take heed
thou dost not snib this witness, as some corrupt judges, when they would favour
a bad cause or give it secret instructions, as David did Joab, to deal gently with
thee. Be willing to have thy conditions opened fully, and all thy coverings turned
up. (W. Gurnall.)

Self-examination much neglected

Many either search not at all (they cannot endure these domestic audits: it
is death to them to reflect and recognise what they have done), or as though they
desired not to find. They search as men do for their bad money; they know they have
it, but they would gladly have it to pass for current among the rest. Heathens will
rise up in judgment against such, for they prescribed and practised self-
examination. Pythagoras, once a day; Phocylides, thrice a day, if Stobaeus may be
believed. (J. Trapp.)

Turn again to the Lord.

On repentance
I. THE NATURE OF REPENTANCE. that repentance which is unto salvation, and
which needeth not to be repented of.
1. Repentance presupposes a knowledge of our previous condition. Before we
can sincerely turn to the Lord, we must be sensible of our alienation from
Him. They who have never felt the weariness and wretchedness of their
natural state; who have never, in any measure, experienced the misery and
guiltiness of their sins, are still destitute of that very knowledge which must
precede the exercise of scriptural repentance. Nay more, this sense of sin
and sinfulness must be no mere general and theoretic opinion no mere
notion; but a heartfelt conviction of entire and aggravated sinfulness,
humbling the sinner in the dust, and depriving him of all fancied
righteousness in the judgment of his own conscience. Combined with this,
there must be also some measure of acquaintance with the character and
perfections of that God with whom the sinner has to do.
2. Godly sorrow has its seat in the affections. It is heartfelt grief, a real and
poignant sentiment of anguish on account of sin; and whilst the soul of the
repentant sinner does mourn over the bitter consequences of sin, yet his
mourning is not confined to the evils resulting from his iniquity. There will
be in the heart that truly seeks the Lord a commencement, at all events, of
hatred to sin, a sense of its hideousness and deformity.
3. Where the soul hath really sought the Lord as He is to be found, there will
be manifested the Spirits presence in efforts at a holy, a spiritual and
heartfelt conformity with the whole will of God.
4. Whilst the child of God experiences all this in turning from sin, he is called
further to beware of regarding his repentance as in itself worthy of Gods
acceptance; our very righteousnesses are even as filthy rags in the presence
of Him who sitteth on the throne, and our repentance not only flows from
the imparted grace of God, but at best can be acceptable in Gods sight only
through the mediation of the Beloved.
5. The believer is further called on to feel that repentance is not proper, simply
to the first stage of his spiritual existence; that it holds not only an
elementary place in practical Christianity, but belongs to the whole currency
of his life on earth. Alas! when is the believer free from sin?

II. THE ENCOURAGEMENTS TO REPENTANCE HELD OUT TO US BY GOD.

This is a wide field; the Lord has not been sparing in the manifestation of such
encouragement. Does not the very existence of the Bible proclaim that God waiteth
to be gracious? Instead of selecting a series of striking invitations from the fertile
pages of the Divine record, I would rather seek to place before you a few of the great
truths which are embodied in the numerous and very varied appeals to mans
conscience contained in Scripture.
1. The foremost of these truths is the fact of Gods mercy. Not only do all the
gifts of His hand bespeak a wondrous forbearance, a marvellous compassion,
but we owe our very existence, amid our sins, to the compassion of the
Eternal: we are all of us living monuments of His mercy; because His
compassions fail not, therefore are we not consumed. God has not, however,
limited the manifestation of His mercy to the mere preservation of our guilty
race, and the bestowal of multiplied temporal blessings. God so loved the
 world as to give His only begotten Son, etc.
2. The justice of God furnishes under the Gospel dispensation the strongest of
all encouragements to the exercise of this grace. Nor is there any paradox in
the assertion. In Christ, mercy and truth meet together, Gods
righteousness and the sinners peace are made to embrace each other.
3. The disquieted and dispirited sinner may be apt to exclaim, of what
service are all the encouragements to repentance, when repentance itself
involves in its very exercise feelings which I do not possess, and which I know
not how to obtain? There have issued from the mercy seat the promises, the
full, clear, and reiterated promises of all needful grace. It is in God Himself
that our succour lies.

III. THE PRACTICAL BEARINGS OF THESE CONSIDERATIONS ON

THE CONDITION AND CONSCIENCES OF MEN.
1. I would address myself, first, to the followers of Christ, those who have
known what it is to turn unto the Lord; who have been quickened by His
Spirit in the inner man, and having the Son, have life, life indeed, life
eternal. I would call upon them to recognise not merely the duty, but the
precious privilege of repentance. Let him that standeth or that thinketh he
standeth, take heed lest he fall. We are never more in need of grace than
just when we think best of ourselves. Self-complacency is the sure token of
backsliding from the Lord.
2. With regard to those who have never yet experienced true repentance, who
may perhaps regret their sins at times when the evils flowing from sin are felt
by them, but whose regrets have been vain and fruitless the mere sorrow
of the world that worketh death I would beseech them, with all
earnestness, to turn unto the Lord. In resisting the call to repentance, the
sinner is not simply putting away from him the only way of peace and
happiness, he is resisting, madly resisting, the expressed mind of God
Gods holy commands; and whether he be a profligate or a man of decent life;
whether an avowed atheist or a professed Christian; whether he defy God or
turn away to the things of this world in besotted infatuation, his course, in
either case, is in direct opposition to the will of God. (L. H. Irving.)

Return to God made easy

A minister narrates the following: While walking along one of the London
streets a Paris pastor came forward and accosted me thus, Excuse me, but were you
not in Paris some time ago? I said, Yes, I was; and then he inquired, Did you not, in
one of your addresses there, say that the latch was on our side of the door? Yes, I
believe I did say so, I replied. Well, he answered, I always thought it was on the
Lords side, and I kept knocking, and knocking, and knocking, until I heard your
words, and what a joy came over me! I lifted the latch. Since then all has been
changed, my church, my congregation, my work, and everything about me!
Remember that the latch is on your side of the door.

The penitents first effort

 In every building the first stone must be laid and the first blow must be
struck. The ark was 120 years in building; yet there was a day when Noah laid his
axe at the first tree he cut down to form it. The temple of Solomon was a glorious
building; but there was a day when the first huge stone was laid at the foot of
Mount Moriah. When does the building of the Spirit really begin to appear in a
mans heart? It begins, so far as we can judge, when he first pours out his heart to
God in prayer. (J. C. Ryle.)

LAM 3:41
Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.

The sublimity of devotion

The finest and most sublime sensations of which the soul is susceptible are
connected with the principle of devotion.

I. THE SUBLIMEST BOOKS EXISTING ARE THOSE FROM WHICH WE LEARN

OUR FAITH. The writings of the inspired penmen abound with passages for which no
parallel can be found in the productions of mere genius. Rousseau once exclaimed, The
majesty of the Scriptures fills me with astonishment; the holiness of the Gospel speaks
to my very heart. Behold the books of the philosophers, with all their pomp, how little
are they in comparison! Is it possible that a book at once so wise and so sublime should
have been the production of mere men?

II. SOME OF THE SITUATIONS OF REAL LIFE PROVE THE INTIMATE

CONNECTION BETWEEN DEVOTION AND THE SOURCES OF SUBLIME
FEELING.
1. In studying the character of God and the works of nature.
2. In the changing circumstances of life, in adversity or prosperity, the
proper operation of religious thought is to call up sublime and fervent
feelings.

III. CONSIDER THE SUBJECT OF ADORATION GOD, WHETHER

WORSHIPPED IN PRIVATE OR IN PUBLIC. If it be objected that in such an account
of the effects of devout feeling, we place religion too much under the dominion of the
imagination, it may be answered that though the abuse of a thing is dangerous, we are
not therefore to relinquish its use. It is the soul that truly feels; imagination is the
effort of the soul to rise above mortality. Imagination as well as reason is frequently
appealed to in Scripture. (R. Nares.)

The appeal of the saints go their God

We owe an appeal to God on whatever concerns us, to

I. THE THRONE OF GOD. Those things which you look upon as trivial, have been
subjects of eternal thought, and of eternal purpose. Some men lay stress entirely
upon the decrees of God with respect to their conversion and their salvation. But
the right view of the Divine decrees is, to connect them with everything not
merely with your conversion, and with your salvation, but with the time of your
birth, and the day of your death; with the hours of your sickness, and the seasons of
health; with the gain of your property, and with the loss of your property; with the
lives of those that are dear to you, and with the deaths of those whom you love:
even with the falling of sparrows.

II. THE PERSONAL PROVIDENCE OF GOD AND THE ACTUAL GOVERNMENT

OF GOD. For the superintendence of our affairs is not committed by God to some
deputy. This must be the case with all human rulers, with all creature governors;
but while God employs instruments, He personally superintends, not only the
instruments, but those for whom those instruments work, He Himself provides,
and He Himself rules.

III. THE CHARACTER OF GOD. Think of His complete knowledge. Think of His
consummate wisdom. He never fails in anything, He never can fail, He sees the end
from the beginning, He counts all the steps between the beginning and the end, and
He can adjust every movement, every instrument, every influence. He can make
angels and devils, good men and bad men, things material, and things spiritual,
earth, hell, and heaven He can make all work together for some ultimate good.

IV. THE PATERNITY OF GOD. I say paternity; and would include in this idea, not
only fatherhood but motherhood: for God is as really mother as He is father. And the
Scriptures do not fail to represent this fact to us. While God has all the masculine
strength of the father, He has also the tenderness of the mother.

V. GODS PROVISION FOR OUR FULL RECONCILIATION TO HIMSELF. For God

is by Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. He has provided for us a propitiatory,
where we may meet, and where He ever stands waiting to be gracious; and His
invitation is, Come nigh. He is not satisfied with our standing afar off; His invitation
ceaselessly is, Come nigh. In the degree of your discipleship will grow your
consciousness of sonship: and just as you say in your heart, I am a disciple of Christ,
so will you say in your heart, I am a son of God.

VI. THE DIVINE PRECEPTS, INVITATIONS, AND PROMISES. Call upon Me,
said God, in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.
Thou hast not called upon Me, O Jacob, said God. Thou hast been weary of Me,
O Israel. Might not God bring this charge against some of you? Might He not say to
some of you, Thou hast been weary of Me. Thou hast not called upon Me?

VII. OURSELVES. This alone will keep the heart and mind in peace; this is the
chief means of deliverance from evil; this renders other means effective; this carries
out our principles; and this will keep us from the use of sinful means.
VIII. EACH OTHER. In common affairs, for example, how can we really help
each other, unless we pray for each other? (S. Martin.)

The reasonableness of prayer

Can God listen to and answer prayer? Will God listen to and answer prayer?
Ought God to listen to and answer prayer? Three points, you notice, are involved
ability, disposition, right.
1. Do our petitions, as a matter of fact, reach the throne, or is it more likely that
they die away upon the sir, never get beyond wall or roof; or, if spoken out of
doors, go no further heavenward than the carrying power of the speakers
voice avails to press them? Doubts of this sort might perplex us, fairly
enough, were we tied to the childs notion of a God only to be really found by
going up and up and up in space. But this is not the true Christian
conception of the mode of the Divine presence. The King of heaven is indeed
what one of the prophets has called Him a God that hideth Himself but
HIS hiding place is close at hand, not far away. Even the heathen, for all their
dimness of spiritual vision, seem to have had some perception of this truth.
Smoke was their chosen symbol of prayer. Sometimes it went up from the
burning sacrifice upon the altar, sometimes from the swinging censer; but
whether the savour that it carried was that of the flesh of beasts or of sweet
incense, they had the satisfaction of watching it melt away into nothingness.
It has gone out of the world visible, they said, this offering of ours, it has
gone out of the world visible into the world invisible, and has reached the
waiting God for whom we meant it. Modern discovery, instead of dulling our
belief that prayer may find a hearing, ought singularly to warm and quicken
it. Only consider the wonderful enlargement that has taken place of late in
our notions of what is possible in the way of transmitting intelligence from
one mind to another mind! It is within the memory of living men that
instruments have been invented to do for speech what long ago the telescope
and the microscope did for sight, namely, to extend its range. There is little
reason to doubt that a time will come, and that before very long, when our
present means, of communicating sound marvellous, nay, almost
miraculous as they seem will be superseded by adjustments and
contrivances even more wonderful in their effects. And shall we say of Him
who has thus empowered us indefinitely to extend the reach of the faculty of
hearing, supplementing His original gift of the sense itself with so generous
an endowment, shall we say of Him that of necessity eternal deafness is His
portion? He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? Consider what speech
is. A word is an embodied thought. When this word has been articulated and
made audible, we call it spoken. So then speech is thought going forth upon
its travels. But midway between the thought just born and the audible
utterance of the lips, comes the as yet unspoken word. It has left the mind,
we will suppose. It has not yet reached the lips. Now who can tell upon what
other undulations besides those of the material atmosphere that thought just
now clothed upon with a word may not be going forth? For mans benefit
and that it may accomplish its earthly errand, it is committed to the waves of
the air; but how know we that there is no more subtle medium still on which
simultaneously it is borne to the auditorium of Almighty God? Human
 hearing is dependent, at least under the conditions of this life present is
dependent, on the bodily organ of hearing, the ear; but Divine hearing may
be just as real as ours without any such dependence. There is good and sober
reason to believe that some of the brute creatures hear sounds that are
wholly inaudible to us, the instrument of hearing having in their case been
differently adjusted. But is there no intelligence, think you, anywhere in the
universe to which all sound is audible? I cannot easily believe it; but, were I
forced to do so, I should still hold fast my faith that to the spoken word of
man Divine audience would be lent, and should still keep on praying my
prayers to Him unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from
whom no secrets are hid. He that planted the ear, shall He not hear?
2. But supposing it conceded that God is able to listen to our prayers, can we
think of Him as having also the ability to answer them? As a matter of fact,
we see and know that hundreds, thousands, millions of requests that are
made to God by the children of men, and made fervently, go ungranted. A
mother prays, with all the earnestness of which a mothers heart is capable,
for the recovery of a sick child, the child dies. But the pathetic thing, the
convincing thing, is that in spite of it all, great numbers of men, and they by
no means the least intelligent of their kind, keep on praying, keep on making
known their requests unto God. What inspires this unquenchable
determination to continue hoping against hope, this dogged resolve to
believe in Gods ability not merely to hear, but also, if He will, to accede to the
petitions His children bring? It is, I think, the conviction lying deep down in
the mind, and fast rooted there, that God is a person, not a mere force, like
magnetism or heat or attraction, but a being possessed of what we know
among ourselves as reason, and will, and loving kindness, one capable of
forming a purpose and working out a plan. We are often told that it argues a
downright puerility to suppose that God either can or will answer our
requests, because nature is clearly and beyond all question an intricately
contrived machine, no more able to alter its motions and change its bearings
in compliance with a spoken word of request, than a steam engine or a clock
or a loom. This would be an unanswerable argument in favour of fatalism,
and against the potency of prayer, were nature a machine of which we could
see the whole, but it is not. There is a background of mystery, a region none
of our senses can penetrate, and there, wholly out of sight, lie the beginnings
of power. It may be that behind the veil which sunders the seen from the
unseen, the hand which keeps the wheel work all in motion, is turned this
way rather than that, or that way rather than this, because two or three
believing souls have agreed on earth touching some blessing they desire to
have, some work they would see done.
3. There remains the question, Ought He always and invariably to answer it, in
the sense of never refusing to any petitioner any earnest request? To this a
sober-minded faith will assuredly answer, No. Fatherhood involves
governance, and governance involves the exercise of judgment,
discrimination. The life of a well-ordered family is full of what we may call
earthly prayer. The children ask the parents questions of many sorts, and
bring to them requests of widely variant character; is it any argument against
the efficacy of this which I have called earthly prayer, that some of the
questions go unanswered, and not a few of the requests ungranted? No, the
 father remembers what his responsibility with respect to the whole family is,
and certain of the favours the children ask he grants not, because he ought
not. And yet, who will deny that in the life of that household the right of
petition is a real thing, or that the exercise of it produces real results? So with
our Father in heaven and His family on earth. Possibly in the clearer light of
the heavenly life, should it be granted us to enter there, we shall find
ourselves thanking Him with greater fervency for withholding our hearts
desire, than we could possibly have thanked Him for conceding it. Moreover,
God forbid that we should confine our definition of prayer to the men
begging for favours. Prayer is more than petition, it is communion,
intercourse, exchange of confidences. The confiding to God the whole story of
our troubles, of our disappointments, of our failures, of our well-meant
endeavours, and last, not least, of our sins, is there nothing of value in all
this that we should leave it wholly out of view in estimating the efficacy of
prayer? Or again, think of how much a grateful heart has to tell. Is it nothing
that the soul should have the opportunity given her to pour out before her
Maker a glad offering of thanks? Intercourse with a character richer and
better than our own is commonly held to be a great privilege. We can all of
us recall friends to whom we have, as we say, owed a great deal on the score
of helpful influence. But is it supposable that God has permitted personal
intercourse between man and man to be such a potent instrument in the
building up of character, and yet has made all intercourse with Himself
impossible? If the spirit of man can, through the power of influence and
sympathy, bless and uplift the spirit of his fellow man, much more, a
thousand-fold more, shall God, who, be it remembered, is a Spirit also, aid by
intercourse and influence the creature spirit whom He permits to call himself
His child. Wherefore, let us pray. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.)

The uplifted hands of the penitent

Instead of wrangling with God (ver. 39) let us wrestle with Him in prayer;
this is the only way to get off with comfort. Nazianzen saith, that the best work we
can put our hands unto is, to lift them up to God in prayer. (J. Trapp.)

Prayer
1. True repentance worketh in us most earnest and hearty prayer.
(1) Because we see our misery in ourselves, and what need we have to
seek to God for help.
(2) It assureth us of Gods love to us, and readiness to hear us.
(3) It encourageth us to call upon the Lord, who in our conversion hath
given us experience of His unspeakable mercies.
2. Prayer to God consisteth not in words, but in the fervent and faithful
lifting up of the heart.
(1) God is a Spirit, and regardeth not the outward action in His worship.
(2) Divers have prayed aright, that have uttered no words (Gen 24:63;
Ex 14:15).
 3. We may use all outward means, that have warrant in the Word, to stir up our
affections to be more fervent in prayer.
(1) Because we are naturally dull in it.
(2) Our hearts are often moved with the things that our outward senses do
apprehend.
4. All our prayers are to be made unto God alone (Psa 50:15; Rom 10:14).
5. The prayer of the faithful must never rest upon anything in this world, but
look unto the mighty God, the author of all things. (J. Udall.)

LAM 3:42
We have transgressed and have rebelled.

Prayer and confession of sin

1. The time of affliction requireth a special kind of showing our repentance both
more fervent and with longer continuance than ordinary.
(1) Because God therefore afflicteth us, that we may be brought to a more
thorough repentance.
(2) Gods anger against us for our sins is manifested unto us by afflictions;
which must be turned away by our unfeigned repentance, or we shall be
consumed.
(3) God hath usually brought His people to such special declaration of
repentance, and blessed them therein (1Sa 7:5-6; Neh 1:2; Est 4:16).
2. It is necessary for Gods people to begin their prayers to God with a free
confession of their sins (Psa 32:5; Dan 9:5; Neh 1:6).
(1) Else we obtain no forgiveness.
(2) Else we have no assurance that we have repented.
(3) Otherwise, we cannot rightly and thoroughly condemn ourselves, and
clear the Lord for punishing us.
(4) By the confession of our sins we are the more humbled, and prepared
the better to prayer.
3. It furthereth to thorough repentance that Gods people do in their prayers adjoin
to their confession of sins a recital of the judgments that are upon them for the
same.
4. Every child of God is justly punished that faileth in any duty whatsoever it be,
that God hath commanded him in His Word.
5. It is rebellion against the Lord to despite any of His laws, though all
human laws should approve us therein.
6. No excuse or privilege can shield any man from Gods plagues for sin. (J.
Udall.)
 LAM 3:43-54
Thou hast covered Thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through.

