Part 24 (2/2)

All the desolation of Judah is on Him alone: _no man lays it to heart, upon Me is the waste_.(787) And what we have seen to be the most human touch of all, the surprise of an outraged father at feeling, beneath His wrath against a prodigal son, the instincts of the ancient love which no wrath can quench,

Is Ephraim My dearest son, The child of delights?

That as oft as against him I speak I must think of him still!(788)

That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their c.u.mulative effect.

Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of G.o.d Jeremiah speaks home to the heart of his own, and of our own and of every generation which loves lies and lets itself be lulled by them. Sin, he says, is no fiction nor a thing to be lightly taken.(789) Time for repentance is short; doom comes quickly. Habits of evil are not carelessly parted with, but have their long and necessary consequences moral and physical. No wash of words nor wors.h.i.+p nor sacrament can cleanse the heart or redeem from guilt. It is not the flagrant sinner whom he chiefly warns, but those who harden themselves softly. And-very firmly this-forgiveness is not easily granted by G.o.d nor cheaply gained by men; G.o.d has not only set our sins before His face but carries them on His heart. And therefore, in view both of the Just Wrath of the Most High and of His suffering Love, only repentance can avail, the repentance which is not the facile mood offered by many in atonement for their sins, but arduous, rigorous and deeply sincere in its anguish. All of which carries our prophet, six centuries before Christ came, very far _into the fellows.h.i.+p of His sufferings_.

I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah's other original contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the Providence of G.o.d, and his hope that G.o.d would be to Israel what the prophet had bravely tried to be-no transient guest but a dweller in their midst.(790) The t.i.tles for G.o.d which we may a.s.sume to have first come from himself are few, perhaps only three: _The Fountain of Living Waters, the Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in time of trouble_, and _Hasidh, or Loyal-in-Love_,(791) a term elsewhere applied only to men. Sometimes, but not nearly so often as the copyists of our Hebrew text have made him do, he uses the t.i.tle _Yahweh of Hosts_, doubtless in the other prophets'

sense of _the forces of history and of the Universe_ (the original meaning having been _the armies of Israel_), sometimes he borrows the deuteronomic _Yahweh thy G.o.d_, or a similar form. But most often (as the Greek faithfully shows us) it is simply the personal name _Yahweh_ (Jehovah) by which he addresses or describes the Deity: significant of the long struggle between them as individuals.

Pa.s.sing now from the world of nations to the world of nature we observe how little the genuine Oracles of Jeremiah have to tell us of the Divine Power over this; yet the little is proclaimed with as firm a.s.surance as of G.o.d's control of the history of mankind. Both worlds are His: the happenings in the one are the sacraments, the signs and seals, of His purposes and tempers towards the other: the winter blossom of the almond, of His wakefulness in a world where all seems asleep; the sun by day and the moon and stars by night, of His everlasting faithfulness to His own.(792) All things in nature obey His rule though His own people do not; it is He who rules the stormy sea and can alone bring rain.

Even the stork in the heavens Knoweth her seasons, And dove, swift and swallow Keep time of their coming.

But My people-they know not The Rule of the Lord.

I have set the sand as a bound for the sea, An eternal decree that cannot be crossed.

Are there makers of rain 'mong the bubbles of the heathen?

Art Thou not He? ... all these Thou hast made.(793)

After all neither Nature nor the courses of the Nations but the single human heart is the field which Jeremiah most originally explores for visions of the Divine Working and from which he has brought his most distinctive contributions to our knowledge of G.o.d. But that leads us up to the second part of this lecture, his teaching about man. Before beginning that, however, we must include under his teaching about G.o.d, two elements of this to which his insight into the human heart directly led him.

First this great utterance of the Divine Omnipresence:

I am a G.o.d who is near, Not a G.o.d who is far.

Can any man hide him in secret, And I not see him?

Do I not fill heaven and earth?- Rede of the Lord.(794)

These verses have been claimed as the earliest expression in Israel of the Divine Omnipresence.(795) Amos, however, had given utterance to the same truth though on a different plane of life.(796)

Second, and partly in logical sequence from the preceding, but also stimulated by thoughts of the best of Judah(797) banished to a long exile, Jeremiah was the first in Israel to a.s.sure his people that the sense of G.o.d's presence, faith in His Providence, His Grace, and Prayer to Him were now free both of Temple and Land-as possible on distant and alien soil, without Ark or Altar, as they had been with these in Jerusalem. See his Letter to the Exiles, and recall all that lay behind it in his predictions of the ruin of the Temple, and abolition of the Ark, and in his rejection of sacrifices.(798) To Deuteronomy exile was the people's punishment; to Jeremiah it is a fresh opportunity of grace.

2. Man and the New Covenant.

In the earliest Oracles of Jeremiah nations are the human units in religion, Israel as a whole the object of the Divine affection and providence. To his age wors.h.i.+p was the business of the nation: public reverence for symbols and inst.i.tutions, and rites in which the individual's share was largely performed for him by official representatives. The prophets, and Jeremiah himself at first, dealt with the people as a moral unity from the earliest times to their own. The Lord had loved and sought, redeemed and tended them as a nation. As a nation they fell away from Him and now they were wholly false to Him. When Jeremiah first urges them to return, it is of a public and general repentance that he speaks, as Deuteronomy had done; and when his urgency fails it is their political disappearance which he p.r.o.nounces for doom.

But when the rotten surface of the national life thus broke under the Prophet he fell upon the deeper levels of the individual heart, and not only found the native sinfulness of this to be the explanation of the public and social corruption but discovered also soil for the seed-bed of new truths and new hopes. Among these there is none more potent than that of the immediate relation of the individual to G.o.d. Jeremiah never lost hope of the ultimate restoration of Israel. Nevertheless the individual aspects of religion increase in his prophesying, and though it is impossible to trace their growth with any accuracy because of the want of dates to many of his Oracles, we may be certain that as he watched under Josiah the failure of the national movements for reform, inspired by Deuteronomy, and under Jehoiakim and ?edekiah the gradual breaking up of the nation, and still more as his own personal relations with the Deity grew closer, Jeremiah thought and spoke less of the nation and more of the individual as the object of the Divine call and purposes.

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