Part 23 (1/2)
The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish and Christian theology has understood. In the Old Testament predestination is not to character or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life or eternal punishment, but to service, or some particular form of service, for G.o.d and man. The Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of G.o.d for the enlightenment and blessing of mankind. And this faith is enforced on the nation, not for their pride nor to foster the confidence that G.o.d will never break from them, but to rouse their conscience, and give them courage when they are feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service. So with Jeremiah in regard both to his own predestination and that of his people. In his Parable of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as vessels that the clay is moulded; G.o.d is revealed not as predestining character or quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they yield suitable qualities. The parable ill.u.s.trates not arbitrariness of election nor irresistible sovereignty but a double freedom-freedom in G.o.d to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man's part to thwart G.o.d's designs for him. In further ill.u.s.tration of this remember again the wonderful words, _Be thou not dismayed before them, lest I make thee dismayed; if thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee_. To work upon man G.o.d needs man's own will.
From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator, such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.
Having this experience of G.o.d's ways with man it was not possible for Jeremiah to succ.u.mb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked of ”the wine of predestination,” and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants-the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. G.o.d overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against G.o.d Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will as over against that of G.o.d:
Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled, Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.
The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people's oncoming doom. He debates with G.o.d on matters of justice. He wrestles things out with G.o.d and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure of himself-as we see him at last when the full will of G.o.d breaks upon his soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly surrenders to his own and his people's fate. That is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so shrinking stands out henceforth _a fenced city and a wall of bronze over against the whole people of the land_: the one unbreakable figure in the breaking-up of the state and the nation. We perceive the method in G.o.d's discipline of such a soul. He sees his servant's weakness and grants him the needful athletic for it, by wrestling with him Himself.
We may here take in full the remarkable pa.s.sage, part of which we have already studied.(736)
Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1 That with Thee I should argue.
Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:- The way of the wicked-why doth it prosper, And the treacherous all be at ease?
Thou did'st plant them, yea they take root, 2 They get on, yea they make fruit; Near in their mouths art Thou, But far from their reins.
But me, O Lord, Thou hast known,(737) 3 And tested my heart with Thee; Drag them out like sheep for the shambles, To the day of slaughter devote them.
Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee- 5 How wilt thou vie with the horse?
If in peaceful country thou can'st not trust, How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan?
For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6 Even they have betrayed thee.
Even they have called after thee loudly, Trust them not, though they speak thee fair.(738)
_The rankness_ or _luxuriance of Jordan_ is the jungle on both sides of the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord's answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to break through to another life.
3. Sacrifice.
But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his G.o.d, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to ill.u.s.trate another and a n.o.bler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah's experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it.
There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.
O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2 A wayfarers' lodge!
Then would I leave my people, And get away from them; For adulterers all of them be, A bundle of traitors.
They stretch their tongues 3 Like a falsing bow, And never for truth Use their power in the land.
But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not!(739)
Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people-worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, _sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord_. His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of pa.s.sing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for repentance-wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, prophets who only flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it so.(740) O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the balcony!