Gods silence
The demand for response is a thing instinctive in us, native to our feelings. We
are so made that when any emotion is stirred in the heart, and breaks out into
expression, there must be answer or we suffer. The very mechanism of Nature seems to
have been planned with reference to this spiritual fact, and, as it wore, in illustration of
it. Motion has its rebound, light its reflection, sound its echo. Nature may be, and, as
we have too good reason to know, is, upon the highest topics, dumb to man, but to
herself she is vocal. Action and reaction, play and counterplay, are the very
groundwork of her being. When now we pass over the invisible line that marks off the
confines of external Nature from those of human nature, and open our eyes upon the
field of our own inner experience, what do we see? We see everywhere the same need of,
the same demand for the response; but we do not everywhere see the need satisfied, or
the demand met. On the contrary, appeal upon appeal, cry after cry, go out upon the
air, and there comes nothing back. And yet the call for response is as real a thing as
anything in us. What can the orator do with the unresponsive audience? lie may be able
to struggle through the sentences he has prepared himself to utter, but if it is plain to
him as he goes along that what he says is nowhere calling forth assent on the part of the
listeners, he is half-paralysed. Liturgical worship, as an institution, may be said to rest
upon this same principle. A recognition of the mutual interest that lies between
minister and people in the act of worship is what makes The Book of Common Prayer
the thing it is. Lift up your hearts, that is well, but how much better to have the reply
come back, full and strong, We lift them up unto the Lord. These are but detached
illustrations of the general principle that there is rooted in human nature a craving for
response. As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man. The
question arises, Has man a right to demand, or to expect, from his Maker the
responsiveness which he instinctively looks for from his brother man? First, then, is it a
reasonable expectation on our part that God should take notice of our sorrows and our
griefs, and in some way speak, to us about them? The Bible warrants me in answering,
Yes. It is the teaching of the Christian religion that whatever there is in man that is
good is also in God, and more besides. This is a general inference from the declaration
that man was made in the image of God. The original has many characteristics which
the image has not. But still the image has resemblance, even though it have not identity.
If it had not resemblance, it would not be the image. Hence when we find in the works
of Nature certain laws of number and proportion accurately followed; when we discover
by chemical process that the same substances always combine according to the same
fixed weights; when botany has shown us that the stalks and leaves of a plant are
arranged in a carefully adjusted numerical order, we infer that a mind not unlike our
own minds, in its general characteristics, must have planned and calculated such
results. Apply this reasoning to the facts of the spiritual universe, and what have we as
a result? Take the sentiment of pity, that compassionate feeling which strength may
entertain towards weakness. It may not be possible to define it satisfactorily in words,
but we all know what it is, and we know also that it is found most fully developed as a
characteristic in the noblest natures. But why stop at this point? Why make the noblest
man you can imagine the supreme illustration of this grace? God is above man, for God
made man, and must of necessity, therefore, be mans superior. And shall we suppose
that compassion ceases to be possible after we have soared up above the level of mans
being? Nay, ought we not to expect to find in mans Maker a larger, deeper, broader
compassion than we found in our very noblest man? There is an immense wealth of
argument hidden in that question of the Psalmist. He that formed the eye, shall He not
see? With equal emphasis we have a right to ask, He that formed mans heart so that it
could be pitiful, shall not He pity? We do not hold our peace at the tears of others,
when we honestly and sorely grieve for them. Why then should He hold His peace at
our tears, if pity us He really does? Is there then any way of satisfactorily accounting for
the apparent dumbness of Gods pity? Does He really, as it might seem that He does,
hold His peace at our tears? Instead of directly answering these questions, I purpose to
meet them indirectly by suggesting a few thoughts to be pondered by all whom this
inquiry in any degree interests. Here is one such suggestion. A voice, in order to be real,
need not necessarily be an articulate voice, need not necessarily employ audible
sounds. Of our various teachers there are few indeed that speak to us more effectively
than the artists and the composers. They do it through the instrumentality of forms of
speech peculiar to themselves. So, then, let us not look to God for a sort of utterance He
has never vouchsafed, unless by miracle, and let us be reconciled to the thought that if
He is to speak to us, it will be in what must seem to all except ourselves the deepest
silence. Unquestionably there does sometimes come to persons in affliction, when they
take their sorrows patiently, a certain quietness of soul, a calm tranquillity of which all
about them take notice. Why is it not a reasonable inference, at least for a religious
mind disposed to think the best rather than the worst things of God, why is it not a
reasonable inference that this very stilling of the waves is the direct result of Gods
having spoken? We charge Him impatiently sometimes with holding His peace, when
really the fact is that He has been bestowing His peace, and in doing so has spoken in
the very truest and most satisfactory sense of all. Under the shadow of some weighty
sorrow a group of friends sit silent in one anothers presence. Shall we say of them that
because their grief is speechless, therefore they are of no help to one another? Most
assuredly, No. Do you tell me that the parallel fails, because in the case of the friends
their silent sitting in one anothers presence is comforting and helpful wholly because
at other times, and in other places, they have spoken often and much? And so, I answer,
has God in the past spoken often and much, spoken more than once, and more than
twice. Through the lips of holy prophets, since the world began, He has from time to
time communicated to the human family messages of reassurance. They tell of a new
heavens and a new earth; they foretell the day when God shall wipe away all tears from
off all faces; they predict a triumph over the grave, and the swallowing up of death in
victory. No one can rob us of our heritage in words like these; they have been spoken;
they have never been taken back; they are the common property of all of us; and while
they stand we have no valid reason for complaining that God holds His peace at our
tears. But I have kept the richest and most helpful suggestion till the last. CHRIST is
really Gods word of answer to those who turn to Him in trouble, all eagerness for His
response. Baffled, disheartened, afflicted, distressed, we look at Him, and faith is born
afresh. With what tenderness and graciousness, and at the same time with what a
masterful touch does He sketch for us the true likeness of the Divine Majesty. Look at
Him as the Good Shepherd leading His flock in green pastures, and beside still, waters!
Look at Him as the Man of Sorrows, a homeless pilgrim, a seeker of mountain
solitudes, misunderstood, plotted against, spitefully entreated, cursed, mocked, and
scourged! See how full of pity He is for all who sorrow and all who suffer! These three
are the great ills of life: sin, disease, and sorrow. We note His attitude towards each of
them, and it is plainly that of pardoner, physician, consoler. If any word can be
imagined more full of meaning than this Word made flesh, speak it out, and let us
know what it is. Failing to do that, no longer think of God as one who will not answer,
who holds His peace at tears, but trust Him, trust Him as your everlasting Friend. (W.
R. Huntington, D. D.)

LAM 3:49-50
Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission, till the Lord look
down and behold from heaven.

Mourning the absence of Christ

I. SHOW WHAT THIS IMPORTS.
1. That a child of God may be under the hidings of Gods face, God will have a
difference betwixt the upper and lower houses. When the saints are above,
all the shadows flee away, but now clouds may intercept the light of His
countenance. When the Lord turns His back, conscience turns its face to the
soul, and tells that the Lord is displeased. And Oh! how bitter must Gods
anger be to that soul that knows Him.
2. That the hidings of the Lords face may continue long with a child of God.
God will have His peoples faith and patience tried, and therefore makes
their clouds return after the rain.
3. A holy dissatisfaction with all things, while Christ hides His face.
4. A wearisome longing after the Lord (Job 7:2-3; 23:3-4). Duties are hard work,
when Christ withdraws. Labour in vain much more causeth weariness. Hope
deferred makes. the heart sick. It refresheth the labourer to think that when
the sun goes down, he will go to his rest; but the people of God, in this case,
see not their signs, nor know the time how long.
5. Some hope that the Lord will yet look down, and behold from heaven (Psa
43:5). Should they lose all hope, they lose all.
6. A resolute persisting in duty till the Lord return: The soul resolves never to
give over, and so holds on, till the Lord look down and behold from heaven.

II. Some REASONS WHY THEY ARE THUS DISPOSED.

1. Felt need of Christ. The gracious soul cannot live without Him. They say with
Peter, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Now,
necessity hath no law, and hunger will dig through stone walls. And if it
cannot dig through them it will leap over them. The soul still cries, Lord help
me.
2. Superlative love to Him (Song 8:6-7). Use
1. Hence we may see why so many professors fall short of Christ. They are utter
strangers to this disposition of the godly.
(1) They have not the living spirit of Christ in them, and so they cannot
follow the Lord fully (Num 14:24; Joh 4:14).
(2) There are difficulties in the way of heaven which their hearts cannot
 digest.
(3) The world and their lusts were never made sapless to them, but still
have the chief room in their hearts. Hence, when Christ will not
answer, they have another door to go to.
2. You are in earnest for Christ, yet under the hidings of His face, and all
things else insipid to you without Him, you see here how you are to
behave; you must hold on seeking till the Lord look down from heaven. (T.
Boston, D. D.)

Compassion for sinners

This is the great need of all the members of our churches. If this consuming
desire were in the hearts of pastor and people there would be less time and thought
for the profitless discussion of technicalities in faith and practice. Dr. Mason said
that the secret of Dr. Chalmers power was his blood earnestness. The seraphic
Summerfield, just before his death, speaking of his recovery, said: Oh, if I might be
raised again, how I would preach! I have taken a look into eternity. Think of Allein,
of whom it is said that he was insatiably greedy for the conversion of souls; of
Matthew Henry, who said, I would think it a greater happiness to gain one soul to
Christ than mountains of silver and gold to myself; of Doddridge, who said, I long
for the conversion of souls more than anything besides. I could not only labour for it,
but die for it with pleasure; of John Knox, who broke the stillness of the night with
his thrice-repeated cry, O Lord, give me Scotland or I die. God gave him Scotland.
No wonder that Queen Mary feared the prayers of John Knox more than an army
of ten thousand men. A passion for souls gives a man irresistible power. The
Chinese convert was right when he said, We want men with hot hearts to tell us of
the love of Christ. All about us are souls in sin and death; we may hear their death
knell sounding. Men and women there are without God and without hope men
and women soon to stand at the judgment seat of Christ. May God help us to cry
unto Him day and might for their rescue!
 LAM 3:51
Mine eye affecteth mine heart.

The proper use of observation

We are not to look upon life with the eye of the statistician or the political
economist or the collector of facts so called; our heart is to be in our eye, and our
observation is to be conducted in the light of our tenderest sympathy. When the
prophet says affecteth he means harms, or causes grief, to my heart: it is as if he
said, What I see hurts me; does not merely hurt me outwardly, but hurts me within,
strikes me at the very heart, gives me pain of soul, distresses the very springs of life.
Note then how keenly sensitive was the prophetic heart. Why is it that our hearts
are so little affected by the destruction that is wrought in the city? Simply because
we are content to look at surfaces, to look with the eye of science or art or social
mechanism. Prophets looked with the eye of the heart, and they could not bear the
sad and tragic visions of the streets. Were our hearts right with Christ, were we one
with the living God in all the tenderness of His love, a walk down the city
thoroughfares would crush us, disable us, and drive us into the utterest despair;
only then by some other vision that is to say, by the very vision of the Cross itself
could we be recovered from our dejection, and constrained to renew our efforts at
amelioration. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Sight aids sympathy

1. The eye, in seeing the outward miseries that God layeth upon us, is a
special mean to make us the more sorrowful in heart for it.
(1) The sight is the quickest of the senses.
(2) Things seen are most surely and amply known and understood, seeing a
report may deceive us, but not the sight.
2. Natural affection of the most passionate woman can bring no such grief of
heart as the ministry of the Church of God doth often work in the godly.
(1) Those mourn for things temporal, these for spiritual.
(2) Those have nothing but natural affection to set them on work; these
have Gods Spirit also that helpeth them herein, and worketh a greater
affection to Gods truth than any affection of nature can work in a
mother to the child of her womb. (J. Udall.)
Mine enemies chased me sore.

Adversaries of the good

1. The true Church and faithful people of God do never want enemies
whilst they live here, who do most eagerly pursue them, by all means
seeking to overthrow them.
(1) Many walk in the broad way, who being of contrary quality to the godly do
therefore hate them (2Co 6:14-15; Psa 124:6-7; 129:1-3; 56:1).
(2) Gods providence hath disposed that it should be so, for the use of just
condemnation of the wicked, and the greater good of His servants.
2. The godly of themselves are so simple and weak, that they can neither
prevent nor withstand the strength of their adversaries.
3. The wicked are moved by the malice of their own hearts to persecute the
godly, not having any cause given to move them thereto.
(1) The godly are fewer, weaker, simpler, and withdraw themselves from
them.
(2) Nothing can be just cause to make one bitter against another but
sin, which the wicked hate not.
(3) God in His providence hath appointed it to be so, to show His
righteousness in delivering His, and overthrowing the other. (J. Udall.)

They have cut off my life in the dungeon.

Malice of the wicked

1. The wicked are often so enflamed with malice against the godly, that
nothing will satisfy them but their blood.
2. The wicked do not content themselves with ordinary means to seek the life
of the godly, but also practise often more than naturally seemeth needful
(Mat 27:66).
(1) They bear a deadly hate to the truth, and possessors thereof.
(2) The sting of their evil conscience maketh them always fear they shall
not prevail (Dan 6:16-17). (J. Udall.)

Waters flowed over mine head.

Sorrows of the godly

1. Many grievous and inevitable are the troubles and miseries which Gods
faithful people suffer in this life.
2. The godly oppressed with miseries are often brought both to doubt and
 despair for the time.
(1) They judge according to their present feelings.
(2) Mans infirmity is naturally prone to infidelity.
(3) God in His wisdom withdraweth the feeling of His grace for a time, to let
them see themselves, and to make them seek to Him the more earnestly.
(4) To make them more thankful for His grace when they feel it, and more
careful to continue in it. (J. Udall.)

LAM 3:55-56
I calledout of the low dungeon.

Prayer in peril
1. The godly do pray unto the Lord for His grace and favour, even when they are in
such great extremity that all hope, in reason, is past. Moses at Red Sea, Jonah
in whales belly, etc.
(1) Reasons.
(a) Their faith can never be quailed, seeing it is that which
overcometh the world (1Jo 5:4).
(b) They rest upon Gods truth that faileth not, and power that
ruleth all things.
(2) Use: to teach us
(a) to strive against that temptation which persuadeth to
surcease praying when our case seemeth desperate;
(b) that their profession was but temporary when troubles do quail;
(c) to call still upon God in the day of our troubles, yea, to increase
in fervency, according to the increase of danger and continuance
therein.
2. There is no condition so miserable in this life, but the godly may and do fall
into it.
(1) Examples. Abraham, for uncertain dwelling; David for many enemies;
Job for inward and outward miseries of all sorts.
(2) Reasons.
(a) God will show His anger against sin in this life, even upon His
own servants.
(b) That by afflictions they may be weaned from the delight in this
world, and made in love with heaven.
(3) Use: to teach us
(a) to reprove them that judge according to the outward estate of
any, what favour they are in with the Lord;
 (b) not to promise ourselves any worldly success, but to look
always for the contrary. (J. Udall.)

The efficacy of prayer

I. TO WHAT A STATE GODS MOST FAVOURED SAINTS MAY BE REDUCED.
In the prophets experience, however, we see

II. WHAT REMEDY IS OPEN TO THEM. The answer he received will lead us to
contemplate

III. THE EFFICACY OF THAT REMEDY WHENEVER

APPLIED. (C. Simeon, M. A.)

Thou hast heard my voice: hide not Thine ear.

Prayer of the godly

1. The experience of Gods former favour is a notable provocation to cause us
still to trust in Him again in our necessities (Psa 4:1).
(1) It argueth that we are engrafted unto Christ, and therefore shall
be loved unto the end, seeing God changeth not.
(2) God is always ready to show mercy and to forgive; and therefore He
will do it one time as well as another.
2. The prayer of the godly ought to come from the heart, and to be with
greatest fervency that may be.
(1) God will not be dallied with, but looketh to the inward affection.
(2) We must groan under the burden of that we would be rid of, and long
for that we desire, before God will hear us. (J. Udall.)

LAM 3:57
Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon Thee: Thou saidst, Fear not.

A wonder explained by greater wonders

How different are our experiences from our fears! This man of God had said,
When I cry and shout He shutteth out my prayer. He had said again, Thou hast
covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through. He had added
even to that, Surely against me is He turned. But now he corrects his
misapprehensions. Neither was prayer shut out, nor had God turned against him; for he
joyfully confesses, Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon Thee: Thou saidst,
Fear not. Brethren, if our experiences have so far exceeded our expectations and
belied our doubts, let us take care that we record them. Do not let us suffer our
lamentations to be written in a book, and our thanksgivings to be spoken to the wind.
Write not your complaints in marble and your praises upon the sand. Whatever wonder
there was in the heart of Jeremiah that God should draw near to him, you and I must
have felt even greater wonder whenever God has drawn near to us. It is to us a
standing miracle that the great and glorious and thrice holy God should ever come and
reveal Himself in a way of love to us, insignificant, dishonoured, guilty sons of men.

I. Let us set forth some sort of AN EXPLANATION OF THIS WONDER.

1. The first thought I would suggest to you is that men have ever been in the
thoughts of God. Of the eternal wisdom we read, My delights were with
the sons of men. Long before man was created it was in the eternal
purpose that such a singular and specially favoured being should be
formed; and all things concerning covenant purposes and designs were
written in that book into which angels may not look. At this moment the
whole conformation of humanity on the face of the globe bears a direct
relation to the ultimate Church of God. Thrones and crowns must all be
subordinate to the main purpose of God concerning his elect; it has been,
and it shall be so, even to the end.
2. God hath drawn nearer to us than we have as yet hinted at, in becoming
tenderly near in nature. If I were in trouble in a foreign land, it would be
pleasant to hear the voice of an Englishman; it would be even more
encouraging to spy out a neighbour, a fellow citizen of the same town; but
most of all would it be cheering to perceive that a dear friend, a brother, a
husband was to the front on our behalf. Such a near and dear friend is Jesus
to each one of those the Father hath given Him. His nature is love itself. He
will, He must, come to you that are in sorrow, and sorrow with you, and
thus cheer your hearts; for not in vain does He wear your nature, not in vain
in that nature has He suffered and died for you.
3. Nor is this all. The Lord Jesus was specially near to His people in the days of His
life on earth. Jesus was the most manlike of all men. He draws us to Himself,
and the nearer we come the more fully we appreciate Him. If Jesus came thus
near to men in His life on earth, do you wonder that He draws near to them
now?
4. Carefully notice that this was a nearness to sinful men. You and I are
sinners too, and our Redeemers nearness to the sinners of Judea meant
nearness to us.
5. Jesus Christ came still nearer to us in His death. For the transgression of
my people was He stricken. He bare the sin of many; He was made sin
for us, who know no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God
in Him. This is coming wonderfully near to us.
6. He is now in heaven; turn your thoughts up to Him there. In heaven He is
still perpetually near us. He has carried our nature into heaven. He is
member of heavens high Parliament for the sons of men, and He holds His
seat as such. He is head over all things to His church, which is His body, the
fulness of Him that filleth all in all. What is He doing in heaven? He is not
only representing us, but He is preparing a place for us: making a niche in
heaven for you, a place in heaven for me; and all the while He is continually
offering intercession for His people.
 7. Jesus may well come near to His people, for there is a mystical union which
ensures it. A Divine doctrine this, of which Paul saith, This is a great
mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church, and this in
relation to the marriage union. He went down to the depths with us, that
He might bring us up into the heights with Himself, that there His
enthroned bride should be forever with Him, a queen more glorious than
eternity had ever seen.

II. THE WONDER ITSELF.

1. By no means is this wonder at all contrary to expectation, when expectation is
founded upon an enlightened understanding. It is natural, it is necessary, that
Christ should come near to a people whom He loves so well.
2. But, if you have ever enjoyed this communion, let me help you to describe it, that
you may wonder at it. What is the manner in which God draws near to His
people in their time of trouble? At times He draws near to us by a secret
strengthening of us to bear up when we are under pressure. We may have no
marked joys, nor special transports; but quiet, calm, subdued joy rules the
spirit. Furthermore, the good Lord often vouchsafes to His people in their time
of great pain and weakness and weariness a doubly vivid sense of His love. At
such times the Lord grants us a sensible assurance of His sympathy with us. We
feel that every stroke of the rod comes distinctly from a Fathers hand, who doth
not afflict willingly. The Lord draws near to His peoples souls sometimes by a
very speedy and remarkable deliverance out of the trouble under which they
groan. Did He not bring up Joseph out of the prison house and set him on the
throne of Pharaoh? He can do the like with you if He wills, ere your sun has
gone down.
3. There seems to be some surprise concerning the memorable graciousness of God.
Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon Thee. Then, I suppose, there
were other days in which he had not called upon God, or at least had not done
so so memorably; but in the first day when I called upon Thee thou drewest
near to me. Does not that give us a hint, as if he said, I had neglected my God,
I had failed to apply to Him; my faith had been asleep, but as soon as ever I
awoke the Lord drew near to me.
4. There seems to me also to be a Nota bene here, a kind of hand in the margin to
point out the promptness of God. Thou drewest near in the day that I called
upon Thee, the very day he called God came; no sooner the prayer than the
answer. Oh, the blessed quickness of God.
5. Observe the extreme tenderness of all this. You remember that text, He
giveth liberally, and upbraideth not. Here is an illustration of it. He comes
to His poor, suffering, downcast people, and what He says to them is not
You should not have done so-and-so; this is very wrong of you; I must
terribly correct you. No; but He says, Fear not, I have forgiven thee; and I
will deliver thee. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Communion with God

I. THE CONDESCENDING VISITATION OF GODS PRESENCE AND GRACE.
 1. It supposes all obstacles to His approach removed.
2. It asserts an actual intercourse with God.
3. It asserts that the tokens of His love were enjoyed; and nearness and familiarity
of friendly communication. It implies also the influences and consolations of the
Holy Spirit: for it is by His Spirit that God is pleased to maintain converse with
His people.

II. THE SEASON WHEN THIS APPROACH TO THE MIND WAS ENJOYED. In
the day that I called upon Thee. Observe that this was a day of trouble.
1. This dungeon may be considered as a representation of temporal
adversity, or spiritual distress; to both of which the children of God are
subject.
2. A day of trouble ought to be a day of prayer. Is any among you
afflicted? Let him pray.
3. God never treats with indifferences the prayers of His children.
4. When God, in answer to the prayers of His people, is pleased to draw
near to them, it must have a most reviving influence on the mind.

III. THE ANIMATING EFFECTS OF SUCH VISITATIONS FROM GOD ON

THE MIND.
1. The best and most eminent believers may be the subjects of fear. In the
animal world, the lion is distinguished by his courage, the hare by its
timidity. And thus in human minds there is a vast diversity: some are bold
and unacquainted with the passion of fear; others are the contrary, and
tremble like an aspen leaf, and are liable to fear even where no fear is.
2. But there in everything is a consciousness of Gods presence with us to
disarm these terrors. Thou saidst, Fear not. God says this by His word
and spirit, and by His providence, and by the exhortations of Christian
friends. And if He be with you, what have you to fear? In concluding this
subject, first, admire the condescension and grace of the Divine Being, that
He is pleased thus to notice the circumstances in which we are placed, and
to afford relief under every painful dispensation.
3. We should be led to inquire whether we know anything of the approach of
God to the mind.
4. I infer the misery of those who are far from God, and strangers to
spiritual intercourse. Behold all that are far from Him perish. (G.
Clayton.)

Prayer encouraged
1. When the godly do rightly pray unto the Lord, they have most notable
experience of His favour towards them.
(1) Reasons.
(a) God performeth His promise unto them (Psa 50:15; Mat 11:28).
 (b) Their affections are carried into heaven, where is the fulness of joy,
from earthly things that are full of vexations.
(2) Uses
(a) To teach us that we, therefore, are not heard when we pray,
because we call not aright.
(b) To teach us to labour with ourselves, that we may increase in
fervent and frequent prayer.
(c) To reprove them that either account fervent prayer needless, or
are negligent in it.
2. The Lord doth give most notable encouragements and comforts unto
those that rightly worship Him.
(1) Reasons.
(a) He doth thereby manifest His love unto His servants.
(b) He will daunt the enemies by their wonderful patience,
constancy, comfort, and courage.
(c) Others may be allured by their example to trust in Him.
(2) Uses.
(a) To reprove them that account the patience of the godly,
sottishness; their courage, desperateness; their
constancy, obstinacy.
(b) To teach us that in walking uprightly, and calling upon God for
His assistance, we shall be assured that He will be with us,
howsoever He seem for a time to neglect us. (J. Udall.)

