Among the surprises which Jeremiah's own Oracles have for the student is the discovery of how little they dwell upon the transcendent and [pg 351] Isaiah's vision was of the Lord upon a Throne, high and lifted up, surrounded by Seraphim crying to one another, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts! the whole earth is full of His Glory! And their voices rocked the Temple and filled it with smoke. Here are a Presence, Awful Majesty, Infinite Holiness and Glory, blinding the seer and crushing his heart contrite. Or take the inaugural vision of Ezekiel—the storm-wind out of the North, the vast cloud, the fire infolding itself, the brightness round about and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber; the rush and whirl of life that followed, wheels and wings and rings full of eyes; and over this the likeness of a firmament of the colour of the terrible ice and the sound of wings like the noise of many waters, as the Voice of the Almighty and above the firmament a Throne and on the Throne the Appearance of a Man, the Appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the Lord. And I, when I saw it, fell upon my face. In the inaugural visions of Jeremiah there is none of this Awfulness—only What art thou seeing Jeremiah? the branch of an almond tree ... a caldron boiling. That was characteristic of his encounters [pg 352] For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of the Prophet's imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and his revelations of God are subjective and given to us by glimpses in scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the adoring wonder of his prophetic peers. Again there were the startled recoil of his nature from the terrible office of a prophet in such times, and those born gifts of questioning and searching which fitted him for his allotted duty as Tester of his people,749 but which he also turned upon the Providence and Judgments of the Lord Himself.750 His religious experience, as we have seen, was largely a struggle with [pg 353] Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered, The Lord is with me as a Mighty and Terrible.751 From his struggles he indeed issues more sure of God and finally more trustful in Him, as is testified by his fair song on the beauty and fruitfulness of faith, beginning Blessed the wight that trusts in the Lord, And the Lord is his trust.752 But even here is none of the awe and high wonder which fall upon Israel through other prophets. Lyrist as he is and subjective, Jeremiah dwells not so much upon the attributes of God on which faith rests as upon the effects of faith in man. Again by the desperate character of the times he was starved of hope, the hope by which the [pg 354] Like those of all the prophets Jeremiah's most immediate convictions of God are that He has done, and is always doing or about to do, things.754 From the first Yahweh of Israel had been to the faith of his people a God of Deeds. He delivered them from Egypt, led them through the desert, [pg 355] It was all this activity and effectiveness, with their sure results in history, which distinguished Him from other gods, the gods of the nations, who were ineffective, or as Jeremiah puts it unprofitable—no-gods, nothings and do-nothings, the work of men's hands, lies or frauds, and mere bubbles.765 On this line Jeremiah's monotheism marks a notable advance; for alongside of faith in the Divine Unity and Sovereignty there had lingered even in Deuteronomy a belief in the existence of other gods.766 With Jeremiah every vestige of this superstition is gone, and other gods consigned to limbo once and for all. Yet Jeremiah's monotheism, like that of all the Hebrew prophets, is even more due to convictions of the character of the God of Israel. We have seen how he dwells on the Divine Love, faithful and yearning for love in return, pleading and patient even with its delinquent sons and daughters;767 but equal to this is his emphasis on [pg 357] As a woman is false to her fere, Have ye been false to me.773 Hence most deeply springs the Wrath of the Lord, a Wrath on which Jeremiah broods and explodes more frequently and fiercely than any other prophet: I am full of the rage of the Lord; the glow of His wrath; take the cup of the wine of this fury at My hand and give all nations to whom I send thee to drink of it; the fierce anger of the Lord shall not turn until He have executed it.774 And He does execute it. God's Wrath breaks out in His spurning of His nation, in the hot names He calls it, adulteress and harlot, and in hating it.775 He will not relent nor pardon it, nor listen to prayer for it.776 He says, I must myself take vengeance upon them. I shall not spare nor pity them.777 They will reel in the day of their visitation. He will feed them with wormwood and drug them with poison; He will suddenly let fall on them anguish and terrors; He will take His fan and winnow them out in the gates of the land and as the passing chaff strew them on the wind of the desert; the garden-land withers to wilderness and its cities break down at His presence and before His fierce anger; He will [pg 359] The modern mind deems arbitrary such immediate linking of physical and political disasters with the Wrath of God against sin. But we have to ponder the following. The Prophet was convinced of the ethical necessity of that Wrath and of its judgments on Judah—he was convinced before they came to pass and he predicted them accurately, from close observation of the political conditions of his world and the character of his people. Granted these and God's essential and operative justice, the connection was natural: What else can I do? It was clear that Judah both deserved and needed punishment and equally clear that the boiling North held the potentialities of this, which were gradually shaping and irresistibly approaching. Moreover, as Jeremiah insists, and as the history both of nations and individuals has frequently illustrated, there is a natural sequence of disaster upon wrong-doing. Be thy scourge thine own sin! Thy ways and thy deeds have done to thee [pg 360] But perhaps the chief glory of our Prophet is that while thus delivering, as no other prophet so fully or so ethically does, the just wrath of God upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people's sin costs God more pain than anger. This no doubt Jeremiah learned through his own heart. As we have seen, with his whole heart he loved the people whom he was called to test and expose, and that heart was wracked and torn by thoughts of the Doom which he had to pronounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel, was the heart of their God. In the following questions there is poignant surprise; an insulted, a wounded love beats through them. [pg 362]What wrong found your fathers in Me, That so far they broke from Me? Have I been a desert to Israel, Or land of thick darkness? Why say my folk, “We are off, No more to meet Thee!” Can a maiden forget her adorning Or her girdle the bride? Yet Me have My people forgotten Days without number.785 So, too, when the deserved doom threatens, and in hate He has cast off His heritage, His love still wonders how that can be— Is My heritage to Me a speckled wild-bird With the wild-birds round and against her? Is Israel a slave, Or house-born serf? Why he for a prey?786 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, [pg 363]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 cumulative effect. Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of God 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 worship 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 God nor cheaply gained by men; God 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, [pg 364] I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah's other original contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the Providence of God, and his hope that God would be to Israel what the prophet had bravely tried to be—no transient guest but a dweller in their midst.790 The titles for God which we may assume 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 title 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 God, 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. Passing now from the world of nations to the [pg 365] 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 God. 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 God, 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 God who is near, Not a God 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 Judah797 banished to a long exile, [pg 367] |