Part 6 (1/2)

The questions of foreknowledge and predestination, with which Jeremiah engaged himself not a little, I leave for a future lecture.(119) Here we may consider the range of his mission.

This was very wide-not for Judah only, but _a prophet to the nations had I set thee_. The objection has been taken, that it is too wide to be original, and the alternative inferences drawn: either that it is the impression of his earliest consciousness as a prophet but formed by Jeremiah only after years of experience revealed all that had been involved in his call; or that it is not Jeremiah's own but the notion formed of him by a later exaggerating generation. It is true that Jeremiah did not dictate the first words of the Lord to him till some twenty-three years after he heard them, when it was possible and natural for him to expand them in terms of his intervening experience. And we must remember the summary bent of the Hebrew mind-how natural it was to that mind to describe processes as if they were acts of a day, done by a fiat as in the story of the Creation; or to state a system of law and custom, which took centuries to develop, as though it were the edict of a single lawgiver and all spoken at once, when the development entered on a new and higher stage, as we see in the case of Deuteronomy and its attribution to Moses.

Yet the forebodings at least of a task so vast as that of _prophet to the nations_ were anything but impossible to the moment of Jeremiah's call; for the time surged, as we have seen, with the movements of the nations and their omens for his own people. Indeed it would have been strange if the soul of any prophet, conscious of a charge from the Almighty, had not the instinct, that as the meaning of this charge was gradually unfolded to him, it would reveal, and require from him the utterance of, Divine purposes throughout a world so full even to the uninspired eye of the possibilities both of the ruin of old states and of the rise of new ones-a world so close about his own people, and so fraught with fate for them, that in speaking of _them_ he could not fail to speak of the _whole of it_ also. If at that time a Jew had at all the conviction that he was called to be a prophet, it must have been with a sense of the same responsibilities, to which the older prophets had felt themselves bound: men who knew themselves to be ministers of the Lord of Hosts, Lord of the Powers of the Universe, who had dealt not with Israel only but with Moab and Ammon and Aram, with Tyre and the Philistines and Egypt, and who had spoken of a.s.syria herself as His staff and the rod of His judgment.

Jeremiah's three contemporaries, ?ephaniah, Nahum and Habakkuk, all deal with the foreign powers of their day-why should he in such an age not have been conscious from the first that his call from the Lord of Hosts involved a mission as wide as theirs? I am sure that if we had lived with this prophet through his pregnant times, as we have lived through these last ten years and have been compelled to think constantly not of our own nation alone-concentrated as we had to be on our duties to her-but of _all_ the nations of the world as equally involved in the vast spiritual interests at stake, we should have no difficulty in understanding how possible and natural it was for Jeremiah to hear his mission _to the nations_ clearly indicated in the very moment of his call.

And in fact Jeremiah's acknowledged Oracles-some of them among his earliest-travel far beyond Judah and show not merely a knowledge of, and vivid interest in, the qualities and fortunes of other peoples, but a wise judgment of their policies and therefore of what should be Judah's prudent att.i.tude and duty towards them. For long before his call she had been intriguing with Egypt and a.s.syria.(120) Just then or immediately later the Scythians, after threatening the Medes, were sweeping over Western Asia as far as the frontier of Egypt, and in his Scythian songs Jeremiah(121) shows an intimate knowledge of their habits. In his Parable of the Potter (for which unfortunately there is no date) he declares G.o.d's power to mould or re-mould _any_ nation.(122) And Baruch, writing of Jeremiah's earlier ministry, says that he spoke _concerning all nations_.(123)

No wonder that Jeremiah shrank from such a task: _Ah, Lord G.o.d, I know not to speak, I am too young._(124) His excuse is interesting. Had he not developed his gift for verse? Or, conscious of its rustic simplicity, did he fear to take the prophet's thunder on lips, that had hitherto moved only to the music of his country-side? In the light of his later experience the second alternative is not impossible. When much practice must have made him confident of his art as a singer, he tells us how burning he felt the Word of the Lord to be. But whatever was the motive of his reluctance it was overcome. As he afterwards said:-

Ah, Lord, Thou didst beguile me, And beguiled I let myself be; Thou wast too strong for me And hast prevailed.(125)

The following shows how this came about:-

And the Lord said unto me, Say not I am too young, for to all to which I send thee thou shalt go, and all I command thee thou shalt speak,

Be not afraid before them For with thee am I to deliver,

Rede of the Lord. And the Lord put forth His hand and caused it to touch my mouth, and the Lord said to me, Lo, I have set My Word in thy mouth,

See I appoint thee this day Over the nations and kingdoms, To pull up and tear down and destroy,(126) To build and to plant.

To this also objection has been taken as still more incredible in the spiritual experience of so youthful a rustic. It has been deemed the exaggeration of a later age, and described as the ”gigantic figure” of a ”plenipotentiary to the nations,” utterly inconsistent with the modest singer of the genuine oracles of Jeremiah, ”a hero only in suffering, not in a.s.sault.”(127) Such an objection rather strains the meaning of the pa.s.sage. According to this Jeremiah is to be the carrier of the Word of the Lord. That Word, rather than the man himself, is the power _to pull up and tear down and destroy, to build and to plant_(128)-that Word which no Hebrew prophet received without an instinct of its world-wide range and its powers of both destruction and creation.

Two visions follow. To appreciate the first we must remember the natural anxiety of the prophets when charged with p.r.o.nouncements so weighty and definite. The Word, the ethical purpose of G.o.d for Israel was clear, but how was it to be fulfilled? No strength appeared in the nation itself. The party, or parties, loyal to the Lord had been in power a dozen years and effected little in Jerusalem and nothing beyond. The people were not stirred and seemed hopeless. Living in a village where little changed through the years, but men followed the habits of their fathers, Jeremiah felt everything dead. Winter was on and the world asleep.

Then the Word of the Lord came to me saying, What art thou seeing, Jeremiah; and I said, I am seeing the branch of an almond tree.

And the Lord said to me, Well hast thou seen, for I am awake over My Word to perform it.

The Hebrew for almond tree is _shakedh_, which also means _awakeness_ or _watchfulness_,(129) and the Lord was _awake_ or was _watchful_-_shokedh_-the difference only of a vowel. In that first token of spring which a Palestine winter affords, the Prophet received the sacrament of his call and of the a.s.surance that G.o.d was awake! That the sacrament took this form was natural. That of Isaiah of Jerusalem was the vision of a Throne and an Altar. That of Ezekiel, the exile, shone in the stormy skies of his captivity. This to the prophet of Anathoth burst with the first blossom on his wintry fields. The sense of unity in which he and his people conceived the natural and spiritual worlds came to his help; neither in the one world nor in the other did G.o.d slumber. G.o.d was watching.

The Second Vision needs no comment after our survey of the political conditions of the time. The North held the forces for the fulfilling of the Word. The Vision is followed by a charge to the Prophet himself.

And the word of the Lord came to me the second time, What art thou seeing? And I said, A caldron boiling and its face is from (?) the North.(130) And the Lord said unto me:-

Out of the North shall evil boil forth(131) On all that dwell in the land; For behold, I am calling All the realms(132) of the North.

They shall come and each set his throne In the openings of the gates of Jerusalem, On all of her walls round about, And every towns.h.i.+p of Judah.

And My judgments by them(133) shall I utter On the evil of those who have left Me, Who have burned to other G.o.ds And bowed to the works of their hands.

But thou shalt gird up thy loins, Stand up and speak(134) all I charge thee.

Be not dismayed before them, Lest to their face I dismay thee.