LAM 3:58
O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; Thou hast redeemed my life.

God pleading for saints, and saints pleading for God

1. The prophet speaks experimentally as of a matter which he had proved for
himself in his own case. There is no true understanding of the truths of God
except by a personal experience of them.
2. Observe how positively he speaks. Thou hast pleaded the causes of my
soul. Let us, by the aid of the gracious Comforter, shake off those doubts
and fears which so much mar our peace and comfort.
3. Observe how gratefully the prophet speaks, ascribing all the glory to
God alone. Earth should be a temple filled with the songs of grateful saints, and
every day should be a censer smoking with the sweet incense of thanksgiving.
4. How joyful Jeremiah seems to be while he records the Lords mercy! How
triumphantly he lifts up the strain!
I. DIVINE PLEADING.
1. The Lord pleads our cause in the Court of Providence. The Christian may
expect that in the course of providence, when he meets with trouble, God
will raise up for him at different times, and in unexpected quarters, persons
who will take an interest in him, and be the means of working out his
deliverance.
(1) Sometimes God pleads the cause of His people by silencing their enemies.
When your foot has slipped when you have spoken unadvisedly with your
lips, if you have deeply repented of the sin, you may leave the matter before
God, for He will either silence every dogs tongue, or turn their barkings to
His glory.
(2) At other times our God has pleaded the cause of His people, by raising
up friends for them. He does not violate the wills of their enemies, but
He wisely turns those wills into the channel of friendship.
(3) You see thus, that either by silencing enemies, or else by raising up
friends, God can, in providence, plead the cause of your soul; or if men
should seem to have even less than this to do with it, He knows how, by
special providences, to bring you out of the depth of your difficulties. No
Christian man, methinks, can look back through many years of his life
without observing some strange and singular workings of the Divine
hand, by which, in an unexpected manner, God has wrought His
deliverance.
2. Our text may be read with great comfort if we think upon the Court of
Divine Law. My soul, triumph thou in thy God! This day rejoice thou with
all thy might, for Christ hath prevalently pleaded thy cause, and thou art
acquitted nay, thou art brought in as meritorious, and accepted in the
sight of God, through the plea of the Beloved.
3. In the third place, Jesus pleads the cause of my soul in the court of conscience,
which is a minor imitation of the great Court of Heaven. Foul and vile I am, and
yet I am perfect in Christ Jesus: lost, ruined, and undone in the first Adam, but
saved and redeemed made to sit in heavenly places, in the second Adam. Ah!
doubts and fears! Where are ye now, when Jesus pleads in my soul?
4. Jesus pleads our cause in the Court of Heaven. A poor man once wished to
have a favour of a great one. This great lord had a son a very kind and
condescending one, who spoke to the poor man, and said, If you will write a
petition to my father, he is very gracious, and he will be sure to grant it; but
that you may have no doubts about the success of your petition, give it to me,
and I will take it in my own hand up to my fathers house for you, and make
your case my own. I win say to him, My father, hear this poor mans
petition, not for his own sake, but consider it as mine; do me the personal
favour and kindness of hearing this mans prayer, as though it were my
prayer; for, indeed, I make it mine: The poor man wrote out his petition, but
when he had finished it, Alas! he said to himself, this will never do to
present before the great one; it is so full of errors; I have blotted it with my
tears, and where I have tried to scratch out a word which I have spelt
wrongly, I have made it worse, and have so badly worded the whole petition,
that! am afraid the great one will throw it in the fire, or never notice it.
 But, said his friend, I will write it out in a fair clear hand for you, so that
there shall be no blots and no blunders; and when I have done so, I will do as
I have said I will take it in my own hand, put my own name at the bottom
of it, with your name, and will offer it as our joint petition; and I will put it
upon this footing, My father, do it for me; not for him, but for me. When
the poor man saw his petition thus written out, and knew it was in such
hands, he went his way, and made sure that the answer must come; and
come it did. This is how Jesus Christ has done for you. He takes our poor
unworthy prayers and amends them.
5. Jesus will plead the cause of His people, and our heavenly Father will do so
too in the last great day of judgment. If you are a true Christian, and you are
called to occupy a prominent post in the service of God, expect to lose your
character; expect not to have the good opinion of any but your God, and
those faithful ones, who, like you, are willing to bear contempt. But what joy
it is for all these holy men to know that at the last God will plead the cause of
their souls!

II. IF THE LORD HATH PLEADED THE CAUSES OF OUR SOUL, WE SHOULD
PLEAD HIS CAUSE WHILE WE HAVE ANY BREATH TO PRAY, OR A TONGUE
WITH WHICH TO BEAR WITNESS FOR HIM. Beloved, there is a way of bearing
witness for Christ which you must adopt that of witnessing by your consistency of
conduct. Holiness is, after all, the mightiest weapon which a Christian can wield. Ire ye
holy as Christ is holy. Lastly, we can all plead for God in a private way. Oh! there is a
great power in pleading for God with individuals. A man went to preach for seven
summers on the village green, and good was done. Joseph sometimes listened to the
preacher, but only to ridicule him. There were many souls converted, but he remained
as hard as ever. A certain John who had felt the power of truth, worked with him in
the barn, and one day, between the strokes of the flail, John spoke a word for truth and
for God, but Joseph laughed at him, and hinted at hypocrisy and many other things.
Now John was very sensitive, and his whole soul was filled with grief at Josephs banter;
so after he had spoken, feeling a flush of emotion, he turned to the corner of the barn
and hid his face, while a flood of tears came streaming from his eyes. He wiped them
away with the corner of his smock frock, and came back to his flail; but Joseph had
noticed the tears though the other tried to hide them; and what argument could not do,
and what preaching could not do, those tears through God the Holy Spirit did
effectually, for Joseph thought to himself, What! does John care for my soul, and
weep for my soul? then it is time I should care and weep for it too. Beloved, witness
thus for Christ! (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The causes of the soul
Roughly classified, the causes that are tried in ordinary courts of law are of
two sorts, those in which the person accused is guilty and those in which he is
innocent. The effort of judicature, the end and aim of courts, judges and juries, is to
distinguish aright between these two classes of cases, to determine whether, in any
given instance, the man on trial is to be held blameworthy or without blame. Under
which of these two heads are we to count the causes of the soul? It may surprise
you to have me reply, Under both of them.

I. TAKE, TO BEGIN WITH, THOSE CAUSES OF THE SOUL IN WHICH SHE

ACKNOWLEDGES HERSELF GUILTY. There are a great many ways of trying to
explain away the sense of guiltiness in the human heart. There is a rooted reluctance in
every soul to take upon the lips frankly, and in the spirit of genuine contrition, the
words, Father, I have sinned. And yet deeper down even than this reluctance lies the
conviction that such confession ought to be made. This is the acknowledgment of the
men and women of fullest, strongest, ripest nature. You say, Oh, no! I am acquainted
with scores of people who have no such consciousness, make no such acknowledgment.
They think too well of God to believe that He will ever punish, if indeed it must be
conceded that He exists, which they doubt. Yes, it must be admitted that there are a
great many such people, and they are often very agreeable people, accomplished,
versatile, cultivated it may be; at any rate, people who are, as we say, exceedingly
pleasant to meet. The question is, Do such people adequately represent human nature
in its heights and depths? Testimony is of weight in proportion to the familiarity of the
witness with the facts about which he testifies. To put the ease strongly, picture to
yourself an aged man, who has see, n much of the trials and troubles of this mortal life,
whose face is seamed with marks that tell of mental struggle, of conflict with doubt,
with difficulty, with pain, whose eye has lost the flash that once belonged to it, but
keeps still the glow and penetrative power that tell of active life within, call him a-
Kempis, if you will, or St. Augustine, or Keble, or Muhlenberg. Now set opposite him
some fresh-cheeked, light-hearted, cheery-voiced young fellow, who knows not very
much of life, to be sure, but is quick-witted and intelligent, thoroughly well read,
informed as to the very latest phase of contemporary thought, literary, social, political,
able to instruct you on a thousand points of scholarship in almost any department you
may choose. To which of the two, let me ask, should you the more naturally, or with
the more confidence turn, were the question to be discussed, not one about rocks or
shells, or pictures, or pottery, or artists proofs, or first editions, but a question of the
powers and possibilities of the human heart? Which of them would be the best
authority, say you, on such a point as this one before us now, namely, the souls
attitude toward God its Maker as respects innocence and guilt? But now the question
comes up, and it is certainly worth looking at, Why should one whoso cause is a guilty
cause care to have it pleaded? Why not confess judgment, and take the consequences?
O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul. Is this a thing to be desired, that the
Lord should take up or help forward the cause of the offender? High-minded advocates
sometimes refuse to defend a criminal when it is perfectly evident that the offence
charged was really committed. Let the law take its course, they say. And ought it not to
be so in mens relations to their Maker? If they have really broken His law, ought they
not to be willing to meet the penalty, instead of expecting or desiring any one to plead
their cause? To all which I merely answer that if it be indeed so, then is the word
Gospel emptied of meaning, and the title our Saviour robbed of all its power to
charm. For what element of good tidings is there in the message, Do wrong, and you
shall be punished? And what need have we of a Saviour, if there be nothing evil from
which it is possible for us to be saved? That ancient sufferer whose words make the
substance of our text was reaching after, and had partly grasped, a truth which Jesus
Christ came into the world to make so clear that every one might grasp it, namely this,
that with God there is forgiveness, not, indeed, the weak-minded, easy-tempered
condoning of sin which it is an insult to forgiveness to call by that name, but a costly
forgiveness involving intensest suffering. O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my
soul. If sympathy and that intimate identifying of ones self with another, which
advocates know something of, when seeking with all their might to save the life of a
defendant in a capital ease if these can, as they sometimes do, involve keen suffering,
can we wonder at mens putting a similar interpretation on the agony and bloody
sweat, the Cross and Passion? The truth is, there is a feeling deep down in the human
heart that if we are to be helped at all, the help must come from some source higher
than our own level. It is all very well to say complacently that men ought to be willing,
and not only willing but glad, to bear the punishment of their sins, and so to expiate
them. But is it quite certain that when we allow ourselves to use language of this sort
we at all appreciate what the punishment our sins deserve would be, or what it would
mean to bear it? That Christ came down into human life, dwelt with us, shared our
sorrows, toiled, suffered, and all in order that He might be the more closely identified
with us, and so the better be our advocate, the better plead the causes of the human
soul, this is the Gospel, this is the glad news, and how different it all sounds from the
bare, Be good and thou shalt be rewarded, be bad and thou shalt be punished.

II. TAKE NOW THE CAUSE WHERE THE ACCUSED HAS BEEN THE VICTIM OF
SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES AND REALLY NOT THE GUILTY PERSON HE
SEEMS TO BE. No men escape wholly misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
Perhaps it would not be putting the matter too strongly to say that there is probably
no time when a man is not in a false position as regards some of those about him; no
time when, on all sides, and by every observer, he is seen precisely as he really is.
The atmosphere through which men look at the actions and the lives of the other
men about them is never so absolutely clear that there is no distortion, no undue
foreshortening or misplacement in the picture received into the eye. Ordinarily this is
tolerable enough; we expect a certain measure of misunderstanding, are prepared for
it, and do not mind encountering it. But there are times in the lives of some men
when misapprehension and unjust judgment seem to hem them in on every side.
Innocent at heart, and sure that they are innocent, they yet bend and waver under
the crushing load of suspicion which adverse circumstance has laid upon their
shoulders. Then it is that the soul, helpless to free itself from its calamitous
entanglement, calls out to God for aid. And how is it that the Lord does plead the
cause of such a soul as this environed one we have in mind? He does it by His
providence, by His ordering of events. Our help cometh from the Lord. It is not by
cultivating an introspective, self-analysing habit of mind that we are likely to find the
way to peace. We are living out these lives of ours too much apart from God. We toil
on dismally, as if the making or the marring of our destinies rested wholly with
ourselves. It is not so. We are not the lonely, orphaned creatures we let ourselves
suppose ourselves to be. The earth, rolling on its way through space, does not go
unattended. The Maker and Controller of it is with it, and around it, and upon it. We
cannot escape Him. Why should we desire to do so? He knows us infinitely more
thoroughly than we know ourselves. He loves us better than we have ever dared to
believe could be possible. Conscience-stricken, guilty, perplexed, spoken against,
misjudged, there is no one we can turn to with such confidence as to Him; no
advocate so trustworthy. He pleads the causes of the soul. (W. R. Huntington, D. D.)

Thou hast pleaded

1. Observe how Let us, by the aid of the gracious Comforter, shake off those doubts
and fears which so much mar our peace and comfort. Be this our prayer, that
we may have done with the harsh croaking voice of surmise and suspicion, and
may be able to speak with the clear melodious voice of full assurance.
2. Notice how gratefully the prophet speaks, ascribing all the glory to God alone!
You perceive there is not a word concerning himself or his own pleadings. He
doth not ascribe his deliverance in any measure to any man, much less to his
own merits; but it is Thou. O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my
soul; Thou hast redeemed my life. A grateful spirit should ever be cultivated
by the Christian; and especially after deliverances we should prepare a song
for our God. Earth should be a temple filled with the songs of grateful saints,
and every day should be a censer smoking with the sweet incense of
thanksgiving.
3. How joyful Jeremiah seems to be while he records the Lords mercy. How
triumphantly he lifts up the strain! He has been in the low dungeon, and is
even now no other than the weeping prophet; and yet in the very book which
is called Lamentations, clear as the song of Miriam when she dashed her
fingers against the tabor, shrill as the note of Deborah when she met Barak
with shouts of victory, we hear the voice of Jeremiah going up to heaven,
Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; Thou hast redeemed my life. (C.
H. Spurgeon.)

LAM 3:63
I am their music.

Facing the music

I. THE TRIAL OF RIDICULE. There is hardly a trial that men feel more severely
than they do the test of ridicule. Livingstone tells us that the Africans cannot stand
a sneer. They bear with wonderful fortitude the most appalling torments, but they
cannot endure ridicule. Poor Africans! How much they resemble civilised men. A
French writer speaks thus of his countrymen: Says Ridicule: You are gay, and the
fear of appearing light-minded makes him heavy. You are sharp, and the ambition
to be strong makes him uncouth. You are delicate, and he becomes a realist. You
are honest, and he becomes a wily politician. You are a believer, and he plays the
sceptic and remains credulous thinks it beneath his reason to believe in God,
whom he does not see, and makes and unmakes gods of men whom he does
see.And outsiders and foreigners judge us on these noisy demonstrations of the
few; for, after all, they are the few. But if a scoff drives the Frenchman to hide his
good qualities, and to boast of his vices, it is not less true of the Englishman. We are
most sensitive to ridicule; we cannot bear a laugh. And we are sensitive to scorn and
humour when they are directed against our religious beliefs and hopes. The prophet
felt this when he gave utterance to the text. Jeremiah lived in days of national
disaster, and endured the pangs of exile, but amid all the tribulations of the period he
seems to have felt nothing more bitterly than the mockings of the heathen. They
turned his religious ideas and hopes into merriment. And the hardest thing that
thousands have to bear today in consequence of their Christian character and habits
is the derision of the ungodly. Sometimes this is encountered in the school. Youth is
peculiarly sensitive to ridicule, and many a lad finds the flouts and jeers of his
schoolfellows a veritable martyrdom. It is sometimes to be borne in the family. And
in the great outside world those who live a truly devout life often excite sarcasm and
raillery. The soldier in the barracks, the sailor in the forecastle, the collier in the pit,
the labourer on the farm, the assistant in the shop, the clerk in the counting-house
are liable to banter.

II. SEVERAL GROUNDS ON WHICH CHRISTIAN MEN ARE SUBJECTED

TO RIDICULE AND HOW FALSE THESE GROUNDS ARE.
1. They are derided on the ground that religion is unmanly. We laugh at men who
are wanting in manliness, and, perhaps, that is a legitimate use of laughter, but
is it a fact that the Christian man is lacking in manliness? Is he wanting in sense,
or courage, or force! Oh! it is said, religion is childish. It is child-like, but not
childish. Oh! it is said again, religion is womanish. When are we to get rid of
the puppyism that prates about religion being fit only for women, and that
taunts us with the assertion that only women are left in the Church? Women
have sufficiently vindicated their intellectual eminence. It is folly to reproach the
godly with unmanliness no man is more manly. Who in the Old Testament is
held forth as the ideal man? The man of God. He is the manly man. Who is the
ideal man of the New Testament? The Son of Man. He is the manliest of men.
The faith of Jesus Christ does not make craven, foolish, effeminate, impotent
characters; it inspires wisdom, valour, chivalry, strong purpose, and noble
adventure.
2. Christian men are sometimes derided on the ground that religion is irrational.
They are supposed to be ignorant, credulous, superstitious, and are laughed at
accordingly. The cultured men of the early ages of Christianity regarded it not
as a problem to be investigated, but an extravagance to be laughed at. We are
told that no one abreast of the culture of the day will give it credence.
Sometimes they scorn the doctrine of inspiration, or miracles, or atonement;
they scoff at the morality of revelation, at its great names, at its glorious hope.
Every sceptical scoffer is supposed to be a thinker of independent
understanding; the believer is treated amusingly as a fossil of the geological age.
But you have no need to be ashamed of revelation. The greatest and best men of
all generations have been its champions, and the grandest deeds of successive
ages have been wrought by its power.
3. Christian people are assailed on the ground that religion is hypocrisy. Many
critics of our faith are cynics at heart; they disbelieve in goodness, and so they
treat the profession of religion as so much canting hypocrisy. How they love
to discover and proclaim a stumbling saint! Hypocrites prove nothing against
 religion. If you wished to give an enlightened opinion upon Mintons or
Doultons ware you would not stir up their refuse heaps and bring out the
rejected shards that had been misshapen on the wheel, or been cracked in
the oven, and parade these as specimens of the potters unskilfulness and
untrustworthiness. It is by the splendid vases, rich in material, exquisite in
grace, brilliant in colour, which adorn palaces and galleries, and not by the
wrecks of dust heaps, that you judge the artist.

III. A FEW WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT TO THOSE WHO ARE BEING

TRIED BY THE FIERY TRIAL.
1. If you are called upon to bear ridicule, you bear it with the noblest of the race.
2. If you are assailed by ridicule for your Masters sake, remember that in these
days we are not called upon to suffer much for His sake. How immense were
the penalties in which the Christian name involved the primitive saints!
3. If the Philistine does make music of you, have you no music? Do not your faith
and love and hope bring you discourse of sweet sounds? When the moments
of reflection come is there no music? When the day is over, and you muse on
your bed, is there no music? When the morning dawns, is there no music?
When you vanquish temptation, is. there no music? The conscience is an
austere organ, without painted or gilded pipes, but it yields delectable
strains, and are not these yours? The heart is a living lute, a many-stringed
lyre, a golden cymbal, and is not its magic melody yours?
4. He laughs best who laughs last, and your mouth shall be fined with
laughter and song at the last. The future is yours. Your faith and
righteousness flower in immortal blessedness (W. L. Watkinson.).
 LAMENTATIONS 4
LAM 4:1-12
How is the gold become dim!

The spoiling of humanity

What is the most precious thing in the world? Why, gold, of course, says
the multitude; not, indeed, with its lips, but with its heart. For this, men will leave
father and mother, and wife, and houses, and lands; for this, what will men not
forsake or give? What is the real cause of half the lawsuits and the prosecutions that
arise; is it not gold? And what will not men do for gold? They will cheat, rob,
embezzle, lie, forge, perjure themselves, nay, they will do murder itself, for gold.
Must we rest content, then, with this answer to our question, What is the most
precious thing in the world? Impossible! for, notwithstanding the force and
unanimity with which the world cries out, Gold! there are voices, not a few, which
instantly and disdainfully reject the insulting reply. Perish gold, where honour is at
stake! cry a hundred men at once; and they are right. Though honour be but an
abstraction, that cannot be exchanged for bread, or pearls, it is more precious than
gold. Part with my political, my religious principle for a bribe, to keep a house over
my head, or my farm in my hands? say scores of men, no! not for the world! And
they are right; though principles can neither be taken to market nor put out at
interest, they are more precious than gold. What! must I empty my heart of love to
fill it with gold; marry a money bag instead of a soul; let the home fires die out of my
heart in my eager pursuit of the gold? No, no! perish the dross, and let me keep my
love, and a whole and sound heart, say scores more. And they are right, for love is
more precious than gold. Ay, and the philosopher would tell us that all the worth of
the gold lies in the man. Now, if this be so, again, what answer must we have to our
question, What is the most precious thing in the world? What answer but this, that
MAN is the true gold, the priceless gem of the world, in comparison with whom all
other things are vile? That, then, is the gold of which I am going to speak. Man,
humanity, manhood that is gold; the most fine gold, the precious stones of the
sanctuary, over whose dimming, and changing, and desecration, I am going to ask
you to lament with me. And I must first ask you to consider with me a little further
the preciousness of manhood. For the mere secular and mundane purposes, there is
no denying the power and the worth of gold. Money can do anything, say its
devotees; and they are right, of course, within limit; but the limits are very wide
ones. Gold can buy up the world, and the worlds laws resolve themselves into
questions of money. And what is true thus of the literal gold, is true also, and in
greater degree, of that more precious thing, of which we make that the figure just
now. Oh! what splendour and glory of capacity is there not bound up within that
little sphere, the body of a man! Six feet of earth can hold him comfortably, and yet
the world cannot hold him he holds the world. He is lord of all he sees; tenant for
life of Gods grandest freehold, the universe; at the annual rent of the love of his
whole soul. And, oh! what capacity of service for the world lies wrapped within that
little germ. You have watched your garden in the blooming time, when every spur
upon the branch holds promise of a cluster of the fruit; did you ever watch the
blooming time of manhood? Did you note the quick impetuosity, the keen
susceptibility, the noble emotions, the tender sympathy, the fine candour, the
metallic ring of conscience, the play of high principle? Oh! what power was there to
bless the world, if all this blossom had set in fruit, and all that manifold being had
developed, in harmonious proportion, to its true stature; what a rich power, to
hundreds and to thousands, had that one man been; what light he would have shot
into the dark places of the universe; what a lever of help would his strong sympathy
have become; what a power against wrong; what a haven of healthy sentiment and
opinion; what a moral power; how his goodness would have radiated round him, as
far as his world stretched. And, best of all, had that promise been fulfilled, had all
those buds of hope and aspiration been set in fruit, he might have been how true, and
good, and grand a saint; devout, and yet withal as cheery as a tenant of this sunny
world should be; tender and gentle as a little unspoiled child, and yet as manly as the
strongest hero in the world. A worshipper in all his life, with God in all his thoughts;
God in his heart; his life a happy, conscious, willing service of his God; and yet the
freest child of man and user of the world; a presence, and a power of righteousness,
wherever he was. What then! do you ask me? Is it within the power of every man
that is born into the world to be saint, hero, statesman, poet, painter, genius,
philosopher, philanthropist, every highest style of man and all to perfection? Of
course I cant mean any such thing! Gods gifts are all disparted. One star differeth
from another star in glory. Few men are great in more than one thing. So that I do
not expect that it will be possible, in any millennium, ever, for every man to be in
everything a man. And yet, though this be true, it is also true that every bit of
humanity is fine gold! What I mean to assert is this, that by far the greater part of
humanity is spoiled; that a large proportion of the men and women you meet every
day might have been a great deal nobler, and better, and greater, and more capable
every way than they are, and would have been so had they not been spoiled. The
gold has become dim, the most fine gold has become changed; the stones of the
sanctuary are poured out in the streets. In respect of this world merely, and of the
things men have to do in this world the handing of its material, the reading its
books, the fulfilling of its relations the masses of men are spoiled; dwarfed in their
capacity, crippled in their mental and moral power, stunted in their development,
warped from their uprightness, shorn of their beauty. There is a bight in the natural
world that kills off the buds of every spring; there are untimely frosts; there are
devouring insects, little, but potent; there are worms at the root, and maggots at the
core; there are wind and tempest; over-sun, and over-rain; and so, not half the
worlds blossom comes to perfection. And as it is with the physical, so it is with the
moral world. There is a human blight, deadly and fatal, that comes invisibly in a
night, and makes our petals fall; there are chilly frosts, in the circumstances of our
youth, that nip our buds; there are moral insects, of passion and temper, that come
and gnaw at our heart; and there are germs of evil in the world around us that lay
their eggs in our life. How is the fine gold become dim! Let me convert the
exclamation of the text into an inquiry. How? First, there is weakness, inherent and
innate the legacy of ones ancestry, more lasting than their gold; weakness,
working through generations, and culminating in us, through ignorance or wilful
neglect of great physical laws; the natural robustness of humanity diluted out of us
by evil treatment, and want of knowledge and care; and so, when the wings of the
full-fledged soul begin to try their unused plumes, we find ourselves incapable of
sustaining our lofty flight, and come to grovel on the earth again. Secondly, there are
the defective or positively evil influences that surround our youth, and play on the
formation of our character. How can one expect anything good to come from such
gems, and out of such homes as thousands of these human germs are born and bred
in? With sordid fathers, and silly mothers, ungoverned and untaught; mindless of
their children, save to prevent them being a burden or a trouble what wonder,
that the fine gold becomes dim! With sweets and finery as the rewards of life, and
God never used, but as a whip or bugbear, how can any good come? With no
painstaking culture of morals and of tempers in such a world as this, how can it be
but that the fine gold should be spoiled? (G. W. Conder.)

The lustre of humanity dimmed

I. THE PROPHETS REPRESENTATION OF MAN. Gold. Fine Gold.
1. A thing becomes valuable in proportion as it is so regarded. Gold in itself is
useless; it is but as the dust which clings to our feet. But men have come to
attach an importance to it, and hence it has become valuable. So man will be
valuable or otherwise, just in proportion to our idea of him. God regards man
as possessed of an interminable life; as worthy of minute providential
inspection; as worth the great redemptive scheme; as fit for a home in heaven.
2. A thing is valuable in proportion to what it can accomplish. Gold can do
much. It can make railways all over the world; tunnel the mightiest
mountain; fix telegraphy to the most distant countries. What has man done?
Measured the mightiest mountain; analysed the floating atmosphere;
sounded the deep sea. What has man done? Let Bacon answer as he reveals
the laws and operations of the human mind; Luther as he dispels mediaeval
ignorance; Clarkson as he pleads for the slave. What has man done? Let
Elijah speak as he mounts up to God; Paul as he hears things which human
speech cannot reveal; John as he sees celestial visions on Patmos; the
humanity of Christ as it pleads in heaven. How great is man! He can partake
of Gods nature; assist in Gods work; share Gods glory.

II. THE STATE WHICH THE PROPHET LAMENTS. The gold has become dim.
Humanity has lost its lustre. This manifested in
1. A cruel neglect of parental duty (vers. 3, 4). Physical neglect is treated as a
crime. Our moral sense loathes the man who withholds from his child its
proper education. But spiritual neglect is far more criminal than either
physical or intellectual. Parents, wont you spread your wings of faith and
prayer, and bear your children up to God?
2. A sad prevalence of spiritual poverty. Those who once fed on dainties are
desolate and perishing, But why this spiritual want? Is there no bread?
Jesus gives the answer, I am the bread of life. Listen! If any man thirst,
let him come unto Me and drink.
3. A fearful prostitution of powers and privileges. Minds which might have
rivalled angels sunk below the brute. Hearts which might have throbbed with
love to God cherishing hatred.

III. THE CAUSES LEADING TO THIS DIMNESS.

 1. Inward listlessness. We are easily moved along by the crowd of evil
tendencies within.
2. Influence of example. The liar helps somebody to tell lies; the drunkard helps
others on to ruin; the dishonest man leads some one else to cheat.
3. The force of habit. He who once yields to temptation finds it more
difficult to withstand the next attack. (W. Tucker.)

Spiritual declension
I. THE OUTWARD SIGNS OF SPIRITUAL DECLENSION.
1. Love to Christ growing cold. We are all, more or less, amenable to the
sympathy of numbers, the force of association; and where the majority are
carnal, it is more difficult for the few to continue spiritual. The same danger
reaches the Church by another route, namely, when there is an extensive
profession of godliness, whether in its forms or phrases.
2. A growing inattention to ordinances. The sentiment of a heavenly-minded man
is, Lord, I have loved the habitation of Thy house, and the place where Thine
honour dwelleth. There is a love of places, as well as of persons and
performances, because of their Divine associations.
3. Niggard and abridged seasons of personal devotion.
4. An easy satisfaction with present attainments. Increase is the condition of
success; there is no stagnation in the waters that Christ shall give us; they
are either springing up, or else the light that is in us is becoming
darkness
5. Religious gossiping. By this is meant a proneness to converse about the
accidents, rather than the essence of Christianity. Not that other subjects
than religion are excluded from their turn of necessary attention, but when
every subject but that wakes an echo of interest, and challenges a general
interchange of sentiment and experience, can they be loyal Christians who
have nothing to say for Christ?
6. Decreasing sensitiveness of conscience. When men allow themselves in
habits of conformity to the world from which they once shrunk, it is not
that the world is better, but they worse.
7. Diminished zeal for the glory of God.

II. SOME INWARD SIGNS OF WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL ALONE IS CONSCIOUS.

1. The cessation of secret prayer. The habit has perhaps not wholly ceased, but it
is carelessly, cursorily dealt with. There is a shrinking from personal details
in communion with God.
2. The neglect of the Bible as a devotional book. If our Bibles cease to be
necessary, nay, delightsome to us, there is an internal evidence of decaying
grace, which must be looked to, or the devotional neglect of the Book will
proceed to the neglect of its Author. Other religious influences will begin to
fail, the gold will become too dim to reflect a solitary star of heaven on the
shipwreck of our faith, and the fine gold so changed as to be no longer
 recognised for a precious metal
3. The spirit in which ordinances are entered upon. If the sanctuary be entered
without previous prayer, and we should leave it as we entered, we asked
nothing, and at least we have what we asked for. If we visit Gods house without
a settled purpose to honour Him, and only to patronise His minister, as some
imagine, we cannot expect to meet Him; for that blessing is limited to them
who meet together in His name, not in their own, or some other name.
4. What St. Paul calls the root of bitterness springing up, whereby many are
defiled. The root is concealed under the soil, and its existence is betrayed
only by the sucker and the sprout starting from beneath, and indicative of a
bad energy at work. Such a sucker robs the sap from the tree, bears no fruit
itself, and detracts from the fruitfulness of the other branches. But the
image is stronger than this: its metaphor indicates a man bad in doctrine
and morals infecting by his evil influence the community of which he is a
member.
5. Self-interest, a tendency to look at what is supposed to become our
station, rather than what becometh saints, as the elect of God. (J. B.
Owen, M. A.)

Dimming of the gold

We might so far alter the obvious meaning of the text as to lay great stress
upon the meaning of the word How as if it involved a mystery rather than
declared the fact. How is it possible? It is gold, but it is dim; it is fine gold, but it is
changed how has it been done? Marvellous is the history of deterioration.
1. Archbishop Trench in his book upon Words has shown this in a very vivid
manner in the matter of certain expressions and phrases which have
gradually but completely, changed their meaning in English speech and
intercourse. He quotes the word innocent. A word of gold, yea, of fine
gold, indicating beauty of character, simplicity of spirit, incapability of
double-mindedness or ambiguity of thought and intent; all so plain, so
pure, so straight forward. How is the word now employed in many cases?
To indicate people who have lost mental strength, or people who never had
mental strength; weak-minded people; even those who are little short of
imbeciles are described as innocent those having no longer any
responsibility; having outlived the usual obligations of life or never having
come under them; persons from whom nothing may be expected. How is
the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! A change of that
kind does not take place on the surface; changes of that sort have history
underneath them as their cause and explanation; the soul has got wrong in
order to allow a word like that to be perverted from its original
beauteousness. This is not a trick in merely vocal transition; underneath
this is a sad moral history. Even words may indicate the moral course which
a nation has taken.
2. What is true of words is true also of merely social manners. How different you
are now in some of your social relations from what you used to be! Every man
will supply his own illustration. How civil we used to be; how courteous; how
prompt in attention; how critical in our behaviour; how studious not to wound!
 How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! How rough
we are, and brusque! How blunt and we call our bluntness frankness! How
positive, stubborn, self-willed, resolute, careless of the interests of others! What
off-handed speeches we make! What curt answers we return! How is the gold
become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! What if that dimness should
so deepen and extend as to lead some persons to question the reality of the
gold? In these matters we must as Christian men be careful, thoughtful,
watchful, critical. There is nothing little that concerns the integrity and the
fulness of Christian character.
3. What is true of words and of manner is also true of the high ideals with which
we began life. Let us be thankful for ideals. We cannot always live up to the
ideal, but we can still look at it and cherish it; and from our uplifted ideal we
may sometimes draw healing when we have been bitten by some flying fiery
serpent whose bite has flung us in agony upon the ground for a while, like
worsted and mortally wounded things. We cannot have ideals too lofty, too
pure, too heavenly. We cannot strike the star. but the arrow goes the higher
for the point it was aimed at. What ideals we used to have! Who dares bring
back to memory all the ideals with which he started life? Where are they?
How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! Let me
add to the criticism the Gospel which says, We may every one begin again.
What say you to that Gospel opportunity and Gospel challenge? Let each say,
I will arise and go to my Father; let each one say, I will arise and go to my
Ideal, and say, I have wounded Thee, dishonoured Thee, fallen infinitely
short of Thee in every particular. I am no more worthy that Thou shouldst be
associated with my poor name. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Gold become dim

In describing and deploring the sad condition of the favoured and once holy
and famous city of Jerusalem, the prophet employs a familiar symbol. We all know
what gold is, and only by precision of statement does the dictionary help us with its
information that Gold is a precious metal, remarkable on account of its unique and
beautiful yellow colour, lustre, high specific gravity, and freedom from liability to
rust or tarnish when exposed to the air. Century Dictionary. Men have been
talking and thinking about gold as they never have before in the history of our
country, possibly as never before in the history of the world. And men are coming to
understand and appreciate as perhaps never before the importance of this most
valuable of the precious metals to the commercial interest of the world, the
distribution of commodities, the remuneration of labour, the stability of institutions,
the progress of civilisation, and the weal of humanity; aye, and to recognise and
admire the Divine wisdom and goodness in providing this important agent, giving it
just the qualities it has, supplying it in just such quantity, and making it just so
acquirable, and just so difficult of acquisition, that there has ever been enough and
never too much for the worlds use, and its value has been more sure and stable than
that of any other material thing that man uses. Gold is valuable for many uses. It is
exceedingly serviceable in the arts, particularly the arts of adornment, not only from
its beautiful, brilliant, and permanent colour, but also from its extreme malleability,
ductility, elasticity, and tenacity. It is easily shaped by hammer, graving tool, mould,
or die. It will receive the most delicate impression, and embody the effects of the
most exquisite skill. It is the appropriate setting for the most costly gems, and the
suitable material for crowns and sceptres and signets, and all the insignia of eminent
and sacred office. It seems designed to express the splendour and glory of goodliest
things. But its most important use is as a universal and unvarying medium of
commercial exchange and standard of material values, representing and converting
all the varied and countless products of human labour. All this is in a measure true
of the other precious metal, silver, but in a less degree. Indeed, the old notion that
gold was related to the sun, and silver to the moon corresponds well with their
actual importance. It has not been left for us at this late day to discover the value
and use of gold. These have been understood from the earliest ages. I counsel thee
to buy of Me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; but allusions to gold
are frequent in the earliest as well as the latest books. Gold has a prominent place in
Biblical symbolism and metaphor. The ark of the covenant was overlaid with pure
gold. The furnishings of the ark, the cherubim upon its cover, the altar of incense
before it, the sacred candlestick, the high priests breastplate in which the twelve
jewels were set, and the plate in his tiara bearing the inscription, Holiness unto the
Lord, were all of gold. Everywhere it is the symbol of what is sacred, and of highest
special excellence and value. As the prophet here uses the symbol he may have had in
mind gold as money; or, if his thought were more general, that will serve to help us
realise the imagery.
1. A gold coin fresh from the mint is an object of beauty as well as of value. It has,
in the first place, an actual and intrinsic value, the same, or about the same, as
its nominal value as money. Real, as distinguished from representative money,
must have this quality, that its actual and intrinsic value is equal to its nominal
or representative value, so that it can pass freely from hand to hand throughout
the community in final discharge of debts and in full payment for commodities,
and be accepted without a reference to the character or credit of the person
who offers it. It is this that makes gold so preeminently adapted for use as
money, that in it this element of value obtains without too great bulk, and with
the stability which is necessary in the commercial interchanges of civilised
peoples. That which is of comparatively low value, so that great bulk and weight
are involved, or that is of fluctuating value, so that it cannot meet the
requirement of stability, does not, and cannot, so well serve this important use.
Besides its intrinsic value, gold coin has impressed upon it some design and
legend, authoritatively attesting its value; this minting being now, among
civilised nations, an exclusively governmental function. But, along with these
characteristics, it has also great beauty. The metal, with its rich colour, is
capable of beautiful effects; and the process of minting develops the capability,
bringing out the rich and brilliant hue, and the image and superscription which
it receives being impressed with artistic skill and the most perfect mechanical
aids. Such the prophets figure of Jerusalem in its better days. It was an
embodiment of eminent civic excellence. It owned the sway, and bore the image
and superscription of the King of kings. There the Temple stood in its stately
splendour. There the worship of God was celebrated with devout and elaborate
pomp. There the Law of God was recognised and honoured, and the ideal of the
holy city, the city of God, the earthly dwelling place of the Most High, was
sustained by a befitting government and order, and had effect in a peaceful and
happy prosperity. Hence the admiring and rejoicing eulogies of Hebrew poets:
Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is Mount Zion: the city of
the great King. But we are in a world where even fine gold becomes dim.
This is true literally. Notwithstanding its freedom from liability to rust or
tarnish, and its resistance to the agents which produce these effects, even
gold win lose its pristine lustre. An old gold coin does not have the sheen and
splendour of a newly minted one. It becomes dulled and dimmed by
circulation. Also, there is an abrasion as it passes to and fro in the uses of the
world. Its edges become worn; the design and legend upon it grow indistinct;
and its very quantity is reduced, so that in the course of about twenty years,
on an average, gold coin needs to be reminted. And there are even yet more
serious processes of deterioration conducted with fraudulent design in the
various forms of counterfeiting and coin debasement. This is even yet more
true of those embodiments of moral excellence of which gold is the symbol. It
would seem that this ought not to be, but that moral goodness, excellence,
and worth should be the most stable and persistent qualities in the world;
that they would be stronger than the opposite qualities and the forces
arrayed against them, and that they would resist and subdue them; and also
that their good effects would be so apparent and approved that the world
would be friendly and favourable to them, and that individuals and
communities would cherish and foster them; and so that every virtuous
attainment would be a happy and lasting gain. Thus we should expect that
truthfulness would become ever more truthful, and more manifestly excellent
and beautiful with the wear of use; and that the friction of the world would
not dim its lustre, wear down its fine precision, and render its Divine impress
less distinct, but give its sheen and splendour and intrinsic worth more
superb and glorious effect. We should expect a corresponding history of
honesty, fidelity, courage, honour, purity, patriotism, philanthropy, and
generosity. This is what ought to be, as every moral intuition affirms. It is
what might be, as every revelation and provision, precept and promise,
guiding law and gracious succour, assures us. But it is not what actually and
uniformly is. Virtue is militant, and maintains itself only by victorious warfare.
There is the possibility of deterioration in every nature that is capable of
virtue, and innumerable occasions, influences, and agents press to develop
the possibility into actual fact. Of nothing perhaps did men ever feel more
sure than Jewish patriots did of the stability of Jerusalem, both in its sacred
and civil glory. Yet Jerusalem declined into an indescribable corruption and
depravity, and the devastation and desolation resulting from
Nebuchadnezzars siege were but the sequel of its moral decadence. How
many other institutions and societies have had a similar history! How to
nations, churches, and other social federations and organisations there have
been what are fitly named Golden Ages! And how these have been followed
by ages of decline. And by what recastings and renovations the progress of
humanity has been realised! This further is to be noted, and it is the great
lesson of history, that material decadence has been the sequel of moral
deterioration. History teems with illustrations of this truth. But we are more
interested in applications and illustrations lying nearer to common life. One
of the most beautiful and precious things our human life can know is
friendship I mean real friendship the alliance for good, and fellowship in
good, of congenial souls, and not mere modish or faddish attachments. What
help and solace these companioned souls afford each other! What interest
and worth they find in each other! In success the joy is insipid until the other
 shares it. In misfortune the pang is softened by the others sympathy. And
each life is unfolded and enriched by its interest in the other. How sad to see
such gold become dim, such fine gold change! And yet how common the
instance! So with other relations growing out of our social aptitudes and
needs. And yet how poor, and base, even, in actual fact they become!
2. But the most impressive correspondence to this imagery is in the sphere of
character and the processes of individual life. With what interest, admiration,
and hope we contemplate the splendid possibilities and goodly promise of a
fair opening life! Childhood has passed under favourable conditions and good
influences, youth has unfolded under judicious nurture and with only the
faults incident to youth, and manhood has been attained with no dark stain
upon the character and no vitiating habit in the life. Grand equipment for
lifes work has been won by the processes of general and special education.
Here, we say, is fine gold. This one will make his mark. This life will count
for something, and be among the grander facts and forces in the life of the
world. The hope, thank God, is often realised. Notwithstanding debasing
influences grand lives are being lived. But it is not always so. In some
instances the following years do not fulfil the promises of lifes splendid
opening. The character, subjected to the hard wear of the world, loses the
lustre of its glorious prime. The high ideals, the noble and generous aims, the
principled integrity, the delicacy of conscience, and the fine sense of honour,
fade under the rough impact of coarser lives. Thus the gold that shone with
such noble brilliancy becomes dim. So it is sometimes with a life that has
come under the influence of religion, and connected itself with, and set itself
to, the highest and best. Sometimes even such a life shows deterioration. The
faith, the love, the zeal, the devotion which marked its opening, and made it
bright with Divine lustre, decline. By some truancy to duty, some neglect of
spiritual culture, or some looseness of living, the heaven-born soul loses the
fine quality of its life, the Divine image and superscription upon it are
defaced. When gold coin has ceased to be what it ought, by loss of weight, or
defacement of its impression, it must be reminted. By that process what is
deficient is made up, and what is defaced is restored. This is what
deteriorated characters, deteriorated souls, deteriorated lives, need; and
this is precisely what Christianity provides for. This is the distinctive feature
of Christianity, that it is a converting, transforming, renewing religion. It
restores in man the faded image and superscription of God, and it makes the
debased nature worthy of the impress. (J. W. Earnshaw.)

LAM 4:2-12
The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen
pitchers!

The heavenly and the earthly estimates of good men

I. THE HEAVENLY ESTIMATE OF GOOD MEN. Good men have a golden value in
the estimation of heaven.
1. Their principles are intrinsically valuable. They are men of truth, justice,
 benevolence, worship.
2. Their influence is socially valuable. They are the salt of the earth, the light
of the world.
3. Their privileges are infinitely valuable. All things are theirs. Angels are their
servants; Christ is their Redeemer; the Lord is their portion.
II. THE WORLDLY ESTIMATE OF GOOD MEN. How are they esteemed as
earthen pitchers?
1. This estimate has ever been lamentably common.
2. This estimate indicates great moral degeneracy. The human soul is
constituted to value the true, to admire the excellent, to worship Divine
virtues wherever they exist.
3. This estimate entails fearful spiritual evils. The virtues of the good are the
worlds uplifting powers. Where they are ignored their salutary influence is
not felt. (Homilist.)

The character, excellence, and estimate of the pious

I. THE CHARACTERS DESCRIBED. The precious sons of Zion.
1. Zion is their spiritual birthplace. Being begotten again, they have received
the spirit of sons (Gal 4:6), and now aspire after the better country to
which the sons of Zion are entitled (Isa 35:10; Heb 11:16).
2. They acknowledge their great and growing obligations to Zion.
3. They are devoted to the interests of Zion. Gratitude, piety, benevolence,
prompt them to promote the prosperity of the Church, by persuasion, etc.;
and by their example and their prayers (Psa 122:6-9; Isa 62:1; Mat 5:14-16; Rom 12:1).
4. They are entitled to all the privileges and immunities of Zion. They are free (Gal
4:31); are fellow citizens with the saints, etc. (Eph 2:19). And the unfailing word
of Zions King secures to her protection (Isa 26:1); provision (Psa 132:15); support
(Isa 35:3-4); comfort (Psa 132:16); and eternal glory (Isa 60:14-20).

II. THE EXCELLENCE OF THE SONS OF ZION.

1. In respect of its purity. Comparable to fine gold; which is gold that has
undergone a certain process of purification, to clear it from dross, and thus
make it more fine, solid, strong, and useful. So the saints have all experienced
the renewing of the Holy Ghost (Tit 3:5); and their hearts are purified by
faith (Act 15:9).
2. In respect of its value. Gold is of the precious metals the most precious, i.e., of
highest price. The text speaks of fine gold, of the best quality; and therefore
most valuable. In this sense Zions sons are precious; possessing intrinsic
excellence. They are partakers of precious grace (2Pe 1:1); which they exercise on
precious promises (2Pe 1:4); which promises have respect to a precious Saviour
(1Pe 2:5-7); by whose precious blood they are redeemed (1Pe 1:19).
3. In respect of its utility. The true sons of Zion are greatly useful, on account of
 their excellent principles of philanthropy and social order, uniting the
different classes and members of society, and promoting the welfare of the
whole (1Ti 2:1-4). Whence results the excellence of their practice; as rulers
(2Sa 23:1-3); parents (Eph 6:4); masters (Col 4:1); subjects (Rom 13:7; 1Pe 2:17);
children (Eph 6:1-3); servants (Eph 6:5-7); doing evil to none (Rom 12:17); but
good to all. If thine enemy hunger, feed him, etc. And they are valuable
also, on account of their piety and their prayers.
4. In respect of its honour. Gold has been employed in presents to the most
honourable persons (1Ki 10:2, 10; Mat 2:11); and in the most honourable
services; whether civil (Psa 14:9, 13); or sacred (Ex 25:11-22; 2Ch 3:3-11). The
pious are highly honourable in the estimation of those who are proper judges
of what constitutes an honourable character.

III. THE ESTIMATION IN WHICH THE SONS OF ZION ARE TOO OFTEN
HELD. How are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, etc.; as mean, worthless,
despicable things! This false estimate of the pious happens, because Satan employs
all his craft and all his agency to obscure the excellence of truth and piety; and to
gild with a false and beguiling lustre what is wrong and wicked.
1. Their principles are misnamed. Their humility is meanness; their
forbearance and meekness, pusillanimity, weakness, etc. On the other hand,
their zeal is rashness; their firmness, obstinacy; their piety, enthusiasm, etc.
2. Their motives are suspected. Of the Redeemer Himself it was said, He is a
bad man, and deceiveth the people.
3. Their conduct is misrepresented. Prejudice has neither eyes nor ears to
discover merit; but it whets the tongue of slander, to mangle, disfigure, and
distort innocent actions; and then to inflict censure and condemnation.
(1) In our estimate of character let us not judge from common report;
but from our own observation.
(2) Nor by the maxims of the world; but by those of Gods Word. Many, of
whom the world was not worthy, have wandered in sheepskins, etc.
(3) Nor be solicitous of the honour that cometh from men; but the honour
that cometh from God only (Joh 5:41-44). (Sketches of Four Hundred
Sermons.)

Excellence of the Christian character

I. The sons of Zion are comparable to fine gold. In its refined state gold is so freed
from alloy or dross, that among the metals it is esteemed the PUREST; and if there
be one feature in the Christian more prominent and distinguishing than another, it
is his purity at once of heart and fife. Between Christians and iniquity there is an
ever-widening distance, an ever-increasing opposition; and although, like the finest
gold, which still contains some portion of alloy, they are never in this life absolutely
free from impurity, they are yet, with an unwavering steadiness of purpose, putting
it progressively away from them, and becoming clothed with that righteousness
which in eternity shall shine in unspotted whiteness. Sin, in every shape and under
every guise, is the object of their deep and confirmed abhorrence; and because of the
love, and faith, and hope which they sedulously cultivate, they are so gradually
approximating in resemblance to Him of whose spirit they are the living temples,
that they exhibit so many reflections of that moral beauty by which the Godhead is
adorned, and are the types of that holiness which, undimmed and infinite, reigns
triumphantly in heaven.

II. But gold is distinguished also for its VALUE. This arises from its rarity, from its
intrinsic worth, and from its utility; and, in these several respects, the comparison
between it and the sons of Zion may be illustrated.
1. First, then, the Christian is comparable to gold in respect of scarcity. Not
profusely enriching every land, nor to be found imbedded in every soil, the
golden ore is discoverable but in few countries; and, in like manner, of the
earths inhabitants, the sons of Gods spiritual Zion form small and
insignificant proportion.
2. Christians are comparable to pure gold, next, as respects their intrinsic value.
Estimated, indeed, on the principles which guide the worlds judgment, they,
in general, have less to recommend them than many of their unregenerated
and ungodly neighbours; but looked at as delineated by the Spirit of
revelation, and judged according to the standard by which the destinies of
creation are to be decided, they are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood,
an holy nation, a peculiar people.
3. The Christian is comparable to fine gold also in respect of utility. By this, indeed,
the value of an object is usually estimated; and as gold, when freely and
plentifully circulated, promotes the general comfort and happiness, so the sons
of Zion, by the sanctity and blamelessness of their lives, exert a most beneficial
influence upon society. With the influence of consistent and persevering
example, every individual is acquainted. It challenges to imitation; it is a living
commentary upon the excellence and power of principle; and where it is not
successful in exciting to kindred action, it usually has majesty enough to awe
and to rebuke the gainsayer into silence. And if we would properly comprehend
the influence which, in this respect, Christians exercise upon the community at
large, we have only to look at them moving within the circle of a family or a
neighbourhood. Suppose multitude of such men, the same in character, the
same in consistency, pervading society throughout the land, mingling in the
market place, frequenting the marts of trade, labouring in the manufactory and
in the workshop; and when you think of the innate depravity of the human
heart, and the inherent tendency of sin to propagate itself, is it not clear that
they are the salt which preserves the whole mass from rottenness, the
preservatives of the community from moral putrefaction and decay? (J. Jeffrey.)

Men lightly esteemed

1. The greatest reputation that man can attain unto in this life, is an
uncertain estate, and easily taken away (Psa 49:12).
(1) Reasons.
(a) There is no certainty in anything under the sun (Ecc 1:2).
(b) God setteth up, and putteth down, at His pleasure (Dan 4:29).
 (c) He that useth his prosperous estate best, deserveth
continually to have it taken from him.
(2) Use: to teach us not to admire the glorious estate of man that is in
honour, seeing it is most fickle; not to set our hearts upon anything
we enjoy in this world, but to use the things thereof as if we used
them not.
2. Those whom God hath advanced in authority above others, are to be
reverenced and honoured above others.
(1) They represent the person of God Himself.
(2) They have that power and authority which should work a
reverent fear and awe of them in the hearts of others.
3. It is a worthy thing in great men to be adorned with good qualities, so far
exceeding others as their calling is above them.
(1) They shall be the more able to carry themselves aright in their
place.
(2) They shall procure the greater reverence unto their place
thereby.
4. It is marvellous in the judgment of flesh and blood to see a man of
highest estimation come to be of the basest account. (J. Udall.)

They that did feed delicately are desolate.

The delicate are desolate

1. It is often the lot of Gods people to spend the former part of their life in
much worldly pleasure, and the latter in great misery.
(1) Because many have their share in the world till they be called to the
knowledge of Christ, which is often at the ninth or last hour.
(2) God seeth it meet to let many of His children have experience of good
and evil.
(3) It is the nature of our corruptions to lead us to abuse prosperity, which
God, will punish in His children in this life.
2. Many are most delicately brought up, that afterward come to great want
and extremity.
(1) Their parents make fondlings of them, and do not put them to any
lawful work in their youth, and so they prove unfit for any in their
age.
(2) God will punish both the folly of the parents, and the vanity of the
children, for the example of others.
(3) Disordered education increaseth the number and height of sin, which
must needs pull in the punishments for sin after it.
3. In a general calamity, they are most subject to ruin that in time of
prosperity are freest from it by their abundance of worldly things.
 (1) They are most likely to have committed the greatest sins in the abuse of
Gods blessings.
(2) They have least exercised themselves in the ways to escape danger;
persuading themselves to escape if any do.
(3) The riches of the wealthiest are the things that spoilers set their eyes
most upon: for which they will be most extreme with the owners
thereof. (J. Udall.)

For the punishment of the iniquityis greater.

Grievous punishment
1. The godly do usually sustain more grievous punishments in this fife than any
others.
2. Man never sustaineth any punishment in this fife, but such as he justly
deserveth by his own sins.
3. That is the greatest punishment which man can suffer in this life, which is of
longest continuance, though it be not the severest in itself.
(1) A short punishment, though heavier, doth not kill the heart so much.
(2) Satan can work many things in time, which of a sudden he cannot.
(3) The consideration of the length of time giveth matter of strong
temptations to despair or revolt from the truth. (J. Udall.)

The kings of the earth, and all the inhabitants of the world, would not
have believed.

The incredible things of life

The impossible is not impossible, the incredible may come to he true, that
which revolts the sense and shocks the feeling may become a commonplace of fife. Let
us illustrate this.
1. All the neighbourhood, all the friends and acquaintances, would not have believed
that the great rich man to whom scores were mean and hundreds trifles could have
come to beg his bread. But it is possible. Riches take to themselves wings and flee
away. Take heed! It is right to be rich, very rich, but it is wrong for the riches to be
master of the man; hold them, so that coming or going they never interfere with
prayer, with faith, with charity, with noble, generous love; they are servants, helpers,
great assistants in the philanthropic cause: hold them so, and you never can be poor.
Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. Pause and consider, and
put things wisely and solidly together, and say, These things are but for a moment;
for a moments use they are invaluable, but as securities, towers, defences, rather let
me entangle myself in some elaborate cobweb, and trust to that against Gods
lightning and thunder.
2. Who would believe that the great strong man, whose every bone is, as it were,
wrought iron, should one day be glad of the help of a little child? How humbling!
how instructive! You may accost him, and ask him if he remembers the time when he
could have lifted a man in each hand and felt he was not doing anything in particular
as an exercise of strength; and with a hollow laugh he will say, Ay, I remember! How
now? the sinews melted, the bones no longer iron, the great frame bent down, the
sunken eyes peering for a grave. What did this? Ill-conduct? No. Wastefulness of
strength and energy? No. What did it? Silent, insidious, mighty Time.
3. who could believe that a man of great capacity and great judgment in all earthly
things should come to be unable to give a rational opinion upon the affairs of the
day? Impossible, say you. How godlike in reason! How all but infinite in faculty! He
will be to the last bright as a star. What if he stumble at noonday? what if he forget
his own name? What if he cannot tell where his own house is? and what if they who
trusted him aforetime so implicitly should say, Poor soul! he is gone; it is no use
looking in that quarter for
wisdom or direction; his genius is dead; alas! but so it is? It that be so, why should
we not learn from that fact, and work while it is called day, for the night cometh
wherein no man can work? Redeem the time, buy up the opportunity, knowing that
our brightest genius shall be eclipsed, our strongest sagacity shall lose its
penetration, and our judgment shall halt for the judgment of others.
4. Who of us cannot name men who, if they were to fail in moral completeness, in
probity, in honour, in truthfulness, would shake Society to its base? What! every word a
hollow word, every action a selfish calculation, every attitude part of a fraud and
conspiracy, every generous deed a new bid for self-promotion, signatures forsworn,
bends broken, by such men? Never! It is impossible, incredible; the suggestion is born
of the pit. We are right in so saying. Have no faith in men who cannot he fired into
godly anger when they hear great reputations assailed and when they see great
characters slurred and defamed. At the same time let us learn from history. Great men
have fallen from high moral excellence. He the unnamed the starry leader of the
seven fell from heaven. Some angels kept not their first estate. With these wrecks
before us, what is our course of wisdom? Lot us trust under the wings of the Almighty,
let us live within the shadow of His presence, let us be hidden in His pavilion; then,
come weal, come woe, our end will be heaven say ye to the righteous, It shall be well
with him, however black the immediate cloud, however storm-laden the immediate
outlook. (J. Parker, D. D.)
 LAM 4:13-16
For the sins of her prophets.

Sins of the prophets

1. When the teachers of the people are wicked, it is a sign that the general
number of the whole people is grown far from the right way.
(1) Very shame keepeth teachers from many sins, until they be grown into
custom among the people.
(2) Such teachers are usually sent of God among a people, as a special
punishment for their grievous sins against the Lord.
2. The promise of Gods presence was never tied to any Church or order of
ministry, further than as they walked in His obedience.
3. Foul spots and gross sins may be in the face and principal members of a true
visible Church.
4. When the corruptions of a Church do grow so far that the maintainers
thereof proceed to shed the blood of them that withstand the same, there
can nothing be looked for but desolation and ruin. (J. Udall.)

They have wandered as blind men in the streets.

Religious blindness

1. Those that are not rightly instructed in the true knowledge of God, are as
blind in matters of religion as the blind man in seeing what is before him in
the way (1Co 2:14; Mat 24:29).
2. An unconscionable ministry begetteth ignorance and all ungodliness in the
people.
(1) Such are usually sent in Gods judgment to lead them to believe lies
(2Th 2:10).
(2) The people are naturally inclined easily to follow that teacher who leads
unto evil.
3. The ignorance of the true knowledge of God is the ready way to all
iniquity.
(1) We cannot know what is sin but by the knowledge of the law of God (Rom
7:7).
(2) Where there is no knowledge, there is no consciousness of sin.
4. They that are ignorant of Gods Word, and live among an ungodly people, cannot
but be defiled with their sins. (J. Udall.)

Depart ye; it is unclean.

The sins of professors exclaimed against

1. The professors of the truth, when God giveth them over unto themselves, become
so odiously sinful, that their enemies shall cry out at them for it.
(1) They have no power to restrain from evil, but only from the Lord.
(2) God giveth the wicked to see and exclaim against the sins of
professors, though they be blind in their own.
2. When we regard not to walk in the truth, God will give us over to do we know
not what, and wander we cannot tell whither.
(1) It is a branch of His judgment threatened (Rom 1:28).
(2) He will let men see in their own experience, what a miserable way they
walk in that have not Him for their guide.
3. We are easily brought to flatter ourselves, and to promise ourselves
much felicity.
(1) We do not rightly weigh the weight of Gods anger, and the desert of
our sins.
(2) Our affections labour to be persuaded of that they desire to enjoy.
4. It is a great fault for him that professeth to make conscience of his word, to
report that which he hath no ground for.
(1) It is a mark of a busybody to employ himself where there is no need.
(2) It argueth the heart to be most light and vain that setteth the tongue on
work with such uncertain things.
(3) It is the cause that many untruths be reported, and consequently
of many sins. (J. Udall.)

Lepers
We do not know whether the poet is here describing actual events, or whether
this is an imaginary picture designed to express his own feelings with regard to the
persons concerned. The situation is perfectly natural, and what is narrated may very
well have happened just as it is described. But if it is not history it is still a revelation of
character, a representation of what the writer knows to be the conduct of the moral
lepers, and their deserts; and as such it is most suggestive. In the first place there is
much significance in the fact that the overthrow of Jerusalem is unhesitatingly charged
to the account of the sins of her prophets and priests. The accusation is of the very
gravest character. These religious leaders are charged with murder. The crimes were
aggravated by the fact that the victims selected were the righteous, perhaps men of
the Jeremiah party, who had been persecuted by the officials of the State religion. The
sin of these religious leaders of Israel consists essentially in betraying a sacred trust.
The priest is in charge of the Torah traditional or written; he must have been
unfaithful to his law or he could not have led his people astray. If a man who has been
set in a place of trust prostitutes his privileges simply to win admiration for his oratory,
or at most in order to avoid the discomfort of unpopularity or the disappointment of
neglect, his sin is unpardonable. The one form of unfaithfulness on the part of these
religious leaders of Israel of which we are specially informed is their refusal to warn
their reckless fellow citizens of the approach of danger, or to bring home to their
hearers consciences the guilt of the sin for which the impending doom was the just
punishment. Our age is far from being optimistic; and yet the same temptation
threatens to smother religion today. In an aristocratic age the sycophant flatters the
great; in a democratic age he flatters the people who are then in fact the great. The
peculiar danger of our own day is that the preacher should simply echo popular cries,
and voice the demands of the majority irrespective of the question of their justice. In
the hour of their exposure these wretched prophets and priests lose all sense of dignity,
even lose their self-possession, and stumble about like blind men, helpless and
bewildered. The discovery of the true character of these men was the signal for a yell of
execration on the part of the people by flattering whom they had obtained their
livelihood, or at least all that they most valued in life. This, too, must have been another
shock of surprise to them. Had they believed in the essential fickleness of popular
favour, they would never have built their hopes upon so precarious a foundation, for
they might as well have set up their dwelling on the strand that would be flooded at the
next turn of the tide. The Jews show their disgust and horror for their former leaders
by pelting them with the leper call. According to the law the leper must go with rent
clothes and flowing hair, and his face partly covered, crying, Unclean, unclean. It is
evident that the poet has this familiar mournful cry in his mind when he describes the
treatment of the prophets and priests. But if the religious leader is slow to confess or
even perceive his guilt, the world is keen to detect it and swift to cast it in his teeth.
There is nothing that excites so much loathing; and justly so, for there is nothing that
does so much harm. Such conduct is the chief provocative of practical scepticism.
Religion suffers more from the hypocrisy of some of her avowed champions than from
the attacks of all the hosts of her pronounced foes. Accordingly a righteous indignation
assails those who work such deadly mischief. Their action appears to show that they
had some idea that even at the eleventh hour the city might be spared if it were rid of
this plague of the blood-stained prophets and priests. And yet however various and
questionable the motives of the assailants may have been, there is no escape from the
conclusion that the wickedness they denounced so eagerly richly deserved the most
severe condemnation. Wherever we meet with it, this is the leprosy of society.
Disguised for a time, a secret canker in the breast of unsuspected men, it is certain to
break out at length; and when it is discovered it merits a measure of indignation
proportionate to the previous deception. (W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

LAM 4:20
The breath of our nostril, the anointed of the Lord, was taken in their pits.

The failure of human trust

I. THE NATIONS RELATIONS WITH THEIR KING. They trusted their fate, their
safety, their hopes,, into the hands of their king.
1. Observe how they regarded him. They called him The breath of their
nostrils that is, they considered him as dear and as necessary as the air
they breathed. We are prone to make too much of human agents and
earthly creatures, especially of the rich, noble, and great.
 2. Observe how he disappointed them. They gave him honour, trust. They
expected security and happiness. But when the city was besieged, he and all
the men of war escaped through the kings garden. His cowardice, however,
availed him nothing, for the Chaldeans overtook him and carried him to
Babylon. Thus were the peoples hopes and expectations painfully deceived,
and the popular idol, instead of defending them, proved a cowardly and a
miserable traitor, who suffered for his wretched conduct by being blinded,
bound in chains, and kept in prison till the day of his death.

II. THE IMPORTANT INSTRUCTION DERIVED.

1. The folly of making popular idols. Whether regally, politically, or socially, they
only bring disappointment, and for their own purposes will deceive and betray
those who have reposed their trust in them.
2. The folly of seeking human help. God will take away or destroy that which He
sees is likely to take our thoughts away from Him. Whatever we make the
means of our forsaking or forgetting Him, He will make the instrument of
chastising us. (Homilist.)

Confidence in vain help

1. The office of the king, and so of every magistrate, is to protect and
preserve the people in safety and peace, even as the breath that we draw in at
our nostrils giveth life and health unto the body.
(1) God hath given them power for the good, and not the harm, of the
subjects.
(2) They are Gods lieutenants, who is the preservation and safety of all
His creatures.
(3) Else are the people subject to fall into all evils (Jud. 17:6; Pro 19:12).
2. Kings and princes, when they sin against the Lord, axe subject to His
punishing hand as well as meaner people.
(1) God is no accepter of persons.
(2) They have no more privilege promised them than others (1Sa 12:25).
3. It is the nature of man to promise himself all assurance, when the
outward means seem strong for him.
(1) Carnal reason doth regard nothing but the outward means.
(2) Satan laboureth to make us secure thereupon, and not to look any
further.
4. When Gods people set their hearts too much on outward things He
useth utterly to take them away from them.
(1) Else they will forget to rely upon Him as they should.
(2) He loveth them, and will force them from all affiance except Himself.
(J. Udall.)
Taken in the pits
The people tell the sad tale of the pursuit of their foes. Swifter than the eagles,
they chased them on the mountains, and laid wait for them in the wilderness. Then
they narrate how their king fell into the hands of them who sought his life. He was dear
to them as the breath of their nostrils; his person was sacred as the anointed of the
Lord; they had thought that even though they were carried into captivity they would
find some alleviation to their hardships in dwelling under his protection; they said,
Under his shadow we shall live among the nations. But even he was taken in their
pits. What a likeness and a contrast to our blessed Lord!

I. There is LIKENESS. He is as the breath of our life. As we inhale the air around us,
so we expand our souls to drink in of His most blessed nature. We open our
mouths, and inhale Him as our vital element; His Spirit for our spirit; His blood for
our souls; His resurrection strength for our bodies. He is the anointed of the Father,
who anoints us. Because He is the Christ (anointed), we are Christians (anointed
ones). His shadow is a most grateful and wide spreading one, beneath which we may
dwell in safety.

II. But how great the CONTRAST! Though He was once taken in the pit of Satanic
malice and the shadow of death, yet now He liveth to be the shield and protector of
His people wherever they are scattered among the nations. He that sitteth on the
throne shall spread His tabernacle over them. They shall hunger and thirst no more,
neither shall the sun strike them. However far our bodies are from one another, we
all dwell beneath the shadow of the Lord, which is as a great rock in a weary land. (F.
B. Meyer, B. A.)

LAM 4:21-22
Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom.?

Edoms rejoicing
1. The godly must take it patiently that the wicked do triumph and rejoice over
them, when God doth humble them by afflictions.
(1) Because they know it to be the Lords doing.
(2) They know that the wicked do but according to their nature.
(3) They are assured that God will look upon it in its due time, to deliver
them, and punish their enemies.
2. Of all the adversaries that Gods people have, those are the cruelest that in
outward respects are the nearest to them.
(1) Because they know best their corruptions for which they are afflicted,
and the ways to do them most harm.
(2) That God may make the rod the heavier, to make them the more
earnestly seek unto Him.
3. Whatsoever afflictions the Lord layeth on His people in this life, the
 wicked shall be punished therewith in their time.
(1) Gods justice cannot let them escape unpunished.
(2) Judgment doth begin at the house of God.
4. Though the Lord spare His enemies, till He hath corrected His servants, yet
will He overthrow them with a large measure of His judgments in His due
time.
5. The wicked, when God layeth His punishing hand upon them, do most
notoriously manifest the heinousness of their sins.
(1) They have no grace to take it patiently, but do rage at it.
(2) Gods hand is never upon them for their comfort, but to crush and
confound them. (J. Udall.)

The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of

Zion.

The debt of guilt extinguished

I. OUR FIRST MESSAGE IS ONE OF COMFORT. The punishment of thine iniquity is
accomplished, O daughter of Zion; He will no more carry thee away into captivity.
1. A joyous fact. Sin deserved Gods wrath; that wrath has spent itself on Christ.
O daughter of Zion, let thy conscience be at rest. Justice is satisfied; the law
is not despised: it is honoured; it is established. Thou art accepted in the
Beloved; thy guilt was laid on Him of old, and thou art now safe. Come thou
boldly unto God, and rejoice thou in Him. Lest, however, while God is
reconciled and conscience is quieted, our fears should even for an instant
arise, let us repair to Gethsemane and Calvary, and see there this great sight,
how the punishment of our iniquity is accomplished.
2. See to whom this message is sent.
(1) In the first chapter and at the sixth verse you find it said, From the
daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed. We should have thought that
Christ would have died for those who had some form and comeliness, but
no. God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet
sinners, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.
(2) Wonder of wonders! the eighth and ninth verses tell us Jerusalem hath
grievously sinned, and the ninth verse tells us yet more, that her
filthiness is in her skirts. Thus those for whom Christ died are made to
feel their sin.
(3) Look on, again, to the seventeenth verse, and there you find that this
filthiness has brought her into utter distress Zion spreadeth forth her
hands, and there is none to comfort her. So those to whom this
message is sent are brought, through a sense of sin, into a comfortless
state.
(4) To make the case worse, this poor daughter of Zion is obliged to confess
that she deserved all her sufferings. In the eighteenth verse she says, The
Lord is righteous: for I have rebelled against His commandments. The soul
 feels now that God is just. Come with the ropes about our necks, ready for
execution, and you will find a God ready to forgive.
(5) Further still: her prayer was not yet heard (Lam 2:1). If thou hast been
for months, ay, even for years, crying for mercy, and still hast not
found it, let not this cast thee down, for to thee is this message sent
this morning.
(6) Further: every place of refuge was broken down (Lam 2:8). Our Lord,
who is determined to bring us to the obedience of faith, continually
beats down the sinners confidences, till at last there is not one stone left
upon another that is not thrown down; then the sinner yields himself a
captive, and free grace leads him in triumph to the Cross.
(7) Further still: this daughter of Jerusalem was now brought into a state of
deep humiliation (Lam 2:10).
(8) Furthermore: it seems from the thirteenth verse that all her foes were
let loose against her, and her grief exceeded all bounds and prevented
all comparison.
(9) In the eighteenth and nineteenth verses of the same chapter you will see
that at last this afflicted daughter of Zion was brought to constant
prayer.
3. A precious promise. I will no more carry thee away into captivity. Thou art
in captivity now, but it is the last thou shalt ever have. Thou art sorrowing
on account of sin, and troubled even to despair; but thou art now forgiven
not thou shalt be, but thou art; all the wrath was laid on Christ; there is
none remaining upon thee; thou art forgiven, and thy captivity is turned as
the streams in the south. Let thy mouth be filed with laughter, and thy
tongue with singing, for the Lord hath done great things for thee.

II. A BURDEN OF WOE. Daughter of Edom! Thus saith the Lord unto thee, I will
visit thine iniquity. Unbeliever, thou who hast never felt thy need of Christ, and
never fled to Him, to thee He says, I will visit thine iniquity. His justice tarries, but
it is sure; His axe seems rusty, but it is sharp. The sins of the past are not buried; or
if they be, they shay have a resurrection. But who is this daughter of Edom?
1. It seems, according to the twenty-first verse, that the daughter of Edom was a
mirthful one. Weep, all ye that make mirth in the presence of the avenging
Judge, for the day cometh when He shall turn your laughter into mourning,
and all your joys shay be ended!
2. Edom, moreover, dwelt very carelessly, she dwelt in the land of Uz, far from
danger. Her dwelling was among the rocks. Petra, the stony city, was cut out
of the live rock. The daughter of Edom said in her heart, Who shall come
hither to disturb the eagles nest? Thus saith the Lord, O daughter of
Edom, I will visit thine iniquity.
3. It appears that this daughter of Edom rejoiced because of the sorrow of Zion,
and made mirth and merriment over the sorrows of others. Do you not hear
even the wise men say, Ah! These drivelling hypocrites, whining about sin!
Why, it is only a peccadillo, a mere trifle!
 4. It seems, too, from Mal 1:4, that Edom always retained a hope, a vain, a self-
sufficient confidence.
5. Besides, it seems that this daughter of Edom was very proud (Jer 49:16). But this
tremendous pride was brought low at the last; and so also all those who think
themselves righteous shall find themselves foul at last. They rest and trust in
the rotten and broken reed of their own doings, and woe shall be unto them,
for God will visit them for their sins.

III. WHAT IS THE REASON WHY THERE ARE THESE DIFFERENT MESSAGES?
1. The reason why I had to publish a message of mercy to the daughter of Zion
just now was sovereign grace. Everlasting love preserved deliverance for the
beloved city. Our God had kindled in her heart thoughts of repentance, and
in His sovereignty, because He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy,
He sent her the gracious message of full remission by an accomplished
punishment.
2. But why was the second message sent to the daughter of Edom? Here it is
not the line of sovereignty, but the line of justice; He sent it because the
daughter of Edom deserved it.

IV. WHAT CLAIMS HAVE THESE MESSAGES TO OUR FAITH? We believe this
Bible to be the Word of God.
1. Well, then, you to whom the first message is sent, believe it. You said, as I
read the description just now, That is my case. Very well then, the
punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished. Do not say, I will try and
believe it, but believe it.
2. As for the second message, again I say this Book is Gods Word, and it is true.
Believe it. Oh, says one, but if I believed it, I should be full of awful
anguish. Would to God you were; for do you not see that then you would
come under the description of the daughter of Zion, and then the promise
would be yours, for what is the law sent for? To flog men to hell? No, but to
be our pedagogue to bring us to Christ. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

O daughter of Edom; He will discover thy sins.

Gods discovery of mans sins

I. It is a VAST discovery.
1. The significance of each separate sin; each one implies the thought, the wish,
the volition of an immortal soul standing up in hostility to its Maker. Each is
a seed of poison capable of indefinite multiplication; every act of a moral
agent, whether good or bad,, has a germinating and multiplying principle in
it.
2. The number of each mans sins. Count the sins of one day, and multiply them
by all the days of his life, and he will feel they are as numberless as the stars
of heaven. God discovers the whole; He discovers their origin, relations,
bearings, issues.
II. It is a TERRIBLE discovery. God has so constituted our moral nature that nothing is so
hideous and revolting to the eye of conscience as sin. When even one sin starts up in all its
enormity to the eyes of conscience, how horror-striking is the vision. But for all the sins to
start up in the sunlight of eternal justice, how overwhelming the terror.

III. It is an INEVITABLE discovery.

1. The discovery is sometimes made here. Cain, Belteshazzar, Judas, Felix. When made here
a blessed relief may be obtained by faith in the mediation of Christ. It was so with Peter,
with the Philippian jailor.
2. The discovery is certain to he made hereafter. (Homilist.).

LAMENTATIONS 5

LAM 5:1-10
Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us.

An appeal for Gods compassion

The prayer opens with a striking phrase--Remember, O Lord, etc. It cannot be supposed
that the elegist conceived of his God as Elijah mockingly described their silent, unresponsive
divinity to the frantic priests of Baal, or that he imagined that Jehovah was really indifferent,
after the manner of the denizens of the Epicurean Olympus. Nevertheless, neither philosophy
nor even theology wholly determines the form of an earnest mans prayers. In practice it is
impossible not to speak according to appearances. Though not to the reason, still to the feelings,
it is as though God had indeed forgotten His children in their deep distress. Under such
circumstances the first requisite is the assurance that God should remember the sufferers whom
He appears to be neglecting. The poet is thinking of external actions. Evidently the aim of his
prayer is to secure the attention of God as a sure preliminary to a Divine interposition. But even
with this end in view the fact that God remembers is enough. In appealing for Gods attention
the elegist first makes mention of the reproach that has come upon Israel. This reference to
humiliation rather than to suffering as the primary ground of complaint may be accounted for
by the fact that the glory of God is frequently taken as a reason for the blessing of His people.
That is done for His names sake. Then the ruin of the Jews is derogatory to the honour of
their Divine Protector. The peculiar relation of Israel to God also underlies the complaint of the
second verse, in which the land is described as our inheritance, with an evident allusion to the
idea that it was received as a donation from God, not acquired in any ordinary human fashion. A
great wrong has been done, apparently in contravention of the ordinance of Heaven. The Divine
inheritance has been turned over to strangers. From their property the poet passes on to the
condition of the persons of the sufferers. The Jews are orphans; they have lost their fathers, and
their mothers are widows. The series of illustrations of the degradation of Israel seems to be
arranged somewhat in the order of time and in accordance with the movement of the people.
Thus, after describing the state of the Jews in their own land, the poet next follows the fortunes
of his people in exile. There is no mercy for them in their flight. The words in which the miseries
of this time are referred to are somewhat obscure. The phrase in the Authorised Version, Our
necks are under persecution (Lam 5:5), is rendered by the Revisers, Our pursuers are upon our
necks. It would seem to mean that the hunt is so close that fugitives are on the point of being
captured; or perhaps that they are made to bow their heads in defeat as their captors seize them.
But a proposed emendation substitutes the word yoke for pursuers. The next line favours
this idea, since it dwells on the utter weariness of the miserable fugitives. There is no rest for
them. The yoke of shame and servitude is more crushing than any amount of physical labour.
Finally, in their exile the Jews are not flee from molestation. In order to obtain bread they must
abase themselves before the people of the land. The fugitives in the south must do homage to the
Egyptians; the captives in the east to the Assyrians. Here, then, at the very last stage of the series
of miseries, shame and humiliation are the principal grievances deplored. At every point there is
a reproach, and to this feature of the whole situation Gods attention is especially directed. Now
the elegist turns aside to a reflection on the cause of all this evil. It is attributed to the sins of
previous generations. The present sufferers are bearing the iniquities of their fathers. Here
several points call for a brief notice. In the first place, the very form of the language is
significant. What is meant by the phrase to bear iniquity? It is clear that the poet had no
mystical ideas in mind. When he said that the children bore the sins of their fathers he simply
meant that they reaped the consequences of those sins. But if the language is perfectly
unambiguous the doctrine it implies is far from being easy to accept. On the face of it, it seems
to be glaringly unjust. We are frequently confronted with evidences of the fact that the vices of
parents inflict poverty, dishonour, and disease on their families. This is just what the elegist
means when he writes of children hearing the iniquities of their fathers. The fact cannot be
disputed. Often as the problem that here starts up afresh has been discussed, no really
satisfactory solution of it has ever been forthcoming. We must admit that we are face to face
with one of the most profound mysteries of providence. But we may detect some glints of light in
the darkness. The law of heredity and the various influences that go to make up the evil results
in the case before us work powerfully for good under other circumstances; and that the balance
is certainly on the side of good, is proved by the fact that the world is moving forward, not
backward, as would be the case if the balance of hereditary influence was on the side of evil. The
great unit Man is far more than the sum of the little units men. We must endure the
disadvantages of a system which is so essential to the good of man. But another consideration
may shed a ray of light on the problem. The bearing of the sins of others is for the highest
advantage of the sufferers. It is difficult to think of any more truly elevating sorrows. They
resemble our Lords passion; and of Him it was said that He was made perfect through suffering.
(W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

Zions sufferings

I. Her entreaties.
1. Remember.
2. Consider.
3. Behold.

II. Her miseries.

1. What is befallen her, captivity; it is not coming, it is already come upon her.
2. Her bright Sun gives not out its rays. Ignominy, like a black cloud, now covers its face.
Lessons:
1. God hath thoughts of His people, when they cannot apprehend His purposes. He thinks
upon their souls.
2. Gods thoughts are affectionate, and hold out help unto His saints. Men many times think
of their friends in the day of their distress, yet endeavour not to make their help their
 comfort, the product of their thoughts, but whom God remembers He relieves (Lev
26:44-45).
3. Gods forgetting is an aggravation of the souls affliction. Questionless, it is the great, yea
one of the greatest aggravations of trouble to an afflicted soul, to apprehend itself not to
be in the thoughts of God (Psa 42:9-11; Psa 43:1-5; Psa 44:1-24).
(1) They are things of value that we commit to memory (Isa 43:4; Isa 43:26).
(2) Special affection is demonstrated by Gods remembering (Mal 3:16-17).
Lessons:
1. Gods remembrance ever speaks a Christians advantage. Whosoever forgets you, let your
prayers demonstrate your desires to be in the heart, in the thoughts of God. This was
Nehemiahs request, and he made it the very upshot of his prayers (Neh 13:31). Do you
likewise. For men may fail us though they think of us, but God will help us if He but have
us in His mind (Jer 2:2-3).
2. They that put us in mind of our friends in misery, are many times instrumental for the
alleviating of their sorrow; their excitements may stir up earnest resolves for their
freedom, they may become messengers to proclaim their peace, to publish tidings of
their salvation. O let us be Gods remembrancers, let us expostulate the Churchs case
with His sacred self, this is our duty (Isa 43:26). Let us beseech the Lord--
(1) Not to remember her iniquities (Psa 79:8).
(2) Not to continue her distress (Psa 74:2).
Israels freedom from thraldom hath been the product of Gods remembering (Ex 6:5-6). O let
us rather beseech Him to think of--
(1) Her former prosperity (Psa 25:6; Psa 89:49-50). Men commiserate them in penury
that have lived in plenty.
(2) Her present afflictions (Psa 132:1; Job 10:9; Isa 64:10-12). The Churchs sorrows
make her an object of pity in the Lords thoughts.
(3) His Covenant for mercy to His people in distress (Psa 74:20-21; Jer 14:21; 2Ch 7:14;
Psa 50:15).
(4) Her enemies for execution of Divine justice (Psa 137:7).
(5) The sadness of her spirit to speak cheering to her heart (Psa 106:1-48.). Relief is the
best remembrance of a friend.
3. Fervency must accompany our prayers. This interjective particle denotes the vehemency,
the earnestness of her desire (Gen 17:18; De 5:29; 2Sa 23:15; Job 6:8). Want of mercy
with sense of misery will make the soul cry O unto its God. Christians, be not like
glowworms, fiery in appearance and cold when you come to the touch; take heed of
lukewarmness, Laodiceas temper; remember that as prayer is set out by wrestling,
which is the best way for prevailing (Gen 32:26; Hos 12:4), so under the law the sweet
perfumes in the censers were burnt before they ascended; for believers prayers go up in
pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh, to the throne of God (Song 4:6). Therefore get
spiritual fire into your hearts, as fast as you can kindle and inflame your affections, that
they may flame up in devout and religious ascents to the Lord Himself. Sometimes
Lord will not serve your turn, you must go with O Lord unto your God.
4. We must only have recourse to God in distress. The Churchs affliction is now become to
her the school of devotion. Where should we make our addresses, but where we may find
relief?
5. Heavy sorrows make Christians moderate in their desires. She doth not desire the Lord
forthwith to cause the fulgent and glorious beams of prosperity to shine upon her, or
 immediately by some heavy judgment upon her enemy, to complete her own delivery,
she only calls for a memento, a remembrance, some thoughts of her unto her God. That
great sufferings make Christians modest and moderate in their demands. Beggars in
their extremest exigence cry not for pounds but pence. A little relief goes far in the
apprehension of a distressed soul.
6. Grievous miseries may fall upon Gods precious saints.
7. God eyes our particular exigence. The original denotes such a consideration as is
conjoined with seeing and looking upon. The eye presenting the object to the thoughts,
makes the deeper impress upon the spirit. When God takes the Churchs sorrows into
His thoughts, He looks down from heaven to see the particulars of her distress.
8. Prayer the means to get a reflex from God.
9. As reproach is heavy so it quickens the prayers of saints. The saints are not hopeless
under the greatest evils, they sing not the doleful ditty of accursed Cain, they despair not
of Divine hope, and therefore because they conceive hope of favour, they betake
themselves unto fervent prayer (Job 13:15; Pro 14:32; Psa 27:12-13).
10. Sense of misery would have God to make present supply. Equity in the Lords
administration of justice, hath ever been their encouragement, as for appeal, so for this
request unto Himself (Jer 12:1-3). Learn what to do when the wicked with the most
violent evils are stinging and piercing your very souls.
(1) Present your troubles, your reproaches upon your bended knees in the Lords
presence (Psa 69:19, etc.).
(2) Plead mercies and promises for yourselves (Dan 9:15-17; 1Ki 8:5-7).
(3) Multiply prayers for your enlargement (Neh 4:4-5; Joe 2:17). 11. Christians are
gradual, they have their ascents in their earnest prayers. Remember, consider,
behold. As God goes out gradually in giving out the dispensations of Divine goodness,
so His people in their afflictions, when they are most earnest petitioners, are gradual
in their prayers (Psa 41:4; Psa 106:4-5; Dan 9:19). (D. Swift.)

Sins garden
1. Probably there is nothing like this chapter in all the elegies of the world. For what is there
here more than elegy? There is a death deeper than death. Here is a prayer that never got
itself into heaven. Blessed be God, there are some prayers that never get higher than the
clouds. Look at it. Behold how internally rotten it is. Remember, O Lord, what is come
upon us (Lam 5:1). No man can pray who begins in that tone. There is not one particle
of devotion in such an utterance. What is come upon us. It is a falsehood. It is putting
the suppliant into a wrong position at the very first. So long as men talk in that tone they
are a long way from the only tone that prevails in heaven.
God be merciful to me a sinner. Consider, and behold our reproach (Lam 5:1). How
possible it is for penitence to have a lie in the heart of it; how possible it is for petitions
addressed to heaven to be inspired by the meanest selfishness! Note well the inventory
which is particularised by these persons, who are very careful to note all that they have
lost. Read the bill; it is a bill of particulars: Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our
houses to aliens (Lam 5:2). Here is material dispossession. If the inheritance had been
retained, would the prayer have been offered? Probably not. We are orphans and
fatherless, our mothers are as widows (Lam 5:8). Here is personal desolation. If the
fathers had lived, would the prayers have been offered? We have drunken our water for
money; our wood is sold unto us (Lam 5:4). Here is social humiliation. The emphasis is
upon the pronoun, Our water, the water that we have in our own gardens, water taken
out of the wells which our own fathers did dig. What an awful lot! what a sad doom! If it
 had been otherwise, where would the prayer have been? where would the confession,
such as it is, have been? Our necks are under persecution; we labour, and have no rest
(Lam 5:5). Here is a sense of grievous oppression. Servants have ruled over us (Lam
5:8). Here is an inversion of natural position. The greater the man, the greater the ruler,
should be the law in social administration. Let me have a great man to direct me,
superintend me, and revise my doings, and it shall be well with me at eventide. Some
kings have been slaves; some noblemen have been servants. We are only speaking of the
soul that is a slave, and whenever the slave mounts his horse he gallops to the devil.
2. Read this chapter and look upon it as a garden which sin has planted. All these black
flowers, all these awful trees of poison, sin planted. God did not plant one of them. It is
so with all our pains and penalties. It is so with that bad luck in business, with that
misfortune in the open way of life. We are reaping what has been sown by ourselves or by
our forerunners. It is quite right to remember our ancestors in this particular. It is quite
true that our fathers have sinned, and that we in a sense bear their iniquities, and cannot
help it, for manhood is one; but it is also true that we ourselves have adopted all they did.
To adopt what Adam did is to have sinned in Adam and through Adam. We need not go
behind our own signature; we have signed the catalogue, we have adopted it, and
therefore we have to account for our own lapse in our own religion.
3. Wondrous it is how men turn to God in their distresses. The Lord said it would be so--In
their affliction they will seek Me early. So we have God in this great plaint, and what
position does God occupy in it? He occupies the position of the only Helper of man.
Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us. Then comes the cry for old days: Renew
our days as of old. There is a sense in which the old days were better than these. What is
that peculiar religious fascination which acts upon the mind and leads us back again into
the nursery? We cry for the days of childhood, when we were unconscious of sin, when
we played in the wood, when we gathered the primroses, when we came back from bird
nesting and summer joys. Oh, that these days would come back again all their blueness,
in all their simple joyousness! Sometimes the soul says, Renew our days as of old--
when our bread was honest. Since then we have become tradesmen, merchants,
adventurers, gamblers, speculators, and now there is not a loaf in the cupboard that has
not poison in the very middle of it. We are richer at the bank, but we are poorer in
heaven. God pity us! Renew our days as of old--when our prayers were unhindered,
when we never doubted their going to heaven and coming back again with blessings;
when we used to pray at our mothers knee we never thought that the prayer could fail of
heaven. Oh, for the old child days, when God was in every flower and in every bird, and
when all the sky was a great open Bible, written all over in capitals of love! The old days
will not come. Still we can have a new youth; we can be born again. That is the great cry
of Christs Gospel Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again--and thus
get the true childhood. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.--

Comfortable directions for such as have been, or may be driven from their
houses, goods, or country

I. IT IS A SORE AFFLICTION AND MATTER OF GREAT LAMENTATION FOR A MAN TO BE DRIVEN FROM
HIS HOUSE AND HABITATION. His house and habitation is the meeting place of all his outward
comforts; the seat and centre and receptacle of all those outward blessings that he doth enjoy in
this world. As a mans house is the nest where all these eggs are laid, and therefore when a man
is driven from thence, the meeting place of all his outward comforts, surely it must be an
exceeding sad thing and very lamentable. To say nothing of the reproach that doth come
thereby, or of the violence that doth come therewith; it is the judgment threatened, threatened
against the wicked, and those that are most ungodly. The contrary is often promised unto Gods
people (Isa 65:21-23). On the contrary, when God threatens evil to a place and people, this is the
evil that He denounceth; that He will drive them from their houses and habitations, and that
others shall be brought into them (De 15:28-30). Now is it nothing for a man to go up and down
under the wounds of a threatening? Again, a man loseth many, if not most of his opportunities
of doing good and receiving. So long as a man is at home, and hath a habitation to resort unto,
he may pray, read, meditate, sing, and have a little church and heaven on earth. He may there
receive strangers, for which many have been blest. There he may exercise good duties, the only
way unto heaven and happiness. When he is thrust out, and strangers brought in, he doth
therefore lose many of these opportunities; and therefore how justly may he take up this
lamentation and say, Have pity, have pity upon me, oh, all my friends, for the hand of the Lord
hath touched me.

II. GOD SUFFERS HIS OWN PEOPLE AND DEAR CHILDREN MANY TIMES TO FALL INTO THIS
CONDITION. Our Saviour Christ Himself, who bare our sins, had not whereon to lay His head.
The apostle tells us (Heb 11:1-40) that many saints wandered up and down the world in woods
and caves, of whom the world was not worthy. They did not only wander, and were removed
from their own houses; but, as Chrysostom observes, they were not quiet even in the woods:
they did not only want their own house in the city, but they wanted a quiet seat in the
wilderness. Four especial causes there are, or occasions, as Musculus observes, whereby men
have been driven from their houses and habitations. First, war. Secondly, famine. Thirdly,
inhumanity, cruelty, exaction of evil men and magistrates. Fourthly, want of liberty in the
matter of religion: and in all these respects Gods people have been driven from their houses.

III. Why doth god suffer this to befall His own people; that His own servants and dearest
children should be driven out of their houses and habitations? In general it is for their good.
Hereby first a man may be, and is, if godly, emptied of that slime and filth that did lie within
him. The sea water, though it be exceeding salt, and very brackish, yet if it run through several
earths, the brackishness is lost thereby, as we find in all sweetest springs which, as philosophers
say, come from the sea, and lose the saltness of the sea water by running through the earths: and
in experience if you take water, though it be salt in your hand, yet if you cause it to pass through
divers earths it will lose that saltness: so that though there may be much saltness and
brackishness in the spirits of men, yet if the Lord by His providence cause them to pass through
divers earths, it is a special means to lose that brackish, brinish disposition, and to grow more
quiet, sweet, and savoury. Again, thereby sometimes the saints, though unwillingly, are carried
from greater judgments that are coming upon the places where they dwell and live. Thereby also
truth and knowledge is carried and scattered into other places, many shall run to and fro, and
knowledge shall be increased, etc: Thereby a man is fitted and prepared for Gods own house,
and those revelations and manifestations that God hath to communicate to him concerning the
house of God. A man is never more fit to see the beauty of Gods house, than when he is driven
from his own.

IV. What shall we do, that if it shall please the Lord to drive us out of our houses and
habitations as well as our brethren, we may both prepare for it, and so carry the matter, as we
may be patiently and sweetly supported in that estate? By way of preparation, for the present,
before that condition come, and the Lord grant it may never come, be sure of this, that you make
good your interest in God Himself, clear up your evidence for heaven, your assurance of God in
Christ. Learn now before the rainy day come to be dead unto all the world. The man that is dying
is senseless, not affected with the cries of his children, wife, and friends that stand round about
him; though they weep and wring their hands, he is not stirred, why? because being a dying man
he is dead to them; and if you be dead to your houses, liberties, and estates aforehand, you will
be able to buckle and grapple with that condition: so it was with Paul who died daily. Be sure of
this also, that you take heed now of all those things that may make your condition
uncomfortable then. There are three things that will make that condition very uncomfortable:
pride, wanton abuse of your creature comforts, and unwillingness to lay them out in the case of
God. But in case this evil feared should come, and who knows how soon it may? then some
things are to be practised, and some things considered. By way of practice. If it pleased the Lord
to bring you or me or any of us into this sad condition, first humble yourselves, accept of the
punishment of your iniquity, kiss the rod, and say, the Lord is righteous in all that is come upon
you; so did Daniel (Dan 9:6). Then be sure you bless and praise the Lord for that little that you
have left; and if nothing be left, praise God for others that are free from your condition. Again,
by way of consideration. Though such a condition as this be exceeding sad and very lamentable,
yet consider this, that it is not any new thing that doth befall you, but such as befalls the saints
and best of Gods servants. Consider the way that God takes ordinarily to bring His people to
mercy. He seldom brings them to any mercy but He brings them about by the way of the
contrary misery. Consider seriously with yourselves what that is which you leave, what the cause
is that you do leave it for, and who it is you do leave it with: you leave your house, your
habitation, your land, your riches, which shortly would leave you, whose wings are like the wings
of an eagle, strong to fly again; you leave it for your God, your country, your religion. And is that
lost which you do lose for truth? Is there any loss in losing for Jesus Christ? If you would have
comfort and supportance in that condition, consider seriously and much how God hath dealt
with His people that have been thus served and used. And if you look into Scripture, you shall
find that He still hath provided for them, given them favour in the places where they have come,
and brought them back again from those places into which they have been scattered. He hath
provided for them. (W. Bridge, M. A.)

LAM 5:4
We have drunken our water for money, our wood is sold unto us.

Zions sufferings
1. Common necessaries denied by adversaries. Fire and water are two necessary elements,
but though God in nature have given these in common to His creatures, the Jews being
captives are now denied them by their cruel adversaries. Time was when they could
command the fields, the wheat, the olives, and the wines, hut at this instant, such is their
misery, that they cannot so much as have wood or water without price, unless for money.
(1) Enemies are cruel, they know this will be vexatious.
(2) Adversaries are covetous, our spoils, our moneys will be their riches.
It is not water alone, or wood alone that is now defective, it is both water and wood that they
are forced to buy. War seldom deprives us of a single mercy, it strips us at once of many
necessaries (Lam 4:1-5). It takes away gold, silver, possessions, habitations, victuals, wood, and
water from its captives.
2. Wood and water sweet mercies.
3. We must not sit fast upon our present enjoyments. Full little did these Jews in their
prosperity think that their water should become their charge, and that their wood, their
fire, should be sold to themselves for money. From whence we note--That Christians
ought to sit loose upon their enjoyments, and to look upon themselves as strangers and
pilgrims in their most sure possessions. Do not glory, be not proud of what you have now
 at your own command (Ecc 5:13; Jer 9:23). The tide may turn, your condition may alter
and not yourselves, not your friends, but your enemies may be their possessors Though
we may complain we must not murmur, we must in patience possess our souls, when our
very necessaries become a prey to others. Thus did the primitive Christians in their great
afflictions (Heb 10:34; Heb 11:37-38). (D. Swift.)

LAM 5:5
Our necks are under persecution, we labour, and have no rest.

Zions sufferings
1. The words explained. This is the miserable servitude of a conquered people, this is the
insulting and domineering pride of a potent and victorious enemy. When enemies come
in power, menaces and insultations speak the pride, the venom, and bitterness of their
hearts, whilst the Egyptians are Israels masters, they will make their lives bitter with
hard bondage in mortar, and cause them to serve with rigour (Ex 1:13-14).
2. Insultations, aggravations of the Churchs miseries. You may see by the deportment of
these Assyrians to the Jews, what was their disposition, what was their nature. If you
open the vessel you may taste the liquor. You may judge of wicked mens hearts by their
speeches, by their usage of the saints (Mat 12:34).
3. Wicked men care not what they do to augment the troubles of the saints.
4. The reason why their necks are under persecution. But why do they complain of the yoke,
the burden, the persecution upon their necks; what, were not the rest of their members
sensible of the pressure? though the rest were affected, yet now the principal weight lies
upon their necks, because themselves had ever been a stiff-necked people before the
Lord (Isa 48:4; Jer 7:25-26; Eze 22:29). You may sometimes read of peoples sin in the
punishments that are laid upon them by the Lord (Hos 4:6; Hos 4:14; Zec 7:12-13).
5. Sorrow without intermission very grievous. Intermissions are mercies, but pressures
continued are very tedious; hop? deferred breaketh the heart, and misery daily
augmented cannot but be crushing to the spirit. Wicked men, when they get Gods people
under their commands, are very insatiable in their exactions (Ex 5:7-8; Lam 1:3). But
what have this people done that they can have no laxation, no ease, no rest, in the land of
Babylon? There be two sins in special for which God brings this evil upon a people,
violence to others (Jer 51:34-35; Jer 51:38), and insatiableness or restlessness in the
ways of sin. It is very likely God now pays her home with her own coin. She hath been
exacting, and grating upon her servants; she is now a servant, and her masters do the
like unto herself. She would not cease or rest from sin, now God hath laid restlessness
upon her as a punishment for sin. (D. Swift.)

LAM 5:7
Our fathers have sinned, and are not, and we have borne their iniquities.

Zions sufferings
The terms unfolded, When in the depths of our distress the iniquities of our forefathers come
to our remembrance, at once they aggravate our sins and augment our sorrows (2Ki 22:13; Dan
9:16; Jer 14:19-20). When God comes to find sin successive in generations, the last shall be sure
to drink deep of the cup of Divine vengeance (Neh 9:34-35; Neh 9:38; Jer 4:24-25). When
ancestors sins are not our cautions (Eze 18:14), it deeply aggravates the guilt of our souls (Neh
13:18; Ezr 9:7; Jer 16:11-13; Zec 1:4-6). The longer heavens patience is abused, the greater and
more dreadful is the wrath of God that is deserved (Rom 2:4-5; Rom 1:18; Jer 49:9-11). If we
promote sin by indulgence, or by example in our posterities, we shall be sure to entail judgment
upon our issue (1Sa 2:29; 1Sa 2:34; 1Sa 2:36). Children are many times executors, they enter
upon their fathers sins, and you know that in justice the executor may be sued, the debtor being
dead. God may punish the sins of the parents upon the children, and yet the cause of the
punishment may be in themselves (Hos 4:12-13). As if any being sick of the plague infect others,
every one that dies, is said to die, not of others, but of his own plague. Had their parents been
good, had they been pious and zealous for God, there would have been no ground, no cause for
this complaint; they could not then have said, Our fathers iniquity is laid as a burden upon our
shoulders. It is good to be good parents, parental holiness is advantageous to posterity (Psa
102:28; Psa 112:1-2; Pro 14:26; Jer 32:39).
1. Exemplary piety in the fathers makes an impression upon the childrens hearts (Zec 10:7).
2. Heavens benediction descends from the parents to the children (Act 2:39).
3. Wicked fathers infelicitate their posterity (Job 5:3-4). The Jews were very unhappy
parents (Mat 27:25). Children, plead if you can your ancestors integrity before the Lord.
The fathers piety is the childs privilege (Psa 116:16; Psa 86:16; 1Ki 8:23-25). Let us
labour to be good ourselves, and to plant holiness in our families, that so we may have
Gods blessings estated upon our children (Gen 18:19). (D. Swift.)

LAM 5:12-18
The elders have ceased from the gate.

The seat of justice overthrown

1. It is a grievous plague unto a people when the seat of justice is overthrown from among
them.
(1) Reasons.
(a) It bringeth in all confusion and disorder.
(b) No man can enjoy anything as his own.
(c) Every one lieth open to the violence of spoilers, and hath no succour nor redress.
(2) Uses.
(a) Better have tyrants govern us, than be void of all government.
(b) Pray unto God for the government under which we live, that in the prosperity
thereof we may have peace.
(c) Acknowledge all lawful magistrates to be the special ordinances of God,
appointed for our good, and therefore to be obeyed and reverenced.
2. The overthrow of magistracy among a people taketh all occasions of rejoicing from all
sorts of people. The young men from their music.
(1) Reasons.
(a) Many great blessings are lost, and many griefs come upon them which will make
the heart heavy.
(b) They have no safety, but have cause every one to fear another, and to stand upon
 his own guard, as though he were in the midst of his enemies.
(2) Use. Pray to God that He would never leave us without those heads and governors
that may take care to protect us in peace; for if He do, our life will be more bitter than
death itself.
3. Honest recreations and delights are to be esteemed among the good blessings that God
giveth His people in this life.
(1) It is here accounted by the Holy Ghost a grievous thing that they are deprived of
them.
(2) Neither body nor mind can continue able and apt to their duties without some
intermission, but it is never lawful to be idle. (J. Udall.)

The joy of our heart is ceased, our dance is turned into mourning.

Gods people may apprehend themselves stripped of all cause of joy

This is the condition of these distressed creatures in the land of Babylon; whilst they were in
Judea, they used to rejoice in their harvest, and to shout at their vintage (Isa 16:10). They had
the mirth of tabrets and their harps melodiously sounding in their streets (Isa 24:8). But now
there is a crying for wine in all quarters, their joy is darkened, and the mirth of the land is gone
(Isa 24:11). All causes of joy are sometimes taken from Gods: precious saints; thus it fared with
Israel upon the pursuit of Pharaoh, when she was passing out of Egypt into the land of Canaan
(Ex 14:10). Neither was it better with Job in the time of his affliction (Job 30:17-18; Job 30:31).
Do but look upon the sweet singer of Israel, and you shall find him in as bad a condition; for the
sorrows of death encompassed him, the pains of hell got hold upon him, and he found nothing
but trouble and sorrow (Psa 116:1-19). The Lord takes away all cause of rejoicing from, that He
may the more deeply humble them for the evil of their ways. Great afflictions effect the like
submissions, with strong cries to the God of heaven (Jdg 6:6; Jdg 10:13-15). Gods great design
in thus dealing with them, is to purge them from their dross (Isa 27:9), to make them cast off the
sin of their souls; you know gold, that it may be refined, must as it were be encompassed with
flames (Zec 13:8-9). The best are prone to rest upon the reeds of Egypt, to rely too much upon
worldly vanities, therefore God makes the joy of their hearts to cease, that He may take them off
from dependency upon creature comforts (Jer 3:22-23; Hos 14:2-3). Beware of sin, it will cause
both sad looks and heavy hearts (Gen 4:7; Am 8:8-10). Keep your eye upon heaven (2Ch 20:12),
it is only a ray of His favour that can cheer your hearts (Psa 9:9-10). Disclaim help from others,
trust not to yourselves (Isa 30:1-3; Isa 31:1; Psa 20:7; 2Co 1:9). Created substances are but
vanities.

I. The precious sons of Zion may be much discouraged in their sufferings. And when Zion was
in affliction, did she not as one in despair cry out, My strength and my hope is perished from the
Lord (Lam 3:17-18)?
(1) Sudden and boisterous storms sometimes make stout-hearted seamen to give up all
for gone (Psa 88:3-8; Isa 54:11; Mat 27:46).
(2) Feeble things are soon thrown down, they want strength, it is weakness of faith that
dejects their spirits (Mat 8:24-26). Give a check to the heaviness, to the sadness of
your souls, when you are in afflictions (Psa 43:5). The apostles carried themselves
gallantly with much cheerfulness in the worst of times (Rom 5:3; Act 21:13).
Now that you may come near them in the same spirit, consider--
(1) That the sorrows of our Saviour were very dolorous (Mat 26:38; Luk 22:42).
(2) That what befalls you is incident to the best of saints (1Co 10:13; Song 2:2).
 (3) That death will put a period to all your troubles.
(4) That God hath promised to deliver His chosen ones (Psa 126:5-6; Job 16:33). Brag
not of what spirit you will be when you come to suffer; you have but a little strength
in yourselves, your hearts may come to deceive you, to fail you when troubles come
with a strong current upon you; thus did Peter, yet denied his Master (Mar 14:29;
Mar 14:31; Mar 14:68, etc).
2. Keep up your heads, your hearts above the waters of sorrow, let them not sink your
spirits, but under the worst of evils, retain your joy, and in patience possess your souls
(Lam 3:26; Psa 27:13-14). (D. Swift.)

The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!--
Mans fall from love into selfishness
The secret of mans perfection may be summed up in these short words, Love to God. The
secret of mans sin may be stated as shortly, Defect of love to God. As the former implied truth
and holiness, and purity of motive, and unity of wilt with His will, so this latter implies the
departure of all these graces. But not only this. The heart allows no vacuum: sin is not a negative
only, but a positive condition; where love has departed, there the opposite of love enters,
namely, selfishness, with all its baneful consequences. And the essence of selfishness is, that a
man lives not for and in another, be that other his neighbour, or his God, hut for and in himself.
Now notice, that this selfishness, arising out of defect of love to God, and in God to others, is not
an act, or a series of acts in man, but a state, out of which spring, as the symptoms out of a
disease, those sinful acts of selfishness, which we call sins. Selfishness has turned love into lust,
dignity into pride, humility into meanness, zeal into ambition, charity into ostentation; has
made the strong man into a tyrant, the womanly into the womanish character, the childlike into
the childish; has turned family and friendly love into partisanship, patriotism into faction,
religion itself into bigotry. It penetrates into, and infiltrates every thought, every desire, every
word, every act; so that whatsoever is of it, and not of faith, is sin. And its seat is in the noblest,
the godlike, the immortal and responsible spirit of man. So that it is no longer worthy of that
noble title of the Spirit, reminding us of God; but they who are thus, are named in Scripture
unspiritual, and their whole state is called the flesh; not that it springs from the flesh, but
because it sinks them into the flesh. Another degrading consequence results from this
usurpation by self of the place of God within us. Man placed under love, though in bond and
covenant to God and his neighbour, was really and essentially free; a child of Gods family; his
will and Gods will being one, law became to him liberty. But under selfishness, though he has
broken loose from covenant with God and his neighbour, he is to all intents and purposes, a
slave; in bondage to his own desires and passions, which he ought to be, and wishes to be,
ruling. The truth, declares our Lord, shall make you free; but all sin is a lie, It practically
denies God,--whose being, and whose power, and whose love constitute the great truth of this
universe: this is the negative side of its falsehood; and it sets up self and other creatures in Gods
place as lord and guide of mans being: this is its positive side. It apes the perfections and
attributes of God, and makes man into a miserable counterfeit, betraying, by that which he
wishes to appear, that which he really ought to be. Well then, it now comes before us as a solemn
question, seeing that our whole nature, the nature of each man, is thus gone astray, and that
every one of us has an abiding tendency to selfishness and to evil--Whence came this tendency?
How had it its beginning? This tendency is a departure from God who made us; and cannot
therefore have been Gods work. And this departure can only have begun by an act of the will of
man. God created us free, gave our first parents a command to keep, which very fact implied
that they had power to break it. Now there was no reasonable ground for breaking it, but every
imaginable reason against such conduct; the departure was not an act of the convinced reason,
but an act of that which we know as self-will--a leaning to self in spite of reason and conscience.
So that sin had its practical beginning in the will of man. And this beginning we read of in
Scripture in the history of the Fall. At once mans personality, the inner soul of his nature,
passes into a different relation to God: it is torn out of the covenant of His love; stands over
against Him as His enemy; trembles at His approach. All peace, all innocence, is gone. The body,
Gods beautiful and wonderful work, becomes the seat of shame. Man, knowing that he is naked,
flies from God and hides himself. And as the spirit of man has renounced its allegiance to God,
so have now the animal soul and the body thrown off their allegiance to the spirit. Anarchy
enters into his being, and holds wild misrule. The gravitation of the spiritual world is
overthrown, its laws of attraction are suspended; the lower revolts against the higher, the lowest
against the lower. And as in man, so in mans world. In a moment the poison spreads, electric,
over the kingdom which he should have ruled; the elements disown him, the beasts of the forest
glare upon him, the ground is cursed for his sake. The king of nature is self-deposed,--his palace
is broken up, his delights are scattered, his sweet fellowship with his helpmate is marred,--and
he is driven out a wanderer. Then first sprung forth the bitter fountains of tears, destined to
furrow the cheeks of untold generations; then first the hands were clenched, and the brow
grasped, and the breast beaten,--and the vastness of inward woe sought relief in outward
gesture. Verily, the crown had fallen from his head; woe unto him, that he had sinned. (Dean
Alford.)

LAM 5:17-18
For this our heart is faint, for these things our eyes are dim.

Zions sufferings
1. The best are exposed to sorrow. That the best are not out of the reach of misery, or that
there is no outward calamity, but it may fall upon the godly as well as others (Ecc 9:1).
Ahabs and Josiahs ends concur in their circumstances, and Saul and Jonathan, though
different in their deportments yet in their deaths they were not divided (2Sa 1:23). No
man knows either love or hatred by that, that is before them. The snow and hail of
adversity lights upon the best gardens, as well as the barren wastes. The best of saints
have the same nature with others (1Co 10:13). The most eminent Christians sometimes
as well as others sin against their God. Here we are soldiers and must look for hot
skirmishes, mariners and must not think to sail without tedious storms. Be not
discouraged, O ye poor souls, though the world be a sea, a rough, a raging, and a
dangerous sea unto yourselves, yea be not dejected and altogether cast down, though a
heavy weight of grief by reason of sin and troubles, the effects of sin come to lie pressing
upon your spirits; though your hearts be faint, let them not die.
(1) That there is transcendent mercy, mercy far greater to be hoped for from our God,
than any misery we can endure.
(2) That there is a hand put down from heaven, when the saints are in danger, to keep
up their heads from sinking.
(3) That great sorrows do but accelerate, do but hasten Divine compassions. It is not
Gods opportunity, until your souls be in great extremity.
(4) Though God multiply His strokes upon you, it is not because He hates, but rather
because He loves you, His design is not to destroy you, but to reform you.
(5) Light, shall spring out of your darkness, good shall come out of your evils, and joy
out of the sorrow that is in your hearts (Rom 8:28). God hath ever had His fire in
Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem (Isa 31:9), and the choicest saints like the finest
 gold for trial must pass the flames.
2. Christians have bowels for others in afflictions. The Chaldee paraphrase will have these
first words to relate to the ruins of Zion in the next verse, and therefore it renders them,
for this house of the Sanctuary which is desolate our heart is faint, and indeed it shows
us as the affections, so the Christians deportment in the Churchs troubles. Zions
sufferings, like darts, penetrate the souls of Gods precious saints. And no marvel if they
have been thus affected with the Churchs miseries.
(1) The downfall, the desolation of Zion is the wickeds triumph (Psa 13:3-4). Moab
skipped for joy when Israel was distressed, she was to her a derision in the day of her
affliction (Jer 48:27).
(2) When the Church suffers, God is dishonoured (De 9:28), and His honour hath ever
been precious to gracious hearts (Ex 32:32; Rom 9:3).
(3) Zions prosperity is not only joy, but hath always been a chief joy to a Christians soul
(Psa 137:6).
3. We must not stand at a distance each from other in the day of sorrow.
4. Sad sufferings cause sad, yea, fainting spirits.
5. Extremity of sorrow brings dimness into our eyes. That dimness of sight is the effect of
sorrow. This was the condition of Job, when his face was foul with weeping, and on his
eyelids was the shadow of death (Job 16:16). When his eye was dim by reason of grief,
and all his thoughts as a very shadow (Job 17:7). And in the like case you may see the
kingly prophet, having his heart panting, his strength failing, and the light of his eyes
departing from him (Psa 38:9-11; Psa 6:7). (D. Swift.)

Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate.

Zions desolations contemplated and improved

I. A DISTRESSING EXPERIENCE. The spectacle which Mount Zion exhibited was necessarily
fitted both to agitate and afflict pious and patriotic soul. God had visited His own holy habitation
in anger. Because of the transgressions of His people, He had afflicted them; because of their
forgetfulness of His mercies, He had forsaken them; because of their abuse of His ordinances,
He had carried them away captive. If such a state of things occasioned to the prophet a feeling of
the deepest distress, similar must be the experience of the Lords people, when any portion of
the Church is visited with tokens of the Divine displeasure. Sins, by us unrepented of--sins,
forgotten it may be by us, but not forgotten by God--these, undoubtedly, as affording cause of
humiliation, grief, and bitterness, are to be considered in connection with the removal of the
light of the Divine countenance; and if we cast our eyes abroad on any portion of the visible
Church, if we look either at its past history or present condition, where can we take our station,
and say that difficulties, or trials, or threatenings of judgment are being made manifest, without
being constrained to acknowledge that there are sins to be accounted for, and for which a fearful
reckoning may be demanded?

II. A REVIVING SENTIMENT. The prophet, amidst the very tears that were shed by him over the
fallen fortunes of Jerusalem, could fix his thoughts upon One who is ever the same; and his
spirit was revived in consequence. And thus have Gods people in all ages been sustained. The
Lord, as it regards His own cause, may hide His face; but it will only be for a season. He may
remove His candle from one corner of the earth; but it will be to plant it in another--He will not
suffer it to be extinguished. As His own existence and purposes are eternal and unchangeable, so
is that provision which He has made for His Church, and for a continued succession of believers,
who shall know His name, and rejoice in His salvation.

III. A HOLY EXPOSTULATION. Animated with a holy zeal for the glory of God as associated with
the prosperity of His Church, the prophet asks whether it could be that God would afford no sign
of His returning favour, which might reanimate the hopes of His afflicted people, and keep them
from fainting under the reproach of their enemies? It is more than prayer; it is expostulation.
Yet the sentiments which he breathed were not those of unhallowed presumption; for he bowed
with the deepest reverence before God when he addressed Him. It was that enlargement of soul,
which they only know, who, in the strength of a living faith, have long walked with the Most
High as their Father and their Friend. And similar, accordingly, at times has been the experience
of the saints in after ages. Thus, for instance, it was with Luther in that most eventful of all
passages in his history, when his enemies who had gathered around him on every side, thought
they had swallowed him up; when the proudest of earths potentates sat in judgment over him;
when the papacy had written out the sentence which doomed him to death, and which doomed
the Reformation to destruction along with him. In these distressing circumstances, when to the
eye of man, the cause of truth seemed on the eve of perishing, he was overheard in an agony of
soul to exclaim, O God, Almighty God everlasting! if I am to depend on any strength of this
world, all is over; the knell is struck; sentence is gone forth. O God! O God! O Thou my God, help
me against the wisdom of this world: the work is not mine, but Thine. I have no business here. I
would gladly spend my days in happiness and peace. But the cause is Thine; and it is righteous
and everlasting. O Lord, help me. O faithful and unchangeable God, I lean not upon man. My
God, my God, dost Thou not hear: my God, art Thou no longer living? Nay, Thou canst not die:
Thou dost but hide Thyself. My God, where art Thou? The cause is holy; it is Thine own. I win
not let Thee go; no, nor yet for all eternity. (T. Doig, M. A.)

The foxes walk upon it.--

Zions sufferings
1. The Churchs miseries make deep impressions in the hearts of saints. Time was when God
chose this place, and desired it for His habitation (Psa 132:13), when it was a principal
object of His affection (Psa 87:2); when the people from all quarters of Judea resorted to
it for Divine instruction (Isa 2:3); when of all other places it was the most precious in the
repute of the saints (Psa 137:1). But now this mountain, this stately mountain is divested
of all her glory, her ordinances are polluted, her inhabitants are driven into exile, her
princes are carried away captive, and all her ornaments, all her jewels, all her riches, are
the spoils of Babylon, now she is as a desert, she sits solitary, she hath none to visit her
but the foxes that walk about her, she is laid waste like a wilderness, and even brought to
utter destruction. So that by this we are taught--That Zion may become like Shilo, the
choicest places notwithstanding their more than ordinary privileges may come to ruin
(Jer 7:12-14; Isa 64:10-11; Lam 1:17-18). But why must Zion become a desolation?
(1) The Jews rested more upon the holiness of this place than upon their God whose
name was called upon in this place (Jer 7:4, etc.). It is the Lord, not created
substances, not places, that must have the truth, the confidence of our souls. God is
jealous of His glory, He cannot endure that His mercies should become our idols.
(2) The people estranged this place, and burnt incense in it to other gods, and therefore,
as they fall by the sword, so their city, this Zion, must be desolate (Jer 19:4; Jer 19:7-
9). If you pollute your temple, God will destroy your temple.
(3) The sins of the priests and prophets that belonged to this mountain were very
grievous; witness their riot and excess (Isa 28:7), their base avarice (Isa 56:11), their
wicked flatteries (Jer 6:13-14), their pernicious examples (Jer 23:14), and their horrid
 neglect of their duties (Eze 34:3-4). These the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities
of her priests, have fetched wrath from heaven, caused God to accomplish His fury,
and to kindle a fire in Zion (Lam 4:11; Lam 4:13).
(4) The people, the inhabitants were abusive to Gods messengers (Jer 11:21-22; Am
7:10-12; Am 7:16-17; 2Ch 36:16), and pitiless one towards another (Jer 2:34; Jer 15:5;
Mic 3:2-3). Her sins that were more obvious to every eye, were idolatry (Isa 10:11-12),
formality (Isa 29:13-14), hypocrisy (Isa 58:2-4), infertility (Isa 5:2; Isa 5:5-6),
obstinacy (Jer 18:11-12; Jer 18:17), security (Am 6:1).
2. The Assyrians like crafty foxes.
(1) The fox is looked upon as that which exceeds in subtilty; shall I say, that faction and
sedition come short of these, no, their counsels and their consultations are very crafty
against Gods precious ones (Psa 83:3).
(2) The fox is not only nimble and light of foot, but usually he shuns the common roads,
choosing bushy and unbeaten places for his paths, that as himself may not be seen,
so that with more safety he may take his prey. Mans locomotive faculty was
bestowed upon him, not that fox-like he should run to mischief, but that he should be
quick to walk in the way which is called holy.
(3) These have the foxs ears, the foxs eyes, and the foxs teeth as well as his nimble feet,
as they are capable of hearing the least sound, that echoes detraction, and speak
reproach unto the saints, lies, not truth being the delight of their hearts (Psa 62:4), so
they look every way how to mischief you, how to get from you, how to get something
to themselves, besides their teeth are as swords, they pierce where they enter (Pro
30:14).
(4) Whatsoever you do to the fox he still retains his nature, men may chain him, but they
can never tame him; so these pestiferous wretches which annoy the Church, they
resolve against conviction, against reformation (Jer 2:25), with Solomons fool, you
may bray them in a mortar, but yet they will not leave their folly (Pro 27:22).
(5) Lastly, you know young cubs in time will prove both greedy and crafty foxes, if they
be let alone; so it is with profane and schismatical persons, if they be not timely
suppressed; the first will become atheists (Psa 14:1-3), and the other heretics (1Co
11:18-19). Here we see it adds much unto Zions sorrows, when she lies open to the
rapine of subtle and cruel foxes, and well may it. For men like foxes are bloody,
deceitful, and devouring creatures. No part of Gods worship can be advanced, where
these have their dens in Zion. What is more destructive to shepherds flocks than
foxes? (D. Swift.)

LAM 5:19-22
Thou, O Lord, remainest forever; Thy throne from generation to generation.

The everlasting throne

Thus at last our attention is turned from earth to heaven, from man to God. In this change of
vision the mood which gave rise to the Lamentations disappears. Since earthly things lose their
value in view of the treasures in heaven, the ruin of them also becomes of less account. For the
moment the poet forgets himself and his surroundings in a rapt contemplation of God. This is
the glory of adoration, the very highest form of prayer, that prayer in which a man comes
nearest to the condition ascribed to angels and the spirits of the blessed who surround the
throne and gaze on the eternal light. The continuance of the throne of God is the idea that now
lays hold of the elegist as he turns his thoughts from the miserable scenes of the ruined city to
the glory above. This is brought home to his consciousness by the fleeting nature of all things
earthly. God only remains, eternal, unchangeable. His is the only throne that stands secure
above every revolution. The unwavering faith of our poet is apparent at this point after it has
been tried by the most severe tests. Jerusalem has been destroyed, her king has fallen into the
hands of the enemy, her people have been scattered; and yet the elegist has not the faintest
doubt that her God remains and that His throne is steadfast, immovable, everlasting. The fall of
Israel in no way affects the throne of God; it is even brought about by His will; it could not have
occurred if He had been pleased to hinder it. This idea of the elegist is in line with a familiar
stream of Hebrew thought, and his very words have many an echo in the language of prophet
and psalmist, as, for example, in the forty-fifth Psalm, where we read, Thy throne, O God, is
forever and ever. The grand Messianic hope is founded on the conviction that the ultimate
establishment of Gods reign throughout the world will be the best blessing imaginable for all
mankind. Sometimes this is associated with the advent of a Divinely anointed earthly monarch
of the line of David. At other times Gods direct sovereignty is expected to be manifested in the
day of the Lord. For Christians, at least as much as for Jews, the eternal sovereignty of God
should be a source of profound confidence, inspiring hope and joy. Now the elegist ventures to
expostulate with God on the ground of the eternity of His throne. A long time had passed since
the siege, and still the Jews were in distress. It was as though God had forgotten them or
voluntarily forsaken them. This is a dilemma to which we are often driven. If God is almighty
can He be also all-merciful? If what we knew furnished all the possible data of the problem this
would be indeed a serious position. But our ignorance silences us. Some hint of an explanation is
given in the next phrase of the poets prayer. God is besought to turn the people to Himself. The
language of the elegy here points to a personal and spiritual change. We cannot water it down to
the expression of a desire to be restored to Palestine. Nor is it enough to take it as a prayer to be
restored to Gods favour. The double expression, Turn Thou us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall
be turned, points to a deeper longing, a longing for real conversion, the turning round of the
heart and life to God, the return of the prodigal to his Father. In the next place, it is to be
observed that the turning here contemplated is positive in its aims, not merely a flight from the
wrong way. To turn from sin to blank vacancy and nothingness is an impossibility. The great
motive must be the attraction of a better course rather than revulsion from the old life. This is
the reason why the preaching of the Gospel of Christ succeeds where pure appeals to conscience
fail. Then we may notice, further, that the particular aim of the change here indicated is to turn
back to God. As sin is forsaking God, so the commencement of a better life must consist in a
return to Him. But this is not to be regarded as a means towards some other end. We must not
have the homecoming made use of as a mere convenience. It must be an end in itself, and the
chief end of the prayer and effort of the soul, or it can be nothing at all. The poet is perfectly
confident that when God takes His people in hand to lead them round to Himself He will surely
do so. If He turns them they will be turned. The words suggest that previous efforts had been
made from other quarters, and had failed. The prophets, speaking from God, had urged
repentance, but their words had been ineffectual. It is only when God undertakes the work that
there is any chance of success. Next, we see that the return is to be a renewal of a previous
condition. The poet prays, Renew our days as of old--a phrase which suggests the recovery of
apostates. Possibly here we have some reference to more external conditions. There is a hope
that the prosperity of the former times may be brought back. And yet the previous line, which is
concerned with the spiritual return to God, should lead us to take this one also in a spiritual
sense. The memory of a lost blessing makes the prayer for restoration the more intense. In some
respects restoration is more difficult than a new beginning. The past will not come back. The
innocence of childhood, when once it is lost, can never be restored. That first, fresh bloom of
youth is irrecoverable. On the other hand, what the restoration lacks in one respect may be more
than made up in other directions. Though the old paradise will not be regained, though it has
withered long since, and the site of it has become a desert, God will create new heavens and a
new earth which shall be better than the lost past. In our English Bible the last verse of the
chapter reads like a final outburst of the language of despair. It seems to say that the prayer is all
in vain, for God has utterly forsaken His people. But another rendering is now generally
accepted, though our revisers have only placed it in the margin. According to this we read,
Unless Thou hast utterly rejected us, etc. There is still a melancholy tone in the sentence, as
there is throughout the book that it concludes; but this is softened, and now it by no means
breathes the spirit of despair. Turn it round, and the phrase will even contain an
encouragement. If God has not utterly rejected His people assuredly He will attend to their
prayer to be restored to Him. But it cannot be that He has quite cast them off. Then it must be
that He will respond and turn them back to Himself. Thus we are led even by this most
melancholy book in the Bible to see, as with eyes purged by tears, that the love of God is greater
than the sorrow of man, and His redeeming power more mighty than the sin which lies at the
root of the worst of that sorrow, the eternity of His throne, in spite of the present havoc of evil in
the universe, assuring us that the end of all will be not a mournful elegy, but a paean of victory.
(W. F. Adeney, M. A.)

Thou, O Lord, remainest forever, Thy throne from generation to generation

1. Gods unchangeableness a support in troubles.
(1) Look upon the choicest things that the world affords as mutable, this will take off
thine affections from them, they perish, but the Lord endures, they all wax old like a
garment, but God is the same forever (Psa 102:26-27). This will make their loss to
thee, thy deprivation of them to be no sore affliction, for who will breathe out sighs,
at the breaking of an earthen vessel, at the scattering of a vapour, at the withering of
a flower, or the vanishing of a shadow?
(2) In your worst condition, when you are afflicted and tossed with the waves of sorrow,
stay, and still yourselves with the thoughts of the unchangeableness of your God, He
is immutable as well in His mercy as in His holiness, He is that Sun that shineth
always with a like brightness, and remember that as this is the way to bring serenity
in your hearts, so also your safety at all times depends upon Gods immutability (Mal
3:6; Psa 73:23-26).
(3) Hold out alacrity, be cheerful, let not your souls faint, and your hearts die within you,
though your lovers have forsaken you, your friends turn enemies, and your
adversaries set up their ensigns for banners, your God is unchangeable in His love,
neither life, nor death, principalities, nor powers shall take you out of His thoughts,
He thinks as well of you when you are black with persecution, as when you are fair,
and shine in a prosperous condition; for the Church is His beloved, though a lily
among thorns (Song 2:2). And the immutability of His rule will terminate the worst
of your sorrows (Psa 7:9; Jer 29:11).
(4) Lastly, remember what God is, and that in a degree it is your duties to assimilate
Himself, therefore humble yourselves for your fickleness in your purposes, and for
your changeableness in your resolves for holiness, have not hereafter a heart loving
to wander (Jer 14:10). Be not soon removed (Gal 1:6). Keep close to your
determinations for the things of heaven, let not the blasts of seducers take your
spirits from their hinges, either in relation to principles or duties (Eph 4:14). You
must imitate your Father, and you see He is a God that is immutable.
2. God is eternal as well as immutable.
(1) Look upon this attribute of God which, like a golden thread, runs through all the rest,
 and admire it; let thy soul echo out the praises of Divine eternity upon all occasions
(1Ti 1:17). And well mayest thou, for this the eternity of God exceeds that of the most
glorious creatures: theirs is but an half eternity, it is to everlasting, not like the Lords
from everlasting; theirs is not intrinsical in themselves, they receive it, but Gods is
independent; they cannot communicate to others, or extend it beyond themselves as
the Lord can, therefore now extol Gods eternity, and let it be matter of wonder to thy
soul.
(2) Be not dismayed when the rage and fury of your adversaries speaks a stripping, a
deprivation of all enjoyments, when they tell you they will enter upon your houses,
seize upon your lands, take away your food, and deprive you of the delight of your
eyes, tell them you know these things are but mutable, and they may take them, but
they cannot take away your God, who is eternal in the heavens.
(3) Rest not upon creatures, Solomon gives you to know that their strength, their help is
vanity, put your trust in this the eternal God, He hath said He will never fail you nor
forsake you, He is not as man that He should repent, He is faithful as well as eternal,
and cannot deny Himself (2Ti 2:13). (D. Swift.)

Wherefore dost Thou forget us forever, and forsake us so long time?--

Helps for time of desertion
For the ship doth not more naturally arise with the flowing in of the waters, than doubts in the
soul with the coming in of troubles. For all this while God is but either trying thy disposition,
and the frame and temper of thy spirit towards Himself, He is but seeing whether thou wilt love
Him frowning as well as smiling upon thy soul (Isa 8:17), or ransacking of thine heart, and
making discovery to thee of the filth and guilt of sin that is within thee, for man feels his sins
with most hatred and sorrow in the times of Gods withdrawings (1Sa 21:1-2), or He is but
putting thee into that most excellent life of His most precious saints. Thou wouldest live by
sense, but He will now teach thee with David to live by faith (Psa 27:13), or else the Lord is
preparing thee for greater apprehensions of His love and favour for the time to come. Yet still,
for all that hath been spoken, methinks I see you, O ye captived Jews, like Rachel, weeping and
refusing consolation; what, are you like the marigold, which opens and shuts with the sun? are
you as court favourites, whose comforts and discomforts depend upon the countenance or
discountenance of their prince? I must needs acknowledge, that heavens frowning, Gods
neglecting, or the Lords deserting, wounds deep, and pierceth through a Christians heart. And
this hath been the cause why in an expostulatory way they have breathed out these, or the like
complaints; if the Lord be with us, why is all this befallen us? Will the Lord cast off forever, will
He not again show favour? hath He forgotten to be gracious, and doth His promise fail for
evermore (Psa 77:7-9)? Neither do I marvel if, in this pang those have been the expresses of their
souls. For where is a believers love concentrate, as it were, and gathered together, but in the
Lord its God? and therefore it languisheth in His absence, and is ill at ease, until it enjoy His
presence (Song 5:8). Hath not the saints rejoicing ever been principally in Divine communion
(Psa 4:7)? Is not the assurance of His love the very day and joy of a Christian heart? (D. Swift.)

Turn Thou us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of
old.

Genuine conversion

I. It is a turning of the soul TO the Lord. Not to creeds, not to churches, but to the Lord
Himself, as the object of supreme love. The centreing of the whole soul upon Him. If the Lord is
loved supremely, He will be the dominant subject of thought, the leading theme of conversation,
the paramount sovereign of life.

II. It is a turning of the soul to the Lord BY the Lord. No one can turn the human soul to God
but Himself. A man may as well endeavour to roll back the Mississippi to its mountain springs
as to turn back the soul to the Lord; He alone can do it, and He does it by the influence of
nature, historic events, Gospel truths, and Christly ministries. (Homilist.)

Zions sufferings
1. Afflictions send the saints unto their God. O happy sorrows, O blessed troubles that thus
bring poor souls nearer to their God. Now, having been thus doctrinated in the school of
the Cross, thou mayest experimentally say with the sweet singer of Israel, it is good for
me that I have been afflicted, thereby I have learned to know Thy statutes.
2. Troubles no discouragements to Gods precious servants.
3. Repentance the work of the great God.
4. Pressures put not Gods children besides their prayers.
5. Deliverances are only perfected by the Lord. (D. Swift.)